Photos from Kagoshima really are up now. No, really.

When I left you, I was… about to board a plane. Had a slight spot of bother with the electric razor in my baggage (anyone quoting Fight Club will be shot) but I sorted it out and bordered the 767 at 13:50ish. The flight took about an hour. Since I don’t think I’ve taken off in the daytime before, it was quite scarily to actually be able to see the ground below you shrink away.

So I arrived at Tokyo Haneda (the main airport for domestic flights, fact fans) like, you know, it was totally something I did all the time. Took the monorail into Tokyo through a vaguely Blade Runner-esque industrial landscape, while listening to Vangelis, natch.

Anyway, the hostel (run by Sakura, who ran the hotel I stayed in when I got here and my guest house) was in Asakusa, about ten minutes from my old home and near the mighty Sensoji temple, which amazingly I’d never actually visited before.

Very impressive, ’specially floodlit at night. Got to the hostel and dumped my stuff and had a shower and phoned Sarah, someone I met aaages ago clubbing in Shibuya. (See, that makes me sound like I do it all the time.) We met up in Shibuya and wandered round for a bit, went to an izakaya (where I had tuna chin - not actually bad, and avocado with mayonnaise - very bad), then went to the Starbucks underneath the big dinosaur screen in Lost in Translation. Oh, and I met L’Arc~en~Ciel.