Travel

Breakfast at McDonald’s

Want a healthy start in the day? Choose McDonald’s Breakfast. 🙂

Yep, our group ate some McD’s after we checked out of Dandy Hotel, and before we head down to Fukushima by Bullet Train. Granted, 80% of the food in the menu are similar to what you can find in almost every McDonald’s outlet from around the world but the Japanese outlets have one thing you cannot find in our local outlets back in Malaysia (or perhaps anywhere else)…

… the crew consists of mostly hot chicks! 🙂 No kidding, and this is what I found to be consistent after visiting a few different McD’s outlets later!

Bullet Train Ride to Fukushima (1.5 hours)

Having used to frequent trains on a daily basis when I was working full-time as an office boy back in 2004, I couldn’t help but compare our trains to the Japanese ones. Not a fair comparison I know, almost like comparing apple to oranges, or rather snail to cheetah. That’s exactly HOW advanced the Japanese train systems are. Being inside the Bullet Train, one couldn’t feel the speed or pressure from within. But if you would look from the outside, which I did…

WOW, the Bullet Train zoomed by with frightening speed! The group caught me with my jaw dropped open. LOL!

Boy Scout in Fukushima Town

Once we settled down in Fukushima, we stayed at the Tatsumiya Hotel. We had a quick lunch nearby and for the rest of the day time, I scouted around town alone. Temperature here is colder than in Tokyo i.e. 17 – 19 degree Celcius, and it gets colder by night. The day is shorter than the night at this time of the year, and it gets dark by around 5:30.

There are less people here compared to Tokyo and the outskirts of town had fewer people. In general, the Japanese people are nice and I would consider them exceedingly polite. 🙂 It is customary for people to exchange bows and be very polite – not an understatement by any measure.

It is also easy to strike up a conversation with people here, which made me felt rather regretful not learning at least basic Japanese to get around on my own. Most of the people here speak little to no English at all. A pity, otherwise I’d love to ask them LOTS about Japan! 🙂

Crime rarely happens here, in this part of Japan at least. Another bonus.

Dinner with Brown Family & Friends

L-R: Frank Bauer, Edmund Loh (me), Mr. Brown, Mari Wakamatsu, Katherine Brown, Rodney, Jamieson, Mrs. Brown (James Brown’s mother), James Brown.

To be continued…

UPDATED TUESDAY, 30th SEPTEMBER…

NOTE: Finally connected to the Internet from the hotel after going 3 days without it! It’s 2:40AM here in Fukushima, Japan and it’s a HUGE relieve that I can finally go online. I wasn’t sure what the problem was, and even Frank and James Allen did their best to help me out. One quick lucky fix with the I.P. detection for the FireFox browser and what did you know? That did the trick!

Okay here are the long awaited updates with pics and all. Videos will come in later… and followed by MORE pics. This is by no means a complete post (and so will the subsequent ones) so do check back now and then for new photos and videos.

Here’s a quick run through and summary account on my journey to Japan for the first time..

(click on any of the thumbnails and open them in a new tab or browser to view them in full size)

Leaving from KLIA

Since the MAS flight was to leave Malaysia at 9:00 in the morning, and that I had to be there at least 2 hours earlier to check in my luggage, I didn’t risk phoning a public cab. My uncle from Klang offered to help fetch me to the KLIA early in the morning… thanks Uncle! 🙂

I had my breakfast at the KLIA cafeteria and after I got through the customs, I killed the last 30 minutes of waiting in the Waiting Hall by posting a quick video on YouTube. Yes, it’s the one you see in the previous post, the one before this one. 🙂

It’s been quite a while since I last fly on Malaysian Airlines. Wait, I rarely fly to other countries to begin with. It was only this year that I started traveling out of Malaysia – to places like Tehran, Bali, Jakarta, and now Narita @ Japan. 🙂

True to following “Malaysian Time”, the flight was delayed by 15 minutes. However we reached the Narita airport in Japan on time. We made a stop at the Kota Kinabalu International Airport for an hour in between. If it was a direct flight, it wouldn’t have taken 8.5 hours; maybe 7.5 hours in all.

Landing on Japanese Soil for the First Time

Reached the Narita Airport around 7:30PM local time and after a tedious immigration and check out, I was greeted by James Brown and his pops, Glynn Brown (I’m going to refer to him as Mr. Brown throughout my Japan Trip posts).

James Brown and I finally met again after our first encounter in person at Singapore last year. Great guy, knows his stuff… and very multi-dimensional thinker. Mr. Brown is a nice man too, you don’t find many sporting fathers from any age like him, I tell you that!

