Cyprus Hill

London :: UK

This years vitamin D fix

Places: Pafos, Coral Bay, Polis & the Akamas Peninsula.

Coolest thing I did: Loads of beach crawling

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Aphrodite was apparently formed from the foam of some other God's testicles. Just try picturing that as a Disney cartoon.

London has had a terrible summer this year. Utterly horrific. Coldest May on record, followed by the wettest June and July and hardly a sunny day to speak of. So I was mostly looking forward to this trip simply to get some sun. I've since been accused of acting like a Pom as all I've been going on about since I got back was how good the weather was. It's made me realise that this is in now way the holiday I would have taken had it been my call, but there's no harm in something different now, is there?

The holiday involved more of an inventory than I was used to, you know, 8 people instead of one, a 4 bed villa and 2 cars (instead of no cars) all parked just north of Pafos, tourist hotspot of the west coast of Cyprus. I think the hardest thing for me to adjust to was getting into the rhythm of 7 other people who wanted very much to unwind, 3 of whom I'd never met before. I'm used to traveling around a lot on holiday (I reckon in a week I'd normally have stayed in 5 different places and seeing a whole lot of island) so the idea of lazing about the pool until a late lunch and then getting out to see a little bit more of the local area was a big adjustment. However, I think all this forced relaxation did me well.

The Republic of Cyprus feels Greek, everyone speaks Greek, the food is pretty much all the meatier bits of Greek food and people pretty much all look Greek. Which means you have to stop yourself from referring to your present location as Greece. The countryside should be a bit of a giveaway as it's much drier and more rugged than anywhere I've seen in either the Greek Islands or on the mainland (someone used the term 'moonscape' at one point) and once you get out of the two touristy build ups in Coral Bay and Pafos itself it's all very undeveloped.

We took day trips to both sides of the Akamas peninsula on the very north western tip of the island, which was difficult in places due to the very un-rugged nature of our Renault Scenic minivan. The completely empty stretch of beach at Lara bay can be overlooked as you eat grilled chicken and pork are spectacular, even if a little bit un-swimable due to some heavy undertows. The opposing side, with the town of Polis is a proper working village complete with old stone churches and flagstone capped squares you can sit after a hard day on the beach and drink coffee you can stand a spoon up in. All very relaxing.

The most touristy thing we did was go and have a look at (and even climb) the Rock of Aphrodite. It's supposed to be the birthplace of the goddess of love, prostitutes, marriage, war and a few other things, who obviously casts a large shadow of Cyprus by the fact practically everything on the island is named after her in some way. The coast dramatically plunges into the blue sea and big rocks jut out of the water and the dark sand beach. The legend goes that if you nude up and swim around the rock 20 times at dusk you'll look 20 years younger. I don't know if I want to look 10 again. I reckon maybe it's for the oldies.

I came back from the trip quite happy to have eaten my fill of meat and seafood, to have a bit of a tan and to have not done very much but swim in pools or beaches. I do, however, have a slight feeling of restlessness due to not having even come close to a column or Turkish town the whole time I was there. I think Cyprus is somewhere I could revisit to take a better look at on my own terms, but I think I needed a good relax and dose of sun more than anything else this time.

I saw you coming!

London :: UK

Well, what do you do with your old power stations?

Places: Tate Modern

Coolest thing I did: Resisted the urge to yell out at the top of my lungs It's just a stack of bricks!

Coolest thing I didn´t know: They replace the installation in the main turbine room of the Tate Modern every year. It's kind of cool when it's empty.

OK, so I know I don't usually write about touristy things when I'm not on the road, but I haven't been to the Tate Modern in London since the very first month I was here last time (May 2000, back in the Dreamtime) and it's the most touristy thing I've done since I've been back. That and I don't go to see modern art very much and had some thoughts about it all.

For those who aren't familiar, the Tate Modern is the gallery the British government built out of a disused power station on the south bank of the Thames in order to house it's ever growing modern art collection, thus also freeing up more space to show all that pre-20th century stuff the Tate Britain had in storage somewhere. The building itself is very cool, with one half left completely open 5 stories up and the other with lots of galleries on various levels. The collection revolves a fair bit, because that's the thing with modern art, people keep making more of it. Once you draw the line and say "right, everything made after 1900 is modern art" then you've got one collection growing faster than the other. Dissected cows and poo in jars aside, I don't mind a bit of modern art, especially the older stuff. Which I know is a bit of an irony, bugger off.

What I like most about going around modern art galleries (it's something I first noticed in the MOMA in New York) is watching the people looking at the art. There are three main grades: clueless-but-open-minded (this is where I fit), dragged-there-by-significant-other (this is where I used to be) and self-proclaimed-expert (god help us all). The first grade tends to take a look at the piece of art, scratch their head a bit and then read that little sign next to it to try and figure out what the bloody hell it's supposed to be. They then read it, look back at it and then they either have a eureka moment when they figure out why this pile of egg cartons is called "monument to the soul" or they close off their faces and mumble something about it being crap. You can sit in the Tate and watch most of the room around you reading the signs and pretty much none of them actually looking at the art. The second grade involves someone who really, really does not want to be there but are doing it because they are either at the start of a relationship and trying to impress someone, or are well into it and have been dragged there against their will. These people can be made out by their eye-rolling, sighing loudly and the need to sit down every 5 mins and hold their head in their hands. I once ended a promising relationship because I would have much rather had a pint than drag myself through another room of canvases painted grey. Oh, how times change.

