Month: December 2016

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Best Wishes for 2017 !

It’s midnight in Japan, and so it’s officially 2017.  My hotel here in Tokyo organized a countdown party with a little brass band downstairs for us, to ring in the new year.   I wish everyone health and happiness for the new year ahead.

This picture is from a few days ago in the Lan Kwai Fong section in Hong Kong.

 

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Saturday/ Tokyo Disneyland

The Keiyō Line, run by Japan Rail East, runs out to Tokyo Bay. (I am close to the Tokyo station, the long bar on the top left). The Disney Resort line is a loop that runs around the Disney premises.

Well – the year is almost out here in the ‘Far East’. (Hey, is there such a concept as the Far West? Shouldn’t there be, if there is a Far East?).

I walked around Shinjuku again today.  Many of the stores closed early for  New Year’s Eve.

Tonight I thought I’d pay my ‘respects’ to American culture by running out to Tokyo Disneyland.  They have a fireworks display at midnight. I thought I might stay for the fireworks at midnight – but in the end I did not.

Here is the beautiful fixtures from the Isetan department store in Shinjuku, considered to be one of the most influential department stores in Japan.
One of several display frames with merchandise inside Isetan .. or is it art? Both, I’m sure. For once, I was not inviting trouble by taking pictures inside the store : there is a sign that says ‘OK to photograph’.
Shinjuku station is nearby, and I went upstairs to look down at it .. and lo and behold, there is the Narita Express (on the right).
Here is the Tokyo Disneyland Station stop. The train runs in a loop, on a monorail, and the windows have mouse-ear silhouettes. (That would be Mickey Mouse, of course).
This is inside the main lobby of the Tokyo Disneyland hotel. I have never seen such an enormous chandelier! Those are hotel rooms in the background.
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Friday/ Shibuya

Newly-clad copper roof of part of the Meiji shrine. The copper will oxidize and turn green over time.

I made a ran out to the Meiji Shrine in Shibuya ward on Friday .. but found it not as impressive as other shrines I have been to on previous visits. The shrine is dedicated to Emperor Meiji and his wife, Empress Shōken.  The emperor died in 1912, and the shrine was constructed in 1915.

This beautiful building is nearby the Meiji shrine, and houses administrative offices.  (The copper cladding on the entrance canopy has turned green).
This is in Shibuya. The tear-dropped shaped kōban (police box) on the left is unusual. Usually they really are ‘boxes’!
Half-boy, half-bird face on an advertising display panel at the entrance of a Virtual Reality arcade in Shibuya. Judging by the clientele inside, I was wa-ay too old to go in (but I did, anyway).
Inside Shibuya station.
The more mundane platforms on the old Ginza line that I use to get to Kyobashi station by the hotel.
Display panel by the door inside the train car on the Ginza line. The program generating the display not only ‘knows’ which line the train is on, it also knows which CAR of the train it is in, and displays precise directions of connecting lines and how to exit the station.
It was the Year of the Monkey, so the stock market went up and down, said the news reader at the final day of trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. And weatherwise it is not warm, but at least sunny here in Tokyo.  Six days ago there was a massive snowstorm north in Sapporo, trapping hundreds of Hongkongers in Sapporo and sparking violence at the airport that needed police attention.
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Thursday night/ to Tokyo

The Narita Express is a sleek machine.

My travels to Tokyo went well today. Catching the first available train out at Narita airport was a little tight, though!
Here is a timeline.
8.30 pm: Walking onto Terminal 3 arrivals hall. Made it through passport control, baggage claim and customs.
8.35 pm: Withdraw yen (¥116 to the dollar, great rate) out of the ATM. Head downstairs to buy a ticket for the Narita Express.
8.37 pm: The ticket office lines are long! Let me try the ticket machine, just have to find an ENGLISH button on the screen first.
8.40 pm: Yikes. The next express train is at 8.47 pm, the one after that one almost an hour later. Better get to it. I luck out, pushing the right buttons, then fed it a ¥10,000 bill (that’s US$85! Better not swallow it, machine!).  Out came the ticket (¥4,560/ $39) and change.
8.44 pm: Three minutes to go. Rush downstairs with all my luggage to the platform. No sign of the train.
8.45 pm: Buy a drink from the vending machine on the platform with my coins from the ticket machine.
8.46 pm: Thinking: the train must be late, but just then it slid into the station. Here it is!
8.47 pm: Whoah, slow down fella. We step on board.
8.48 pm: On our way.

An unusual sight (for me, at least) : an Aeroflot Airlines jet (Russian airline) at Hong Kong airport about to taxi out to the runway. The plane is a Boeing 777-300ER.  It is probably on its way to Moscow.
We had just left Hong Kong international airport on Lantau Island, now on our way to Tokyo, a flight of about 4 1/2 hours.
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Thursday/ the new South Island Line

I read about the new South Island Line’s opening just Wednesday, at breakfast this morning, and thought : Man! I will have to go. I will just have enough time before heading out the airport – and so I did.  Here is the South China Morning Post’s report on the US$2.2 billion expansion, 9 years in the making.  The train has no driver, and the cars are decorated inside with colorful pictures of animals and fishes (one of the stops is at the aquarium at Ocean Park).

There is a red-eyed tree frog on board! (These are actually native to Central America down to Columbia, and not to Hong Kong).
These pictures are from inside the new train cars on the South Island Line. It’s hard for me to say which creature I like best : the panda, the sloth or the kangaroo !

 

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Wednesday/ more Hong Kong

Here are my pictures from Wednesday’s walkabouts in the city.  I spent some time on the Hong Kong mainland side (Kowloon).  My Marriott Courtyard hotel is on Hong Kong island.

This is the Kowloon train station entrance from the plaza by International Commerce Center (the 108-storey, 484 m skyscraper completed in 2010 in West Kowloon). The ICC is behind me.
This is the base of the International Commerce Centre skyscraper. Besides the international financial services firms, there is a Ritz-Carlton Hotel in the skyscraper as well. (Here’s to hoping that the ‘smartest guys in the room’ in their suits are not brewing up another 2008-style financial crisis for us!).
There is a Christmas tree with Fantastic Mr Fox characters on display inside the ICC. This is Rabbit, one character of many in the Fantastic Mr Fox novel.  (A children’s novel written by British author Roald Dahl, also made into an animated movie in 2009).
Lots of Hong Kong taxis outside the Times Square mall in Causeway Bay. These old Toyota taxis are hanging in there; I don’t see too many Priuses that had replaced them yet.
I cannot leave Hong Kong without a tram ride, I thought .. this is the view from one taking me to Lan Kwai Fong (‘party central’ for the expats in the city). I am sitting upstairs and right up front, and trying not to annoy my fellow passengers ‘too much’ by incessantly taking pictures.
This is the start of a whole series of escalators and stairs that make it easy to go up the hillside to the ‘mid levels’ where more shops and restaurants are.
Check out these gorgeous exterior wall decorations from a building in Wellington Street in Lan Kwai Fong.
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Tuesday/ Hong Kong at night

Tsim Sha Tsui : still my ‘favorite’ Hong Kong station name. And the new stations does not feature the little mosaic tiles on the walls.
This is inside the Landmark Atrium mall in Central District. Nevermind that Christmas Day has come and gone – the mall is still using its elaborate display to draw shoppers. (The stores are empty, though. I felt sorry for the bored shop assistants).
Bank buildings in the Admiralty district, lit up. From left to right: the Bank of China building, the Cheung Kong Center, the Agricultural Bank of China, the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) Main Center, the Standard Chartered Bank.
Nearby, the City Hall Public Library was in on the action as well (of lighting up its building with changing colors on the different floors and cells).
And here is a late night photo shoot taking place on the quiet streets in Central District by the designer stores. By day the sidewalks are packed with pedestrians, and the streets filled with buses, cars and trams.

Here are pictures from my late night venture into Central District.  It’s been four years since I have walked around in the city. The city continues to add to its already staggering inventory of skyscrapers, and there seems to be more Starbucks coffee shops around than ever; some of them just hole-in-the-wall take out locations.

One can now get to the Marriott Courtyard a little easier with the westward extension of the Island Line. Ironically, the hotel is right in between two new stops .. so still a good 10 minute walk from either station.   The old street trams are still running, though; some of them now nicely refurbished on the inside with new seats.

 

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Monday night/ back to Hong Kong

Almost there .. about one more hour of the 7h 45m flight to go to get to Hong Kong.
A picture from our approach into Hong Kong airport.   Another year had gone, and I see the world’s longest bridge, the HongKong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge will now only be completed by Dec 2017 – at the earliest.  This is one of the man-made islands.  The white rectangle in the middle of the island is where the ‘bridge’ actually becomes a tunnel (see next picture).
The three cities that the HongKong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge connect with one another.  The bridge is actually a bridge-tunnel-bridge combination, so that large ships can cross it.
Here’s the inside of an almost-empty Hong Kong metro train car. (At the end of the Island Line, on my way to the hotel). The cars have open gangways, so you can see all the way to the front as it snakes through its tunnel.

On Monday night I started to make my way back to Seattle, but with stay-overs in Hong Kong and in Tokyo.   Our flight out of Perth departed at midnight and brought us into Hong Kong by 7.45 am on Tuesday morning.

