Tokyo

This amazing Asian mega metropolis is brimming with copious kinds of contrasts! You’ll be flabbergasted from the moment you land in this illustrious land until you reluctantly leave. Touch down in 10 seconds. Let’s take a tour of tantalizing Tokyo on this week’s episode of FYI!

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• 8:59 (Cont.) Tokyo

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[Music] this amazing asian mega metropolis is brimming with copious kinds of contrasts you'll be flabbergasted from the moment you land in this illustrious land until you reluctantly leave touchdown in 10 seconds let's take a tour of tantalizing tokyo on this week's episode of f y i welcome to for your info english you got it[Music] hello hello hello amigos and welcome to another exciting edition of f y i i can't believe it there are over a hundred and twenty episodes available that's if you're a patron if you aren't a patron you probably have around 80 or so but if you're a patron you will have access to 120 episodes plus 750 posts well more than 750 posts by the time you hear this so what am i saying what are you waiting for join our curious community and you'll have instant access to so much content plus you'll be a part of our curious community and speaking of i'd like to send a shout out to all my patrons especially my super duper students javier roberto david jose maria mila alex and edgar and don't forget about my interstellar students isabel paco diego and carmen keep up the great work and if you guys want to join our curious community you can get a bonus episode every week you can get bonus documents with all the vocabulary expressions and structures in each episode plus if you're in our higher levels you can review this episode with us in a class we have a weekly review class plus we have a monthly master class events giveaways giveaways es donde regalamos cosas so again i'll repeat my question what are you waiting for go on over to patreon.com slash alberto alonso and for as little as three euros a month you can have instant access to tons of content and more importantly belong to a community of english explorers all right well let's begin with the intro today we're going to one of the coolest cities in one of the coolest countries in the world and i can tell you that from experience and in the bonus episode i'm going to tell you all about my experiences in tokyo and in other places in japan and i'm going to give you some insider tips and insiders visto desde tips that really you don't know until you go there in person yeah you can read guidebooks and all of that stuff but remember there's nothing like hands-on experience and hands-on experience is experiencia practica so i started off by saying this amazing asian mega metropolis that's a tongue twister well let's start out with asian because i hear a lot of people say asian or asiatic but it's asian this asian mega metropolis is brimming with copious kinds of contrasts and that sentence is brimming with seas and to brimus i think rebosar estar yenode and if you think about it the brim is el borde so the brim of the glass we also use this word when we're talking about a hat la alla olabisera but as a verb if something is brimming with something it is full and copious i think you understand from spanish a lot of contrasts then i said you'll be flabbergasted now this is one of my favorite words in english flabbergasted i also like discombobulated discombobulated means descolocado well flabbergasted is atonito es and if there's one thing tokyo will do is it will leave you flabbergasted from the moment you land at and then i use the adjective illustrious which i think you understood illustrate this illustrious land do you see what i did there i used land como te ritar and land como tierra and then i said until you reluctantly leave and if you are reluctant is reactio i think in spanish you don't really want to go you're doing it against your will contract and then i said in my pilot's voice touchdown in 10 seconds and touchdown is just another way to say to land the opposite to take off despigad i said touchdown in ten seconds and then we heard the screeching of rubber hitting the runway and then i said let's take a tour of tantalizing tokyo and i guess that's one thing we should point out right there the spelling is different tokyo we spell with a y and the word tantalizing is seductor it attracts you and today we're going to focus primarily on tokyo i thought about this long and hard i said should i do japan or should i just do tokyo so i started working on tokyo and i realized there's so much content just in tokyo that we could focus this episode on tokyo which is the capital of japan but it wasn't always the capital of japan the capital at one point was the place that you guys know i'm sure you've all heard of it because of the climate conference the climate summit and that's kyoto which is an absolutely stunning beautiful city the air is so fresh and you walk around the bamboo forests but see there i go i'm going off track again let's focus on tokyo so it wasn't always the capital in fact it wasn't always called tokyo either it was called ido until 1868 but the site that tokyo is on has been inhabited since ancient times and i want you to say that word with me ancient we don't say ancient we say ancient times it was a small fishing village as i said it was called ido and it existed there for centuries and the development of the city didn't occur until what was called the tokugawa period now just to give you an idea this was from 1603 to 1867 and at that point it started to gain importance but the imperial family was still in kyoto the ancient imperial capital well not until 1868 when the meiji restoration the meiji i believe i pronounced it right meiji restoration which ended the shogunate and we're going to look at a lot of these words that we use in english that some of them i didn't even know the word honcho is jefe the head honcho well i didn't know but that comes from japanese but we'll look at that in the bonus part so in 1868 the city was renamed tokyo which means eastern capital and it has been the largest city in terms of population in terms of economy since its inception just to give you an idea as of january 2020 tokyo has a population of 13 million let's just round it up 14 million that's right 14 million now this