Hi folks!
I was thinking the other day (it happens, trust me), and i wondered "What makes japan being so different". Of course i thought about the food, the language and all the obvious things you can think about with such a stupid question. But there are other stuff that are, in my humble opinion , quite typical !! That's what i want to try to show you through this post.

First funny thing, there is an indicator on almost every pedestrian "stop" to indicate you how long you'll have to wait for the red guy to get green ! Working in the computer science field, I'm tempted to say this is a "waiting status bar", and that it's a really good idea in a matter of ergonomy improvment.... But I'm certainly not geek enough to be the kind of guy who would say that in his blog ...

First thing first, the cars ! God they're ugly in here !!! I mean, if you do like cubes, then here's your paradise... Otherwise, you better have money to buy a real japanese car (and by that i mean a sport's looking car). But the common people are litteraly driving in boxes. Check the pictures out ! And like the look of their car wasn't ugly enough, they often tune it. So you end up looking at shinning cubes rolling on sparkling silver rims. And because they do love their cars, you'll probably never see a dirty one on the road. It looks like they wash their cars every 2 days !

And they're japanese, so they like electronic stuff ! Like they have a device for warning you when you can cross a road, they have GPS and TV receiptors in their cars. Some cars even have weird antennas popping off the roof to be able to receive TV while moving... But it's really common here, i even saw people watching TV on their cellphone with a tiny antenna. And i'm guessing, if they can receive TV with such small antennas, then we must really be under a massive rate of electromagnetic waves ...

Alright, i shouldn't make fun of them, i'm mean, i know ! But i just don't get why they use these car's while they have those other ones... . Not that i'm a huge fan of cars (actually i'm lying right now), but they have very styled cars that have nothing to do with cubes !

And while i'm talking about transport, i should also talk about the metro/train here ! There is an incredible number of railroad companies (something like 25) sharing the network around tokyo !! So, you can go pretty much everywhere in the area by train... if you can read kanji . First, locate on the map the station you want to reach, then make sure you memorized the kanji and the line color (you then realize how useful colors are !!) and buy a ticket for the price of the distance you're going to travel : It's a nightmare the first time, especially when you look at the map i had in the beginning !

Once you've understood how it works, it's really a nice way to travel around here. It's always clean, no bad smell, air conditionning, heat... nothing like Paris. A nice voice tells you where you're going or what the next station is, in both english and Japanese. And on some lines there are TVs (again) !! One major difference with Paris would be the high concentration of advertising inside the wagons and, i got to admit, the charm of french metro stations stays unbeaten yet !

Here it is, a small tour of what's different here. I'll report some more stuff when i can catch them, it's always interesting to see how different things can be from countries to countries. Well, have a good one ! I'm going to ask people for money (i'm kind of really poor cause waiting for my international fund transfer to go through...). That reminds me of how different banks are here ! It took me 20 minutes to open a bank account (in english of course, it would have taken 10 times the time in japanese ). Bank staff was nice, helpful, understanding and got my debit card ready in 5 minutes !!! I even had the opportunity to chose its color, so, what could i ask more ?