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Sunday/ Perth downtown

Here are some pictures from Sunday afternoon and Monday, of Perth downtown and its surrounding area.

Here’s a panoramic view of the Perth skyline from Kings Park, on the western edge of the city.
These are black ducks, in Kings Park and its botanical garden.
A protea from the small South African section in the botanical garden.
The Western Australia museum is closed for renovations, but I liked this billboard with its swimming dinosaur-lizard.
This building at 139 St Georges Terrace looks like a church, but it is a school : Old Perth Boys school, the earliest government school building in Western Australia, and established in 1852.
This bright red Alfa Romeo caught my eye, in downtown against the old buildings.
And the inevitable city tourist bus, with a kangeroo on the side with the ‘hop on, hop off’ text.
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Friday/ back to Perth

We drove back to Perth from Albany, with highway 30 most of the way over Kojonup and Williams.   Here are some pictures from our stops on the way.

This is in Kojonup, and the mileages are in kilometers. The last two town names are from the Noongar language. The Noongar are Aboriginal people that have lived in the south-west of Western Australia for more than 45,000 years.
This is a giant replica of a loaded horse-drawn wool wagon from yesteryear. In 1908 some 10,000 sheep were shorn in the Kojonup Shire (a shire is a county).  By 1969 that number had reached 1 million.  Nowadays the local wool industry has become much more mechanized and specialized.
Here’s the abandoned train station building at Kojonup.  It has been at least 30 years since the last train went through here.
The old main hotel in Williams is still standing. There is still a bar downstairs, but its heyday has by now been long. long gone.
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Friday/ the Albany from yesteryear

Here are some of the older buildings around York Street and Princess Royal Drive in old historic downtown Albany.

The Albany town hall was its first civic building. It opened in 1888.
The ‘London Hotel’ is on Princess Royal Street. It is the oldest licensed hotel in Western Australia, first built in 1856 and rebuilt after a major fire in 1909.
This train came steaming through the main station in Albany this morning. It is westbound, towards the town of Denmark.
This beautiful old gazebo overlooks the main train station.
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Thursday/ Flinders peninsula

A whaling station was located at Discovery Bay on Flinders Peninsula, and was operated on and off from the early 1800s to 1978, when it was finally closed down. The two main species of whale hunted were the Southern Right Whale and the Humpback Whale.
A whaling ship is part of the historic whaling station display (the busy background interferes a little with the image of the ship).
Man! Watch out!  Lots of calamities that can befall the careless explorer of the cliffs and coastline around the peninsula (check out the pictures).

We drove out to Flinders Peninsula on the King George Sound today, and stopped by a historic whaling station (now a museum), and the coastline on the oceanside of King George Sound.

This view of the Southern Ocean from the view point called ‘Blow Holes’ on peninsula.  Sea caves form in the rocks, which result in blasts of water from the top of the opening.  We did not see much of that today, though.   Maybe the tide was low.   
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Wednesday/ Albany

We spent a little time at the beach at Greens Pool in the Denmark area today, before heading out east to Albany for the next few days.  Albany is a port city in the Great Southern region of Western Australia.  It is the oldest permanently settled town in Western Australia, since it was actually founded more than two years before Perth and Fremantle.

Kangeroos come quite close to the chalets and tents in our camping area, usually as the sun sets. These fellas are probably eastern gray kangeroos, found throughout southern and eastern Australia.
Greens Pool beach is part of William Bay National Park. It has a large natural tide pool with a sandy white beach ringed by large granite boulders that keep the surf of the Southern Ocean out.
Lichens and a hardy succulent on the granite boulders by Greens Pool.
Albany has a peninsula and two natural harbors. We are staying at Emu Point. Look for it at the top right of the picture, by Oyster Harbor.
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Tuesday/ the drive to Denmark

We got a late start out to the drive down from Perth airport to Denmark on Monday afternoon, and took a wrong turn on the way there, to boot.  (Yes,I should have turned on the Google Map navigation, but I wanted to save some data and the cellular signal is very weak in some remote areas).   But we did eventually make it in to Denmark at 9 pm.

The drive from Perth to Denmark was as follows : Perth-Armadale-Williams-Arthur River-Kojonup-Mt Barker-Denmark.
This beautiful Memorial Hall building in Kojonup shows the typical architecture of buildings found in the small towns on the way to Denmark.
A very cool surfer Santa Claus, in front of a store in Denmark.
The Ocean Beach estuary at Denmark. The ocean on this part of the Australian coast is called the Southern Ocean.
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Monday/ arrival in Perth

We flew dye south for 7 hours from Hong Kong to get to Perth. Here we are about 3 hours away.

