91–100 of 308 posts
"Very few people take me up on this part of the recommendation: get out of the cities if you are here for more than a week in your life." Same situation for visitors to the UK. I've given up trying to tell tourists to get out of London, they never listen.
The same situation for people visiting the US and they only ever go to some major US city like New York City or Los Angeles. Visit some place that's more than 100 miles from the ocean and isn't an urban downtown center.
It's not just Japan. I've been travelling a lot for many years, for work and pleasure, in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. In this time, the experience has become consistently much worse everywhere I go. I personally blame social media and camera phones for this. In the past, a place might be busy, but people were mostly enjoying the place which is all good. Now it's all about people taking the same photo 100 times with slightly different poses. Wannabe influencers using their boyfriends as personal photographers. Youtubers being loud and not caring whether you want to be in their video or not. The list goes on. I'm definitely jaded but between that, airport insanity, and recently covid measures, travelling has never sucked more than it does today.
https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/huis-ten-bosch-o...
Seriously: read the whole thing. There's a bit where bankers take investing advice from a psychic ceramic toad. It's wonderful.
When we visited Japan we made a special trip there and it was every bit as amazing as this article makes it out to be.
I would be careful with his advise on money. If you came to Japan in the past 3 months with no cash and a Visa card, you would be in deep shit. Visa cards are just not working here and it seems nobody cares to fix it. Japan is very safe so it's probably fine to just bring your budget in cash. Also outside of the beaten path like he advise people to go it's still very cash heavy society. Your taxi driver will not be h…
> Note that Japanese reviewers are substantially pickier than you are No kidding, I see lots of reviews like: food is tasty, service was friendly, price reasonable. 3 stars.
Basically, they use the entire dynamic range. 3 stars for "as expected" is eminently sensible, but the west and especially the US suffers so much from review inflation that you could really remove 2 if not 3 stars of a 5-star scale: either a reddit/hn-style up/down, or possibly have a middle-ground "at expectations".
If you really do want to go (slightly) off the beaten path, try Yokohama (a short hop from Tokyo), Kobe (rebuilt and revitalized since the ruinous earthquake, Fukuoka, Nagano (Winter Olympic city) or Sapporo. Or even take a domestic flight down to Okinawa and visit Naha.
To go off the beaten track in Tokyo, stay in Ikebukuro an unfashionable but IMHO awesome Tokyo hub. For amazing coffee there check out the insanely superb Mermaid Coffee Roasters and its stunning top two floors featuring the owner's curated furniture. Add their knock out baked goods and you won't want to leave. Minami-Ikebukuro park is a nice spot to relax on bright days (next to Blue Bottle coffee) though avoid the in-park Racine's Farm to Table and check out their sister Vietnamese restaurant Raindrop on the trendy Azuma street. Also be sure to walk further along Azuma to the Toden-Zoshigaya Station of the Tokyo Sakura tram line, the last surviving tram in Tokyo, and take it all the way to the Minowabashi terminus and explore the adjacent covered arcade for a taste of old Tokyo.
To use the physics sense, we found vacationing in Japan high friction . Yeah, it was totally different than anywhere we have been on n America or Western Europe. At times, it felt like we were looking at everything on the other side of a closed window, amazing yet inaccessible. This was ‘05 or earlier, and the lack of Roman lettering outside Kyoto was hard. Outrunning English has not been a problem elsewhere, but los…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My new rule of thumb for travel is that if I’ve heard of the city, it probably sucks.
How does it work in Italy?
And I have more examples: Cinqueterre is out of this world. In same cases it's true though: Florence left me unimpressed, but I think it was the fault of the huge influx of tourists and peddlers that ruined everything.
To use the physics sense, we found vacationing in Japan high friction . Yeah, it was totally different than anywhere we have been on n America or Western Europe. At times, it felt like we were looking at everything on the other side of a closed window, amazing yet inaccessible. This was ‘05 or earlier, and the lack of Roman lettering outside Kyoto was hard. Outrunning English has not been a problem elsewhere, but los…
I would agree that would have been the case years ago. Nowadays with the equivalent of babelfish on our phones, language barriers have come close to being almost non existent.
Going off the beaten path always amuses me a bit as advice (what happens when everyone decides to do that?) but it's also quite true that you can often be literally tens of metres away from the most touristic locations with barely any tourists actually around you in most places (exceptions include cities that have become theme parks like Venice).
> exceptions include cities that have become theme parks like Venice Even in Venice, if you leave San Marco and if you cross into San Polo, you just have to leave the Ponte Rialto behind. It also helps if you arrive by boat and land at Fondamente Nove and just don't take the "straight" route to Piazetta San Marco. Cinque Terre is a similar "theme park" in italy. We've been there on an holiday weekend in spring with r…