We went to see R.E.M. last night in Philly. Somehow I’ve made it this far in my life without ever being to one of their shows. Even though they made some questionable albums over the last few years, word on the street was it was a good show with a good setlist. That was the case, despite feeling really old looking at the crowd of old people around me, it was incredibly good and the band actually looked like they were having fun doing it. Their tour site is all driven by crowd photos, video, and Twitter feeds which is almost expected at this point but still a cool thing to check out.

 

I watched the Phillies get beaten down last night in front of a sold out crowd during a really slow moving game. At least the seats were good.

 

We took my Dad to the track yesterday for lunch for Father’s day. We lost on every single horse we bet on, expcept for one – a bet I made by accident when I asked for the wrong horse. Anyway, it was a good lunch that got better when we decided to leave the races and hit the slots. 10 minutes later my dad was up $315 and it was all good. I ended up by $10 and we called it quits while we were ahead.

The combination of Tara’s new camera and photomerge in Photoshop CS3 is making way better panoramics than I’ve been able to do before. Some of these are coming out amazing, like the track above or the Tokyo Bay image I have down below. My banged up camera usually shifts the exposure on all the shots and they end up looking striped, which isn’t the case here.

 

It was a perfect morning. The weather couldn’t have been better so I decided to take out the Chevy. I cracked open the hood and put in some transmission fluid, about as much as the puddle on my garage floor, hooked up the iPod to the ghetto speakers that sound just right, and took off. Now I’m just waiting for people to take a number and see who can destroy my good mood first.

 

Speaking of bikes, here’s some of the kickass bikes we saw all over Tokyo.

 

Since we came back to instant summer, we decided to go to the Philly Triple Crown bike race. 110° on the pavement for 6 hours wouldn’t make for a fun day on a bike.

 

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Day 11 highlights:

• The flight home was no less of an adventure. United had us on an Air Canada flight through Vancouver, and the flight times changed to only leave us 55 minutes to go through customs where we had to pick up our bags and re-check them. We talked the guy at check-in into slapping some priority tags on our bags, and that was the only thing that saved us. The Air Canada flight was perfect – each set had a big touch screen with On Demand content, and a 110 outlet to plug things in as well as a USB power outlet. The only thing missing was a way to display your iPod on the screen, but I can live with that. The 10 hour flight went really quick.
• Our first flight was delayed like 20 minutes, and we ended up only having about 40 minutes for customs and getting on a plane to take off. We got off the plane, ran to customs and the line was still pretty short. While we were in line, we saw our bags come up first on the belt. Once we got past the agent, we grabbed the bags, dumped them on the other belt, and got the friendly Canadians to let us in front of the security line. It was now 12:15 for a flight taking off at 12:30 and not looking good. Of course the gate was the furthest one from security, and we ran through the airport to get to it. Once we got there, the doors were closed and people were just sitting around. We thought we had missed the flight, and I knocked on the glass to get the agent’s attention, and he came out and told me the flight was delayed. 5 minutes later we were getting on with everyone else, though we were a little sweatier.
• The next flight to Dulles was the inaugural direct flight, and it was empty. We made the most of empty rows, because there’s not going to be much of that anymore.
• A quick layover in Dulles got us back to Philly. Our bags never made it on the second plane, but we didn’t care as long as we had made our flight. They showed up at our house the next night with no problems.
• The only issue left for us was to be able to fall asleep and get back on US time. I didn’t fall alseep until almost 4:30am that night though, so going into work the next day hurt. Coming home on Thursday and just working one day before the weekend is the way to go.

 

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Day 10 highlights:

• We had a mid-day flight back to Korea, so day 10 was wrap up for obsessive shopping. Ramon got the address for a semi-hidden Japan only Bape store, so we jumped in a cab to Harajuku and he picked up some shoes. I had to do a return trip to pick up a few more small things at Tokyu Hands, and the last step was getting it all into our bags for the flight back.
• We made some pit stops at some other stores in Shinjuku, packed our bags, and waited for the bus.
• I had been complaining I hadn’t gotten to eat at any sushi train places, and as my luck had it there was one in the Narita airport. There was no wasabi on my plate, but a tube of green powder so I started putting it in my soy sauce. It wasn’t spicy but it was tasty, and then the waitress saw me and said " No! No! Green tea!" Then she brought me some wasabi and it was all good.
• We checked in at United and I tried to use my meager status to get at least one Economy Plus seat. We had the best gate agent, and she was clicking away on the keys and after a long wait in silence she said I don’t have Economy Plus for you because you are in business class. After telling Tara she could have the seat, a bunch more click clacking followed with "Good news – I have two business class seats for you and I’ve found some better seats for your friends." Shitya, what a great finisher to a great trip. We were actually bummed it was a 2.5 hour flight because it was so comfortable and Tara and I were both trying to ge through the end of season 1 of Heroes. We put back some glasses of champagne before takeoff and asked to send some to Ramon and Wendy. They wouldn’t send it to them, but they let them come up to hang out with us to drink which was cool. It’s a night and day difference of flying when you’re outside of the US…
• We landed back in Korea and took the bus to Suwon, where Wendy’s mom was waiting with a great dinner, and her dad ready to drink. They invited two friends from the building to come practice their English. One of them was Hannah who was about 80 pounds, and she showed up half way into a bottle of scotch. Instead of sipping it, she started pounding shot after shot and turned bright red. Every now and then she would say things like "I love you. Sorry sorry sorry. I’m drunken." Once dinner was done, Wendy’s parent’s fired up their singing skills and turned it into karaoke night. Wendy’s dad barely speaks English, but he speaks it perfectly well when he’s singing it, check the video. It was the best way to finish our trip, they were such great people and so hospitable to us.

 

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Day 9 highlights:

• Day 9 was for last-minute shopping. It was raining pretty hard so we started at nearby Tokyu Hands. It’s 8 floors of kickass department store, and we got there when it opened. We started by going to the top and working our way down, and we bought something on almost every floor. Check out the photo of the $3500 Darth Vader samurai that we didn’t buy, it was awesome. We were in there almost 3 and half hours before we realized what time it was. We did a quick check at the stores in the other half of the building and grabbed a sushi lunch upstairs.
• Our hotel was a block away and we had to go drop off all of our purchases so we could keep moving. Every time was passed the Krispy Kreme, there was a long line and even in the rain the line was long. Supposedly it’s normal to have a 1 or 2-hour line, and when they opened it was 3 hours. Check the video on Liam Maher’s blog to see how nuts it gets… Just click the post on the right that says "Krispy in Shinjuku."
• We worked our way over to Akihabara, and spent a lot of time at Yodobashi, 9 floors of every electronic device ever made. It’s mind-blowing, no matter what you’re looking for, there are a hundred options.
• The rain kinda sucked and after you’ve seen everything in electronics, there wasn’t much point in looking at the other stores so we headed back to Shinjuku. We went to check out the Isetan department store, which was more mind-blowing retail. There’s a men’s building and a women’s building, and both are like 7 or 8 floors. It’s like Saks on steroids – huge, high end, and there were almost as many staff people ready to help as there were customers. Any department you went into had an army ready to help, and if you like to drop obscene amounts of money on really cool clothes this is the place for you. Either way it’s definitely worth checking out.
• At this point we were too tired to change, so we went straight to dinner in dirtbag mode at the Century Hotel. We started with cocktails at the bar, and then into their restaurant. The views are the reason to be here, it’s all glass and you can see the whole city from here. We were so shot from the day of shopping it was the first day we didn’t go out for late night.