Over the holidays:
We spent a good chunk of our month in Japan. Mainly in Tokyo, because both of us are very urban creatures who enjoy our high tech comforts and also we’re travelling with a baby. We’re (an investment banker and a project manager) really big on strategy: OK, so we had about 3 weeks plus- we will stay in a different area of Tokyo eachweek and really concentrate on getting to know that place inside out, as if we were a resident there. We’d already done the general tourist spots in Tokyo before, so now we’ll deepen our experience of Tokyo.
Our first and most expensive week was in Roppongi because we stayed at The Grand Hyatt in snooty arty farty Roppongi Hills.
The rooms in Grand Hyatt were perfect. Could spend hours in shower and bath watching TV. Those cooking shows for Japanese housewives really were cute. And the variety/gameshows! Pissed myself laughing.... 
And I loved the retractable bedside table- reminds me of another deisgner bed that’s on the market. One that comes with a sub-woofer under the bed. Woohoo. Gangsta. I could spend all day lounging around in here drinking roasted green tea and never go out.
Why did we stay in this particular Hyatt? Why not stay in Park Hyatt in Nishi-Shinjuku, where Lost In Translation was filmed? Welllll, it was booked up. Damn damn damn that we didn’t plan months ahead for this trip….
And the armchair in the room was just so comfortable check out the label- they’re designed by B&B Italia, mmm-kay? Serious furniture bling.
BUT Grand Hyatt really delivered on value. I loved everything about the hotel-especially the bar. We came here without a nanny, but we caved in and called the hotel babysitter service. Hubby and I headed to the hotel bar Maduro and listened to some jazz band with a sexy brazilian singer who sang in Portuguese and French.
Just like a scene out of Lost in Translation: Water feature at entrance. Flames dance on torches above the bar. Dramatic setting. Kirin beer (for him. Not me- still BFing baby). Suave bar staff. Ahh- too relaxed to take any photos. I sank into my Lost In Translation fantasy.
Urban oasis at Tokyo Midtown, Roppongi.
You know what? I felt really at home in Roppongi. I could live there, I swear. We found a great supermarket, Precce at Tokyo Midtown that we visited almost every day during our week here. We’d walk there mid morning, grab a bento from Precce and eat it at Hinokicho Park, next door to Suntory art museum. Other young mums with kids and prams, OLs are also there having lunch. The only one out of place over there is my husband…. the salarymen from Konami and Yahoo.jp preferred to lunch at the piazza/oasis area. Nevermind, we’re on holidays. At the "oasis", a glass roof over the atrium doubles as a water feature/ cooling system and baseball is shown on giant flat screens and a bose surround sound system.
Water feature at the urban oasis at Tokyo Midtown. It's also the glass skylight for the shopping atrium below. The sunlit atrium is cooled down and the glass house effect is thus eliminated.
Verticality
A pic taken from where we were eating. Stairs lead up to Suntory art musuem.
In the Roppongi Hills area- we easily could find chemists/pharmacists or drugstores as they’re called here at all hours. We went out one evening to buy baby milk formula because Tokyo isn’t a place that has many BFing facilities for mums with babies, so this really came in handy.
I’m speechless. Our baby girl LOVES this sweet smelling formula milk- she sleeps through the night when I gave it to her! But she’s back on the boob 100% now that we’re home in Sydney.
Week 2: we stayed in yet another icon of Tokyo- Keio Plaza in Nishi-Shinjuku.
Quite retro- kinda 70’s. And the rooms all had a smoky cigarette smell- well, besides rice, the ciggy is a staple of the Japanese diet. Really. Let's be honest here.
This was the most hectic week of our visit. I don’t know- maybe because Keio Plaza is more of a business traveller’s hotel than a luxury hotel. There IS a sterile, alienating atmosphere within this 1440 room city within a city. I wouldn't have liked to stay in and lounge around AT ALL, yet I wasn't eager to go outside the hotel each day to face the pulsating chaos that IS Shinjuku. There! My Lost In Translation experience is complete!
Sure beats a McDonalds breakfast.
