Everywhere and Everywhere else

Gallery: japanese hotel room

klynne — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:57:00 GMT

Rubber stamps!

klynne — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:35:00 GMT

If you will be traveling to Japan with children (or are just a big kid yourself) I would suggest bringing a plain notebook or buy one when you get here. I found out near the end of trip that in nearly every castle or other places to visit, there is a stand with rubber stamps and ink at your disposal.

They are great images that could be used to decorate journal diaries or scrapbooks when you get home.

Gallery: sushi

klynne — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:58:00 GMT

Faux pas to avoid when eating sushi

klynne — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:40:00 GMT

If you would like to have an entertaining meal in Japan, I would suggest stopping in at a sushi family restaurant. It is a friendly place where all the staff yells out hello and goodbye every time a patron either enters or leaves the establishment. There are business men sitting at the counter and kids peeking over the back of their family’s booths. Once you are escorted to your table, it is easy to choose what you would like to eat. A conveyor belt loaded with sushi snakes through the restaurant and passes by every table. All you have to do wait for something that looks good (or recognisable) and pick it off the conveyor belt. Sometimes there is a “before” picture that proceeds the “after” concoction to give you a hint of what you could choose to eat.

Since we were sitting in a booth, we really could not anticipate what would be coming up next so we had to be vigilant for whatever would appear. We had about a ten second window between when a plate of sushi would appear, our decision if we wanted it or not, and grabbing it off the belt. It made me feel like I was in a Japanese version of an “I love Lucy” episode.

Since we had wandered into our first sushi restaurant by ourselves, we had no one to guide in what we were doing. After grabbing our fifth plate off the belt, we started to wonder how they would ever figure out what we had eaten. We did a little deductive reasoning and noticed that not all the plates had the same pattern. We then found a laminated chart displaying all the different plate patterns with prices in Yen next to them. So you pay by the plate and some plates are more expensive than others. Hmmm, practical and logical.

One thing that stumped us was every once in a while a plate would go by on a raised plastic stand. Was this a featured item? More expensive? The house special? We decided to spurge on the featured item/expensive/house special and grabbed the next one that came past. It was like small fried cheese egg roll things and were quite good. As SB was not as enthusiastic as we were with eating raw fish, we let him eat a majority of them. We then decided to make a point of trying almost all the featured item/expensive/house special that went by. The funny thing was they were all the same item. You would think that they would at least have more than two or three special items per day. We were surprised when we saw a waitress come to the table behind us and hand deliver a featured item/expensive/house special to them. Maybe they were a difficult family. They sure were not a happy bunch, seeing how they were scowling at us as they left.

Oh well. We didn’t let the Sensei Grumpys ruin our meal. The kitchen seemed to have run out of the featured item/expensive/house special by this time as we never saw another one go by. When it was time for us to leave, we waved down a waitress and she came over and added up our bill that consisted of a pile of dirty plates.

As we left, the staff called out, to what seemed to us, to be an unenthusiastic “arigatou gozaimasu” as we left the restaurant. It was late and they must have been tired. Poor things. It must be hard serving all the hard-to-please customers that they must get every night.

The next time we went to a sushi restaurant we went with JN’s high school friend, L, and his Japanese wife, Y. What a different experience! That is when we discovered that there was an interphone at each table with which you can communicate with your waitress. Y wanted to order miso soup for her husband. And just guess how it was delivered! Via the conveyor belt on a raised plastic stand! “Oh yes,” explained Y, “the specially ordered items are always delivered like this.” We burst out laughing when we realized that the other night we kept snatching the other family’s food off the conveyor belt right before their eyes. No wonder they were all scowling at us!

Gallery: Tokushima Festival

klynne — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:19:00 GMT

SHUKKETSU DESU !

klynne — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 22:55:00 GMT

Since I involuntarily volunteered to test the Bolivian medical system, JN so kindly decided to take a turn and test the local system on this trip.

