Worldcon Dispatch #8
Sep. 23rd, 2007 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperOriginally written on 9/6/2007 9:16pm, transcribed 9/23/07 10:17pm
In which Worldcon is over but the Post-Worldcon tour begins, and Day 1 of the tour is made a little bit more eventful by the Oncoming Storm of Typhoon Nine!
There is something quite a bit alarming about discovering that there's a typhoon on the way just as you're about to set off on a guided tour. The exact stats on Typhoon Nine (as it is apparently called here, since they don't name storms in Japan) I don't know. But as of this writing, I do know that it was apparently supposed to make landfall in the Tokyo area around 3pm today and move north from there. Our tour, it turns out, has headed west; we're missing all but the edges of the storm. Go us! Cool as Japan is, a Japanese typhoon is one experience I can do without.
I keep giggling over the storms being numbered, though. This of course immediately reminded me of the Doctor; quite rightly,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
solarbird pointed out that the Doctor is called the Oncoming Storm.
Anyway, yesterday morning we all met up in the lobby of the Sunshine Prince. Our tour guide is a lady from Osaka whose full name I have utterly forgotten, but who said that we could all call her by her nickname, Ikko. I've been calling her Ikko-san, since that seems a little more appropriate. Counting Dara,spazzkat, and me, there are twenty-six people on the tour, many of whom were also at Worldcon. Notably, a couple by the names of Rachelle and Les turned out to be costumers--hardcore Worldcon-caliber costumers, which is very cool. :) And like me, Rachelle was pulled into the fold of Doctor fandom thanks to Christopher Eccleston and kept in thanks to David Tennant. Let's hear it for the Oncoming Storm. :)
(Speaking of David Tennant, Rachelle said that there'd been a young guy at NASFiC who'd done a kickass Ten costume and who, as a result, had girls hanging all over him. Apparently, he was heard to say of this in a very Ten-ish voice, "I rather like this!" Hee!
But I digress.)
We took the tour bus out of Tokyo and headed into Hakone, through a lot of increasingly rural and lovely country. We saw rice paddies all over the place, of a startling rich yellow-green hue that looked like it belonged in any of the new BSG episodes set on Kobol. I halfway expected to see Six in her virginal white dress out there somewhere.
On the way we stopped at a rest station that really was a Japanese version of a truck stop, which was kind of neat. And I missed the souvenir stamp here--but Dara didn't! She's way ahead of me on stickers and stamps both.
First stop on the tour: Mount Fuji. This turned out to be less cool than it sounds, because as we went up the mountain, the weather grew increasingly sucky. I only caught a glimpse or two of the peak on the way up, and at the little souvenir/gift area where we got off the bus, it was windy and rainy enough that I couldn't see much at all. Plus, since I was still fighting the cold, I restricted myself to ducking in to buy a bunch of gifts and then ducking right back to the bus. And again, I missed the souvenir stamp. Sniff.
Stop #2: Lunch at a hotel in Hakone, but not the one where we were due to stay.
And #3, a bit daunting what with the dodgy weather: a cruise on Lake Ashi. I couldn't really hang out on deck the whole time (stupid cold), but I did get some eyefuls of the wind-driven mist writhing over the gray lake. Behind that, the trees in dozens of shades of green ran right down to the waterline, and on some of the surrounding slopes, they made strange patterns if you imagined them just right. Paul made jokes about a monster peeking over the hilltop at any moment, too. Hee. :)
The boat itself was neat in a cheesy sort of way, decorated with a pirate theme and lots of brightly colored paint. We got a great shot of Paul up on an upper deck next to a pirate figure leaning out with a gun.
From the lake we did something that was perhaps a tad reckless given the weather: riding the Hakone Ropeway rail cars up to the top of the mountain. Very cool in a nervous-making kind of way to be ascending the car into seemingly nothing but storm-blown mist.
Last, but not least, there was our next hotel, the Hakone Palace. This time we had an even bigger room, perhaps because a resort hotel in that location had more space for it. But the room as well as the dinner they served us really rather paled in comparison to the star attraction of the place: the hot spring baths.
Gods, that was blissful. They gave us complimentary robes to wear to the baths, which were pretty and which, we decided, made Dara look kind of like the mother in My Neighbor Totoro. In the baths themselves, we had to split off away from Paul since the women's baths were separated from the men's, but that was all right. Dara and I went out to the outside bath where we could watch the wind blowing the trees out in the night. We had a great, bracing contrast between the hot water and the cold wind, and by the time we headed back in to shower off, we were quite relaxed indeed. The foot massaging devices in the dressing area helped out with that a lot, too--especially the one I could feel liquefying my muscles clear up to my knees. Mmm.
