Ochanomizu and Nakano
Time for the long day before the long flight. The key is to do everything slowly, walk, eat, urinate etc.
First of all, it is best to stay in your hotel until checkout time, and shower just before you checkout, and apply various oils and lotions to your entire body. Then, due to a really hot day, it is important to try not to sweat, for many many hours.
To try and kill time and not sweat I decided to go to Ochanomizu to look at guitar related things, and then to Nakano to look at whatever they had, which turned out to be cats.
Right now I am typing this in Haneda airport, too early to check in, using their free wifi. I took quite a few boring pics today, so more text below.
First pic of the day is just a random corner in Akihabara as I walked past to demonstrate that the weather is clear blue sky and really hot, 23c today I think.
A train went overhead.
I was late enough that the guitar stores in Ochanomizu were open, I had some pocky to celebrate.
The synergy preamp modules at the end are really rare, I used to have an amp head that used them.
This seems to be the big thing everyone is advertising in guitar shop world lately.
It was interesting (to me) to see that they list the weight of each identical guitar, and that the weights vary quite a bit.
Big Boss is still the place to order custom made ESP guitars, but they no longer have all the strange solid gold crucifix and diamond encrusted ones on display, still some of these cost about $13k
Nakano now, here is the covered shopping street leading to the braodway, will this be the last covered shopping street photo? Very probably.
But wait, what is this strange architecturally designed wooden jungle area?
Oh hello.
These 3 never really moved from the glass, they were very interested in puppies barking down stairs.
There were 8 cats available for annoying.
Some are the useless variety with corgi legs.
Random cat.
There was some fighting going on, probably spurred on by me, but it is hard to photograph.
Also a lot of sleeping.
OK no more cat photos.
Time for the broadway, which is 4 levels of shops selling mainly secondhand collectables.
I like the headphone shops more so than the schoolgirl figurines.
Also if you missed fushimi inari shring in Kyoto, do not panic, there is one here.
It was now time to go and sit in the park and re hydrate, the park was strangely busy for a Friday afternoon.
The reason seems to be the nearby purple sweet potato festival, which is more of an Okinawa thing.
The back streets of Nakano have some really good eating places, I would like to stay in Nakano on a future trip as it is on the train line to the mountains, and closer to the mountains than Ueno or Shinjuku.
For the last pic taken in Tokyo other than the airport, 3 trains and a river.
Tokyo Haneda airport
After checking in and going through security, I realised I probably should have got my dinner before going through security. So my top tip is, eat before security.
Haneda airport terminal 3 is very small, but does have some great features. The greatest feature every airport should have is the outdoor viewing gallery, with no plastic windows to photograph through even. Amazingly, this was also before security, so on the roof there were a heap of guys who are not flying anywhere with all their huge lenses. I am reasonably confident that if I were to take a lense that huge out onto the roof viewing area it would be declared a national security incident, priority 1: foreigner.
Anyway, after the long winded and out dated customs, I found my yakisoba, found a seat after circling like a vulture, and bought a heap of water from vending machines.
The check in area of Haneda terminal 3. There are 2 other terminals. There is no terminal 4. I am a mathematical genius.
You can go up and up and over this bridge though, so that is pretty cool. There are about a thousand warnings that the bridge is on a slope and it seems apparent people lose control of their luggage very often.
Now for the wonderful roof top viewing gallery. It goes the full length of the terminal, there is even more of it behind me.
Here is a shot from the roof gallery.
And because I could line up with the green taxi lights, enjoy another. Actually I am just left of centre as all the photographers had snagged the centre spots.
One level down there are a few restaurants. I should have eaten here. All of these are before customs.
They have a few 'streets' like this.
After going through customs, there is just one very small food court, that has nowhere near enough seating.
But I did get to have a decent yakisoba, prawn, squid and pork, quite cheap too. This was the last photo taken in Japan, a meal in a food court.
Tokyo to Cairns on a Virgin 737 max
I had an entire row to myself on the plane which was less than half full. They cannot continue with this service forever like this. Not that I am complaining yet, but if I book it again soon for the same time next year, I predict they will cancel it before next November and I will be in trouble.
The reason it is not popular is the wait in Cairns for a connecting flight on the return leg, which I am now experiencing, with no lounge access in either Tokyo or Cairns, which eliminates 100% of business travellers, and now that Virgin is partnered with ANA, this eliminates most of the people using frequent flyer points too. But that is all a bit boring.
I thought by having the entire row to myself with lift up arm rests I could lay down. Hmmm, not as easy as I thought. The Seats are really hard, it is not quite long enough, and the seat belts stick up between each seat. I pretty much gave up on that after a while and sat in the middle seat of the block of 3, fully man spreading.
Now I am sitting in Cairns typing this, after having collected my bag from international, and dragged it a decent distance to domestic where I had to re check it in, another reason people do not like the via Cairns to Japan option. The advantage of Cairns though is that the international arrivals was just my tiny 737, no other flights, so customs etc was very fast.
And now... that is all, there will be no more updates unless the bus breaks down again or my flight from Cairns to Melbourne gets diverted or something like that.
With 5 hours to spare I went for a wander around the Cairns airport area. Quite cool at 6:30am too. The airport is surrounded by small tropical mountains and mud flats.
And for the final pic of this entire thing, a food court of sorts, in the Cairns domestic airport which has a lot more shops and cafes than I was expecting.
The end.
There are currently 1 comments - click to add
jenny on 2023-11-24 said:
love the last shot.