is tokyo center or tokyo proper as we say the metro area take a guess take a guess how many people do you think live in the metro area or the greater metro area of tokyo if i said the city center is around 14 million what do you think well 37 and a half million people and one thing that blew my mind when i was there was that no matter how many people there are people don't bump into each other they pay attention to their surroundings they're respectful they're polite so you would think you know oh my god the main station you know hundreds of thousands of people passing through there every day but for some reason people don't seem to bump into each other people seem to respect each other's space it really blew my mind and i'll talk about some other things that blew my mind in the bonus episode let's take a look at the climate in tokyo as well since the city is built on low alluvial plains and alluvial i don't know how you say that in spanish but i'm gonna look it up alluvial avanico alluvial ah see sometimes it's exactly the same and adjacent hills and the word adjacent i don't maybe this one's the same too adjacent is adjacent see guys english and spanish are not as different as we think well the climate is the climate is mild in the winter and hot and humid in the summer another way to say humid is muggy and when we talk about uh the climate being mild that's templato i think in spanish so mild in winter hot and humid in the summer and in early summer and early autumn or fall those are the rainy seasons so they can expect typhoons which usually happen during september and october so uh pretty interesting a wide range of different climates depending on the season la stacion which is really cool because that makes their parks absolutely beautiful and tokyo london as you guys remember was quite surprising the amount of green areas in london but tokyo for being such a big city it doesn't have huge parks but it has a lot of them and they're spread out all over the city so i can recommend a few some of the ones that i really enjoyed and let me explain something guys it's not like retiro or central park there are temples there are people playing instruments i've never heard before so it's not your typical park you know that you're in another country on another planet as i said but these are beautiful and the landscaping the gardens we know how seriously japanese people take their gardening they really believe in having an aesthetically beautiful yard and that's evident in their parks you can go to bueno park we went there and we were making fun of the name because it's okay really bad joke bueno park that's cool because you've got the tokyo national museum right there you've also got the science museum the zoological gardens and so much more and of course you can just take a stroll around the park and have some sake oh that stuff i can't drink sake that stuff goes right to my head but that's one of the most popular parks and i think it's easy to remember for my spanish speaking students then you've got yo yogi shinjuku these are just a few of the parks but remember as i tell you with every city get lost and you have so many options if we take a look at the transport options in tokyo you can get anywhere in the world from tokyo anywhere on this planet from tokyo they have two airports they have narita and haneda airport i think we flew into narita if i'm not mistaken we had a stopover in dubai i believe i'm mixing up my trips no no we stopped in frankfurt on the way over to tokyo but wow it's a long flight even with a quick stop to stretch your legs it can be pretty endless but it's really well connected both airports are really well connected to their public transport and their public transport is second to none as i said the subway stations are crowded you're thinking oh my god but there's order in that chaos you know i imagine all those people in plaza mayor and it would be bedlam it would be mayhem and obviously tokyo is the chief transportation hub for japan and a hub is an airport or i think of in madrid some of the hubs are atocha that's a southern hub you have a northern hub which is cha martin moncloa is another hub these are places where a lot of different transportation systems connect and it is busy this place is bustling and there are shops there are restaurants i mean these are some big stations just think if they have to fit all those people they see here's shinjuku station let me give you an idea it has 36 platforms and it serves around 1.2 billion passengers annually you can say annually or yearly now remember billion is that is pretty nuts and to give you an idea on the global scale 51 of the busiest train stations in the world there's a list 51 well 45 of them are located in japan but don't let that deter you don't let that throw you off this concert i'm telling you i swear it's organized despite the chaos of all these people running around it is extremely organized maybe it's just the respect thing people wouldn't dream of bumping into somebody because they're not paying attention and another thing is you rub shoulders or elbows with somebody on the subway but i don't even think that happened either and people are very trusting i remember seeing people on the subway with their backpacks wide open they didn't zip them up and you would never dream of doing that in new york one time when we were at shibuya we were at a happy hour at shibuya that's that famous crosswalk and i remember we were having some drinks the bar was packed again organized but packed and one girl you could tell she had a few too many established and what did she do she put she left her camera well her phone i should say her camera phone on the table she left her backpack or her purse i don't remember wide open and she went to the bathroom now you would never dream of doing that in times square which i think would be the new york equivalent but let me explain something if you think times square is crazy shibuya is times square on crack and we talked about the subways the metros but they're all connected to the bullet trains the shinkansen bullet trains let's put it this way their slowest train flies and they're always on time i mean precisely on time and they're clean i'll tell you a time i had to go to the bathroom i was really worried we were catching a train because we got a rail pass and i'm going to give you