Japan Please

Video

2011-12-10T14:46:00.000-08:00

Slapped together a clip reel....

Budapest, Prague, and Vienna

2011-11-05T18:20:00.000-07:00

We've slacked on the blog updates. Sorry. Europe was so much more expensive and easy to travel than the Asia portion of our journey that we pretty much sped through the continent. I suppose we'll be speeding a bit through the blog posts as well. When last we met, we had survived radioactive moss and possible wild boar attacks in Chernobyl. Our next destination was decidedly more tame: Budapest, Hungary.

Another overnight train brought us into the city. The city itself is gorgeous. It's always being called the Little Paris of of Central Europe, but at this point I think it's actually more beautiful and cleaner than a lot of Paris itself. On our first day, we went to the Hungarian Museum of Agriculture. It's housed in a former castle, which made the building more interesting than many of the exhibits. In the afternoon, we caught a train to the nearby town of Szentendre to check out a marzipan museum. It had and amazing variety of huge marzipan sculptures, with everything from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to a life-sized Princess Diana.

The star exhibit was the giant Michael Jackson, seen here threatening Greg. The sculpture was so popular that they were actually in the process of making a second when we were there.

The following day we headed to Monument Park, a sort of graveyard for old soviet statues. The park was a bit overpriced and had far fewer exhibits than I was expecting. More interesting than the statues was an old East German made car called a Trabant. Its loud two stroke engine produced about nine times the pollution of its western counterparts, and buyers often had to put up money for the car years before they would actually receive it.

We also checked out the Saturday flea market. It had some really wonderful stuff, but, alas, nothing small and light enough that I could justify hauling it around in my backpack the remainder of the trip.

While the tourist attractions themselves weren't too exciting, Budapest was still a wonderful city to visit. It's very pleasant to walk, it has a very nice streetcar system, people were always happy to speak English (because Hungarian is basically impossible to learn), and we had some of the most amazing and certainly the largest meals of the whole trip there. The food we ate seemed to mostly consist of large quantities of already fattening things breaded and deep fried. Also paprika.

Another overnight train trip (during which we managed to sleep through the entire country of Slovakia) landed us in Prague. In Prague we found that we didn't eat all that much. I think we were still recovering from Hungary.

I had been to Prague once before back in 2004, so this was the first city that was a repeat visit for me. It was just as beautiful as last time, but far busier. The old town area was absolutely packed with tourists. This was the first city in which we started to encounter a lot of Americans again. I took Greg on the basic tour: old town square, the Jewish cemetery, the Charles Bridge, Prague castle, and Strahov monastery. At the monastery we visited the Museum of Miniatures. It had amazing tiny works of art viewable only by microscope. You could look at a hair with your eye and see nothing, but through the microscope you'd see an entire menagerie of carefully sculpted animals sitting on the hair.

The next day we took a train to Kutna Hora. We wasted about half the day wandering about lost because of some bad information from the internet. We did the whole trip without any paper guide books, which was nice for keeping of the beaten track but occasionally we were led astray. Once we got back on track we easily found Sedlec Ossuary, the famous bone church. The basic story is that the cemetery got too full and they let an eccentric do what he wanted with the bones to make room. Highlights included a chandelier and a coat of arms.

Before heading down to Austria, we dropped into a Lego museum. It was mostly devoted to pre-made Lego kits rather than creative original designs, which was a bit disappointing, but still made for a good nostalgia trip.

Vienna is not a cheap city, so we booked a room outside of the tourist area, but still near the subway. We were shocked to find that our room was actually an apartment, complete with a kitchen and a shower. Vienna has an awesome old street car system that made traveling to attractions an attraction in itself.

We first visited Schloss Schonbrunn Palace, but declined to go inside because places themselves aren't really our thing. Instead we headed to the back, where they have fun interactive sculptures and a hedge maze.

Next up was the Narrenturm. This giant circular building used to be an insane asylum. Now the creepy old cells that housed patients contain thoroughly disturbing medical exhibits as part of an anatomy museum. If you've ever wanted to see wax models of STD infected skin and giant skulled skeletons in glass cases while walking in a dizzying, seemingly unending circle, this is the place for you!

