S’funny how your perspective changes with a new piece of information.

While I was briefly under the impression that Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent was written by the cuddly old curmudgeon pictured on the back cover I rated it LOL for very funny. But once I found out that it was actually his first book, written when he was 33, his lovable vitriolic ways sounded a lot more spiteful.

The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn’t hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist. Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that they would soon be dead.

I still enjoyed it though.

The book is a standard Bill Bryson travelogue with scathing, spur of the moment honesty uncensored by any regard for the recipient’s tender feelings. It’s funny to read the reviews at Amazon by all the people who’s town he trashed. They are all like, “No wonder he found BFE dead on a Thursday night. If he had come the night before, he could’ve have played bingo”.

Bill has an unnerving ability to say what you are thinking but in half the words and with twice the bile.

About casinos…

I wandered through room after room trying to find my way out, but the place was clearly designed to leave you disoriented. There were no windows, no exit signs, just endless rooms, all with subdued lighting and with carpet that looked as if some executive had barked into a telephone, “Gimme twenty thousand yards of the ugliest carpet you got.” It was like woven vomit.

That’s like every casino I have ever been in. When we lived in New York, G and I took the bus to Atlantic City - not to go to a casino, just for a day out.

As we got off the bus, they gave us $10 in quarters and a big plastic pot to keep them in so we felt obliged to go spend them. We managed to spend about $1.25 each and then wandered around for hours trying to find the way out. When we got back on the bus we still had about $18 in quarters.

…and who hasn’t done this?

And the toilet seat did not have a sanitized for your protection wrapper on it, denying me the daily ritual of cutting it with my scissors saying “I now declare this toilet open”.

The Lost Continent is very funny but not quite Bill Bryson funny. If you’ve read all the others, read this one too - unless you are a waitress or you live in BFE - but if you haven’t, read In a sunburnt country first.

Was planning to go to a customer meeting this morning but, with the huddles masses of my breakfast yearning to break free of their gastric bonds, we decided it was probably best if I skipped it and prepared myself constitutionally for my third and final presentation in the afternoon. It’s a good job too as I don’t think I would’ve survived the taxi ride and I know that their meeting rooms do not come equipped with buckets. 200 year-old bonsai plum trees in full bloom, yes. Buckets, no.

The presentation went well with lots of questions then I jumped in a taxi to make it to the bus terminal with 2 minutes to spare and I settled down for a nice, long bumpy ride to the airport trying my damnedest to keep everything inside where it should be.

The plane was pretty empty so when the cabin attendant invited the dude next to me to move to an empty row, I stretched myself out, set my sleep transducer to ‘coma’, adjusted my meal cart detector to ’sensitive’ and started manufacturing some serious ZZZs, waking every three hours for light sustenance and beverages.

With my ravelled sleeves of care fully knitted - and my lost day safely returned - I landed at SFO in the warm California sun refreshed and ready to face the new day.

It was a great trip - thank you, Yukio, Jeff and Mirek for your kind hospitality!

Arigotou gozai-masu!

For all their brilliant design skills, they designed my room with a usability problem.

When I dragged my jet-lagged, tired body into my dark, dark room, I couldn’t find the light switch because the room was too dark.

I turned on the bedside lamp so I could find the light switch - nothing. I went in the bathroom and put the light on there. Nothing.

I would have read the manual but it prolly would have been in incomprehensible squiggles instead of proper words and besides - I wouldn’t have been able to read it as the room was very dark.

I opened the door in case the light switch was on the outside - nope - and then I noticed the card slot thingie and a light went on in my head. When I put my card in the slot, the light went on in my room too. Oooh! I felt so proud!

I put my bags down and while I was rummaging in the cupboards to see what goodies were in my room, the light went off again! D’oh!

After three more times of stimbling over to the card slot in the dark, I realized that the light would only stay on if I left the card there….and then I didn’t feel so proud any more:-(

Ohayou-gozaimasu!

So, after we left the yakitori place, we went to a wine bar. Wine was so-so, but the whole pig’s leg sitting on the bar was interesting. When Yukio asked for prosciutto, the barman just got out his carving knife and cuts some bits off for us. It was the best prosciutto I even tasted.

After the wine bar, Yukio said his friend runs the best sushi bar in Tokyo and it was just around the corner. So we went there and had the best sushi this side (actually, the other side) of Nagasaki. If you ever go there, have the mackeral - it’s like raw fish from heaven. Oh..and we had some more sake. A lot more.

By this time it was after midnight (+7hrs for the jet-lagged among us) and Australian Jeff wanted to go back to the hotel. I wanted to go to since my big presentation was the next day (and I was jet-lagged) and I didn’t want to wake up with a hangover - but I was outvoted 2 to 1, so Mirek, Yukio and I jumped in a cab to the famous Bar at Kanda.

I had heard about the bar from Jeff and it goes by several names. It’s in Kanda (hence, the bar at Kanda), the home-made sign on the door says Crossroads but Mirek referred to it as the One Coin Bar because every thing is the same price - one 500 yen coin. It’s a bit of stretch to even give the place a name, ahseb u ara three, because it’s not big enough to deserve one.