The last kind, of course, is the true believer. You can see them rapturously staring for hours at a stack of house bricks trying to work out how many formations are possible because that's what the artist intended when they got 50 grand for a stack of house bricks. Thankfully, this kind of person is rare, but they are fascinating to watch, but not for too long. It's all you can do to hold off the urge to run over and slap them when they pontificate to their rather bored boyfriend about the torrent of ideas flowing from three white lines on a blue background.

Despite the negative tone I've had all through this, I do think there are some clever things done with modern art. I read somewhere that modern art is supposed to shift some of the work of thinking about a piece of art from the artist onto the viewer, kind of outsourcing the ideas so they give you enough space to look at something and make up your own mind about what it means. Sometimes, you probably think of something the artist didn't intend, and that's probably a bit of a success. I like the idea of that, even if the reality doesn't always meet it. I think for me to appreciate something like that, the artist has to meet me half way. They have to do something that's actually a bit clever, and obviously clever before I can get anything out of it. People keep telling me Andy Warhol was a genius for taking crates of soup cans and putting them in an art gallery, and I'd tend to agree, but not for the same reasons. If someone can attract enough stooges to pay lots of money for something they could have got for nothing then he is a branding genius. That's not really my bag when it comes to art.

I think the trouble these days is all the new stuff that's being created is being looked at by proper art people, who tend to have a hive mind like appreciation for what's good art. I'm waiting for the day when someone points out that the emperor has no clothes and the British government just paid 75 grand for half a cow. What arty types tell us we should be liking, and what most of us like seems a world apart. I that tastes change, and I'm sure they said the same thing about Picasso and Monet (and probably Da Vinci, in his day) but unless I'm missing something, so much modern art is leaving too much to interpretation. I'm willing to be open minded, but I'm not going to admit that 6 canvases painted brown in a room is all that inspiring. Call me uncultured.

I can't help but think of the sketch on the new skit series from the cast of the old "The Fast Show" which is called "I saw you coming". It's about a small antique/art shop in Notting Hill that sells to rich, pretty and thick women. The proprietor says things like "this particular piece of wank is rather popular with your kind" and "it cost me nothing, but as your husband just sold his media company I'm going to have to price this at 50 grand", followed by the women whipping out their chequebooks. It works better on TV.

The best thing I reckon I saw in the Tate was this giant egg thing with a big bit cut out of it's side and a black shiny interior. As the viewer was standing right in front of it you can see a beam of light that is reflected from the roof that moves when you watch it. The little sign tells us this beam of light is the art, and an object in it's own right. Even though it sounds wanky, I did see what they artist was trying to do. More of that, less of the piles of old mattresses (the smell is supposed to be challenging the viewer about the wastefulness of consumer society. Oh SHUT UP!)

The fun house mirror

Tokyo :: Japan

A bit of a quick sum up.

Places: Tokyo

Coolest thing I did: Saw a shopping centre with a zoo in it. A zoo I tell you. Are these people mad?

Coolest thing I didn´t know: In Japan Astroboy was known as Mighty Atom. I think their way is cooler.

So tomorrow I leave Japan and I have to say it's more than lived up to my expectations. I wasn't sure what to expect from the whole thing but from the mountains of snowboarding to the piles of history, I've had a ball. Of all the places I visited I have to say Tokyo is my favourite. Many people have told me they liked everything except Tokyo, but I get the feeling that this is what life is like for the vast majority of Japan's population, which is strikingly urban. I guess I feel more comfortable in big cities myself.

While I learned more than I ever wanted to know about Buddhism, Shinto, Japanese history and the like it's been the vision of the future and just watching the Japanese do their thing that I've liked the best. Watching them go about their business I get the idea that these people have childhoods that extend far longer than ours. I've seen women in their 20s walking down the street dressed as French Maids (apparently French maid is the new Schoolgirl for those who like to dress up), grown men paying $USD800 for one of those old game and watch machines, shops stuffed with comics and readers of all ages, shops that sell models of everything from Godzilla to Transformers and all the patrons are older than me. I swear these people are all kids!

From what I've read the post-War building boom has fueled an economy where everyone works hard and then has to find something to spend all their money on. I've mentioned the consumerism but there also seems to be this need for novelty, and to have a collection of something, no matter if it's vinyl records, porno comics or foot high robot models. Everyone needs a massive amount of novelty. Work and spend.

The cultural relativists will tell you that it's a shame that these people are losing the rigid culture they once had, that their national character is being replaced by a monoculture that stems from all that is evil in the US system. I tend to disagree with that. You only have to take a look around Tokyo for a day to recognise the inspiration for a fair deal of the West's popular culture, design and fashion. Thought we probably are gaining a global culture, it's not all one way traffic. I get sick of know it all guidebooks and backpackers scoffing at those who eat McDonalds here and don't experience the culture. You just have to look around to see the Japanese aren't hung up on these things, so why should we be? They are both embracing and extending the global culture of our generation so it would be foolish to go looking for "the real Japan" (as someone in the hostel put it to me) because Tokyo IS THE REAL JAPAN. The small number of people living in little farming hamlets and cultivating rice with a bullock cart are doing so because that's what the tourists want to see. I am personally more interested in what Japan is, not what it was.