I knew something was wrong when I spotted a taxi slowly driving up to L’s place in the early morning. When I woke up, JN jogging shoes were missing so I assumed that he had gone for a run. He had been jogging for about an hour and was about five minutes from the apartment when he stepped on a metal sheet that was covering a hole on the sidewalk. What happened next would have been a great scenario for a Tom and Jerry cartoon, but rather painful to a mortal human being. The metal sheet popped up, his one legged slipped in the hole and he stopped falling when his leg rammed into and was sliced open on a ginzu knife-like sharp metal edge.

According to him, he laid dazed half in and half out of the hole while bleeding profusely and had to watch to make sure that his fingers did not get crushed by the little old Japanese women barely swerving around to get by him on their bicycle. It took about three minutes before a woman stopped to help. She asked him in Japanese if he wanted to go to the hospital or if he wanted her to call a taxi. He preferred to come back to the apartment so she hailed a cab and helped him in.

He came limping up to the door, blood running down his leg, and before he explained anything, wheezed out that I should pay the taxi driver. As he was explaining his story, L and were looking at his leg, and it didn’t look good. I suggested that we cancel our lunch date with our friends in Osaka before he went to the hospital. “Hospital,” he said with blood still running down his leg, “I don’t need a hospital.”

Five minute later, L and JN were bundled off into another taxi and were on their way to the hospital. The taxi driver a friendly guy and started up a nice conversation with them on the drive there. He mentioned in a casual way that oh yeah, he had seen JN lying in the hole. L said incredulously in Japanese “and you didn’t stop to help?” He answered back that he had a customer and couldn’t stop.

When they got to the emergency room, they had to wait a relative short time before they were ushered in to see a doctor. He was a kind man who spoke a few words of English and after studying JN’s x-rays and cleaning out his wound; he determined that no bones or ligaments were respectively broken or torn. But the cut was almost to the bone and needed five stitches.

The total cost of the visit was roughly $120 and the antibiotics and really weak painkillers added up to $22.

So we didn’t make it to Osaka today and I don’t think we will make it there tomorrow either.

We are going to wait three days to see if he can walk a little bit before we consider coming home early.

Tokushima Festival

klynne — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 22:50:00 GMT

When we were looking into coming to Japan at the end of July, I was in charge of the packing, JN was in charge of finding lodgings. As we have done during our long trips to Australia and San Francisco, JN organized home exchanges for us. For those of you who do not know what this is, there are several websites that let you meet people all over the world with whom you can exchange your home and car for their home and car. Up until this trip, we have never met the people with whom we were exchanging since they were simultaneous exchanges. This time we have met or stayed with all the people we are exchanging with. First there is Lovely L and her son who is letting us come and go from their house outside of Osaka during our entire visit, then there was V who passed us her apartment in Nagoya for a week and lastly there is Mr. W.

Mr W has been a mystery. He invited us to his place, we thought. We were not sure. Our e-mail correspondence has been a strange affair in bizarre English. We tried to determine if he was letting us stay at his place, at least for one night. He wrote back that he was “happy that our family would be staying with you.” Ahm. The date that was set was for August 12.

We got around to calling him on August 11^th about 10:30 at night. L was nice enough to call and translate for us. She wrote down the train directions and told us where we needed to get off. We knew we were going South. We knew we were going to an island. That was it.

So we got up early, took three small suitcases and headed off on an adventure.

We had to change trains two times to reach Akashi which is on the coast. We got off the train walked into the train station…. And no Mr. W. We stood for about 10 minutes trying to look like a nice family, in case he was hiding behind a column trying to check us out. Still no Mr. W. We realized that we never set up a meeting point so JN took SB into a Starbucks and I waited with the bags right at the turnstiles. I seemed to be making to much friendly eye contact with all the potential Mr W’s because a lot of Mr V, Mr K and Mr M started to check me out. I rapidly changed places with JN and he finally tried to call to Mr W, and got his answering machine. JN left a message that said that we were waiting near Starbucks. So we waited. I was surprised when a young Starbucks counter worker walked over and told us that our friend would be there at 11:45. How he managed to get that specific Starbucks number still amazes us.

