I had a flight from Sydney to Tokyo with a stop in China at the Baiyun airport. The flight to China was easy but the 5hr layover in China sucked. When I landed the international airport section wasn’t open so they made us wait in this holding area and took our passports from us – I assume to keep us from running away. Eventually the airport opened up and I made my way to security. Security was pretty strict and even my wallet set off the metal detector. They checked it out and I made it through with no other problems. I went and tried to get on the WiFi before my plane took off and sent off a few emails. The flight to Tokyo was only a few hours long and seemed very short because I slept through the entire thing. I landed about 3pm and after picking up my bag I made my way to the Softbank store to pick up a few SIM cards for my phones. I have had pretty good luck with SIM cards so far for this trip and up until now they were all prepaid. Instead, Softbank (the company I chose to go with because they were who I was here to see) decided it’d be a better idea to rent SIM cards. This is complete crap. They detailed the prices to me and I was pretty shocked that they were as high as they were. I got 2 and left to head to the train. It was a pretty simple process and the Narita Express was nice but pretty expensive. I had to change trains at Tokyo station and this process was pretty easy as well. All of the ticket machines have an option for English and it was easy to figure out the whole process. Once I got off the stop at Hamamatsucho I opened up Google Maps and made my way to the hotel – it was a short 5 minute walk. I was staying at the Shiba Park hotel – the hotel wasn’t the best I’ve stayed in but for how this entire trip was going it was pretty good. There were a few downsides. The hotel had huge keys with a very large keychain on it, there was no WiFi, the heat was on way too high and I had to keep the window open, and the Ethernet cord I had just barely reached the bed as well.
For the first night I kept it pretty low key – I had a ton of preparation for the next few days. I was training for 2 ½ days and I had basically nothing put together. I headed out for dinner and was in search of a sushi restaurant. In my mind, I thought that this will be the easiest thing I’ve ever done and I was quite wrong. It took a good bit of searching to find sushi, but very likely the reason was that I couldn’t read most of the signs. I finally found a place and asked for an English menu and while looking around wasn’t too happy that people were smoking. Japan is entirely too smoker friendly still – everyone smokes! The sushi menu was relatively close to what I’m used to – other than the number of rolls was pretty small – for the most part everything was a single piece. I ordered a Tuna roll and a few single pieces and when my order was given to the sushi chef he laughed. I really have no idea why – maybe what I ordered was amusing I guess. Either way – once the food came it was delicious. Afterwards I made my way back to my hotel and stopped off at the Family Mart (small convenience store) and bought a water and some sake. The rest of the night was all work but by the time I went to sleep everything was ready.
The next morning I headed out to Tennozou Isle where the client I was doing training for was located. It was just 1 stop on the monorail and a quick 4 minute ride. We did all of the introductions and the day was underway pretty quickly. Of the 6 people that I was going to be training only 1 of them spoke decent English and he translated just about everything for the rest of the guys. This meant that things didn’t move along as quickly as I’d have hoped. When it came time for lunch I was asked if I wanted Japanese food or alternatively they had Subway. Subway was off the list quickly and they brought in a selection of various Bento boxes. I chose one with pork and shrimp tempura. It was very good and the guys made a note of how good my chopstick use was. I don’t think I’m that great with chopsticks but I guess they expected me to be horrible. We made it through the day of training with no major hiccups and by the time I was ready to head to the hotel my coworker Gavin had arrived.
Gavin used to live in Tokyo when he was in middle school and knew the area fairly well and he headed out to Shibuya to grab some dinner. Shibuya was about a 15-20 minute train ride away – I can’t recall how many stops because if I could then I’d know how far away it was. All stops are 2 minutes away on the Yamanote line. Just outside of the train station is home to the world’s busiest intersection. I didn’t have the Flip ready but I’d be sure to pull it out later – it was quite impressive. We walked around a bit – did some light souvenir shopping and eventually wound up at a curry house for dinner. It felt a bit like a Waffle House on the inside – just like WH it wasn’t the nicest/cleanest place but the food was great. We walked around a bit more and headed to a smoky bar on the 4th floor and had a very expensive beer. The coolest thing about the place was that the dart board was hooked up to a huge flat screen that kept up with the score. After the beer we headed back to the hotel – it was going to be another long day of training tomorrow.