I was sitting in a bar in Shibuya last night (the Insomnia Lounge, you walk around barefoot because it's all shag carpet, choice!) and a couple of guys sitting next to me at the bar stuck up a conversation with me. One of them was born only a week before me (1977 and all!) and does exactly the same kind of work as me, not only the Sun Unix geekery but the EMC and Cisco as well. So here I am, confronted with what my life would have probably been like if I was born to Japanese parents. It made me realise how lucky I am to have the life I do. These guys said they thought I was a musician because all the IT guys in Japan wear suits 6 days a week (because they work 6 days a week and often Sunday from home). They were stunned to hear I've lived in so many countries and just take time off to travel between contracts and countries. Both are barely out of Uni (that's how it works here) and should have been married 2 or 3 years ago, according to their parents. They work, then go out drinking 3 or 4 nights a week to go looking for girls. The studio the bloke my age lived in apparently has enough room for a single bed, a sink/kitchen/bathroom and a clothes rack. They also get paid about half what I do, even though this is the most expensive country I've ever seen (and I've seen a few).

Before this trip I was starting to question whether my life of drifting around is starting to wear thin and should I be thinking more about a career and becoming more settled. I think Japan has shown me just what a society based on the extreme of career and consumption looks like and it's made me more resolute that I've not wasted the last 7 or 8 years. That could have been me working 6 days a week, 50+ weeks a year with little to show for it. If nothing else this trip has given me some perspective on things and I'm much happier with life.

Right, I've enjoyed Japan but it's nearly time to fly back to Dublin. St Patricks Day awaits!

Big city, bright lights

Tokyo :: Japan

Spend, Spend, SPEND!.

Places: Tokyo, Nikko & Kamakura

Coolest thing I did: For about 30 mins I was the coolest white bloke in Tokyo. Then more white people showed up and I was no longer.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The three wise monkeys live in Japan.

So I'm back from the country to the big city. On the Shink
I spent far more time looking out the window that on the trips down and
I found out a couple of things. One is that from Kobe to Tokyo (and I
imagine even further north) there is no end to the urbanization as it
goes from skyscrapers to suburbs to heavy industry and back again
several times. It's staggering to think just how many people they've
fit on this island. I also saw Mount Fuji and at this time of year it's
probably as close as I'm going to get as they tend to discourage people
from climbing it when it's covered in snow and avalanche prone.
Spoilsports. Now all my pictures (taken from a train moving at about
200kph) are all blurry and have telephone poles in the foreground.

I chose to return to Tokyo for the weekend instead of going south some
more because despite all the party work our group did last time around
I felt there was more to be found. And was there ever. I'm staying in a
hostel in Asakusa
(because they are all there, because it's cheap and dodgy) so if you
want to hit the better places to go out the only option is to stay out
all night and wait for the subway to re-open at 6am. My first night I
headed out alone to Shibuya in armed with nothing but one address (from the Time Out webpage
) of a bar and some high hopes. Thank God it all worked out. After
trying a few bars around ｔｈａｔ seemed to be filled mostly with salary
men I wandered through darkened alley ways until I found the place. It
was an unnamed bar, all painted red with chandeliers on the ceilings and
most importantly, no other white people. Up until this point I'd either
been in seedy bars with all Japanese people or places haunted by Westerners
so for the half hour I sat there with some very cool looking Japanese
people I ｈａｄ no hope of communicating with I felt very hip indeed.

As
it turns out this place appears to have recently crossed over into
ex-pat land from being mostly Japanese and it wasn't long before the
other Westerners started showing up. They were a quite good mix of
Antipodeans and Europeans and the Japanese English speakers who started
showing up seemed to be happy to mix with us. I ended up with a handful
of Japanese kids, a French girl, some bloke from Brisbane and his
Japanese wife and a Dutch girl in some nightclub halfway between Shibuya and Roppongi until about 9am. Great night out but I ended up being woken up by some friendly old ladies on Asakusa because I'd obviously been snoring on the train.

Saturday
was a bit different. I met some Canadians in the hostel who took me out
when they went to meet up with a Japanese DJ who they'd befriended
earlier in the week. Like South Africans, most Japanese seem to think
they areDJs. He told us to come out to Ikebukuro to a party he was playing at and while we were waiting for him outside Ikebukuro
station to pick us up we decided to make good use of a giant Kiwi we'd
brought with us. If you think I get stared at in Japan being just over
6ft tall, you want to see the stir someone who is 6'10" causes. People
were coming up to be photographed with him, and one bloke even put his
girlfriend on his shoulders and they were still shorter than him. It
was seeing the reactions on the kids faces when they first spotted him
that was the best.

