Just Back From Japan

I just got back from my trip with Lois to Japan. If I stick with this blog, you will get to hear all about it. Just in case I don't stick with it, all you need to know is that Japan rocks, the beer is cold and the Jgals looked hot. Save your money and make the trip NOW!

OK. Back to the regular program already in progress. Booking the hotels in Kyoto and Osaka.

I booked my hotels for Kyoto and Osaka on-line using on-line agencies I saw on JapanGuide.com. For Kyoto I found a good deal for a Hirashin "ryokan" on agoda.com. I put ryokan in quotes because it felt more like a business hotel with tatami mats than a ryokan. More on that when I get to the Kyoto part of the story. Agoda was easy to use and everything worked out as promised. Agoda seems to be based out of Thailand. The reason this might be important will be revealed in the Osaka part of my story. I picked the Hirashin based on it's price (about 13,000 yen per night with breakfast), non smoking room, private bath and location to shopping and nightlife. The reviews on agoda were all very positive so I felt good about booking. After I booked I made the mistake of checking tripadvisor and almost crapped my pants. There were a lot of negative reviews on tripadvisor so I was really concerned I booked a dump. I think either agoda edits the negative reviews out or people that post on tripadvisor are crybabies or a mixture of both. I work in the hotel industry so I know there are two sides to every story but only one side is seen on the internet reviews. In case you are booking soon I would recommend the Hirashin if the price is right. Just don't expect a true ryokan experience with historic buidings and beautiful gardens. Hirashin is located in a busy part of downtown Kyoto, built like an office building and no views at all. If you understand this up front, you will not be disapointed with the location, cleanliness or service at this hotel.

For Osaka I used japanican.com and booked Osaka Hotel Vista Grande in the Namba area of south Osaka. Japanican is the English site for JTB, Japans biggest travel agency. I was a bit pissed off after booking this hotel because the web site quoted 8,500 yen per night but after I got finished booking and paid for the room the charge was 8,500 for one of the nights and the other three were at 12,000. I bet there was some disclosure that I must have missed because Japanese are very good at going over every detail but I was really pissed off at the time. I will come to sing the praise of JTB later on in the story by the way. I booked a double room, non smoking. Believe me that if you are sensitive to smoke, a smoking room in Japan is like living in an ashtray. I picked this hotel because of the look of the room, non-smoking, location to the action of Namba and the price. There were a few glitches with this hotel that were fixed quickly. Other than that I loved the set-up of the room and the location could not be beat! Service was the worst of the four hotels but that is not saying that it was bad service. Just not as good as the others mostly in terms of friendliness.

Picking hotels

Ok I have decided to hit Tokyo, Hakone, Kyoto and Osaka on this trip. My goal is to find hotels with the best selection of porn videos. Just kidding. I am looking for location, no smoking and a price range around 10,000 yen. I know the size of the rooms are going to be small but thank God Lois is a tiny gal and likes to snuggle. Private toilet and shower is also important because with all the great eating comes all the great dumping. I got to do this in private for fear of being deported for air pollution. So where do you look for good deals? I started at Japan Guide and clicked on the adds on the side of the page. I used Agoda and JapanICan for two hotels and I booked direct for two others. I found info on the two I booked direct on Japan Guide.

TOKYO: I used to live in Tokyo and worked in Ikebukuro so I know this city the best. Ikebukuro gets totally ignored in all of the travel guides but it is actually a great city to explore for tourists. Ok there are no famous shrines but you could explore the area around the station for days and never see the same thing twice. I ended up booking the Sakura Hotel mainly due to the location and price. I have a bit of history with the Sakura group of hotels. When I was working in Tokyo fifteen years ago, Sakura opened up some gaijin houses in Ikebukuro. Now for anyone that is living in Japan there is a feeling that "ok now that I am here, stopping letting any more gaijin into Japan." I want to be the special freak show that everyone points at and not share the spot light with other freaks. Speaking of freaks.The biggest dorks in the world can come to Japan and teach English and all of a sudden they become a rock star. I am not saying that everyone goes crazy over them. What I am saying is it just takes one of the millions of hotties to fall for the gaijin dork and he is now tasting nectar that he could only imagine (insert porn rental joke here) at home. A lot of these guys get married to their J gal and take them home to his country where the Jgal finally realizes "My husband is a dork" when compared to the guys back home. OK back to Sakura house. So Sakura is running long term gaijin houses, gaijin hostels and now a hotel. I am not flying all the way to Japan to hang out with gaijin that is for sure but I think this will be the best way to break Lois into the Japan scene. I am spending 9,000 yen per night for a double room for five nights. I will give you a full report when I return. They have another hotel close to Shinjuku that looks like a killer location. Small town feel with lots of restaurants near by.

HAKONE: I wanted to stay at a ryokan in Hakone but they were all so expensive for the date I was looking for. I searched Japan Guide and found the Fuji-Hakone Guest House. This looked like a fun place with only about seven rooms. It is tatami style room so Lois can get a chance to try sleeping on a futon. There is no private toilet so I hope they forgive me someday. They have a furo that is private so Lois and I can have a private bath together. The cost is 11,000 yen and I included breakfast for 800 more yen apiece. Again this is a gaijin friendly place which is not really what I am looking for but will be fun to hang out with people after a nice bath and talk about who stunk up the bathroom.

Coming up next post: Kyoto and Osaka hotels. Thanks for reading.