The second day of training was pretty uneventful other than the morning didn’t go so well. We had a server error and it stopped training for about 2 hours unfortunately. The client was pretty pissed off but nothing could be done. After that was cleared up the rest of the day went pretty well. Gavin and I went out for lunch with Nancy – our main contact with this client. We went to a place where nobody spoke English but at least the menu had pictures. We all picked something out and Nancy handled the ordering. Again the food was great and we went back to finish up the day of training. Training ended just a bit early and then the fun was to begin. Nancy took us to a micro brewery to wait for the people that were taking us out to dinner to show up. We had a beer flight and then ordered one more pint while waiting. Once our hosts showed up we headed out.
Tonight was the ‘Executive dinner.’ We weren’t sure what we were in for but supposedly it was going to be fancy – it didn’t disappoint. We arrived and put our shoes in a locker then made our way to our private room. We started off with a few beers and I quickly learned that the polite thing to do was to never pour your own beer and to keep everyone’s glass full. We were there with 2 people from the client and were waiting for 2 more. While waiting we went ahead and began eating the 7 or 8 course meal. I honestly have only a rough idea of what I was eating about 50% of the time but it was all very good. The dishes just kept coming and coming – I honestly had no idea when they’d stop. They were all pretty small courses and each was pretty different. The final one before dessert was a tray of some of the best noodles I’ve ever had – soba noodles. I will definitely find a place back in the US that serves this dish. Somewhere along the way I switched what I was drinking over to plum sake – it was a very sweet sake served with ice (you could get it hot if you wanted as well). Also the rest of the crew showed up as well. Everyone spoke English except for 1 guy and from time to time they would translate for him. One of the more interesting things of the night was that we got to see some of the local phones with TV on them. One of the more expensive ones even had a split screen. Everything had closed captions so you could watch on the train as well. It impressed me – the US is behind by a long shot. About ¾ through the dinner one of the guys started to get tired and you could see him drifting at the table – eventually he gave in and folded his arms and put his head down on the table. I couldn’t help but laugh but everyone else seemingly didn’t care and just kind of kept on doing what they were doing. I can’t even begin to guess how expensive the meal was but I’d guess for the 6 of us it was easily over $1,000 USD. We headed out and made our way to the train station – it was a short ride back to the hotel. It was a good night.
The last day of training was going to be a few hours of technical followed by some sales and marketing information. The whole day went by pretty quickly. There wasn’t too much worth talking about for the most part. Gavin and I were on our own for lunch and went to this deli type place. I ordered chicken curry and a crab bisque soup. The food was very good and we had a great view of the river from where we were sitting. The day of training ended and work was done in Tokyo. We headed back to the hotel to drop our stuff off then we were going to meet Gavin’s friend that lived in a nearby town. We met up at Shibuya – where we went two nights ago. This time I had my Flip ready for the massive intersection though. We headed to a bar to have a few beers before venturing out for some food. All of the beer I’ve had on this trip has been great – the world is right when they say Bud / Miller / Coors are crap. Eventually we make our way to the next place which was a British pub and I had a great IPA but it was insanely expensive – over $10 for a pint. The next stop was food. We went to a place that was the Japanese equivalent of Korean bbq. Gavin’s friend knew enough Japanese to order for us and what came was wonderful. It was a bunch of raw food that we cooked on the grill built into the table. Everything tasted absolutely delicious. We finished up there and headed back out. We wound up at a place called Gastronic – an underground bar with some great music. Eventually Gavin’s friend had to catch the last train back home and we headed back to the hotel. It was a good Friday night. Tomorrow I was heading home.
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