We played a game with SB of “guess what Mr. W will look like.” Old? Fat? Young? Tall? We had no idea.

Finally a nice looking man in his 50s walked in wearing a Hang 10 tee-shirt and shorts holding a sign with our name on it. (Like he wouldn’t be able to spot the only three non-Japanese in the train station.) He introduced us to his wife, a lovely lady who was a little shy.

We collected our bags and followed them to the ferry. It turns out that they are from Nara and were staying at the family house on the island of Awajishima. The ferry ride lasted about 20 minutes and sailed under the longest suspension bridge in the world that is almost 4 kilometers long. We had time to get to know one another and it turns out that Mr and Mrs W are teachers and they were spending the O-bon holidays on the island. O-bon is the festival of the dead and many Japanese travel home to their birthplace to honor their ancestors.

The house was in a small village in the hills, not far from the coast. It was made entirely of wood and had one bedroom. They let us take the bedroom and they slept on futons on the floor of the living room downstairs. We took a short nap and then headed out with Mr. W by car to the neighboring island of Shikoku to the town of Tokushima for the Awa-odori dance festival.

It turns out that we were there for the opening night of the festival which is considered to be one of the premier good time events in Japan, according to the lonely planet guide book. To cite the guide book “The event largest and most famous ‘bon’ dance in Japan and attracts tens of thousands of people from August 12 to 15 every year. Every night, over four days, the revelry continues as men, women and children don yukata (light cotton kimonos) and take to the streets to dance to the samba like rhythm.” There are expecting more than one million people over a four day period.

We had a hard time finding a parking place and had to hurry to see the first dancers go by the big grandstand. We had to help SB hurry as he wore his kimono for the event. We passed by a small park where six different groups were perfecting their dance steps. There were elegant women wearing fascinating straw hats, men in kimonos and shorts high stepping, musicians with flutes, three string guitars, and drums called taiko, and another group that did not dance very well and had ridiculous looking foreigners wearing blue and yellow kimonos waving their hands around. I mean, really. Where was their pride? That is when a very kindly man approached us and asked if we would like to join their group. That is how there were three more ridiculously looking foreigners with no pride ended up dancing with their group. We borrowed kimonos and the president of the international association even loaned SB his own obi (the colored cloth that wraps around the waist) for his kimono. We practiced dancing for about five minutes before we found ourselves in the parade, dancing and chanting before the grandstands. We had a blast!

Afterwards we walked with Mr W through the streets to find another parade and ate fried octopus balls along the way. The parade was fantastic (see the pictures in the photo gallery).

We headed back about 9:00 and ate at a ramen noodle house on the way. Back at the house they had prepared a tradition Japanese bath for us. First you take a shower and wash with soap before completely rinsing off before getting into the deep hot bath in which you are sitting straight up and the water easily reaches up to your shoulders.

The next morning Mr W offered to take us swimming in the “interior sea.” It was the first time SB has swum in the ocean. Mr W was driving back to Nara and offered to drop us off in Osaka.

As we were saying good-bye, we said that we were looking forward to seeing them in France someday soon.

Gallery: Pikachu!

klynne — Sun, 9 Aug 2009 23:56:00 GMT

Nagoya

Gallery: day trip to Tokyo

klynne — Sun, 9 Aug 2009 23:47:00 GMT

Gallery: first day in Nagoya

klynne — Sat, 8 Aug 2009 08:00:00 GMT

First day in Nagoya

klynne — Sat, 8 Aug 2009 07:45:00 GMT

L was very kind to make us a packed lunch for our trip to Nagoya. JN was brilliant in navigating through the bus/subway/train system to get us to our destination. We are now staying at V’s place in Nagoya. This is her first home exchange so she felt a little safer exchanging with a family than with a couple of backpackers her first time around. She is from Jamaica and her boyfriend is from Argentina. She met us the first day to show us around her place and left the next day to join her boyfriend who is now working in Tokyo. They are planning on staying with us in France sometime in the next two years.

