I went on vacation again with my family, so here are some more photos to compliment the ones from last year. I was originally going to translate the photo captions into Mandarin like my previous vacation post, but then I accidentally wrote too much, so now I don’t have enough time to translate it all.
The journey started on August 5 at 7 AM in St. Louis, Missouri with a flight to the Chicago O’Hare airport, then to the Tokyo Haneda airport. The St. Louis airport is of course the least fancy out of the three, but they play jazz at the gates instead of trashy pop songs, so that automatically makes it the best for me.
At the Chicago airport, I saw a guy photograph that sign for whatever strange reason. It’s especially strange since the maps are obviously for Dallas, not Chicago. Or maybe that’s only obvious to me since I was just in Dallas a few days before this vacation. And I doubt Chicago’s real #1 hot dog would hang out at an airport.
This was one of the first views of Japan that I saw shortly before landing, although I did see Japan on the flight back from my vacation last year. Looks like a really cheerful and bright place! Also, the flight to Japan was on a Boeing 787 with fancy adjustable-tint windows, but the seatback screens had lots of ads before each movie. Luckily, you could skip the ads simply by dragging the slider at the bottom to the end of the video. Truly the pinnacle of modern technology.
Did you know that in Japan, the monorails are actually giant robots with LCD foreheads that perpetually stick their tongues out at you?
The Tokyo Skytree, as scene from my hotel. I also saw a rat near a 7-Eleven during my first two hours in Japan, so maybe Japan isn’t as clean and tidy as I expected. Or maybe rats are just too powerful. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel tired despite being awake for 24 hours continuously, maybe because it was back to morning in St. Louis. I had felt increasingly drowsy during the flight but couldn’t fall asleep, and then three hours before the end, I started feeling better and better and more energetic. That night I fell asleep quickly though, so I must have been exhausted even if I didn’t feel that way.
The same view, but during the day.
A stone fox statue in Ueno park.
Some buildings in Akihabara, with lots of slightly-questionable anime-related stores.
My hotel seen from the top of the Tokyo Skytree.
Eels in front of a Don Quijote store in Asakusa.
Asian companies, please please please look up the meanings of English words before you use them in your store’s name. This is a perfectly legitimate confectionary store, but they just had to ruin it with that name. In Kyoto, I saw a coffee shop with an English name in )(gasps in horror) Comic Sans. Japan seems just as obsessed with English as the other Asian countries that I’ve been to, and they’ve even borrowed English words in bulk into their language, unlike with Mandarin, which is ironic given that Japanese people even in touristy areas can’t speak much actual English. I learned katakana before the trip to read English loanwords in Japanese, but they had English signage everywhere so it wasn’t super helpful. I also learned hiragana and Hangul for fun, which was also totally useless since I can’t speak any Japanese or Korean. Hooray, I’ve now gone from “I have no idea what these squiggly lines mean” to “These squiggly lines are pronounced like this, but I still have no idea what any of that means”. That’s fine though, since it only took me a few hours to learn all those writing systems. Mandarin should really also switch to an alphabetic writing system and leave Chinese characters only for proper nouns, but none of the Mandarin-speaking countries seem enthusiastic about doing that. Oh well.
The eel’s face.
Another stone fox statue, at the Toyokawa Inari Betsuin temple.
And another stone fox statue.
Lots of stone fox statues.
Another view of the stone fox statues.
Seriously? This is a perfectly legitimate eye glasses store in Ginza, not some sketchy destination for basement dwellers. Or maybe basement dwellers need glasses after reading too much erotica. I didn’t actually see a lot of people in Japan wearing glasses compared to the US, but I didn’t see a random sample of Japan’s population so my observation might not statistically be true.
A “No Under 20” sign at a Lawson (convenience store similar to 7-Eleven) in Ginza with girls from the anime Bocchi the Rock. I think it’s actually about age restrictions for alcohol and tobacco purchases, despite the anime girls. Just like in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Japan has a ridiculous number of convenience stores. In Taipei I saw three 7-Elevens on the same side of the street in the span of two blocks, which is just absurd. I’m not sure if mainland Chinese cities have so many, since my time in Beijing didn’t go as planned as I’ll explain later.
A hot dog filled with stir-fried noodles at a 7-Eleven. I’m glad I didn’t have to eat it. I did have sushi at a restaurant in Ginza, and if American supermarket sushi is a 100, then Japanese 7-Eleven sushi is a 120 and Japanese restaurant sushi is a 150. It’s good, but not groundbreaking or anything. Or maybe I didn’t go to the right restaurant. We had to stand while eating at this restaurant, and they made the smoked salmon using a blowtorch. Honestly, I don’t think I have the capability to appreciate expensive food, since my activation function for food (ML is rotting my brain, sorry) is a sigmoid, not ReLU.