those tips in the bonus part what to do what not to do because you can save yourself a lot of money with this rail pass but there are a few things you should know but i remember one time well as the expression is in english when you gotta go you gotta go and i had to go to the bathroom and i got nervous and i said oh guys okay well this you know the train's not coming for another seven to ten minutes i don't remember what it was i said i'm gonna go look for a bathroom and i'm thinking i have to go down to the main train station because i'm on the platform and then i saw wait a second there's a bathroom on the platform i don't have to go down to some main restroom and so i go into the bathroom thinking oh man this isn't just a bathroom and a train station this is a bathroom on a train platform oh i was a little bit nervous about what i would find and i found one of the cleanest bathrooms i've ever had the pleasure of using in my life and i don't know about you guys but that's something i appreciate i appreciate cleanliness especially when it comes to food or bathrooms you know hygiene and the japanese again in this area they are second to none and now i'm going to give you guys some musts things that you have to do impress first things first just go to any arcade quarter recreativos it's going to blow your mind it looks nothing like arcades in the west the games the sounds the signs it's incredible we went to an arcade well we went to many arcades but i remember the first arcade i saw in japan was in a shopping mall in kyoto and i'm thinking ah this is whatever and i went in there my wife i mean we our jaws were dragging on the floor because of the sounds everything was like very interactive remember they love their technology over there as well and all that adds to a very cool feel the city has a good feel no um i loved also the the vending machines the vending machines are awesome because you don't know what you're getting that's right i remember every time we would be thirsty we would stop by a vending machine and say which one do you want to try today and i know they say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover but we couldn't read japanese so we would just try different things and sometimes we were spot on we were like wow that's a really tasty drink and other times we took a sip and we threw it out lotiramos alabasura but i think that's part of the adventure trying new things and those vending machines they don't just sell soft drinks they sell all kinds of things in the vending machine so you can't go to tokyo and not get some stuff out of vending machines and i'll tell you there's one every meter well at least it feels that way then of course you have to stop by the imperial palace it's absolutely beautiful because it's this palace that is encircled by stone-walled moats and a moat is like this water that's around a castle it's absolutely beautiful it's the home of the emperor of japan and it's in the heart of the city i would say it's some of the best real estate in japan and then east of the imperial palace just a hop skip and a jump away a ladito is the very colorful marunochi district and this is also a financial hub some really swanky restaurants we went there uh we just had a drink we decided to go back to our neighborhood to have dinner and remember that tokyo is huge it's well connected you don't have to stay in the center just make sure you're staying close to a subway stop now everything i've told you so far is either free or cheap as chips you know getting something out of a vending machine i don't remember how many yen it was but it's just like here you know you're thirsty you get something to drink and there hoo hoo you are in for a treat sometimes a positive one and sometimes a negative one but one of the greatest treats and a free treat is the view from the tokyo metropolitan government building or as the locals call it this is a free view you can go up to the top of this government building and get one of the most beautiful views of tokyo it's absolutely beautiful and it's free now everybody knows the tokyo tower it was inspired by the eiffel tower and by the way there's an episode on the eiffel tower if you haven't listened to it but that's going to cost you a pretty penny especially if you go to the top observation deck the bottom one is a little bit cheaper there are two observation decks in the tokyo tower and why is it red and white why didn't i mean if they were going to make it like the eiffel tower why did they make it red and white and not stick with the original color well that was because of japanese regulations they said it had to be seen because obviously there's a lot of air traffic so they mandated that that tower had to be red and white shibuya i already talked about shibuya's a shopping area restaurants it's like the times square area and that crossing a little tip if you go up to the starbucks over there you can get a really nice shot now just remember i'm not the only one who had that idea so you're gonna have to wait a while if you want to get up to the window but i shared on patreon i shared a video of my wife and i at the shibuya crossing and it is said that around 1 000 people are crossing it at any given moment well not at any given moment hopefully when it turns green and we're gonna wrap up the first part of today's episode just talking about how tokyo was bombed what i know what you're thinking you're thinking hiroshima nagasaki that's where the atomic bomb was dropped but a little known story at least i didn't know it and it's not a little story it's a major event 300 b-29 bombers dropped around 500 000 cylinders of petroleum jelly and napalm on the city this resulted in a 40 square kilometer firestorm this was during the second world war the bombing killed more people than the combined numbers of the nagasaki and the hiroshima bombing i had no idea of this historic fact because the first thing you think about when you think about loss of life and war and japan and it's history you think of hiroshima and nagasaki and i'm going to tell you about hiroshima in the bonus part it was a very very emotional experience but there's one thing we can learn from all of these cities tokyo hiroshima nagasaki you've got to rise from the ashes like the phoenix como el fenix guys i hope you enjoyed the first part of today's fyi[Music][Applause] you