The bar is about 3ft by 10ft inside - not including the 3ft square where the barman hangs out. That’s about the size of our walk-in closet and, with 13 patrons, it was rather full. I had a Guinness (cost: 500 yen) or two to keep my fluid levels up.

The bar is home from home for Yukio - the Agitar office is just around the corner - and it’s also home from home for all the other patrons too. Mirek says that the exact same people were there every time he had been there. A friendly crowd but, then again, they had to be. There was no room to be unfriendly.

I was home by about 1:30am and went straight to sleep, ready for my day 3 adventures. Three dinners and one bar in the same evening! Wait until you hear what I had for breakfast!

Jeff sent me some leftover pictures of the Yakitori place.

A Performing Chef (and Rui in the foreground)…

Some leftover sticks from the leftover bits…

What sake looks like after too much sake…

What Yukio looks like after too much sake …

Oyasuminasai!

First customer visit. After three train rides, four tickets (costing an average of 8 million yen) and about a thousand miles, Australian Jeff, Polish Mirek, Japanese Yukio and English I arrived at our destination (late) and rushed in to give my first presentation with Yukio translating for me.

I have no idea how it went but, from the deathly silence, I assume it wasn’t too bad. Best bit was the intermission where our host led us in synchronized stretching to the strains of classical music from an huge ghetto blaster brought in for that precise purpose.

The thousand mile train ride(s) back to the hotel were uneventful but, man! There are a lot of people in Tokyo and most of them were on our train. I even got the hang of buying my own ticket(s) from the machines with the little squiggles instead of proper words and didn’t have stare at every coin counting the zeros like a tourist.

I had a couple of hours to spare before dinner. Both American Jeff and Polish Mirek had told me to go to Ginza but, since I didn’t know what a Ginza was or where to find one, I just wandered around Shiodome City Centre to see all the millions of beautiful restaurants that I could have gone to the night before instead of drinking crap beer at the Rose and Crown.

The Japanese have a wonderful eye for design and all their best designers are tasked with making every restaurant look like a work of art. Even the crappy little cafes look like they were designed for Zen Homes and Gardens. Made me hungry…which was handy since we had reservations for our team dinner at 5:00pm.

Australian Jeff had been teasing me that I would be eating chicken hearts washed down with sake. Yeah right thought I but, sure enough, that’s what we had.

We went to a Yakitori place that was quite magnificent. If they ever made a romantic movie about a Yakitori restaurant, they would make it here. The soft-focus, opening shot would zoom gently out from the swirling, sizzling clouds of steam rising from the cooking-as-performance-artists chefs work to catch the Mistress d’, greeting the next customer with a loud Oyasuminasai! (warning. don’t click on that link if you are in a meeting room with a lot of very quiet Japanese businessmen, because they will all turn and laugh at you).

Yakitori means “leftover bits of chicken on a stick“. It wasn’t just leftover bits of chicken though - they had leftover bits of other things too. The leftover bits were barbecued to perfection by the performing chefs and delivered on an endless stream of little plates, tapas-style. The waitress just kept bringing them while we just keep eating them in between sips of silky sake poured from bamboo bottles into little bamboo sake cups. Until…

Hearts and Livers!

which I thought was a Japanese toast until the waitress put down the next plate containing, yes, little sticks with little chicken hearts and little chicken livers. The hearts were actually pretty good but am not in any rush to have chicken livers any time soon. The non-chicken bits were fantastic too.

to be continued because it’s time for tonight’s adventure. I think we are having deep fried sea creatures tonight.

Konnichiwa!

It’s my first visit to Japan and I wish it were under different circumstances so I could enjoy it more. I just gave my presentation at the Tokyo Developer Summit and have a couple of hours to kill so I thought I’d let you know what I am up to.

My room at the glorious Royal Park Shiodome is on the 33rd floor and I woke up to a clear, brilliant view of Mount Fuji this morning. Apparently, it’s pretty rare that you can see it and I am to consider myself lucky - which I do.

Room is quite lovely especially the zen-inspired bathroom complete with squirty toilet and seat warmer. Squirty toilets are wonderful and every home should have one. I managed to figure out the international symbol for squirt-water-up-yer-bum but I am not sure what the other symbol represents - or even if I have the bits that might need that kind of washing.

Trip into Tokyo from the airport is a bit intimidating if you don’t know any Japanese (which I don’t) and no-one else knows any English (which they didn’t). It doesn’t help that they don’t use proper letters. Instead they use mysterious squiggles to represent words. How they expected me to make any sense of them, I don’t know. I made it though, and arrived safe at my hotel at 8pm on Monday - I left home at 8am on Sunday. Someone somewhere owes me a day which got stolen from me in mid-sleepless-pacific.

Everyone was very friendly at the airport. A lot of bowing goes on over here. Even the policemen who checked my passport every 12 minutes while I waited for my bus bowed a lot. It’s kinda fun. Especially endearing was the moment when the baggage handlers all lined up and bowed in unison to send my bus safely on its long, long journey into the city.

I was tired and hungry after a long flight so I went out walking to find a bite to eat. Coward that I am, I didn’t get very far. In fact, I only got as far as the Rose and Crown right outside the hotel.