All in all, a wonderful way to end Day 1 of the tour.
In which Worldcon is over but the Post-Worldcon tour begins, and Day 1 of the tour is made a little bit more eventful by the Oncoming Storm of Typhoon Nine!
There is something quite a bit alarming about discovering that there's a typhoon on the way just as you're about to set off on a guided tour. The exact stats on Typhoon Nine (as it is apparently called here, since they don't name storms in Japan) I don't know. But as of this writing, I do know that it was apparently supposed to make landfall in the Tokyo area around 3pm today and move north from there. Our tour, it turns out, has headed west; we're missing all but the edges of the storm. Go us! Cool as Japan is, a Japanese typhoon is one experience I can do without.
I keep giggling over the storms being numbered, though. This of course immediately reminded me of the Doctor; quite rightly,
solarbird pointed out that the Doctor is called the Oncoming Storm.Anyway, yesterday morning we all met up in the lobby of the Sunshine Prince. Our tour guide is a lady from Osaka whose full name I have utterly forgotten, but who said that we could all call her by her nickname, Ikko. I've been calling her Ikko-san, since that seems a little more appropriate. Counting Dara,
spazzkat, and me, there are twenty-six people on the tour, many of whom were also at Worldcon. Notably, a couple by the names of Rachelle and Les turned out to be costumers--hardcore Worldcon-caliber costumers, which is very cool. :) And like me, Rachelle was pulled into the fold of Doctor fandom thanks to Christopher Eccleston and kept in thanks to David Tennant. Let's hear it for the Oncoming Storm. :)(Speaking of David Tennant, Rachelle said that there'd been a young guy at NASFiC who'd done a kickass Ten costume and who, as a result, had girls hanging all over him. Apparently, he was heard to say of this in a very Ten-ish voice, "I rather like this!" Hee!
But I digress.)
We took the tour bus out of Tokyo and headed into Hakone, through a lot of increasingly rural and lovely country. We saw rice paddies all over the place, of a startling rich yellow-green hue that looked like it belonged in any of the new BSG episodes set on Kobol. I halfway expected to see Six in her virginal white dress out there somewhere.
On the way we stopped at a rest station that really was a Japanese version of a truck stop, which was kind of neat. And I missed the souvenir stamp here--but Dara didn't! She's way ahead of me on stickers and stamps both.
First stop on the tour: Mount Fuji. This turned out to be less cool than it sounds, because as we went up the mountain, the weather grew increasingly sucky. I only caught a glimpse or two of the peak on the way up, and at the little souvenir/gift area where we got off the bus, it was windy and rainy enough that I couldn't see much at all. Plus, since I was still fighting the cold, I restricted myself to ducking in to buy a bunch of gifts and then ducking right back to the bus. And again, I missed the souvenir stamp. Sniff.
Stop #2: Lunch at a hotel in Hakone, but not the one where we were due to stay.
And #3, a bit daunting what with the dodgy weather: a cruise on Lake Ashi. I couldn't really hang out on deck the whole time (stupid cold), but I did get some eyefuls of the wind-driven mist writhing over the gray lake. Behind that, the trees in dozens of shades of green ran right down to the waterline, and on some of the surrounding slopes, they made strange patterns if you imagined them just right. Paul made jokes about a monster peeking over the hilltop at any moment, too. Hee. :)
The boat itself was neat in a cheesy sort of way, decorated with a pirate theme and lots of brightly colored paint. We got a great shot of Paul up on an upper deck next to a pirate figure leaning out with a gun.
From the lake we did something that was perhaps a tad reckless given the weather: riding the Hakone Ropeway rail cars up to the top of the mountain. Very cool in a nervous-making kind of way to be ascending the car into seemingly nothing but storm-blown mist.
Last, but not least, there was our next hotel, the Hakone Palace. This time we had an even bigger room, perhaps because a resort hotel in that location had more space for it. But the room as well as the dinner they served us really rather paled in comparison to the star attraction of the place: the hot spring baths.
Gods, that was blissful. They gave us complimentary robes to wear to the baths, which were pretty and which, we decided, made Dara look kind of like the mother in My Neighbor Totoro. In the baths themselves, we had to split off away from Paul since the women's baths were separated from the men's, but that was all right. Dara and I went out to the outside bath where we could watch the wind blowing the trees out in the night. We had a great, bracing contrast between the hot water and the cold wind, and by the time we headed back in to shower off, we were quite relaxed indeed. The foot massaging devices in the dressing area helped out with that a lot, too--especially the one I could feel liquefying my muscles clear up to my knees. Mmm.
All in all, a wonderful way to end Day 1 of the tour.