Woke up with my cold feeling better at least than the night before. Packed, checked out, stored my luggage with the hotel, then we bought tickets for the train to Narita Airport later that day and went to breakfast. Yakisoba was sounding really good, so we had to wait until 11am for the lunch place to open.
The big question was what to do, one option was Tokyo Tower, another was to go to the Japanese war dead shrine (to see the interesting account of WWII etc.) Instead we settled on going shopping for my wife, who couldn't come on the trip and maybe I'd be able to find something for her that would help make her feel better about it.
First thought was Shibuya, but on further consideration (on the train, after the fare had been paid) my brother thought that Shinjuku would be much better. So we got off there instead, and went to a handle Fare Adjustment machine to add an extra 20 Yen to my ticket. Have I mentioned that I love the mass transit system in Tokyo? Best I've ever ridden, and I've hit quite a few major international cities at this point.
There are a couple of major department stores adjacent to the train station, and when I say mayor I mean HUGE, at least one order of magnitude larger than the American equivalent. The target was a camera store that took up 4.5 floors of a large building (across the road from a dedicated camera store which was in a similarly huge building and no doubt took up the whole thing).
I didn't actually expect to find anything appropriate, one great idea my brother had was to look for one of the ultra ultra thin and small digital cameras that were brand new, the appeal being ultra portability with a very usable and powerful camera.
Those were really quite nice, but what caught my eye instead was a very small and portable video camera/still camera. We don't have a video camera, and I doubt my wife is interested in video (yet) but it is a nice complement to what she already has and I can just see the adorable videos of the cat now.
I played around with it and was very impressed by the technology and form factor. It wasn't too hard to change the menus in the store display version to English, the display is gorgeous and navigating previous recording and pictures was very easy. USB 2.0 Hi Speed, SD to save the data, just great stuff (by Sanyo I think, I won't even open the bag I bought it in unless customs requires it, that's half the fun for my wife with gifts).
It was on sale, plus I signed up for a Points Card (apparently very very big in Japan), and then did an immediate second purchase to spend those points on a 1g SD Card. Wife might be minorly impressed by the deal skills, especially cross language, the credit belonging to my brother although I could follow most of the conversation.
The big thing I found from this vacation: My Japanese skills aren't as bad as I expected, a lot came back as we went along, and I could do a few basic things without too many issues. I could read many more signs and understand it when I was spoken to as long as it was a reasonable context.
I suspect if I wanted to do much outside of Tokyo I'd have to brush up more and have materials, and
given this experience I have a better idea of what kinds of Japanese I'd concentrate on for another trip.
Oh yes, in the airport I managed to lose my ticket (it fell out of my pocket) after getting to the gate. I had bought internet access (500 Yen) and was talking to a few people on Messenger and downloading/uploading work email when I noticed I didn't have it. Retracing my steps was painless and effective, the only real annoyance was having to repack/unpack all my computer gear.
Right now I'm on the plane a little south of the Bering Sea. I guess we have a very nice tailwind now so the flight should take 7:46 this direction as opposed to 9:30 or so on the way out. My cold is switching forms to a cough instead of mostly a sore throat. I'm not looking forward to suffering through a cold and jet lag at the same time, hopefully I'll have recovered by Monday for work.
One thing I've pondered on and off all trip is what we could do in Messenger to make it more useful and relevant for the Japanese market. We're doing some work already, but I'm sure there's more, and some of that may work well in other markets as well. Haven't come up with anything Earth shattering yet.
