Monday, February 12, 2007

Riding Around Tokyo

The down jaket, aka the 80kmph parachute, and the felt gloves, aka why bother, needed to be replaced asap for riding on the bike. Someone refered me to a few places not too far from me to check out. Got a nice textile armored jacket and mathing gloves. Yoshu!

I wanted to spend the day exploring Tokyo, learning the roads. I'm usually pretty fucking good with a natural sense of direction, but Tokyo is screwed. I need me some GPS. Or just more practice. Either way I hit up some good spots. Lunch at a great little cafe in Omotesando, another funky cafe in Daikayama, rode across the Rainbow bridge.

The roads in Tokyo are nice and wide, but they need to put the lights on a timer or something. You could get through maybe 2 lights before having to stop again it seemed. And be careful, most traffic lights in Japan have 4 or 5 lights. I'm getting good at kilometer math too. I can accelerate to 50 without having to constantly watch the speedo. I know it's just a 0.6 conversion to miles, but when you are riding between traffic, trying to read hiragana traffic signs, and checking out which of the 5 traffic lights you should be paying attention to, simple math takes to the back burner.

To my Japan friends, sorry I couldn't meet up in Roppongi! Going from west to east places was easy, but getting back seemed way hard. I spent about 4 hours all around the waterfront. I was trying to spot Tokyo Tower to use as a landmark, but for some reason they shut off the bright oarnge lights that night.

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