The party turned out to be in a tiny club on the 6th
floor of some back alley building and we were a little concerned that
our party (which had added a couple of random Japanese people by this
time) doubled the crowd. However, everyone was very nice, even if they
spoke about 3 words of English between them, and as the night went on
it got much closer to packed. Great night out but the back to back all nighters took their toll (I'm 30 now, after all) and it was a very long ride home at 7am.

I spent the first couple of days back in Tokyo mostly retracing my steps
through the shopping districts to join the super-consumerism that makes
Japan famous. Many acrobatic feats of design have been achieved by the
retailers of Japan and some of the shops are just cool to go and look
at, no matter what the sell. I did, however, seem to have a hangover
induced
lowering of sales resistance and ended up with far too many new
T-shirts. For those who have time you want to take a look at the shops
aroundAoyama and just gawk at all the glass and chrome, even if you don't buy anything.

In my geekier days I used to read far my sci-fi than I do now and a reoccurring theme in the 80s was this idea that in the near future the urban dwellers would all live in arcologies, giant buildings that contained work, home and play all under one roof.
Trust the Japanese to have started building them. The development of Roppongi
Hills is residential-entertainment-retail extravaganza that just has to
be seen to be believed. I've since been told there is a newer
development in Shiodome that puts RH to shame so I guess people do
really want to live, work and shop in the same place. I wonder if this
will catch on in the West at all.

I have also spent some time doing some more cultured day trips from Tokyo to balance out all the Blade Runner city scapes I'm seeing all day and night otherwise. The town of Nikko
has some temples and shrines in it so I set out to see it and despite
some screwing up of trains (the further off the beaten track you go the
less English there is) I managed to get out there in time to see the
main temples. The highlight is the one with the original carvings of
the three wise monkeys (hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil) on
it. I was kind of glad it turned out to be a half day as Nikko was way
up in the hills and it was snowing when I got off the train. I wasn't
at all prepared for that so I was bloody freezing by the time I got out
of there.

Today was spent going the other direction, to Kamakura to see　a giant bronze Buddha.
That was pretty cool. I also saw lots more shrines and temples, but to
be honest they are starting to kind of just merge into one temple in my
mind now. They were still very nice temples and shrines. I especially
liked the one with all the Shinto demons and rulers of hell in it. I
guess in all religions, like all good stories the baddies get the best lines.

Back in Tokyo for the last stretch now, as I'm flying back to London on Friday.

Auschwitz II

Hiroshima :: Japan

A bit of a downer, really.

Places: Hiroshima

Coolest thing I did: Saw the trees that not only survived the bomb but are still growing.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Hiroshima baseball team is called....the Carp. Seriously. Go Carp!

History is a funny thing. It's hard to know where the truth lies when things are told from people's imperfect memories, and it gets even worse when governments and their money get involved with preserving it. While I know both the Japanese and Germans have been very, very apologetic over their actions during the Second World War (and the Allies less so) it's hard to be objective when walking around the monuments and museums of Hiroshima (all which inevitably have the word Peace in their title somewhere).

The narrative in the Peace Memorial Museum tells the story of a city that built itself up as a military power during Japan's rise as a world power during the first half of the 20th century to a point where during the final stages of WWII it was the southern command of the Japanese army and the point where the defence of Japanese soil would probably be directed from. The war was pretty much lost at this point but (if we are to believe the story we're told by the Allied Powers) Japan was ready to fight to the last man to repel invasion. The bits I found most enlightening were the things you didn't expect to be shown.

Extracts from the diaries and letters from such luminaries as Einstein, Roosevelt, Truman and Oppenheimer tell the story of the Manhattan project and the lead up to the creation of the atomic bomb. We find out the Americans deliberately wanted to see the effects of a nuclear weapon on a functioning population and did not want to give any advantage to the Germans, who they suspected were far advanced in building their own atomic weapons. As a result as early as 1943 it was decided that mainland Japan would be the target of the first atomic weapon and as bombing raids started on Japan itself there would be none to take place over possible atomic bomb targets. The Americans specifically wanted to use this weapon at least once, both to dispassionately observe its effects and to warn all future foes (which would eventually mean their allies, the USSR) of the power they held.

In the end, geography and good weather conspired to pick Hiroshima. The target was a bridge which happens to be two bridges meeting in a T shape (easy to sight visually for the bombardier) and to prove this was a scientific endeavour, two other planes launched recording equipment to collect data. While it's unfair to make comparisons to the Nazis experiments on Jews it does seem to stem from the same mentality.

The impact point (hypercentre) is marked with a small granite memorial you could almost trip over so as to not take away from the A-bomb dome a hundred metres away. A Czech designed government building on the river front survived the blast with it's stone walls and the framework of it's dome intact. This has been kept in the same condition as it was after the blast, as a reminder of what took place. Of all the memorials it's the least contrived and I hope the one that survives all the rest.

As the single biggest geopolitical event since the invention of gunpowder it's hard to predict what would have happened had the Americans warned the Japanese of the existence of atomic weapons, or had they demonstrated the power to them. In the scale of human life lost in WWII 150,000 is a rounding error, but it was the impact of killing them in this way that may have ended the war when it did. It seems the US were indeed hell bent on using it. Would the Japanese have actually fought to the last man, thus extending the numbers of Allied casualties? Would the Soviets have paid as much attention and kept pushing on with conventional warfare in Europe if they suspected the US unwilling to use such a terrible weapon on actual people? Would there have been the relative calm of the Cold War or would we have had another World War by now? No one would disagree that the horror that Hiroshima and Nagasaki endured should never be repeated, but can we be so sure the alternatives would have been no worse?

