Jack of all trades…

Hi there!
I’m sorry I haven’t updated this blog very often lately, but I have been traveling a lot during the 3 last weeks… meeting old friends, new people, eating (a lot!!!) and finishing the final project work for my MBA. I have 10 at least 10 drafts that are waiting for completion… should hit the [...]

Tokyo is a big city. Tokyo is full of huge malls. Tokyo has plenty of small shops. I love the latter. I like to discover them and get lost amongst crazy and original products.
During my sabbatical, I’m dedicating a lot of time to one of my passions: photography. I’m a gadget geek too, so I [...]

I get this question very often, and that is: which guidebooks do I use during my sabbatical in Japan? (I also get a lot of inquiries about the online resources, but I’ll talk about that in a future post).
I have so far used several books, but the main ones are:

Lonely Planet Japan (ed. October 2007)

Time [...]

As I posted before (read here and here), I keep finding abandoned photos around Japan. Well, I must confess that each time I go to a shop where they have those self-printing machines I look around to see if someone has lost, forgotten or just abandoned a photo. This last time I found a pack [...]

Modern warfare was definitely changed in August 6th 1945, at about 8.15am local time. The Enola Gay B-52 bomber dropped the “little boy” on Hiroshima. The city was destroyed. A new era had begun.
It is difficult to see modern Japanese people, a peaceful society, as one of the instigators and fighting parties during WW2, though [...]

I was about to publish a serious post on Hiroshima’s A-bomb dome and have a draft guide on Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish market since the beginning of the month, but tonight’s dinner has changed my mood for good so I’ll post about it.
I arrived to Hiroshima today, after a short Shinkansen trip from Osaka. It was [...]

I had to come to Japan to be immersed completely in the Muji experience, one of my lovemarks. Muji is already a well known global brand and  the typical anecdote is that it’s name comes from “Mujirushi Ryōhin” (無印良品) meaning “No Brand Quality Goods” (check out the Wikipedia article).
From their website: “The Company’s basic principle [...]

Japanese Kombinis, from the english “convenience store”, are small everything-you-might-ever-ever-need shops spread all around Japan (more than 40.000 according to Japan Guide) and usually open 24hs. There are many of them, 7 eleven, AM/PM, Sunkus, Family Mart, Heart-in, Lawson (my fav) and often you find several in the same block. I read somewhere (can’t find [...]

If you are the kind of person that judges a book (and he who’s reading) by its cover, well, you might have a hard time doing so in Japan. Japanese people read a lot while commuting in subways and trains (that is if they are not playing with a PSP, fiddling with the mobile phone [...]

Tomorrow I’ll be traveling to Kyoto, and Osaka, Nara, Kobe, etc (follow me on dopplr.com) and yet I have gazillions of photos to edit and post on my flickr.com page. But in the meanwhile I’d like to share some pics with you. Tokyo can be a skyscrapers crowded metropolis or a tranquil kids-playing-on-the-street neighbourhood. These [...]