general

We arrived in Bangkok on Tuesday afternoon and so far have just been mostly relaxing and enjoying the food. I have a Thai friend in Bangkok that I use to work with so we've gone out with him a couple times and had amazing food (I just let him choose the food :) ). It's been quite humid, but fairly moderate temperatures in the mid-20's so quite bearable. Sam's mom arrives today, so we should finally start doing some sightseeing today or tomorrow. We're staying near Khoasan Road in Bangkok until Tuesday and then heading out to the islands.

The other day I pulled myself out of bed at 5am to go see the action at Tokyo's infamous Tsukiji fish market. This is a massive hub in the city, the arrival/distribution point for almost all of Tokyo's fish. With 32+ million people who love their fish, it's hard to imagine just how much seafood must flow through there on a daily basis.

To give an idea of the size of this market... from wikipedia:

Tsukiji alone handles over 2000 metric tons of seafood per day. The number of registered employees varies from 60,000 to 65,000...

Due to a lack of planning, Sam and I stayed in Tokyo this weekend. We'd originally planned to head out to Mt. Fuji, but unfortunately was prohibitively expensive with last minute planning (all we could find was roughly $300CAD / night). So we had to move out of our previous luxurious 215 sqft apartment into a hostel for last night and tonight. Tomorrow we're staying at a hotel near the airport since our flight out is quite early in the morning.

Anyway, our current place is a whopping 55 square feet! (about 5 square meters). Let me tell you, it's been fun :).

I'm pretty sure we could squeeze another person (with luggage) in here.

Due to the unfortunate incident with my last VoIP company I've had to switch providers. Because the number I had been assigned on that network was a Richmond number very few VoIP providers were able to transfer it to their service, for this reason I've needed to just drop my 604 number and get a whole new phone number.