One gazillionth photo of the Golden Gate Bridge - view from Fort Point Posted by Picasa

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Back home

Blogger has been a bit of a bee-yotch lately, so I wasn't able to post more before I left Tokyo, and now here I am back in Ottawa experiencing some pretty major jet lag. When I left Tokyo it was Monday afternoon at 5, and when I arrived in Ottawa it was still Monday, 7.30 in the evening, and I'm pretty certain that my flight was more than 2.5 hours long. Mt. Fuji ended up being a bust, as I seemed to have caught the extended tail end of a rainy season in Japan that just doesn't want to end. Going to T's colleague's parents' place in the country was also a bust due to an illness in the family, so instead we went down to Koya-san, the holiest mountain in Japan, to stay in a Buddhist temple, eat surprisingly delicious vegetarian meals based mainly on tofu, and take part in a confusing, fairly unintelligible but wholly spiritual Buddhist prayer session. After visiting one of the largest and most beautiful cemeteries I've ever seen, we accidentally hiked down ...
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Tokyo - Initial Impressions III

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ENVIRONMENTALLY UNFRIENDLY At the grocery store, all the fruit is wrapped in plastic packaging as you can see. After paying for your purchase, the cashier puts the fruit into individual paper bags and tapes it up, then puts those packages into a plastic bag or paper carrier bag for transporting. T says this is to ensure that your fruit does not become bruised. Back home, I have often lamented the fact that all food shopping seems to be geared toward the non-single consumer, i.e. groups of two or more. But this is pushing a bit! Umbrella bags. When it is raining and you are going into a store, many establishments provide umbrella bags, plastic bags to cover your umbrella while you are inside the store. This is to prevent water dripping from your umbrella onto their floors. When you leave the store you discard the bag in the garbage provided. Tokyo has no recycling program that I can see. T says garbage here is divided into two categories: burnable (food, paper, organic-based) a...
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