Nothing in my travels has made me think about what evil people are capable of like this has except for the memorial at Auschwitz. It seems that World War II was indeed humanities Whoa, Whoa, WHOA! moment when we realised that we were plumbing the depths of what humanity could do. While the second half of the 20th century was not all sunshine and lollypops compared with much of the rest of human history it's been relatively peaceful. The biggest problem is we now have so many nuclear weapons we could destory the planet many times over. I don't think that's a problem beyond solving, but places like this need to exist to remind us why we need to solve it.

Shrine me

Hiroshima :: Japan

Being a super tourist in the future.

Places: Kyoto, Nara, Himeji & Hiroshima.

Coolest thing I did: Breathed incense smoke and drank water to make me somehow holy.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Japanese people don't seem to mix wasabi in their soy with sushi.

While Kyoto is a modern, happening town with all the mod cons you'd expect from a big Japanese city you really only go there to see old stuff. It's bloody well full of old stuff. There's shines for the Shintos, temples for the Buddhists and even a castle if that floats your boat.　The fact that UNESCO have gone mad over classifying everything in sight tells you it should be good stuff. Of the many temples I saw I rate the one covered in gold leaf (the Kinkakuji Temple) and the one with a view over the city (the Kiyomizudera Temple) the best to look at. I also rated walking along the rather grandiosely named Path of Philosophy (even though it was named Path of Philosophy (even though it was, in reality a footpath next to a canal) to the Ginkakuji Temple (which is also called the Silver Pavilion despite them never raising the capital to actually cover it in silver).

While I thought the Temples and Shrines were very nice to look at, I also enjoyed the rituals. For free you can wave incense smoke over you for some reason, and catch water as it dribbles off a roof and drink it. I have no idea why but everyone else was doing it so I did too. The other rituals seemed to involve buying things (bits of paper with stuff written on it, bits of wood with stuff written on it) and trying them to walls/trees/clothes lines. I'm sure the Catholic church would be jealous that some people can get away with selling redemption for cold hard cash without causing a major schism in their church.

My trip into Japanese nightlife was severely curtailed by my reckless need to arrive in a new town on a Saturday afternoon having not booked anything. The only hostel I could get into was well located for the tourist stuff but was like a barracks for tourist stuff but was like a barracks for it's rigidity. At 10.30pm sharp the doors closed and at 6.40am sharp a siren sounded and everyone had to get out of bed. This meant while I went out for dinner every night and sampled a few random bars, I was usually doing my Cinderella act right as things were picking up. Still, after the previous two weeks a few days off wasn't the worst thing that could have happened.

On a totally unrelated note I'd like to nominate the sushi train concept as possibly the best lone eating experience possible. Sit down and the waiter does nothing else except bring your beer. You pick plates of food off the conveyor belt going around in front of you and you're charged by the plate at the end (including a yellow plate for each beer). The chefs work right in front of you so you know it's fresh and they just make whatever they feel like. I tried to not just stick with the white boy stuff of salmon on rice and I tried all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff. Still not sure what the bright blue fish was though...

I broke up my stay in Kyoto with a day trip to Nara to see, yep, more shrines and temples. They have this big park where the deer are so populous that they just pretty much ignore cars/buses/people and go about doing as they please. There was an option to buy deer biscuits to feed them but after watching a group of deer chasing some Japanese schoolgirl around after she ran out of them I thought it wise to pass.

The highlight of Nara is the Todai-ji Temple which has a massive bronze Buddha and a couple of smaller gold Buddhas in it. I like it when people make really big sculptures of stuff like that. There were also these huge statues of pig headed guardians that are supposed to scare of thieves. Those were also rather impressive.

While Temples, Shrines and giant statues are all very impressive I found I quite like Japanese gardens. Of these, the best are the Zen gardens, which are kind of like gardens on the cheap. You have sand, rocks and a bonsai or two and then you rake patterns in the sand. It'ｓ a very pleasing aesthetic and all very Zen. Man. I also learned that the minimalist aesthetic of Zen came about because the Japanese were a really poor country so couldn't afford all the trappings of other religions and philosophies. Rather simple explanation, and very cool if it's true. Some yank grad student told me that so it might be rubbish.

Post-Kyoto I caught the Shink (yeah, I'm calling it that now) to Hiroshima with a quick stop over in Himeji for the day. Himeji is a tourist spot because it has something for the boys and something for the girls. Next door to each other is Japan's only surviving castle that hasn't been totally reconstructed out of concrete and a huge Japanese garden next door. The castle is well worth the visit, very imposingly martial. My favourite bit was the annex built for one of the Princesses that went to live there. She married the Diyamo of the castle and they apparently had a really nice marriage, until a rival came along and took the castle and killed her husband. She then married the new Diyamo and just got on with it. Resilient lass.

