Title: Outer Tsukiji market
Author: Scott Hadfield
Taken: 14 Oct 2009 - 6:36pm

The other day I pulled myself out of bed at 5am to go see the action at Tokyo's infamous Tsukiji fish market. This is a massive hub in the city, the arrival/distribution point for almost all of Tokyo's fish. With 32+ million people who love their fish, it's hard to imagine just how much seafood must flow through there on a daily basis.

To give an idea of the size of this market... from wikipedia:

Tsukiji alone handles over 2000 metric tons of seafood per day. The number of registered employees varies from 60,000 to 65,000...

Due to a lack of planning, Sam and I stayed in Tokyo this weekend. We'd originally planned to head out to Mt. Fuji, but unfortunately was prohibitively expensive with last minute planning (all we could find was roughly $300CAD / night). So we had to move out of our previous luxurious 215 sqft apartment into a hostel for last night and tonight. Tomorrow we're staying at a hotel near the airport since our flight out is quite early in the morning.

Anyway, our current place is a whopping 55 square feet! (about 5 square meters). Let me tell you, it's been fun :).

Title: 55sqft room
Author: Scott Hadfield
Taken: 18 Oct 2009 - 12:39pm
Our room in the New Koyo Hostel, Tokyo

I'm pretty sure we could squeeze another person (with luggage) in here.

Due to the unfortunate incident with my last VoIP company I've had to switch providers. Because the number I had been assigned on that network was a Richmond number very few VoIP providers were able to transfer it to their service, for this reason I've needed to just drop my 604 number and get a whole new phone number.

This is actually more of a rant than a review. But hopefully it will serve the purpose of other people avoiding Netfone in the future.

To start with, I've never received worse service at a company than this, not even with Telus if you can believe that. The service is so bad, that I even have trouble believing it... until I try to contact them again. I've used them for about a year now and never really needed to contact them. My VoIP phone is basically only used for forwarding to my cell or receiving voicemail. I almost never use it as an actual phone.

Title: Shibuya Crowds
Author: Scott Hadfield
Taken: 11 Oct 2009 - 10:07am
Crowds in Shibuya shopping and chilling with friends at 10pm on a Sunday night. This would never happen in Vancouver.

Always when first arriving in a new city you'll notice odd things that everyone else just perceives as normal... and you do too after a couple weeks. I wish I'd written more down in Buenos Aires, I recall there being a bunch of things but can now only remember a few. I've listed a few my random observations from Tokyo after one week below: