I haven’t written anything for the past couple of days because, well, nothing that exciting is going on. I’ve been teaching class during the day, grabbing some dinner, then crashing. It doesn’t help that the remnants of jetlag are on the periphery of my consciousness, and that it’s been raining off and on so I’m not that inclined to go out anyways. Still, that’s likely to change tomorrow, which is the last day of training, and a half day to boot. Then Friday I’ll have the day to do some exploring, which I’m still figuring out.

For the foodies out there, I’ve been eating local as much as possible. For example, last night I went to an all-you-can-eat sushi and shabu shabu place. I’m not a sushi fan, but I love shabu shabu, which is basically a boiling pot of broth in which you cook paper-thin slices of meat and an assortment of veggies. Everything is very fresh and it’s a fun social thing to do. I also tried a kind of Japanese-French bistro place yesterday for lunch where I had a pork loin stewed in plum sauce and a kind of pasty risotto. Today was slightly more traditional Japanese - tempura in a bento with miso soup and steamed rice. The nice thing about Japanese food is I always feel good after eating it because it tends to be so light in comparison to Western food. Or it could be that I’m eating with sticks which slows my gluttonous ass down to more human levels.

Lately, I’ve had people ask how I find things to do when I travel to different places. When I first started doing this sort of thing, I did what everyone else does - pick up a travel guide and read. The thing is, youre typically getting a very sterile view of the area you’re going to be visiting. You get all of the “standard” attractions, places to go, and so on. It works, but it’s not a good way to get a true feel of where you’re staying.

For that, I’ve become very dependent on blogs and message boards. Blogs written by expats living in an area oftentimes don’t intend to provide travel information to visitors, but they do as a side effect of talking about ther lives. They may talk about something cool they visited, or a great place they ate, and for someone coming from the outside that may be a place that they would never have found on their own or by using a travel guide. The same goes for message boards, which are often congregation points for expats and can provide a ton of information - restaurants, attractions, and so on. Really, they’re a great way to see some of the grittier bits of a city that are off the beaten path.

In preparation for this trip, I looked back on some resources that I had found on previous trips to Tokyo. Alas, my favorite site MasaMania seems to be updated only infrequently at best lately. MasaMania is a Japanese photographer guy that does the most bizarre Engrish commentary ever but shows some interesting cultural phenomena at the same time, maybe inadvertently. The site now is just a shell of what it used to be.

So, I had to rely on some more standard resources, such as Metropolis, probably the largest Tokyo expat magazine and message board out there. There’s also a slightly more offcolor forum called Fucked Gaijin that is quite good. Quirky Japan is a listing of some of the stranger sights to see, and Japanmanship is a sometimes funny, sometimes bitter blog that has some gems in it. There are numerous other blogs out there because the expat community in Tokyo is so large, so just looking through some of those tends to be a bit of an adventure.

The other bit of “research” that I did was to watch a BBC series called Japanorama which is a BBC series hosted by Jonathan Ross. For those who don’t know him, he’s a talk show host in England that has a speech impediment like Barbara Walters where r’s become w’s. Think ‘Barbara’ becoming ‘Bawbawa’ and you’re on the right path. Anyways, each episode focuses on a theme (cool, geek, cute, tribe) and shows a bunch of stuff related to it. So, for example, in the zoku (tribe) episode, they covered Cosplay, which is where people dress up like anime characters and such. They also covered a wrestler called “Hard Gay” that is straight but plays a completely over-the-top gay leather type. If you have a few minutes, the YouTube vids the link point to are pretty funny. Think of ‘Party Boy” from Jackass and you’re on the right path.

So that’s my kind of alternative guide to discovering new places. It’s not quite as straightforward a path as looking through a travel book, but I can guarantee you’ll find something unique every time.