So I got into Hiroshima this afternoon but I've done nothing but look for an ATM that will take my card. Here's a lesson kids: pretty much no banks in Japan will give you money, except for the post office. I now remember reading the post office is Japan's biggest bank, but I didn't realise until I'd walked Hiroshima end to end that they are also the only ones that take foreign ATM cards. Trick for young players.

The future is full of tiny little people

Kyoto :: Japan

And things come in vending machines.

Places: Furano, Tomamu, Kamui, Asahikawa, Tokyo & Kyoto.

Coolest thing I did: Sat nude in a hot bath in the snow.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The list is endless...

There was once a bloke called William Gibson who used to write science fiction novels but now writes novels set in the present that relate almost as closely to technology as his old ones did.　His first great claim to fame is to have invented the term "cyberspace" about 15 years before the general population had ever heard of the internet. His other great claim to fame is to have told us that Japan is the future. This may not seem like much of an observation now but it was a big deal in 1980.

If Japan is still the future then the future is filled with tiny little people who are very nice. People like me may have some problems in the future as I may have some problems in the future as I'm pretty much covered in bruises, bumps and scratches from running into things because everything is too small for me to use. This seems to cause the Japanese no end of amusement.

My trip here so far has consisted of three very different parts, two involving big groups of people and one not. The first part was snowboarding in the very northern island of Hokkaido. Unlike the rest of Japan, Hokkaido is quite cold and doesn't have a whole lot of people in it. It also has some moderately high mountains on it, which means you can ski on it too. All credit to my mate Law for organising 20 odd people to come away together and have a ball. We were based in the town of Furano which is nestled at the base of two ski fields with some fairly long runs that were just about perfect for someone of my ability. Add to that some fresh snow early on in the week and that there were no queues for anything, even on the weekend and you have a recipes for some very enjoyable boarding. We also sampled a bigger field called Tomamu, which was better for the elite but a bit of a pain for us amatures, and a smaller one at Kamui. Kamui was wrecked for us by blinding snow above the treeline and pelting rain below it. This was a pity as it seemed rather nice.

The nights consisted of freaking out the proprietors of restaurants by showing up in a massive group in the off season and eating all their food. We saw some very good just in time inventory control, mostly involving getting your dad or brother to come by with more beer or wine. The drinking was a bit harder, as most of the bars were empty but with persistence it was possible to sniff something out. I found by sticking my head in the door and covering my obvious counting of the patrons with a "good evening, how are you doing?" worked. We had some top nights, including Law's birthday karaoke extravaganza, which according to witnesses can only be described as feral. Our rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody may have contributed to that.

Not all the days out involved snow. We did an afternoon to an Onsen (hot bath to you lot) up in the mountains that was all outdoors and all naked. The segregation of the sexes probably helped more people participate and I'm finding I'm getting a bit adicted to just sitting in pools of hot water. This was probably the best one we did as it was in a natural setting at there was massive chunks of snow falling the whole time. It does wonders for the aches and pains of snowboarding too.

We did another day trip to Asahikawa and it's nearby zoo. While I wouldn't be a zoo person I did think the spectacle of them having Emperor Penguins walking past the crowd was pretty cool, as was the tank that let you see polar bears both above and below the water. I did think that keeping African animals like Rhinos and Lions in the snow seemed a bit wrong. The town of Asahikawa was memorable mostly for lots of Japanese girls giggling at us doing pretty much anything (eating with chopsticks, drinking beer, walking...). We also happened into a Panchinco parlor, which is something that has to be heard to believe. It's basically slot machines that take ball bearings as money. When you finish you swap your winnings for prizes, which you then take around the corner to a "pawn shop" to exchange for cash money. The sound of torrents of ball bearings running through hundreds of these machines at once it deafening and something to behold.

I kind of liked all the time we spent on the bus in Hokkaido (and there there was a lot of it) if for nothing else than watching snow covered fields with mountainous backdrops pass by. It's barren but beautiful country.

After a day of travel we made it into Tokyo, city of the future. Having only spent a couple of days there I only have a quick impression of it all but looking out over it from the heights of the Metro Offices it feels a bit shapeless with these wide streets and buildings stretching shapeless with these wide streets and buildings stretching out until they hit the bottom of Mount Fuji. Down on street level you can walk for ages and find nothing but the chance for consumption, and that's what people in the future do best. I spent a day walking from our hotel in Shinjuku to Harajuku, through Aoyama and down to Shibuya seeing nothing but food, advertising and retail. For a country that's been in the economic doldrums for the last 1 been in the economic doldrums for the last 15 years they sure do like to spend.

From street level you are amazed at just how clean and ordered everything is. Yellow lines to divide the footpath, no rubbish anywhere and a subway system that tells you when the train is coming down to the second (I know the Tube does that in London too, but the difference is in Tokyo the estimates are invariably right). What strikes you is despite being the home of automation Japan is a very labour intensive country. All this stuff works so well because they employ so many people to do jobs no one would bother with in the West. When you see a guy in a uniform and white gloves whose only job is to make sure the road is clear when the bus comes around the corner every 15 mins you know that bus isn't going to get held up.