Some Japanese macaques having lunch at the Iwatayama Monkey Park in Kyoto.
A Japanese interpretation of a pizza at a French restaurant in Kyoto. It tasted… odd. My family also went to an Indian restaurant in Azabudai, where one of my family members asked a waiter in English whether we could use a Chinese payment app (WeChat Pay) at an Indian restaurant in Japan. He said yes.
Yet another fox statue, at the Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto. I saw a lot of people in Kyoto wearing kimonos similar to all the hanfu people in Xi’an during my vacation last year. It was all pretty kitsch, since most of those people were wearing sneakers which doesn’t mesh well with supposedly traditional clothing. In Xi’an, most of the kitschy traditional-looking buildings were actually constructed in the past 20 years for tourism, so fortunately Kyoto was a bit more authentic than that.
Another fox statue, with an accidental lens effect.
A fox statue in a more athletic pose, rather than sitting 24/7, which is supposed to be bad for your health.
A black and white cat sleeping at a store near the Fushimi Inari shrine.
An army of colorful ceramic fox figurines.
The Hello Kitty Express.
The Meiji chocolate factory, which looks like a giant chocolate bar.
And that’s the end of the Japan portion of the trip. I was honestly a bit disappointed by my experience, partially due to the language barrier. Also, based on my very limited time in Japan, their society seemed more rigid than in the US or China. For instance, at a Muji store in Ginza, my family was waiting in the self-checkout line and a store employee told us to move back to stand on the footprints painted on the ground, so we did. A bit later, the same guy yells at us again for standing 20 cm in front of the footprints instead of exactly on them. In the US, no store employee would care at all about us standing a bit too far forward, since among other things, they’re too busy being overworked since the store is understaffed to cut costs. I also saw fewer elderly people than I expected from all the news articles about Japan’s population aging and shrinking, but I probably didn’t go to the right places to see old people. In addition, I surprisingly didn’t see anime-related stuff plastered everywhere except in Akihabara. For instance, there wasn’t a lot more advertising in Tokyo with anime characters as compared to Taipei (I did see a subway ad for Ashinaga featuring the protagonist of Suzume). I guess manga and anime are still mostly a young person thing even in Japan, and maybe a lot of their population doesn’t want to see anime stuff everywhere they go. That said, I went to a bookstore in the Tokyo Skytree, which turned out to be a pretty dumb move since I couldn’t read any of the books, but they had a huge manga section. In addition, I was surprised that Japanese cuisine doesn’t have a lot of vegetables and a lot of people there are short (maybe there’s a slight connection) which I originally thought was just a stereotype. I checked with Wikipedia and the average height in Japan is indeed a few centimeters shorter than the US, although of course there’s a lot of variability and it’s not like they’re all Hobbits and dwarves.
My family then flew from the Osaka Kansai airport to the Beijing Daxing airport, picking that specific Beijing airport since it’s closer to Gaoyang in Hebei where some of my relatives live. I wanted to see the DMZ and North Korea during the flight since we flew over Seoul, but I wasn’t on the right side of the plane to see it. Literally the right side of the plane. The Beijing Daxing airport is like the Xiong’an New Area which I visited last year, in that it’s a brand-new, gigantic, gleaming airport with barely any people inside. The kids these days would probably call it a liminal space. Maybe it’ll liven up in a few more years.
I saw this book at a relative’s apartment in Gaoyang, China. The title translates to “The Humor of Mao Zedong” and the blue text says “He was great because he was funny” and “He was funny because he was great”. On a slightly related note, I discovered some of the Google Maps reviews for Mao’s mausoleum are unexpectedly funny: “I was not even allowed to touch him”, “The guy in box was asleep the whole time”, “He looks like a figurine. He probably disbanded years ago.”
A black cat and a white cat playing inside an unused fountain.
An orange cat on a sidewalk in Gaoyang.
A gray cat in a cage and two dogs in Gaoyang.
A black cat in a park in Gaoyang.
Bread that looks like watermelon slices.
A plastic head massager thing called “灵魂提取器” in Chinese which translates to “soul extractor” at a Miniso store in Gaoyang. Yes, that Miniso.
Ah yes, a trash can for throwing away all your organisms. Actually, it should say “landfill” or “non-recyclable” but maybe the translator wanted to have some fun by picking a completely random word that has nothing to do with trash cans.
Confucius’s Analects as a manga: The perfect tool for indoctrinating your kid!
A bottle of “skin vape”, whatever the heck that is.
