A long wait

I know one should not be frustrated, but how do you help being impatient?

Now our site is placed page rank 4, but the robot of the search engine has not crawled it yet. Our new entries have not yet listed in the search engine. We have not seen a major change at our site analyser, either.

Site management teaches us a lot about Zen.

Do not expect. If yes, it will be counter-productive.

Just be patient and wait. Wait till it happens naturally.

Meanwhile we have started our new project. 

This time we carefully choose the name of the site, referencing a key word analyser.

Let's see what will happen.

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.

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.

Asakusa Samba Carnival

Strangely, Asakusa enjoys its Samba Carnival.

It attracts a lot of spectators with a camera and a huge zoom lens in their hands.

Those are the amateurs of fetish photos.

The Asakusa district authority wisely chose the spectacle in the early 80s to stimulate its local economy.

Unlike other exotic attractions in Japan, some of which have a very short life, Asakusa's Samba celebrates nearly 30 years of its existence.

The difference is the presence of bikini girls.

To buy and sell a bicycle in Asakusa

It doesn't reduce your travel expense even if you buy a bicycle.

If you stay in Tokyo more than one month, it is definitely worth while.

If you stay there for a week, it is not, at least in terms of saving.

Nevertheless, I assure you that you can have totally different experiences in Tokyo with your bike from those of a tourist only using public transportation.

You are freer.

To buy a second hand bicycle is not at all difficult. 

You have various bike shops in Asakusa area. They often sell second hand bikes as well as new ones.

To sell one is another story.

Most of bike shops and second hand shops buy only expensive bikes, which you might not want to buy.

To sell your bicycle, you have to ride it to another district and return to your hotel by train.

Their selling price is between 5,000 yen and 10,000 yen. They don't disclose the buying price.

I will write an article about it now.

By the way, I just got a phone call from my collaborator Chi-chi in Thailand. He will be back in Japan a few day's time. He has taken more than 400 photos there and it is enough to launch another site.

He said, "A prodigious American site manager thinks that you don't have to have many accesses in one site. All you have to do is 1,000 sites with 10 accesses a day".

Save the Asakusa seaweeds

Asakusa is just an old sector of Tokyo, which has nothing to do with marine lives.

Most of the tourists there may think so.

However, the name of the place means "Shallow grass". It can be interpreted as the reeds in the shallow water. Half a millennium ago, Asakusa was on the sea.

When they eat sushi rolls, people never think Asakusa was once well known for the cultivation of nori, the paper-like seaweeds wrapping the roll in their hand.

Now the wetlands at the river mouth of the Sumida have been turned into the reclaimed lands, and the sea weeds cannot grow there any more.

Asakusa nori is on the verge of extinction.

There are a few men in Chiba, the neighbouring prefecture to Tokyo, who are trying to revive the species in Tokyo Bay. Though it is polluted, its marine resources are surprisingly diverse. Those guys are unsung heroes protecting the endangered species.

Taste Thunder Raisers

Yesterday I wrote an article titled "Taste Thunder Raisers".

It is about a traditional sweet sold in Asakusa.

It is nothing fancy, just folkloric.

You don't regret it if you miss eating it in Japan.

That is exactly the reason why I want to promote this sweet.

I just wonder why people try to eat and do something recommended in a guide book.

The article has not been posted yet since my collaborator Mon Chi-Chi is in Thailand.

Being ignorant of Html, I am not supposed to touch the layout of our site. 

Well, I had a little revelation this morning, at the very moment of waking up. "I should put links with the people in Blogger", something said to me.