good things

[Sakura]

Mew mew?

[oldwrench]

Sorry, Christmas and the family have kept me busy. Happy new year and I hope Christmas was good for you.

There were plenty of Christmas gifts in the stores in Japan. They tend to give gifts of food. Here is one of the food boxes, very pretty....... check the price.

And I thought the gift boxes from Hickory Farms here are too expensive.

There were lots of little things that I have seen in animes that make sense now that I was to Japan. Like once when the girl got very upset because someone ate her strawberries. I figured, big deal, just go buy some more...... I saw a box with 6 strawberries for 6500 yen, that's awfully expensive berries. Watermelons in the market place were around 4000 yen........ crazy. Apples, 500 yen each.
Check this melon price.

Christmas has no religious significance to the Japanese, it is just Santa and gift giving. The new year is a much bigger celebration for them. Japan has about 127 million population, 98% native Japanese, according to our guide, 110 million claim to follow Shinto religion, 90 million claim to be Buddhists and not many of them actually believe anything.

I took over 700 picts so there should be a few good ones. Lots of temples, shrines and gardens.

and Fuji

I'll post more later. Bye for now

[oldwrench]

Happy new year to all the cool cats out there.

[Sakura]

Ah guess you visited Tokyo then?
I remember people saying, Tokyo is the most expensive town ever, followed by London (3 minutes city parking 5 pounds sterling).
Now I'm gladly purrreparing my own bento, thanks alot for the pictures. I purrrefer tasty bento over any fancy bento anytime

I was a little bit jealous when you left but now I imagine I wouldn't been able to buy a ticket for a bus ride, considering the purrrice

(I missed writing posts that contain many words starting with "per")

[oldwrench]

Actually you could get along on a low budget there. Rail transport and cabs are very reasonable. Eating at ramen shops or at the food vendors in the markets is also very affordable........ grilled squid on a stick anyone?

Tokyo can be expensive, but other areas are lower cost. It would be no more expensive than Your big cities.

[Sakura]

Heh and I can barely afford My big city

Cup Ramen ftw

[oldwrench]

Ah yes, cup ramen....... half a buck each and some hot water....... yum, enough salt for a whole day.

Oh, my internet is back up to 20 mb/sec. Rodents! Some rodent chewed the insulation on my cable outside of my house. I'll be able to upload more pics again.

[Sakura]

Been there with Sally. Actually been there this week when Sally decided to chew on my internet cable. She's quite the lolcat. I'm purrroud owner of a bunch of five high quality network cables (now four) for that situation.

I will ask her if there happen to be any rodents in her bloodline.

Oh and with 20 mb you hopefully mean "20 megabyte data per second" as in "we have fibre?"

[oldwrench]

as in we have cable...... 20 mega bits

fiber is but a dream.

[Sakura]

I assume that installing a few 100 meters of fibre cable on your property is very expensive and not worth the extra speed then.

Imagine what amount of Anime you could download at a speed of 21 mb/sec