Page Rank 4

Finally we made it, but we don't know what it really means.
Yesterday the world best search engine granted our Asakusa Underground a rank 4.
Since we started our site last March, we hadn't had our page rank.
We thought that one could improve his rank step by step.
First one gets rank 1 and moves up to 2, then 3.
Eventually he is accepted the class of big league players, 4+.
That was what we thought, but in reality it is not like that.
One day you wake up, and, voila!, you are in the major league of Internet.
It feels fantastic.
We are very grateful to the people who supported us, especially the site owners who placed the link to our site.
They didn't laugh at us though our site was an n/a. They treated us as their equal.
We must not forget that.
Soon, we hope, we will be receiving e-mails asking for reciprocal links.
We must not be haughty.
We should reach out and help them as the others helped us.
Thank you all.

Drink Bar

What do you think when you hear the word "drink"?
Then, what do you think when you hear the word "bar"?
You may think of beer, whisky, or your favorite cocktail.
In any case, it is related to alcoholic beverages.
If you pronouce the two words in a Japanese family restaurant, they do not mean alcohol at all.
It means the right to drink as much non-alocoholic drinks as you like.
Once you order a "drink bar", you can taste any soft drinks from the machines situated at a designated area. If you wish, you can try all kinds of them, and, if you please, you can drink 10 cups of hot chocolate.
Having seen the success of free coffee refill, some Japanese restaurant owners developped more genereous version of it.
That is "drink bar".

Net Cafe Refugees

Have you ever heard the expression ?
A Japanese TV station showed a report on the people who live in a cyber cafe in Japn last year, and immediately the expression became known to the Japanese.
Net cafe refugees are the young workers who are not able to pay their rent any longer and forced to live in a cyber cafe.
It is relatively cheap to sleep over at a cyber cafe in Japan, and some of the cafes even have shower facilities. (See Sleep in a Net cafe)

The strange thing is that we hardly encounter a man who really live in a cyber cafe in Japan.
Some Japanese believe that the story is an absolute invention by the Japanese media.
It is sensational enough to sell their stories.
The truth still remains to be seen.

Family restaurant Juraku

We have posted two new pages at Asakusa Underground:
and .
The former is about a brief analysis on how the Japanese imported and assimilated the consept of a roadside diner.
The later is about cheap sweets in Japan.

Besides, to improve SEO, I wrote an article on our site itself.
By using the words like travel, guide, tokyo, and Japan, we hope that they will place us at a much better position in the search engine.
Lte's see what will happen.

10 yen Manju cake

We have posted a new entry.
It is about cake that you can buy for 9 cents of US dollars.
It is called 10 yen Manju in Japanese.
The price of the cheapest hamburger at McDonald's is 100 yen (about 90 cents) in Japan.
You can buy 10 pieces of the cake for it.
Asakusa enjoys plenty of pastry shops where you can buy them.
Japanese economy has been sluggish for more than a decade, and people are rediscovering the value of 10 yen Manju cake.

hitchhiking from Paris to Italian border

I have just hitchhiked from Paris to Menton, a French town bordering Italy.

The most difficult part is getting out of a big town.

I went to Orly airport by train and started hitchhiking there.

And getting out of Marseille was hard, too.

Today we posted 10 most popular Asakusa gifts.