Charles Stross' Diary (RSS Feed)
09-06-2007, 01:50 PM
Please excuse the lack of recent updates; I've been recovering from the worldcon in Yokohama by indulging in gratuitous tourism. Japan is, indeed, pretty weird, and my wife's been getting to use the Japanese lessons she's been taking for the past couple of years (she's a language geek: I'm sadly monolingual).
Yesterday — still staying in Yokohama — we headed up into the hills to Hakone, where we ascended about 550 metres on a remarkable 1930s high-altitude railway (taking slopes of up to 1 in 10 and making several switchbacks). Then we spent most of the afternoon in the Yunessun spa, which boasts something like 23 different bathing experiences (from the hot springs to the flumes by way of a coffee-flavoured pool and a whole bunch of other stuff besides). Very much a tourist experience, but fun — and given we've had temperatures up to 31 degrees and 80% relative humidity for the past week, feeling clean (in the way you can only get after several hours of bathing) is really good. On the way back we stopped to go up the Landmark Tower (274 metres to the observation deck -- lower than the Empire State Building, but not by much) and failed to see Mount Fuji, mostly because of it being (a) nighttime and (b) foggy.
Foggy? Well, the weather forecast may have something to do with that. Typhoon Fitow has been gathering force for a couple of days, and today it's making landfall ... on Tokyo. We checked out of Yokohama this morning, caught a series of trains to our next hotel (near Shinjuku, in Tokyo), dropped our bags, and went exploring. Hint: if you're going to explore downtown Tokyo, and there's a typhoon warning out, take an umbrella and be prepared to have fun getting back to your hotel if you leave things too late! Exploration came to an end around 6pm, as the increasingly gusty squalls and cloudbursts began to get worse, and on our way home the station information boards began displaying lists of service interruptions. It's not a powerful typhoon, but a typhoon by any other name is a hurricane (in the Pacific). It shut down the Shinkanesen and many of the commuter lines, and right now it's rattling the triple-glazed window half a metre in front of my nose, booming and rumbling outside and throwing sprays of rain at my face.
The plan for tomorrow (if Typhoon Fitow leaves us alone) is to visit Puroland, which is to Hello Kitty as Disneyworld is to the rodent prince. Then we hit Akhibara, before zipping along to Kyoto. Tourism is an exhausting business!
(Original Post) (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/09/shibuya_in_a_typhoon.html)
Yesterday — still staying in Yokohama — we headed up into the hills to Hakone, where we ascended about 550 metres on a remarkable 1930s high-altitude railway (taking slopes of up to 1 in 10 and making several switchbacks). Then we spent most of the afternoon in the Yunessun spa, which boasts something like 23 different bathing experiences (from the hot springs to the flumes by way of a coffee-flavoured pool and a whole bunch of other stuff besides). Very much a tourist experience, but fun — and given we've had temperatures up to 31 degrees and 80% relative humidity for the past week, feeling clean (in the way you can only get after several hours of bathing) is really good. On the way back we stopped to go up the Landmark Tower (274 metres to the observation deck -- lower than the Empire State Building, but not by much) and failed to see Mount Fuji, mostly because of it being (a) nighttime and (b) foggy.
Foggy? Well, the weather forecast may have something to do with that. Typhoon Fitow has been gathering force for a couple of days, and today it's making landfall ... on Tokyo. We checked out of Yokohama this morning, caught a series of trains to our next hotel (near Shinjuku, in Tokyo), dropped our bags, and went exploring. Hint: if you're going to explore downtown Tokyo, and there's a typhoon warning out, take an umbrella and be prepared to have fun getting back to your hotel if you leave things too late! Exploration came to an end around 6pm, as the increasingly gusty squalls and cloudbursts began to get worse, and on our way home the station information boards began displaying lists of service interruptions. It's not a powerful typhoon, but a typhoon by any other name is a hurricane (in the Pacific). It shut down the Shinkanesen and many of the commuter lines, and right now it's rattling the triple-glazed window half a metre in front of my nose, booming and rumbling outside and throwing sprays of rain at my face.
The plan for tomorrow (if Typhoon Fitow leaves us alone) is to visit Puroland, which is to Hello Kitty as Disneyworld is to the rodent prince. Then we hit Akhibara, before zipping along to Kyoto. Tourism is an exhausting business!
(Original Post) (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/09/shibuya_in_a_typhoon.html)