Quagmire

Planning the itinerary

A great site for your planning pleasure is Japan Guide. They have great write ups of the main tourist areas of Japan. This is a great place to look for what interests you. Most guides are heavy on temples and this one is no different. I am not a big temple fan. I think the best part of traveling in Japan is just wandering the streets of a big city, getting lost and finding something unexpected around the corner. By unexpected I mean porno video shops. I don't think I will be doing a lot of porno video shop tours this time because Lois will be going with me. So this trip's "unexpected" could be a small shrine, a great restaurant or drunk salary man barfing. What I m trying to say is that the regular web sites on Japan will not be talking about that kind of stuff. A great part of the Japan Guide is the FORUM section. Here you can read letters from readers that start off with " I never thought the letters to the forum were real until this happened to me...." Oopps. That is the Penthouse Forum. The forum at Japan Guide is a questions and answer board where people exchange information. You can get a lot of great info from the questions that previous travelers have asked. Use the search function. Odds are your question has already been asked before. One of the best posters is the one of Farah Faucet with the one hard nipple. Also one of the best posters on the forum is a Japanese guy named Uji who is very helpful answering transportation questions. There are also a ton of links to cheap (or should i say "less expensive") hotels. I found all of my hotels following different links from this site. Since I haven't gone to Japan yet, I can't tell you how it all worked out yet.

Google maps is also a great way to prepare for your trip. Here is a street view of one of my past trips wandering around a big city looking for the "unexpected". If you are looking for the unexpected is it still unexpected? Anyways one of the places for porno video shop finding is in Shinjuku in the Kabukicho area. For all you youngsters out there, in the bad old days of porn you had to physically walk into video shops filled with other like minded people, although those guys were loser pervert jerkoffs, pick your porn o' the day and rent it fron the guy working the counter. The guy at the counter always had some problem with the video you picked and would have to ask his co-workers in a loud voice "This guy right here wants to rent this midget port video but I can't find the tape." The coworker would come over and say "Where did you find this midget porn video? I have worked here for a long time and I never seen anything as messed up as midget porn." Now all the pervert jerk offs in the store start looking for the midget porn because it is the only thing they haven't jerked to....Now you young wiper snappers can just point and click and get all the porn you ever need. The reason why this is so important is the video shop is a dying breed and this could change Kabukicho forever. The poor pron masters will be out of work and the video store will be replace by a used high school girl's panty shop. Don't laugh I am not joking. What is so special about porn in Kabukicho? This is where they sell the under ground porn vids with no blurring of the J-guys micro junk. But I guess most guys make the effort to go there and deal with the yakuza to see the girls micro junk (usually about the same size as the guys). Anyways fifteen years ago when I lived in Japan this is what a guy had to do to get his hands on some good porn. Damn! Why does it always come back to porn!

Getting started

First off I just got to say that any blog on Japan that uses the word "archipalego" is written by a total fag....SHIT! I just used the dreaded "a" word. I guess what I am trying to say is people that use that word are copying shit out of a travel book. I am not going to do that. Mostly because I am too lazy and that stuff is so easy to find elsewhere. I hope to give you something new. If not new, then something different. If not different then at least I hope it is not boring. Who am I kidding. I will never post more than two posts on this blog being that I am a lazy sod. That reminds me of the Sex Pistols song. Speaking of sex, did you know that Japanese are the biggest perverts in the world? Well they are and thank god for that. I think they produce about 90% of all internet porn. Well at least the internet porn I look at. It is so hard to do any research on Japan on the internet without being sucked into yet another porn site filled with hot naked J-gals get nailed by some fat old dude. If you know anything about Japan, you know they blur out the genitals due to the fact that Japan is an archipalego...SHIT...due to the fact that they don't want to show their micro junk to the world. Crap, where was I...See it always goes back to PORN! Concentrate Quagmire.

Second off: Let me introduce myself. My name is Quagmire. I am 45 years old and live in Honolulu. I am divorced and going out with a great gal I like to call Lois. Here's a picture of me and my gal doing it. Giggity.

My ex-wife, who I would like to call "Cleveland's wife because she certainly isn't Asian reporter Tricia Takanawa", is Japanese and we lived in Tokyo together for three years in the mid 1990's. Since she was Japaense, I really didn't have to think much about how to get around in Japan. Now things are different. It's all on my shoulders to plan out this trip and show Lois that the Quag is the man. Let's talk about finding the cheapest airfare.

Third off: there is this thing called the "world wide web" where you can type things like "Cheap airfare to Japan" or "Midget Porn" on a site called "Google"....If you found this shitty blog you sure know how to search for an air ticket. BUT, which gets me thinking about how nice Japanese girls butts are, you may not know this: most of the airseats to Japan are controlled by Japanese travel wholesalers. They get the best prices due to the huge volume of seats they sell. SO, checkout your local Japanese travel agent or check out this site H.I.S. I live in Hawaii and our Sunday paper's travel section is full of ad's for cheap airfare to Japan. I bought my ticket from Panda Travel because they had an add for air and three nights hotel for $680 per person. Of course that special was sold out for the dates I wanted but they still had the best air onry (I am practicing my Japanese) rate on JAL. Did you know the JAL flight attendants on flights from Honolulu to Japan are from Thailand? Well they are and they are HOT! Shit now I want to google Thai porn. Concentrate Quagmire.

Quagmire Goes to Japan

Auuuuright.! The Quag is going to Japan on March 17, 2010 for a two week Giggity tour. I manage a hotel and I have come to a new perspective of what my guests are going through when they plan a vacation. I can't get my mind off this trip. I am completely worthless at work. If my internet connection was any good at work I would most likely be fired by now.

Japan is not new to me. I lived there for three years about 15 years ago. This time it is just for fun and all about the experience. The experience I am looking for is eating as much great food as I can from Tokyo to Osaka that I can in two week.

Why am I calling myself Quagmire and not my real name. I will get to that later. Who am I going with, stay tuned and you may find out.

Giggity