And that’s the end of the China section of the vacation! Wait what? Well, I wanted to visit the National Museum of China but couldn’t get a reservation in time. So then I planned on visiting the brand-new Chinese Archaeological Museum, but then COVID-19 struck me once again. So, I was basically confined to a bed for the whole time in Beijing. My family has a tradition of always eating at a Pizza Hut (it’s completely different than the US, with menu items like seafood pizza) and a Haidilao Hot Pot location each time we visit China, and despite my illness, we managed to accomplish our tradition again this time. We went to the Haidilao right before I got sick. For Pizza Hut, we got a pizza delivered while I was sick. I’m surprised how far food delivery in China has come in the past few years, and it’s a lot cheaper than in the US. Another interesting difference is that there are now quite a lot of electric cars in Beijing, which you can tell since their license plates are green instead of blue. Some of those EVs are also compact cars (such as the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV that I photographed last year) so it’s not just Japan where compact cars have been successful. And Beijing also had a lot of electric scooters unlike Taipei which was full of motorcycles. At least for transportation, they’re really doing way better at the clean energy transition than the US.
And then I had to endure a flight from Beijing to Taipei while sick and using the bathroom every hour. It was pretty rough.
A black cat at the Houtong Cat Village in Taiwan. Sadly, I didn’t see a lot of cats since we visited in the morning, when most of the cats were still sleeping.
A sleeping black cat and gray tabby at Houtong.
A black, white, and orange cat at Houtong.
I guess people are pretty good at drawing cats.
In Houtong, even the bathroom walls are covered in cats.
The view of the ocean from Jiufen. This town is famous for looking like the buildings in the film Spirited Away, but I didn’t really see the resemblance while I was there. Or maybe it looks more similar at night. At least we didn’t get turned into pigs. We had to use Uber a lot that day since we were far away from the convenience of Taipei’s public transportation, and the Uber drivers were all very chatty and kept praising Taiwan’s food and people and mountains and culture and that it was safe enough to play basketball in Taiwan at midnight. Their enthusiasm was pretty contagious!
In the nearby town of Shifen, lots of the stores and homes had laid out food offerings for ghosts, since completely coincidentally, it was the day of the Ghost Festival in the Chinese lunisolar calendar. There were also people playing the suona and other traditional Chinese instruments for the festival. Speaking of calendars, I also saw the ROC calendar used in a few places, in which the current year is 113 instead of 2024.
A guy in Taipei who was just walking around with a gray bird perched on his shoulder. The photo’s a bit blurry since we were both walking when I took it. There was another guy nearby with a backpack and a small dog standing on his shoulder and the backpack.
I don’t know why anyone would buy Hatsune Miku-flavored perfume, but here it is, at a store in Taipei.
Taiwan has a lot of computer hardware companies, so here’s a wall under a highway overpass in Taipei made of computer motherboards.
Turns out on Monday, a lot of things in Taiwan are closed, including the National Palace Museum which was going to be one of the highlights of the vacation, since I didn’t have time to visit it last year. Ugh, I guess I’ll just have to come back to Taiwan at a later time to finally visit that museum. Instead, we went to the Taipei Zoo which was surprisingly huge and nice, although the Maokong gondolas and one of the zoo exhibits were closed because of Monday. The animals have pretty large enclosures and the zoo is very conservation and rewilding-focused. So, enjoy this meerkat.
The Taipei Zoo also had pandas, koalas, and pangolins!
And pink infant panda plushies, although they didn’t have newborn panda plushies to avoid grossing people out.
There’s a phrase in Chinese, “憂鬱的臺灣烏龜”, which mocks the complexity of traditional Chinese characters. It means “melancholy Taiwanese turtles”, so here’s a Taiwanese turtle in the Taipei Zoo (actually a Burmese turtle).
An “escape sling” at the Taipei zoo, in case you’re being chased by a melancholy Taiwanese turtle.
You might remember the “SPYxFAMILY Almond Dried Pork Paper” from my vacation last year, and I really wanted to track it down again and buy and taste it. I went to the exact same store in the Taipei 101 (we were going to go there anyways since my family wanted to shop there), but they no longer had that product and instead replaced it with SPYxFamily rolled peanut biscuit things which is a lot less exciting.
Lots of chefs at a Din Tai Fung restaurant in the Taipei 101.
The Taipei 101, seen from the bottom of the building.
A furry leopard cat statue with red boots at the Taipei Taoyuan airport. I saw the real thing at the Taipei zoo in the “Formosan animals” section.
I got back home on August 20 and my jetlag was much worse this time. The other thing that got worse upon getting back were the prices: at the San Francisco airport, a less-than-mediocre bowl of pho at a random airport restaurant costs more than an expensive hot pot place in the Taipei 101! I had over 200 unread emails and 90 feed reader articles, since I wanted to take a break from all that stuff and instead enjoy foreign countries and being sick with COVID. Did the vacation meet my expectations? Nope, of course not. That’s what life is like sometimes. Was it still fun and exciting? Definitely. It’ll probably be a few more years before I’ll have another opportunity to go on vacation like this again, so don’t expect one of these posts again next summer. Maybe next time I’ll actually visit the National Palace Museum.