We arrived at Perth International Airport at 6.20 am local time, by which time the sun had been up for more than an hour already.  I have to wait for my friend Marlien from South Africa, arriving around noon, and then we will drive down to the coast to Denmark* to join my brother and his family there.

*Denmark, Western Australia.

This artwork in the Perth airport arrivals hall is by Penelope Forlano. It is titled ‘From the Skies’ (2015). It symbolizes Munday Swamp, part of the Perth airport site, one of the most significant archaeological sites in South Western Australia, and dating Aboriginal occupation locally for at least 38,000 years. It was traditionally a site for turtle fishing and an Aboriginal meeting place by the Whadjuk people.
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Sunday night/ stop in Hong Kong

Here are some pictures from Hong Kong airport.
The flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong was 5 hours. I am on the way to Perth shortly.

We’re still on the ground at Tokyo’s Narita airport, but not for much longer. Here is the in-flight camera showing the ground crew removing the stopping blocks from the aircraft wheels.
Arriving at the gate at Hong Kong International airport with its wavy roofline. These are all Cathay Pacific birds, same as the one I am in.
Inside the terminal at Hong Kong International airport.  The display of giant polished spheres are by fashion house Dior.
I love the dragon boat with the M&M characters in.  The red one and yellow one in front are the cutest with their nón lá (conical Vietnamese style hats).  Of all the varieties, the almond M&Ms are still the best.
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Sunday/ Shinjuku

I made a run out to Shinjuku station on Saturday night, if only to test my mega-train station navigation chops (Shinjuku is by far the world’s largest and busiest train station).

Later on Sunday I have to head out to Narita airport for my flight to Perth, with a stop in Hong Kong.

This is the Isetan department store near Shinjuku station, in a beautiful historic building. Life is a Gift .. smart marketing? wise outlook on life? Probably both.
This giant crab on a building near Shinjuku station has animated arms, and is about 20 feet across. I assume it advertises seafood at a restaurant inside.
More upscale shopping in Shinjuku san-chome (Shinjuku Block no 3). Maybe the rainbow colors are purely incidental, or maybe not : the gay night life district is just next door in Shinjuku ni-chome (Shinjuku Block no 2).
There is still construction going on in the streets around Shinjuku station (there was last year). As far as I remember that skylight pyramid is new.
This is Sunday morning, on the Yamanote line from Japan Railways company. I’m at Shimbashi station, going to Tokyo station. Check out the old controls on the pillar on the left.

 

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Saturday/ Ginza and Akihabara

Here are pictures from the time I spent in the Ginza district and in Akihabara.  I spent way too much time in the Yodobashi electronics store – some of it drooling over a beautiful $430 Seiko titanium watch (no! go and think about it first is what I told myself).

A Nissan concept self-driving car in a display on a street corner in Ginza.
This giant ‘polar bear’ with two cubs is in the Wako department store. There is a button in the window that passers-by can push to ring the golden bell (up and to the left of the little guy checking out the bear). And then the bear stirs lazily and opens her eyes, and go back to sleep.
Many of the streets in Ginza were closed for traffic, to allow shoppers to wander around in the streets. Several light displays of giant flowers add some festivity.
Here’s the Sony building in the Ginza district. Look for a sleek all-electric BMW i8 at the bottom of the picture in black and white.
This is the Ginza station on the Hibya line. I’m getting ready to go to Akihabara.
This is a new sign, evidently warning of the dangers of texting or browsing while walking around on the platform at the same time. Yes – it can be very dangerous.
The Yodobashi electronics and appliance emporium is as popular as ever, and I spent a lot of time there. That’s the iPhone 7 that is featured on its billboards.
There are many, many sets of make believe characters in the toy department : the Sylvanian rabbit family, Lego friends. monsters and warriors, and then there are the ‘pose skeletons’. (A little weird, not?).
Another somewhat jarring concept: anime characters dressed up in Christmas gear, for a show called ‘Precious Christmas’.

 

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Friday night/ arrived in Tokyo

We had a late start, one hour delay out of Seattle, but made it in to Tokyo 9 hrs 20 mins later, just as the sun was setting in the Far East at 4.30 pm.  Everything went well, but it took time to get through passport control and customs, and then another hour on the Narita Express to get to the city.   It was three hours later when I checked into the hotel here in the Ginza district.

Here’s a view of the Boeing 787 engine on the All Nippon Airways plane. That’s the Sea of Okhotsk below, to the east of the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Here’s our plane parked at the gate at Narita International airport near Tokyo. I took the Narita Express train into Tokyo Station in the city.