Tsumago and Tokyo

Chloe and I spent the morning walking around buying gifts for people back home, and walked up to the site of an old castle. We tried our hands at climbing the slippery and dusty bamboo along the way


I saw this amusing sign on the side of the road:

dont make the telephone cry!!!
This would make a cool T-shirt (minus the Kanji)

My parents told us to go into a museum that had been made out of the town head honcho's house

A set of stoves:

ingenious outer sliding door design, which I might borrow for Alta:

A beautiful enclosed garden:

After packing up, we took the train to Nakatsugawa, then Nagoya, where we ate at the Paul restaurant in the station and watched the bullet trains go by



and then on our own bullet train to Tokyo. I got my dad to read me an article in the Bullet train magazine (WEDGE magazine!) about the new series of bullet train thats coming out. It's quite similar to the very cool 700 series train shown above, but with a longer nose and aerodynamics that have been optimised by a genetic algorithm... very cool.


images stolen from WEDGE magazine
Apparently it's the first time that a GA has been used to optimize a trains shape.

Once in Tokyo, we took the JR lines from the station to Iidabashi where my mom had scored some relatively inexpensive rooms at the opulent Grand Palace hotel. Kenji kept asking the taxi driver and then the porter -- "this is the GRAND PALACE, right? in iidabashi? " because it didn't look like the usual kind of hotel that they stay at in Tokyo. We got ripped off at a local Izakaya, walked around and then went back to the hotel. I noticed along the way that the Rod Stewart/ Liza Minelli style haircuts seem to be really popular in Tokyo now, and they look just awful.

Our hotel room had one of those electronic ass washers on the toilet. I'd seen them before of course, but had limited my use of them to trying to spray my dad with them as he walked by the bathroom door. Chloe had tried this one and said it worked, so I got up my courage, and decided to try it out. It turns out that there was a "pressure" knob which Chloe had turned to the maximum (she denies this), so I got a little bit of a surprise when it turned on... but I thought to myself: Chloe used it, so it shouldn't be a problem for me, right?! Well, no. It's hard to put this delicately, but suffice it to say that the result was less like a bidet, and more like the word that starts with an "E" and ends in an "a". So my advice to the first time Japanese toilet enthusiast is to turn the pressure way down. Waaaaaay down.