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Tsukuba Expo and Planetarium Center

October 30, 2008 by Jeff · Leave a Comment 

I visited the Tsukuba Expo and Planetairum at the end of September 2008. The cost to enter the combined exhibit is 700 Yen, which works out to approximately $7.00.

Tsukuba Expo

The Expo consists of two floors and an outdoor arena. The first floor is a hands on science experiment area. You get to see everything from how human energy turns to power to the forces of electromagnetics. The picture below is from one fun experiment where you pedal and it creates power and the power moves a model train around a track!

The upper floor was all about the worlds travel to outer-space. There are fun games to play and a full NASA suit on display. I really enjoyed this part of the expo exhibit.

Plantearium

The planetarium is held in the world's largest hemispherical dome. You get to watch the presentation (movie) in this dome. The neatest part for me was the entrance to the dome where they have some robots which were presented at Tsukuba Expo 85. The one robot I really thought was neat was a robot that plays the piano (organ). There are pictures of it playing with a crowd of people watching the presentation... very neat!

Warning: The planetarium is Japanese only. This means that the entire presentation (movie) is in Japanese. I still understood the general idea of the presentation. However, I definitely missed parts of the movie.

If you're in Tsukuba and looking for something to do I'd recommend the Expo. This would be a really great thing to take a group of kids to as all the hands on displays can make for a fun afternoon.

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Hotel Grande Shinonome Tsukuba - A Review

October 28, 2008 by Jeff · Leave a Comment 

We stayed at the Hotel Grande Shinonome in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan at the end of September 2008. We stayed here during a conference that Lindsay was attending at the Tsukuba Internation Congress Center. Here is a review of our stay at the Hotel Grande Shinonome.

Location

The Hotel Grande Shinonome is located approximately 5-10 minutes (walking) from the Tsukuba Train Station. To get to most of major attractions (Tsukuba Expo, Conference Center or Train Station) you're looking at a 10-15 minute walk or approximately 1-2 km.

English Language

When checking-in and talking to anyone at the front desk we are always able to speak to someone in English. Although, we'd like to practice our Japanese (or lack thereof) this makes a very nice way of simply getting your room.

Hotel Class

The hotel seems quite nice, the American equivalent would probably be somewhere around a Ramada Inn. Obviously, we've stayed in better and worse hotels but this is a quite comfortable hotel. In fact, outside there is a well Japanese manicured garden and pond.

Rooms

The rooms themselves are small (as expected) but clean and comfortable. Although, we've both remarked on how the beds (yes, plural as they're are two twin beds for a 'double' room) are rather hard. One neat thing about the room is the shower and tap combination where you have a leaver that allows you to switch between either the shower head or the sink. Just don't try and wash your hands while someone is having a shower (trust me!).

I've made a YouTube video of the hotel room for everyone to see, so enjoy.

Weirdness

The weirdest part of the hotel is our bathroom. To get into the bathroom there is a large step (8 inches) up. This is not that bad going into the bathroom but actually leaving, especially at 3am in the morning! I swear that if I stayed here for longer then a week I'd have two rolled ankles.

Overall

Overall we really enjoyed our stay and would definitely stay at the Hotel Grande Shinonome again. It's a reasonably priced, within walking distance and clean and comfortable.

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Raw Chicken is safe to eat?!

October 1, 2008 by Jeff · Leave a Comment 

Last night we headed to a restaurant to celebrate Lindsay being done work here in Japan. We went to the Qt Mall where there is a selection of great restaurants to choose from. Anyway, we chose one of the restaurant (I totally forget the name, sorry) that looked like a hotpot / grill type place.

Lindsay picked something on the menu that we could share as she's bit more picky then me. Then we payed a little extra for the 'special chicken appetizer' not knowing what it was but it sounded ... special ?!?!

Anyway, when the 'special chicken appetizer' arrived it was a appetizer of slightly seared (and I mean slight) chicken. So basically it was six pieces of rolled up raw chicken breast. It was pretty stange. We looked at each other and thought it through... "well, it has to be safe if that's what they're serving." So, we both threw back a piece and I can say that I didn't really mind it. I thought that it doesn't really taste like chicken the way we know how chicken tastes.

Overall, though it was tasty and today is the next day and I wasn't up sick all night so the chicken must have been safe! phewwf, that would have been a bad way to commute to Yokohama!

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LaLa Garden and Sansuitei Restaurant Tsukuba

September 30, 2008 by Jeff · Leave a Comment 

Today I spent the day exploring more of Tsukuba. I started the day off by going to the LaLa Garden. Don't be confused (as I was) that this is an actual garden. It's actually a shopping mall.

The neat thing about this shopping mall (along with the Q T mall and maybe other malls in Japan?!?) is that this is an outdoor-indoor mall. Meaning the walkways between shops are all outdoor (or mainly outdoor) while the shops themselves are indoor. It's basically like a stripmall without the MASSIVE department stores.

After that I headed to the Tsukuba Expo and planetarium. The planetarium was sorta funny because it's basically a giant movie but only featured in Japanese... which makes sense really because why would we have a movie in Japanese in Canada?

Then that night we headed to Sansuitei for a banquet for Lindsay's conference. It was a more of a reception then a banquet because everyone stood around and ate. However, the food was delicious with sashimi, prawns and other pickled stuff to name a few things.

After dinner we headed to the Pink Panther and played some video games. I took a little movie of a guy playing the equivalent of rock bank drums ... I caught probably the slowest part of the game too! It was seriously crazy how fast his arms were moving!

