Average Joe In The House. sKy

Here I am, back from Japan. Sigh.

I'm gonna put my thoughts in point form. There's too many things inside that I want to say, but I can't remember it clearly.

Warning: Large entry, due to number of pictures.

1) Vending Machines
The amount of vending machines in Japan is crazy! They have it everywhere! And they have all kinds of vending machines. They have vending machines that sell canned drinks, bottled drinks, cigarettes, train tickets, eggs etc. Here's 2 examples.

This is most common seen. A cigarette vending machine.

This is the train ticket vending machine.

2) Technology
Their level of technology is crazy over there. At the Toyota showroom, they have a car that drives by itself. All you need to do is to set the destination, and the car will go by itself. On the road, there are sensors placed in the middle of the road, and the car will detect it and move accordingly. They are still researching and will implement this in the future. This way, when you're on the highway, you can just set your destination and let the car drive by itself. It's totally safe as the car will position itself quite a distance away from the car in front, therefore preventing any accident from happening.

Because of their big notes (1000, 5000 and 10,000), they have a small machine beside their cashier that vends out notes immediately. I bought some chewing gum at this small mart, and I used a 10,000 note. Instead of going to the cashier and count 9,000 out, the cashier entered 9,000 on that small machine, and within 2 seconds, out comes the 9,000 yen.

Another example is their arcade machine. I'll just talk about one, a touch screen mahjong game. They have user accounts for each player, and how do they log in? They use fingerprint recognition. They place their index finger on the fingerprint reader, and then enter a 4 digit password, and there you go! Can you imagine seeing that in Singapore?

3) Weather
The weather there is fantastic! It ranges from 4 deg C to 10 deg C, and I must say that I'm in love with that weather! It's like a huge air-con outside the buildings, and like what I told my dear, how can anyone possibly have oily skin and pimples in such weather conditions? :p

But it gets really cold when the wind comes, and it comes really strong. Not exaggerating, but I almost fell when the wind turned really strong at the Disneyland.

In any case, I still love it. I hate Singapore's all-summer weather.

4) Food
Being a huge lover of Miso soup, going to Japan is like a dream come true for me to taste authentic Miso soup, and not those out from machines in Yoshinoya.

Every single day, I have Miso soup for breakfast. Without fail.

But of course, there's other things, and I must say their food is really good. Not all, but most. The one thing that I cannot take it, is that they love raw food. Raw squid, raw fish, raw everything! And oh, they do not have chilli sauce.

Their sushi is crazy. The meat on top on the rice is so huge, you can't even see the rice! Even if you can, you take the meat and roll the rice in it! Too bad I do not have any pictures of that in my camera. I'll gather other pictures soon and will put them in an album for you guys.

An example of a breakfast.

5) Service/Attitude
I can say they have the best service in the world. They greet every customer that enters the shop with a smile, they have very high efficiency (I actually see workers run to clean up the table), they don't chit chat with their friends on the phone/counter when working etc. There's just too many examples to list out.

Another thing about them is that they do not say excuse me when you're blocking their way. They simply either squeeze through, find another route, or wait behind patiently. Yes, they might grumble, but they do not ask you to move away. I believe they find that rude.

The waiters and waitresses do not clear your table when you're eating. They only do so either when you're not at your table, or when you leave the restaurant.

They clean every single part of their shop, and have people sweeping the floor all the time. I passed by one shop, and I saw one of the workers scrapping away dirt that accumulated on the floor!

They have many food samplers for people to try before buying it. And I believe that Singaporeans, being the kiasu type, will eat hell lots of it, and not buy any of it. Not all Singaporeans, but many many.

6) Religious
The japanese are really religious people. They have many temples everywhere, and all kinds of god! The way they pray is different though.

Whenever you want to enter a temple to pray, you must first cleanse your hand at a small well. First use your right hand to hold the saddle and scoop the water to wash your left hand. Next, do the same thing for your right hand.

In the temple itself, they put the incense in the urn, and then here's the funny part. While people in Singapore try to run away from the urn because of the amount of smoke it emits, people in Japan believe in "scooping in" the smoke from the urn. They use their hands and bring the smoke to them, as though they're bathing with it.

Interesting, eh?

One of the many pagodas around.

I do not know what those are for. They look nice though.

That lantern weighs 3 tonnes! Amazing!

Guess I'll stop for now. Really tired. Maybe it's because I need to go back to camp tomorrow. I'll carry on next weekend. Goodnight everyone.