I'd live on an island made of trash

Tokyo Skyline
Originally uploaded by mkeoshkerian.

I'm Back from my awesome weekendy goodness that was a trip to Tokyo-Yokohama (also called the Keihin[京浜] region).
For those of you that didn't know, I went down to Keihin on Friday morning to attend the Yokohama Techincal Show 2006. My company, more specifically my group's product (which I wont name here because it could possibly end up first on a google search), was at the show.
So all the group members of R&D had a chance to go down and check it out. Pretty cool I'd say, I liked hte part with the robots the most, but for hte most part it was decently boring...
Although the "survival questioning machine" was pretty interesting. It's a machine that probes disaster areas for signs of life (such as a building collapse).
Anyway, after the show I visited fake-China. When I stop being lazy and upload the pictures, you'll see why I called it fake-China... Mostly because the streets and shops were ridiculously clean... Guess my Japanese teacher was right about it being the cleanest China town in the world.
Anywhoo, I wandered around there for about 2 or three hours checking stuff out, looking for a place to eat... Didn't find a place to eat because everything was so ridiculously expensive and I just never found a place that had the chinese food I like. It really is true that the Chinese food we get back in Canada is completely different than the real thing.
So after leaving Chinatown, I did that long walk from Yamashita park to Queens Square/Landmark Tower like I did the last time I was down in Yokohama. Except this time I stopped over at the World Porters and checked it out... Decently cool mall, 5 floors of imported clothes, sports equipment, home decor, food, cooking utensils, and so much more. So after leaving there and going back to Landmark Tower, I continued searching for a place to eat with no success (sigh...). I was hoping to eat at one of those restaurants looking over the dockyard garden, but it didn't happen. From there I decided to go back to Tokyo, in particular Ginza! For those of you who remember, you can probably guess where I went to directly from there... Thats right, I went to the Apple Store :P It's a REALLY cool store! While going up, I was fortunate to see they were having a seminar run by a musician from Britain (or something.. he had a british accent! so there) about making music with Logic and a couple of neat pieces of hardware. I was impressed and considered buying a system like it... until I found out it would cost about $800 canadian dollars ($300 for Logic, $200 for soundboard/controller, $200 for mini keyboard) so clearly that was out of the question (I'm probably going to get a lecture on saving of money after my parents read this). Anyway, after the session I played around with some more appley goodness, and was really really impressed by the new iMacs. They really do run a lot faster and smoother than the older models, makes me want to go buy one... But I have to keep reminding myself that Apple is probably going to be launching new Tablet Laptops sometime within the next few years, so thats what I really want ;)
Anywhoo, that was pretty much the end of that night. Everthing in Ginza started to closedown around 9, so I just went out and ate some dinner (at a Japanese fast food restaurant... so typical) and went to the hotel. This hotel was pretty cool. You have to see the pictures once I upload them.

Day 2 (oh yes, there's more)
A decently lazy morning of sitting around and not doing too much while surfing the web in my room at high speeds (I hadn't had high-speed access in forever. This was like a breath of fresh air ;) and planning my day. First thing first, I decided to go to this cafe in Yokohama by Azamino station thats apparently run by some Armenian guy, called Cafe Vartan. 1 hour and 4 train transfers later, I get to the closest station only to find out that the cafe closed down a year ago... Yea, that pissed me off because I hadn't ate breakfast and spent my morning on trains. Disappointed, I decided to take some shots of the Keihin and Tokyo Bay/Yokohama Bay area from the Landmark Tower's 69th floor Sky Garden Observatory. If you remember, I took a whole slew of shots during the night from the same tower, so this time I took morning shots (I'll upload the images when I get home :P). Oh yea, and getting from Azamino to Sakuragicho (near the landmark tower) was another hour train ride... fun. After Landmark tower, I thought a bit more of Tokyo fun was in order. I went over to Odiba (also known as the Tokyo Teleport) to check that place out, and it was definately a cool place. It has the quiet, subrurb feel only a 10 minute train or monorail ride from the Keihin-Tohoku and Yamanote lines in Tokyo, respectively. To explain the title of this post, Odaiba is essentially an island built ontop of trash used as a landfil in Tokyo Bay. Home to Toyota's MegaWeb Showroom, a Venice themed mall, giant ferris wheel, Telecommunication office, and Fuji TV HQ, this island has grown from an old fortress back in the feudal days of Japan to a popular tourist attraction. Anyway, I visited the Toyota showroom, saw some cool cars and a neat minivan that had automatic everything and was designed for long trips (because the captain seats could stretch out and had foot rests!!!!). A video of the automation goodness will soon be up. After the showroom, I went to the venice-themed mall and it was really really cool. It looked like an itallian street market and had a sky and everything!
Next up, the Fuji TV globe observation deck. This was cool... I managed to get some really really nifty shots of the Tokyo skyline and quite a few of the Tokyo Tower and Rainbow Bridge. Quiet a nice treat. If I lived in Tokyo, I'd probably want to live there. From there, I was going to meet up with one of the other Waterloo guys and his friend for dinner, the funny thing was they were also in Odaiba at the time they called and asked where I was. However, I left Odaiba and met them in Ginza infront of the you-know-where ;) But to be fair, I did go to the Sony showroom first so the Apple store wasn't the main reason I went there!
The Sony showroom was pretty nifty, and I want an Aibo. Those dogs are so cool!
But anyway, I also went up to their Playstation area where I was able to play games on my PSP wirelessly by a terminal! How cool is that!? It just downloaded the game (not the full version obviously) and I was able to play, but the closed shortly after so I had to leave :/ Thats when I went to the Apple Store and met up with the other two. From there, we went to a sushi restaurant... the best sushi and sashimi I have ever had... SO GOOD. And I thought the cheap restaurant here was miles ahead of the Canadian stuff, with that scale this was on the other end of the galaxy good... I love Japan :D
So yea, we spent a good two or three hours at that restaurant and eventually went back to our hotel room and so concludes day 2.

Day 3 (more? make it stop!)
So another decently lazy morning. Got home pretty late the other night so I decided to sleep in a bit, take a shower, then check out at 10. From there, we went to get some breakfast near Gotanda station. Looking around for 10 minutes, we eventually decided to get some Denny's. Ah, fast food...Always there when you've been searching for food for long times.
Anyway, after breakfast we went to an Antique show by the Tokyo International Forum by Yurakucho-station. Saw some pretty interesting stuff, like an old samurai suit (picture is in there somewhere). Went and grabbed some lunch, then went to the Tokyo-Edo Museum. This Museum is definately a weird building, because the actual museum part is on the 7th floor, suspended above the city. This museum covers about 400 years of the history in Edo (the old name for Tokyo) and Tokyo. Pretty interesting stuff!
Anyway, after the museum we walked over to the Sumo wrestling stadium and watched some sumo action. I managed to take a few pictures and a crappy low-res video with my camera, even though we were pretty far away. So once I post those, enjoy!

Thats it for now! Sorry for posting this so late :P
Pictures will be up later on tonight, when I have time to tag them all and hit the upload button.
(Yes, I have one picture uploaded already. The one you see above. Also, I made a little modification to that image and posted it to deviantArt. It's kind of a cool shot that can be used as a wallpaper. Thats what I'm doing ;)