Sparkly sparks

A cold that has repeatedly decimated the company I work for (an easy circumstance in a nine-person company ...) has kept me mostly in bed since Friday afternoon, but I felt a little better after lunch today and went down to the Museum of Technology on Riverside (with the 170-foot chimney, it's hard to miss) for a demonstration of Tesla coils. Bumped into bugshaw there; I think her trousers are the backdrop to the brush-discharge photo.

It's there Sunday as well; traditional British well-made hobbyist engineering, actinic sparks, electrical roaring, comforting whiffs of ozone, and there's also a museum of working steam-engines, with a vast furnace whose door, to save on coke, is only ever opened for just long enough to discover that you've got the exposure on your camera wrong. The Teslathon is well-concealed, but worth asking people to find.

Logistics for Worldcon 2007

I've got a membership for the Yokohama Worldcon, and am starting to wonder what else I need.

The flights seem to be either £600 on the hopefully-not-bankrupt-by-then Alitalia changing in Milan, or £500 on Aeroflot changing in Moscow (bringing with that all the delights of Russian transit visas); I suppose that's unavoidable since Japan is relatively distant and aviation fuel relatively costly. I've tried being flexible about mid-week departures and returns but it doesn't seem to reduce the cost; I presume NRT is the right airport.

There's obviously no point going to Japan for a five-day con; I'd plan to take a fortnight or so, so would be interested to know if people going are tending to take their extra time pre-con or post-con ... I'm sure there are likely to be fannish trips to places like the Tokyo Science Museum. I'm completely decision-paralysed by the long list of hotels on the con website, and so would like to appeal to people I know who are going to tell me which hotel they're in and I'll aim to use that one.

I get the impression Yokohama may not be the right place to stay for touristing in the Tokyo region: would it make more sense to book the central nights of the con in the con hotel (anyone prepared to share a room? five nights at the £120/night single-room rate is a lot more than I'm comfortable with, I can provide references that I'm not an axe-murderer) and get a travel-agent in England to book me a cheap hotel somewhere in the metro area for the rest of the fortnight?