Willem's Planet

I tagged along with two of my colleagues to Luohu Commercial City.   It is a shopping mall right next to the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border’s customs building (first picture).   Wikipedia says the place is notorious in Hong Kong for its bargains, and that many “one-day” visitors from Hong Kong venture no further into Shenzhen than the mall.  Most of the items for sale in the mall, however, are either counterfeit or cheap replicas of designer brands, and the mall has a reputation for selling low-quality goods through high-pressure bargain tactics.

So it’s not for people like me that 1. hate haggling over prices, and 2. want the real thing!   But there we were – and it wasn’t long before a ‘guide’ latched on to us, inquiring what we were interested in buying, and then taking us a store owner that sells it.   The guide was a nice young kid and I hope he gets money from the shop-owners he brought us to.   I am pretty sure he does.   We also stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall tea shop, and the owner sat us down and served up green tea, oolong tea and jasmine tea.   We loved the green tea and each bought a ‘brick’ of the stuff.   Then we hopped in the taxi and came back to Dameisha.

There is a tropical depression (named Banyan) off the coast of Hong Kong that has produced a steady rain the last three days out here.   This is bad news for the already-flooded areas in Thailand as well, I’m sure.   The arrow sign is at our turn into Ping Kui Road every day to work, and I wonder if there will be enough light energy collected by the little solar panel to make the left and right arrow flicker at night – there probably will be.   

Wednesday night I had dinner at the Denny’s across the street from the hotel one last time, then caught the Narita Express at 7am Thu morning at Tokyo station.    There’s the sleek machine in the picture,  gliding in and stopping so that the car doors line up exactly with the markers on the platform.    I learned of Steve Jobs’s passing away at the airport on CNN.    The picture is from a discussion of the iPhone 4S in Japan earlier in the week.  iPhones were previously limited to one carrier (Softbank), but will now be available from a second carrier (KDDI), similar to the at-first-exclusive-to-AT&T and then-also-Verizon situation in the USA.

It was rained all day Wednesday in the Tokyo metro area (picture from NHK TV station) and I had on-line work to do, but I still managed to run out to Akihabara.  It is also known as Akihabara Electric Town and located less than five minutes by rail from Tokyo Station.   As the name indicates, it is a major shopping area for electronic, computer, anime, and otaku* goods, including new and used items.   *roughly translates as geek; a person with obsessive interests in anime, manga or video games.   The store is gigantic : 7 floors of Best Buy, Toys-R-Us and Office Depot stuff.   The displays in some areas are just overwhelming but the store is very well laid out and run.   The friendly guy in the picture explains how to measure your wrist size for watch straps, the blond anime girl is from the floor in the DVD/ CD section – why waste floor space if it can be put to good use to advertise the merchandise?   The last picture is from outside.  By then my shoes and socks were wet in spite of the umbrella I borrowed from the hotel and I called it quits and went back. 

My first mission of the day was to find the Tokyo branch of the Japan Mint store to buy a 2011 Japan coin set, and I succeeded.  Most Japanese streets have no names! and the addressing system is quite different from Western ones.   It is near Higashi-Ikebukoro station and I had to ask for directions twice.   This is the entrance of the store.   (I will show the coin set later).

Next stop was Akasaka station.   There is a Noritake porcelain show room there that I wanted to check out (sneak picture of porcelain with gold leaf is from there).   The Akasaka area sustained heavy damage in WWII and has been newly rebuilt : and it shows.    I loved the spectacular curved vanishing-edge building with the diamond window panes.  The area is also full of shrines.   I walked to the east from the orange area to find the Hie Jinja Shrine (next two pictures).    Finally the obligatory self-picture in the subway mirror with my iPhone 4.  I see there is considerable disappointment at Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 4S (what? no iPhone 5?!).

Monday’s weather was perfect for being out and about.    This Ginza district lamp post with the Fenghuang (mythological bird of East Asia) on top has  a decoration with up-faces/ upside-down-faces on.   The Ginza street scene shows Matsuya Ginza, an upscale department store with a design museum on the 6th floor (white building on the right).   I love the chess set but didn’t make a note of who the artist was.   The Klein & More clock replica dates back to 1956 (a little pricey at  ¥ 47,250/ US$600, though).   Elsewhere in the store the Issey Miyake jackets went for $400 or so.  (Miyake was born in Hiroshima and witnessed and survived the atomic bomb at age 7 in 1945).   I ran into the Ichiro picture (from the Seattle Mariners) in the subway.  He is promoting Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and yes, that’s a Starbucks store name reflected at the top of the picture.    And back in the hotel I can watch high-definition manga animated stories.   The artwork is stunning, but of course the dialog is in Japanese!

Here is the Boeing 767-300 of All Nippon Airlines that brought us to Tokyo, at a wet Hong Kong airport.   (An ANA plane was involved in a hair-raising incident on Sept 6.  Flight 140 with 117 passengers en route to Haneda -Tokyo’s other airport- briefly flew virtually upside down after a co-pilot mistakenly operated a key steering mechanism.  Whoah!  Amazingly, just two flight attendants were slightly injured, and six passengers reported that they felt ‘unwell’ after landing).    Today I sat in coach but that didn’t stop me from enjoying a Kirin beer.   Wish I knew what the little sticker on it said ! of course I don’t !   So that was 4 hours in the air.   Then I took the Narita Express train to Tokyo (it’s been a long day, does it show in my face?).   It helped a lot that I have the Tokyo subway figured out and that I came to the same Marriott I stayed in, in May.