Tomorrow I'm off to Akibahara to explore electric Tokyo should be exciting!

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Seiku, Sato, Omelettes and Matsumi Park in Tsukuba Japan

September 29, 2008 by Jeff · Leave a Comment 

Today we wandered around Tsukuba without much of a plan. The original idea was to have some lunch and then head to the Tsukuba Expo, however, once arriving it was closed. Oh well, we still had a great day!

The day started off by going to the Omelette restaurant in the Q-t Mall for lunch. It was a nice little place serving all kinds of omelette stuff. I ordered an omelette (stuffed with rice?!?!) and with some potatoes and chicken on the top. Lindsay ordered a rice curry thing, although, it looked a lot more like an eggplant sauce thing. Anyway, we ended up trading as Lindsay couldn't handle the Curry dish and I thought it was quite tasty!  It ended up being rather expensive, compared to the delicious Italian food the day before. Overall, it was just alright and I don't think I'd be rushing to return.

We then headed to the Tsukuba Expo which was closed.  Oh well, we made the best of it by walking around the University of Tsukuba. We went neat Matsumi Park which has a little lake (more of a lagoon). At the end of the lake there is this REALLY tall tower made out of concrete with an observation platform at the top. It's 10 flights tall and is really quite something considering it's right at the end of the lagoon.

Anyway, we headed up the tower, which cost a whole 100 yen! Once at the top we were able to get a nice view of the city. Well, actually, it would have been a nice view had it not been a really rainy day, but it was still well worth the dollar! lol.  Here's a view from the top of the tower looking at the Expo (the big dome looking thing)

After that we went to the Seibu Mall and walked around. Seibu seemed a lot like a gigantic Sears or Bay. they had everything (it seemed) ranging in prices from really expensive to super cheap. I was able to buy 2 pairs of pants and a hat for basically $27. Very sweet! In fact, I think I might go back and buy another hat or two because they were so cheap and cool!

For dinner we headed to Japanese Restaurant Sato.  This was what we had pictured as a traditional japanese restaurant.  We ordered a couple of bento box type of things that involved all kinds of neat things to sample.  I had a rice, fish, pickled zucchini dish and it was quite good!

The funny thing about the restaurant was the fact there was no numbers on the menu just symbols.  This led to a bit of confusing trying to figure out the prices...  Alas, we had our handy-dandy translator books and deciphered the cost of the food.   Funny trying to not only figure out what the pictures meant but also the prices!


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Exploring Tsukuba

September 28, 2008 by Jeff · Leave a Comment 

Today was the first full day in Tsukuba, of course, I like to call it Skuba, but that's just me. Anyway, today we spent the day basically wandering around seeing and exploring.

Italian Restaurant

We wandered around lots of Tsukuba looking for a convenience store located on our not-so-accurate map. While wandering around we found a Italian restaurant that we checked out. Note that the only way we knew it was an Italian restaurant was the fact that there was a Green, White and Red flag outside, otherwise it could have been a refridgerator shop to us for all we knew.

Anyway, once inside realize we were very under-dressed and ill-prepared to eat in a fancier Japanese restaurant. Too late now. We pulled out the handy-dandy Japenese-english translator book and asked, "What do you recommend". The waitress pointed to some random symbols and we said, "Ni" which means two.

What a great lunch! It was two very delicious fresh greens salad. As an appertizer (or appertif) they served persuito and grapefruit, some beef and green onion thing and a bruchetta. As a main course we had prawn and pesto fettucini, which was delicious. In fact, we even looked up the word delicious in the translator to tell them it was delicious.

University of Tsukuba Dance Team

The other thing that we stumbled upon was the University of Tsukuba dance team. They had a show outside of the Days City complex. It was totally impromptu thing and we couldn't understand a thing they were saying but was pretty fun to watch. I even took a video of it so take a look.

Sushi Dinner

Finally, we figued that we'd been in Japan for a whole 24 hours and it was about time for some Sushi. So, we went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of sushi from the store. It was soooo cheap and actually not bad, unlike the more expensive less tasty stuff that we have in Canada. The best part, suprisingly, was the sushi maki rolls... yum!

Besides those highlights we also made it to the Tsukuba Expo Center (which we're going to go to another day), the Q-t (giant fashion mall) and the international conference center (where the conference is happening). More tomorrow!


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18+ Hours And Finally in Japan!

September 27, 2008 by Jeff · Leave a Comment 

It's official, we're in Japan.

The best way to describe it right now is .... WOW! (or should I say Crazy).

On the plane over my stereo system was broken so I couldn't watch the movie. Luckily, Lindsay shared her headphone so we were able to listen to half of Iron Man. Good flick, although, I'm sure it's a much better movie when you don't have one headphone in and people are walking in front of the screen all the time... just a guess though. lol. The good thing about the broken sound was that the crew gave us a coupon for something... not exactly sure what the coupon is good for exactly. However, we have a code to input in Air Canada!?

On a side note: Who doesn't love airplane food? Not sure exactly why but I love airplane food. I think it's a matter of having nothing better to do.

When we arrived in the airport we took a bus (number 8) just outside the terminal to Tsukuba center. We'll be here for the next 4 nights and it should be exciting. So far we've gone for food twice and we're getting better at ordering in the language. But reading anything is basically a write off.

Now we're off to the Expo here in Tsukuba a better post with more pictures is to come.

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