“You’ve gotta sell money at a discount.”
— James Eric Brown

Let’s not forget Frank Bauer – hey hey, we meet again for the 3rd time in person! He talks a lot and I mean, A LOT and I always hear the words “PayPal”, “German”, “Pattaya”, and later on, Frank would go on to add “Merry Christmas” to his frequent one-line dialogues because almost everything in Japanese sounded as if the sentence ends with ‘-mas’. 🙂

Ah yes, James B Allen too. Met up with him half way while we were jumping trains to get to Downtown Tokyo, and camp at Dandy Hotel.

Downtown Tokyo

This is where we spent our first night.

I have to admit that it was a culture shock I still find it hard to handle now. To begin with, this is NOT your average hotel. Instead of individual rooms, we get…

… our own morgues.

But the nice ads they’ve plastered around the ‘capsule’ rooms made good eye desserts. 😉

Later, James Allen took me and Mr. Brown and showed us around Downtown Tokyo a bit, and we had our late dinner at an English Pub down the basement nearby.

To be continued….

Edmund here, writing from the KLIA as the flight is about to leave Malaysia for Narita Airport, Japan in about half an hour from now. I hope the Internet connection there is significantly better – had been staying in Klang past night and traveling down to KL the day before – connection was horrible!

So I hope the Internet access in Japan hotel is better so I can keep my readers posted, hopefully every night, while I document the journey on full account. 🙂

Catch you all later…

P.S. I will be back in Malaysia 1st October. Until then, all support helpdesk customer queries will be handled by my V.A. I won’t be around to read JV offers until I get back.

It’s a go.

On 26th September through 1st October, I’ll be flying down to Tokyo, Japan to visit my friend James Brown, his wife Mari and of course, the J-Warriors (you know you who you are). 😉 Partly for attending James’ wedding function but the bigger part of the reason: going for a holiday, experience Japanese culture, sake, hot chicks, and everything else Japanese. 🙂

It was a bit tedious (largely owing to procrastination, my bad) but I got my VISA application approved in a jiffy and the flight ticket booked. Two big worries off my mind and I look forward to traveling to another beautiful country. 🙂

I’ll be seeing you J-Warriors there! Show me around and… yep, let’s commence with our product creation session while we’re at it. 😀

ON A SIDENOTE: I was wondering why most of the Warrior Internet Entrepreneurs staying in Japan are NOT Japanese. They are all married to their Japanese wives though. Hmmm… I’ll only find that out and unlock the mystery once I set foot on their soil.

Photos will be posted up after the holiday trip.

Here’s the overdue blog post I was talking about earlier so I’m sorry to keep you waiting for quite a while. Right after my trip to Bali, instead of flying straight back to Malaysia, I boarded a flight to Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.

“I thought I’ve seen this armor somewhere on another person’s blog and in a comic book…”

Flying to Jakarta took approximately two hours from Bali, and I would be here for three days.

Truth to be told, I found Jakarta to be the second ‘Kuala Lumpur’ – which was both good and bad.

GOOD because it’s modern and I saw a lot of familiar places which I could find in Malaysia… like McDonald’s. 🙂 And since Bahasa Indonesia is similar to Bahasa Malaysia – with the exception of some differences – going around and reading signs were a piece of cake. This is where being able to speak Malay pays off. 🙂 A lot of things sold here are cheaper than in Malaysia too, so definitely to please shopping addicts (not that I am one, of course).

And the BAD points about going to the second ‘Kuala Lumpur’? I have to admit that my expectations on the trip went down, especially since I just came from Bali, which was a damn good trip if I must say so myself. The traffic jams here are worse compared to KL; a wrong turn can result in another 15 more minutes lost just taking another road. And there weren’t many attractions to look forward to, either. But hey, at least I can tell my friends that I’ve been there before! 🙂

Due to time constraints (working on two big projects right now), I’m keeping this post relatively short so I hope the photos make up for the content. After all, don’t pictures paint a thousand words? 🙂

SOGO Shopping Mall

Semmy was kind and generous to pick Ladan and me up from the airport. Yep, Ladan tagged along too! Semmy had just moved to a new house and now lives one hour away from Central Jakarta (where Ladan and I spent the next three days in). So we gave him a free treat to a dinner at the Japanese Restaurant in SOGO Shopping Mall. 🙂

Later, Semmy taught both Ladan and me how to play bowling.

Semmy showing how it should be done.

Ladan about to throw the first ball and knock ’em pins down. 🙂

Me holding the bowling ball for the first time in my life… five seconds before I threw my first gutterball too. 😛

… See the direction of the bowling ball? Gutter ball!

The Jakarta Cathedral

Dee Ferdinand and Kevaz tags along on our adventure for the day!

The Jakarta National Museum

Until then…