During a Japanese buffet breakfast at Kagari, I could overhear a bunch of Malaysian (I don’t think Singaporeans talk like this, in my experience) engineers/project managers/developers in their ill-fitting polyester suits talking about a project and basically criticizing their Japanese consultant counterparts. As with many Malaysian mega projects since time inmemorial, there are always numerous foreign consultants- and you have to travel to meet them for “workshops” in Japan. Anyway, these Malaysians (chinese, from what I can hear) waxed lyrical about the utopian-ness of these projects and how far-sighted the planning was. (That’s why I don’t think they’re on about Singapore, y’all) We look like any other young family on holidays to anybody- but my husband and I have been there and seen it, we just rolled our eyes.
We also caved in again and called for a babysitter twice this week: first time was so that we could head to the hotel bar, Polestar at the 45th floor of Keio Plaza. Breathtaking view and friendly bar staff. Bottles are arranged at the transoms so that the view is not obscured. Seems to complement the verticality of the skyline in Nishi Shinjuku.
At Polestar, the bar is sunken- bartenders do all their mixing and blending a full metre below us- we can actually see the tops of their heads! They have to climb up a full metre to reach the platform where they serve drinks to us. Assuming this is so that patrons can enjoy uninterrupted views
Pretty darn dark and quite empty at Polestar on a weeknight. No drunk salarymen, but older couples enjoying drinks and cigars together.
The second time that the babysitter came around was for us to head over to Kabukicho and Ni-choume. Again, I didn’t take any pics. Looked to us like there were some places there that served great food at very reasonable prices. Walking in heels was killing my feet.
Where do you get nappies in Japan?
That question ever even entered my mind until now. We spent 2 days desperately asking each kombini (Lawson stores- why oh why do you not stock them?) for omutsu as our supply of Huggies dwindled down to 1. As anyone with a 4 month old baby knows, that could mean your situation could go down the shitter any second now.
We found a pharmacy in Ni-choume that had nappies, woohoo! So I carried a plastic bag of nappies through the gay district on our way home. It was a rainy Tuesday night, the place was rather tame. Male hosts were on the streets handing out brochures under an umbrella, approaching single women. I resigned myself to not seeing any BL(Boys Love) action. We stopped for a mos burger and headed back to the hotel. Gah. Whatever happened to DATES?
Week 3: Ginza. Not many hotel pics here, though. I was pretty much over the whole document-your-hotel-room thing by now.There are pockets of truly innovative architecture in Ginza.
We ended up at Muji at Matsuzakaya’s basement (at the annex to Higashi-Ginza station) three times that week because my husband felt like getting more khaki pants and shorts, in addition to a few great shirts. Not much shopping by the time the 3rd week came- so we revisited some tourist spots in Ginza like Hamarikyu-Teien during the week in Asakusa, Tsukiji and Akihabara.
The 300 year old tree- looks the same as it did a few years ago. It looks like a grand old lady, doesn't it?
The food in Duplex, Ginza is highly recommended! I think Japanese do steaks better than Americans do steaks. It's just more delicately handled here and it's not just about a huge hunk of meat, you know what I mean? Go to B1 to find out!
On the whole, we didn't try to fit as much into our time as possible. I think we had a longer time there, so there were the odd one or two days where we did nothing at all except go out to lunch at the park or go on a river bus just to sight see. It was a more relaxed holiday.
A bit of constructivist art at the banks of the Sumida River, Asakusa. Kandinsky on Sumida-gawa!
During the three weeks, I swung from thinking that Tokyo would be an awful place to bring up kids- but then I swung the other way when I saw that each female public toilet cubicle had a high-chair fitted on the wall for mums with babies- so that the mum can actually go to the toilet! And there were baby change rooms in Muji. And the mums who unlocked their Aprica prams as they came off the bus in Ginza with one hand while holding the baby with the other hand. I would never be able to do that with our Bugaboo. BUT when I saw the men walking back home/ to the train station in their suits at 11pm, I began to feel for the kids who see their Dads one or two days a week and for the mums who literally raise their kids as a single mum usually without the help of a maid while their husbands are at work. I feel badly for the men too, as the single bread-winner of the family, their loyalty to the company has to come before all else.....