Nagoya is very nice and the people are fantastic. We are amazed at the service, at the friendly attitude of everyone we meet. As we can speak about four words in Japanese, we rely mainly on the kindness of strangers. I cannot count how many times we just show a map and the person goes out of their way to walk us directly there.

The first day we just walked around the city and headed to the Osu kannon district. What a surprise to stumble upon a temple in the middle of the urban landscape. A kind man took SB aside to show him how to wave the smoke from the incense burning in an urn over his body.

We also found a used clothing store where I bought a kimono for two dollars for SB and one for myself for under 20. We wandered into an arcade where there were two floors of games. One thing I must say, it is rather loud and noisy here. Between the music blasting, the electric pinging, you are constantly assaulted when walking around a city with visual and audio distractions. If that is not bad enough, in order to get your attention so that you go into THEIR store or go to THEIR attraction, people shout into megaphones. Oddly enough, on the subway and in restaurants, everything is very, very quiet.

We ate in a Japanese fast food restaurant when we got tired of wandering. What is Japanese fast food? When you walk into the restaurant and go to a giant automatic machine, put your money into a slot and push on your choice of food. In return, a ticket spits out, you sit down and the server gives you a glass of green tea when she comes to collect your tickets. When your meal is ready, the server brings out your food to your table.

We walked back to the subway and on the way we saw two guys juggling with a soccer ball. We stopped to watch and were given our own private show. They were very talented and they were practicing together and set their act to music. They were very kind and kicked the ball back and forth to SB a little bit.

We ate in a restaurant at the train station on the way back to V’s apartment. They apparently never have non-Japanese clients as the menus were purely in Japanese. I relied on taking our waiter out and pointed to the plastic food displays in the window for SB and my orders; JN pointed to a sign in Japanese where we could just read that it cost 1000 yen and said “surprise me.”

He got a wonderful meal of miso soup, pickles, chicken wings, tofu, and cabbage salad. Ours was quite good, too.

Gallery: Pokémon!

klynne — Sat, 8 Aug 2009 07:05:00 GMT

SB is crazy about Pokémon. So I will post here all the pictures of Pikachu et whatnot that we see during our trip

Gallery: Best meal ever!

klynne — Sat, 8 Aug 2009 00:23:00 GMT

Gallery: trip to Nagoya

klynne — Fri, 7 Aug 2009 19:45:00 GMT

Gallery: Osaka Aquarium

klynne — Fri, 7 Aug 2009 11:19:00 GMT

Gallery: Osaka

klynne — Fri, 7 Aug 2009 11:06:00 GMT

Osaka

klynne — Fri, 7 Aug 2009 00:06:00 GMT

One word to say about Osaka in August, hot. Hot when you wake up, hot when you get out of the shower, hot when you get dressed, and all this before 7h30 AM. Add to this that I was told that the Japanese think that we smell, I have been putting multi-layers of deodorant on before leaving L’s house in the morning.

JN has figured out the bus/metro system and we automatically get on the back of the bus and pay the driver as we get off in the front and we politely stand in line to get on the metro. If we do get lost, the Japanese are the nicest and the most helpful people we have ever met. It has not been uncommon when asking our way to have a Japanese go out off their way to take us to our destination.

We went to the Osaka aquarium and JN and I both agree that it is the best we have ever been to. There were so many different kind of sea creatures we have never seen and they have an amazing whale shark tank.

We went to eat in a mall right next to the aquarium where we found a ninja maze that JN and SB went through. SB was a little scared but he got over it when he got out and when to a ninja stand and threw ninja stars at a target to win a prize.