I left my 20s　somewhere in Roppongi. This was careless of me, I know. After a nice group BBQ for dinner the group tied balloons to me and we headed for Roppongi, a red light district that makes Vegas look like Disneyland. The bars we mostly full of white guys in suits and we mostly full of white guys in suits and Brazilian prostitutes so we kind of stood out a bit. It was a huge night and probably not a bad way to see in my 30s. Needless to say the balloons didn't survive the night.

The group departed Japan for their various countries and jobs yesterday so I got on the super fast Shinkanzen train (Bullet train to the peons) to Kyoto. It says something about current politics when all I knew about the place was there was a treaty on carbon emissions signed here. I'll save the tales of looking at shrines and temples until next time, as I've been shrines and temples until next time, as I've been typing on this stupid kanji keyboard for far too long. The place I'm doing this is called a Manga cafe and it's basically a place where nerds hide. My booth has a PC with the internet and games, a playstation 2 and a plasma TV in it. Should I tire of playing games I can read backwards comic books in Japanese (many with covers that would make Larry Flint blush). Should I need more energy I can order food, and should I start to stink I can shower. How long do people spend down here?

More soon. Konichiwa bitches.

Non Touristique

Dublin :: Ireland

In search of those elusive French bastards.

Places: Paris and Reims.

Coolest thing I did: Saw lots of Champagne in chalk caves.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Oscar Wilde died of Acute Menegitis.

After my last mid-winter visit to France about 5 years ago I promised that my next trip would come at a time more congenial to sitting around in cafes and making things like parks generally more visitable. However, when Mark, Dee and I were trying to work where to go away for our last family gathering in Europe together none of the usual Ryanair stag-do venues were really appealing. Without a general idea of what we wanted to do (except for one request to go to the Champagne region) we booked ourselves in for a cheap flight and split hotel room and were away.

With one of the wildest spates of winter weather on record hitting Europe on the same day as we were to depart we spent most of a Thursday night at a pub in the airport in Dublin waiting for our plane to come and get us from Paris. This turned out to be not too bad a night out and probably helped calm the nerves a bit when it came time to fly into what should have been a pretty choppy flight. By the time we got into the hotel at around 1am we all pretty much had moved from drunk into hangover and a night out was off the cards. Mark and I did discover that food wasn't too hard to come by, wolfing down something called a King Sandwich each before bed.

While the hotel itself had some issues with hot water the location between Place Republique and Rue Oberkampf was pretty much unbeatable for everything we wanted to do. With a fresh morning to work with it was a brisk walk to Gare L'est just up the road and onto a train bound for Reims. The goal was home of Verve Clicquot but Reims itself turned out to be a nice old town as well. There's a staggeringly large Cathedral there, which I've since found out is pretty famous which we took a look at, even though we weren't supposed to be too touristy on this trip. I know I've seen about a million churches, but the scale of this one is just something to behold.

Our tour of Verve started a little late, but I don't think Mark would have held out through the whole thing. A rather serious bunch of people were standing around being told of the history of numbers of bottles shipped to St Petersburg in the time of Catherine the Great when we walked in. By the time the map of the Champagne region was lighting up to tell us where they got most of their Pinot Noir from I could see lots of eyes glazing over. It wasn't until they took us down into the ground that the whole thing became worth it.

Verve own 24km of caves that have been tunneled out of the soft chalk that lies under the entire region and apparently these have the perfect conditions to store industrial scale quantities of sparkling wine in all states of completion. Apparently some of these caves go back as far as the Romans and each House has it's own set down there somewhere to do all the blending and aging that goes into making every rapper and teen heiresses favorite tipple. You walk past pallets of unlabeled bottles in each cave and when each individual cave is numbered in the hundreds (we started the tour at cave 251) you get some idea of how big an operation it is. We were shown a video (projected onto one of the walls, making an interesting impromptu cinema) of the 10 people whose job it is to taste every single batch to work out what gets blended together to make the finished product. The staff seem pretty loyal, if you stay longer than 10 years you get a cave named after you and there were a lot of plaques commemorating past employees. I guess I'd be a far more loyal employee if that was my job too.

After the standard tasting in the gift shop (ah, winery tours...) we decided we'd take our time getting back to the station and visit a few more places for some tastings, but when some young Americans coming out of the Tattinger House told us we'd have to do the cave tour again we decided against it. We were, however, aghast when the same young Americans told us they'd done the tour but not bothered with the tasting. I still don't get it.

We started off in one of those smoke filled tabac/cafe things for a beer but pretty soon descended into the madness of going into bars and buying champagne from the bottle. At an average of about a bottle every 20 odd minutes between three the result was rather predictable. Apparently tourists are out of season at the moment, as we got some rather funny looks from all the French speakers in the bars, but we didn't care too much. It was much better than being at work on a Friday afternoon.

The train back to Paris was sometime around commuter o'clock so we seemed to stand out a bit by being the only ones drinking champagne out of the bottle and who had obviously been through several previous bottles. I attempted to teach Dee and Mark how to play the card game Arsehole properly, but at that stage I was pretty much having to make the rules up as I went along. It showed.

