the tall blond guy goes to japan

Chiba: Duller Than Advertised.

Grand Central

I remember being really impressed with Chiba when I saw it from the train on the way into Tokyo the first night. There was a big plaza, lit with trendy purple lights, with a Sogo store and lots of people milling about. "Cool!" I thought. "I'll have to come back sometime."

Since I was in the neighborhood (the SkiDome was about halfway there), I decided to keep going and see what Chiba's all about.

From my three hour wander-fest in Chiba, I think it's trying to be the San Jose to Tokyo's San Francisco. In other words, they're trying to be the livable alternative to big-city Tokyo. They're doing lots of urban renewal stuff in the centre of the city around the train station. There's a big bus loop and a big plaza. There's also a strange, wide, pointless tunnel going under it all.

They have a huge ugly new monorail, which is not quite ready to go yet. It's immence, and snakes through the heart of town, creating quite an spectacle of itself.

Chiba's eyesore of a monorail system

After having dinner, I got out of these as quickly as I could.

Oh! Dinner! This has happened to me twice so far: ticket cafe's! Warning! They're usually found cowering under rail lines with big pictures of tasty-looking food in the windows. Beware! If you see one of these places with a strange machine with buttons lurking nearby (it looks like a Coke machine without the Coke and with too many buttons), you're most likely at a Ticket Cafe!

I'll include a picture of one of the machines, along with a description of the button functions, as soon as I can figure out what they all do.

Coming back into Tokyo, I took the JR line for the first while, then transferred to the subway partway home. When I transferred, I thought it was kind of odd that I didn't have to punch out of the JR system and back into the subway system, as is normally the case. "Well, whatever," I thought, "perhaps they have some kind of system."

Not so! When I tried to get out of the subway at my stop, the machine wouldn't take my JR card (since it was a subway machine), nor would it take my subway card (since I didn't enter the system with it). I don't know what the normal procedure is in this case, perhaps the ticket man was explaining it to me, but he knocked some money off my subway card and gave me back all my cards, along with a small piece of paper to give to the JR people. I suppose it explains what happened to me, but I'm sure that's not the proper way for someone to do that. I'll have to get someone to explain it to me one of these days.

Hotel. Bed. Collapse.