A mixture of signs that caught my eye for artistry, bizarreness or eyebrow raising amusement!
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Quick Observations
1) You can get hot bottled or canned drinks, cold drinks, coffee, tea, beers out of vending machines. ☺✔
2) You can still smoke in a lot of bars & restaurants in Japan. ☹✗
3) Toilets are either incredibly advanced so much so that you think you’re a Bond villain with optional heated seat etcetera. ☺✔
4) Or these toilets still exist which are not cool! ☹✘
(Yes, I’ve posted a picture of a toilet!)
5) Its true you don’t have to go very far in one place to find a cacophony of noise.
6) Yet you can still find places like these:
Perhaps we need both to even things out.
Well does it look like ‘Blade Runner’? You tell me.
It’s rolled out almost as a cliche now but also tells you just how influential ‘Blade Runner’ was in defining a look and a style. The only department not to have a really telling influence is perhaps arguably the costume department in the film. They say Osaka in the rain and Tokyo really call to mind ‘Blade Runner’ but here are some shots of Kyoto in the rain.
Here’s a tune from the sondtrack if you want to listen to it now…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAwo7DPUFUM&feature=related
Luckily for me I’m staying round the corner from the nightlife so can rest before possibly heading back out to look for Rachael, what I don’t need is Leon, Pris or Batty.
Kyoto
Kyoto Market, busy, more of which later.
I rode the Shinkansen to Kyoto which is better known in the west as the Bullet train, if anything its more like a plane on the interior and puts Inter City to shame although it does come at a price.
The vibe in Kyoto is very, very different from Tokyo while the area has been dramatically effected not directly by the disaster in Japan last year, it seems many of the tourists have yet to come back.
To me Tokyo works on a vertical plane with the skyline dominated by skyscrapers where else is having lunch on the 38th floor not that unusual other than Chicago perhaps.
Kyoto on the other hand while in possession of tall buildings has maintained the majority of its older buildings and those don’t stretch upwards like skyscrapers. In that sense Kyoto in my mind works on the horizontal.
Tokyo is also dominated by a near steady stream of people like ants or one of those National Geographic videos of those streams of red crabs on Christmas Island. Kyoto has a large population of bicycle users who ride on the pavement.
One thing that has irked me in Japan however and I understand they’re starting to catch up with the rest of the world is that smoking is still allowed in bars and restaurants. For a supposedly cutting edge country there are still a large amount of smokers of all ages.
I have been here in Japan for just over a week now and will try to catch up with the things that I’ve been doing in the past week. I haven’t been as free with my picture taking due to working commitments and not being able to sightsee nor feeling inclined to take shots of things I have seen before but will try.