Who would I be if I lived here? Would I be one of those housewives in a modern townhouse Shirogane/ Azabu? Would my husband be a workaholic executive or a lowly manager? (Not that he isn't a workaholic right now in Sydney) Would my kids attend international english schools? Interesting to escape into this world for nearly a month. That's what a holiday is for. To escape.
"Now if you followed speech about a new agenda to help bumis. So this is the way to create towering malays - just give them more handouts.
All talk was about helping, read enriching the malays. No one had the balls to talk about the Malaysian agenda. If this is what our future leaders spew, then I shed tears for my beloved country.
Much of so-called leakages of bumis allocation has not gone to other bumis but merely lost. Look at the ringgit depreciation, the loss of Proton, the debt of Perwaja, the bank write offs etc, and you get an idea where they have gone. The non-bumis benefit is marginal compared to the larger loses.
Just look at how many of the Menteri Besar and Chief Ministers reap profit from their position for personal gain, compared to few did not do it. They must be using the same pretext of some noble cause like NEP. But at the end the one benefiting is their closet cronies.
What left to Malaysians is the exorbitant car prices, high toll rate, no viable alternative public transport in cities, ever increasing water tariff etc. Who is suffering at the end? Isn't it the "rakyat" at large and bumis forming the largest portion?
Have they not considered why previous implementations failed? In fact one needs not look far to find the answers - CORRUPPTION and ABUSE of POWER leading to cronyism and nepotism.
A simple solution is to implement an independent judiciary, answerable to parliament and freedom of the press as a starter.
Instead, Umno is asking for more privileges. Who are the main beneficiaries? So long as Malaysia's resources are plentiful, the non-bumis as scapegoats, the use of religious fear factor works on the rakyat, Umno will continue to call the shot.
Unfortunately there is not enough resources to satisfy the greed of Umno, the rakyat will remain poorer while the rich get richer.
For non-bumis, their ultimate aim is going abroad. Those left behind, well, the left over will join the poor including the bumis in Malaysia. Thus denying Malaysia the skill and wealth of the emigrating Malaysians.
Don't forget the call for more help, enriching the malays are actually for Umno, selected few and cronies! Not all the malays!
Do read them carefully and not counting it as every malay or Malaysian! Because of this nature of speech don't count it as "for all malays" and a case for you to bombast the innocent malays!
With all the multibillions and hundreds of millions of ringgit contracts going to the Umno bumis and crony companies, with all the Approved Permits (APs) going to the bumis (almost), with all the banking licences going to the bumis (almost), with all the big Government-Linked Companies (GLCs) coming under the control of the bumis, with all the government jobs (almost) going to the bumis, with all the petrol stations, transport licenses going to the bumis, etc, etc.
Perhaps one reason that Umno Youth perceived that the bumis are not faring too well in the economic field is that the wealth that is now in their hands is not well shared out, and is concentrated in the hands of a small number of elite and crony bumis.
If you look at the number of government contracts going out to bumis is really discriminating against the non-malays.
Until now, I have not heard of one malay who has the courage to admit, that about 90% of the government projects and assistance that went to help the malays has gone to waste - huge squandering and wastage.
It is the reason why they are not being respected by other races.
That is their huge weakness. No matter how much monetary assistance you give to the malays, somehow or rather it doesn't improve their character and attitude towards work. It doesn't improve their knowledge on any business they are in.
Their business ethic is the lowest among Malaysians. Their wealth will never improve. Later down the road, they will be spending most of their money if not all on material gain rather than on building values, skills and knowledge.
That is why, 90% of the student scholarships, or 90% of the government projects goes to them, has gone to waste. They didn't take the opportunity to enhance their knowledge, skills but merely for material gain.
They have no confidence in themselves after so many years of independence. No confidence and faith in themselves to do their best and compete in the world. None at all.
Because most of the time, they spend their money and time on politics, and material gain. I would say malays place more importance on the form rather than on the substance.
Look at the amount of protocol they have to follow in their daily life. Most of it is not practical at all.
In short, we are stuck in medieval concept of balance of conflicting interest rather than those about moving forward to be become one.
So long as we are stuck in such medieval thinking, so long as we will be paralyzed by our fears and insecurities, and honestly second-rate as a nation."