Here's a tip, don't just go into a Parisian restaurant at random and order stuff off the menu at random. While my pre-chewed looking omelette did taste alright, Mark somehow ended up with a liver sitting in a plate of brown gravy. He seemed to take it rather well.

After the day we'd already had we decided it was better to just go directly out, so we set off in the direction of Rue Oberkampf, which I'd been informed was a good place to go out. With much wandering it became clear navigation had gone out the window. We wandered towards the bottom of Canal St Martin and it was only once we were heckled by bunches of dudes sitting in the middle of the park and witnessed someone kicking the utter crap out of a bus stop that we realised we might have gone the wrong way. Thank God there is a map about every 5 metres in Paris so we could have a few more attempts at getting to the right place.

After this Friday night on the Oberkampf I can endorse Paris as a primo nightlife destination, but not a cheap one. At somewhere in the order of 6.50 EUR for a half pint of beer it was never going to be a cheap night out, but man, was it a good one. We went to a handful of bars at different points down the street and any one of them would have sufficed for a night out. Despite what you keep hearing about the rudeness of the French everyone was beyond friendly. The bars are also the kinds of places you long for in Dublin and could never exist anymore in Sydney, usually intimate in size and experimental in decor and music choice. Table service is the norm and you actually feel rather cool just for being in them. After a while you also start forgetting you couldn't see the roof through the smoke and you're passively putting away about a million cigarettes a night. Someone told us they were cutting out indoor smoking in 2007 but I'd daresay it's going to have a much harder time getting through France than it has elsewhere. Smoking just seems to be something they do. All of them.

Once Dee had enough (this can be forgiven with the day we'd already had) somewhere in the order of 1am Mark and I found ourselves holding court at a long table in the heart of the Oberkampf. In the preceding 4 hours we befriended Frenchmen (and Frenchwomen), Moroccan drug dealers and Ivory Coastian bouncers. Very good atmosphere and a cracking night out. So good, in fact that despite being about 2 mins walk from our hotel we managed to almost get into an altercation in a taxi queue outside the Pere Lachaise cemetery, which was so obviously in the opposite direction in hindsight that it's hard to figure out how we got there on foot. Bien!

So while Mark suffered through a whole day of the sweats and KFC, Dee and I went back to Pere Lachaise (well, first time for her...) to go look at where they stuck Jim Morrison. Jimmy's grave is yet another example of the Mona Lisa Syndrome (ie. everyone standing around saying "I thought it would be bigger...") but it's still cool enough to go and see. I've seen pictures of the graffiti from the olden days when it was on every American's must do list and even though it's now less impressive, it's still probably a good thing they cleaned it up. I thought the final resting place of Oscar Wilde, which has been marked by the kisses of many lips, was much better to look at.

That was one of two seriously touristy things we did. The other involved dragging out very hung over selves up all those stairs leading to the top of Montmartre and the Sacre Coeur sitting on top of it. Sitting up there at night was possibly one of the best things I did the first time in Paris and it was just as good during the day. I think Dee was impressed too. We then spent the afternoon nominally walking towards Notre Dame, but really just meandering around the winding streets. We probably would have made it all the way to the river if the heavens hadn't opened and we didn't need to go and rescue Mark from his three piece feed.

Having heard Canal St Martin was the new Oberkampf, and in light of what it looked like the night before we decided to have a bit of a look around during the daylight hours. What we did see was something like a refugee camp, with rows and rows of tents lining each side of the canal. I'm not sure if it was a policies statement or proper homelessness. After a bit more lazing around a smart looking cafe up there we decided that we'd go back to Oberkampf for round two.

Our second night involved less lunacy that the first, but it was still a hell of a night out. We went to three bars, again, none of which you would expect to find in Dublin. The first was a cozy affair with lots of people around 10 years our junior sitting around what had to be the worlds lowest tables drinking cocktails, smoking their little hearts out, and occasionally yelling at a game of yhatzee that was spiraling dangerously towards rowdiness. It does seem that the French think nothing weird of card games and the like being played in ultra cool bars on a Saturday night. The second place we went, a sort of bar/art sales room with painted skateboard decks on the wall for sale, we were sitting across from another bunch playing cards. Try that in Bungalow 8.

The last place we went was probably the most eventful. We saw a bloke that looked like Ryan Girdler (formerly of the Penrith Rugby League team) probably knew nothing of this 'Rugby League' of which we spoke. There were two girls dancing on the bar whom we later found out were Americans. We should have figured this out by the stripper moves they were putting in, or probably more likely when one of them reached up, stumbled and pulled a fair part of the air conditioner out of the roof. I'm sure the bar tender would have cared had he not been so obviously on something that he couldn't focus on you to get the money once he'd reached down to get your beers and looked back up, despite you being a) right in front of him and b) exactly where you were when he looked down 15 seconds previously. Said American girl also made quite a river of vomit in the toilets (which seemed to be unisex in every bar and restaurant in Paris) according to Mark, who also got to see the spectacle of the French people all going nuts at her.

All in all, a great three day weekend away, and very little serious tourism done. For all the attention going to the ultra cheap destinations that were once on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, some of the old gems like Paris and Berlin are getting forgotten. It's a pity, as these places are famous for a reason.