Long Overdue Holliers Review

Ok I`ve been really lazy about updating here. Muchos apologias. So getting on with it... Ronan arrived on the day after I got my camera at about 7pm. He was completely knackered as expected from his stop over at 2am in Dubai. So he pretty much slept straight through til the next day despite the lack of air conditioning in my room. The next day we went to Shinsaibashi in Osaka to walk around and snap some photos in front of the famous Glico sign. That night I finally got to see my first baseball game here - went to see Orix Blue Wave (the soon to be disbanded Kobe team) versus Nippon Ham from Hokkaido. The stadium is really nice but pretty far out and was probably less than half full, with most people in Kobe and Osaka supporting the much bigger Hanshin Tigers. But the game was pretty cool despite the lack of a throbbing crowd and I now consider myself a BW fan. We went out to Nara the next day, the first official capital of Japan, to see the famous Todai temple with its huge Buddha statue inside. The next day we were supposed to go to Hiroshima on the Shinkansen train but because of the time of year (Obon, when most Japanese take their holidays) we couldn`t get any tickets before 5pm which was pretty feckin` useless. So instead we took the cable car up to Rokko Mt. behind Kobe only to find it was just as feckin` roasting up there. And instead of nice views across the bay and to Osaka there was just the usual heat haze. Having got our tickets for the train to Tokyo we headed off in the morning. We had to get a train at 6.30 which is far to early to be getting up when on holiday. I didn`t bother trying to get much sleep on the train hoping to get some nice pics of the Japanese countryside (if there`s any left) with the new camera. Unfortunatly the sceanary consists almost entirely of unending industrial drabness...of which I got plenty of pictures. Feckin` useless. When we pulled into Tokyo we spent the first hour looking in vain for the tourist info. with our packs on in the heat before finally checking into our hotel in Roppongi, the district of Tokyo famous for its extra sleazy foreigners. But the hotel was actually pretty nice and the size of the room was huge compared to the prison cell sized places I stayed in when I was there before. So for the rest of the day we went to Shibuya and Shinjuku and then back to Roppongi hills. There should be photos of all those places. The next day we went to Asakusa in the north east of Tokyo, home to the biggest and most busy temple in Tokyo before taking a river ferry back down towards central Tokyo which showed off the concrete ugliness of Tokyo nicely. After that we checked out Akiharbara, the electric discount district of Tokyo which consists of shop after shop of mobile phones and computers etc...all pretty much selling exactly the same thing so I don`t know how they all stay in business. Then had coffee in a cafe called..Tullys. Weird. Went back to Kabukicho in Shinshuku in the evening to see what exactly had inspired Blade Runner. It was a bit disappointing but still class. We spent the last day in Tokyo in Odaiba, a man made island full of shopping centres and huge deserted corporate museums. The busiest place was this really weird building, home to Fuji TV, where hoardes queued to visit the sets of Japanese soaps. In the evening we decided, sure feck it, we`d go to Disneyland just for half the day to see what it was like. Well...it was pretty feckin shite. We queued up for 20 minutes to get in...a further 90 minutes for the first ride and 90 minutes for the second. And that was it. The place closed at 10. While the two rides (two rollercoaster ones) were good it was not work three hours of queuing in the Tokyo summer humidity. So the next day we were up super feckin early again to get our train to Takayama. We spent two days there, partly just to hang around and do nowt, and partly to see some the preserved streets which show what Japan used to look like. You can`t really see streets like them anywhere else anymore, not even in Kyoto. The place was pretty nice but we would have been bored shitless if we`d been there a third day. The weekend we got back we went to Kyoto for the day. It would have been nice had we left earlier. As it was, we got to Kinkakuji (Golden Temple) about 10 minutes before it closed. Then we pegged it down to the Ryouanji temple where Japans most famous rock garden is. We got there 10 minutes before it closed too. Well the rock garden is pretty...minimalist. You could easily say its a pile of shite if your not into the whole zen whatever. I guess its kind of interesting. The next day me and Ronan went back to Osaka to meet up with Keiko and have a go at Karaoke before leaving Japan. Twas a bit of a laugh. Links to some pictures can be found here. Anyway...so that was the summer holliers. I can`t think what I`ve been doing since..probably just working.....