We went back to L’s place to pack as we were leaving the next morning for Nagoya.

Arrival in Osaka

klynne — Mon, 3 Aug 2009 23:24:00 GMT

The flight to Osaka went well, I was hardly disturbed at all by all the intensive coloring that was going on beside me. Only it was not SB doing the coloring, we did not get seats together, but two teenage Japanese girls who were intently working in a kiddy coloring book. They didn’t even watch the movies! They were too busy coloring! They were about 17!

SB was surprised by all the police and custom officials wearing masks upon our arrival. Interesting that even before the flu scare the Japanese wear masks when they are sick. But I think these guys were just a little leery of what we might be dragging in to their little island.

JN got us to L’s apartment like a pro. L gave us wonderful directions and we traveled by train and taxi to get to her place. She is also an American and has been living in Japan for four years with her son. Since none of us had gotten any sleep on the flight, we were all worn out. SB fell asleep at 3:30 while JN and I went to a little supermarket and I bought some nice chips. We almost gagged when I opened the bag outside of the store. “Hmm, cuttlefish,” said L when she translated the package. (actually, the taste grows on you.) We went to bed at about 8:00 after having a wonderful Japanese curry dinner.

The adventure started at midnight when SB woke up. JN got up too and in an effort to wear him out, they went for a walk. From what they reported, the streets were calm and they would run into the odd woman riding a bicycle, but that was it. They walked until 4 in the morning and SB took tons of pictures of this great glittering palace with spot lights and an exotic garden……turns out that it was a love hotel. Great. This is what happens when I nod off.

SB slept in until about 6 AM when he woke me up. L made banana pancakes for all of us about 8 AM and we didn’t really get going until afternoon when we went to an all you can eat Japanese-Chinese restaurant for lunch. SB loved the fried squid and insisted on eating with chopsticks.

We took the train into the city and got helplessly lost. We finally made it to a nice district where we sat on a bench and watched lady after lady walk by in their kimonos.

We kept SB up until 10 PM and he just crashed on his little futon on the Tanami floor.

Packing our suitcases

klynne — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:10:00 GMT

“Mommy, I am tired of having cereal for breakfast,” said SB as he sat slumped over his bowl and I was trying to pack suitcases before rushing off to work. “Uh, I think in about two weeks you will be wishing for that bowl of cereal,” I answered. We are off again, this time for a month in Japan. We will be flying standby, hopefully, on Saturday to Osaka where we will be staying in the beginning with L. and her son I.

We decided about two weeks ago to make the trip because we have friends (he French, she Japanese) who will be travelling to Japan in August. Do they want us to be tagging along? At this point they seem rather enthusiastic, but we haven’t gotten there yet, and we don’t know if the phone number that they gave us (as in, yeah, sure, give us a call.) actually works.

But they are not L.and I.

JN found L and I on a home exchange website. Since we really did not have time to plan this trip, we did not have time to set up a proper home exchange. So this time we will be staying off and on with L and I at their apartment outside of Osaka during the month of August and they will come sometime in the future and stay will us in France.

We have also made tentative arrangements with a Jamaican teacher in Nagoya to stay at her apartment for a week (she wants to stay with JN's family in Paris, his mom is game) and we have a Mr Wanabe from Nara who has been sending us strangely translated messages inviting us to what we think is a festival on what we believe to be August 12th. All that I am sure of is that his wife is Catholic and that in exchange she wants to visit Lourdes that is not that far from where we live in France.

With that being the extent of our plans, we have borrowed guidebooks a-plenty, have three weeks worth of rail passes in our possession and are looking forward to a month of being helplessly lost and constantly befuddled as we crisscross the land of the rising sun.

I just hope that SB will like eating hot soup for breakfast. (Any bets on when he will be begging for rice crispies?)

Gallery: Brusso's

klynne — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 09:54:00 GMT

La Paz, Bolivia