The following day we visited the Austrian National Library, which looks exactly like a library should. Then we headed up to an amusement park to see the Ferris Wheel made famous in The Third Man. The wheel cost about ten bucks to ride, so we declined and headed for the world's tallest swing ride, which was just around the corner. We finished off the day by visiting Sigmund Freud's old apartment, where you can see his famous fainting couch among other things.

Kiev

2011-10-05T00:14:00.000-07:00

A 25 hour train ride carried us from Moscow to Kiev, Ukraine. Kiev was sort of Moscow-lite. The metro was almost identical in design to that of Moscow, but without all the glitz. It was also a bit more English friendly, which made things less intimidating. Furthermore, the prices were actually reasonable.

Our hostel was immediately next to independence square. We were stuck in a completely packed 10 bed dorm room, apparently because every room in town was occupied for a major dance competition taking place about a hundred feet away from us.

Our first night we grabbed some sandwiches and headed toward the Dnieper River to have a picnic dinner. We were surprised to find ourselves with lots of company, as we ended up in a former soviet outdoor theater that had been converted into a small amusement park. We watched teenagers climb on the tops of heads of imposing soviet statues while Matrix-themed thrill rides spun in the background.

One of my stranger life long goals has been to explore Chernobyl, so when we found out that our hostel could connect us with a guide who could bring us into the exclusion zone signed up immediately.

We were loaded into a van where we ended up seated next to two Japanese guys. We were pretty tired so we let them chat for about an hour before they began contemplate where we were from and we chimed in with a Japanese response. One of them was from the area near the Fukushima plant, so he was especially interested in seeing how the government reacted to the disaster.

We watched a video explaining the basics of the disaster. It was the first time I had heard the phrase "bio-robot." Apparently actual robots weren't getting the job of shoveling highly radioactive rubble off the roof of the plant done quickly enough, so the government had soldiers sew together their own lead bibs and run onto the roof for twenty second shifts.

Finally arriving at the exclusion zone, you have to pass through a security check before attending a meeting where you sign off on your life in a waver and get told not to touch or sit on anything. Then we were brought into Pripyat, the worker's town. Two days after the disaster, 53,000 people were told they needed to evacuate for three days, but then they were never allowed to return.

The preferred method of evacuation was to break windows and throw out your belongings. You more often find yourself stepping on broken glass or books than actual floor. Nature has made its way back into the buildings.

The amusement park was scheduled to open a few days after the evacuation.

This moss is registering at 12 micro sieverts - the equivalent of about two and a half dental x-rays.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much freedom we were given to explore the town. At the school, we were simply told to "come back in twenty minutes." I got so wrapped up in taking pictures that I got completely lost and had to run through the hallways trying to find an exit.

On the way out, we had to pass through a machine that allegedly told us if we were covered in radiation or not. I'm not entirely convinced the machine did anything more than flash a green light every time a person stood on it. To this day the government only acknowledges the deaths of the 31 workers who died immediately, but Greenpeace estimates that 200,000 or more people have probably died early from cancer as a result of the disaster.

We had two more days in Kiev due to a lack of space on trains. We went to some churches and markets, but I came down with a slight cold and was too tired to do a whole lot. I used it as an excuse to spend some time going through all my Chernobyl photos!

Moscow

2011-10-01T04:06:00.000-07:00

Four straight days on a train can kinda get to you after a while. I didn't feel completely terrible, but when the closest thing to a hot shower is throwing cupfuls of warm water onto your head inside a cramped, bouncing restroom and your only food consists of cereal, bread, and instant noodles, you enter this weird, grimy altered state that you're not fully aware of until days later.

This time, our train was mostly occupied by Mongolian traders, who use their cabins as makeshift warehouses to house cheap jeans, hats, track pants, jackets, and purses. At each major stop, a mad horde of Russian shoppers will come to the train station simply to buy up dirt-cheap Mongolian merchandise on the platform, then go home.

Apart from looking out our window to endless forests, innumerable little wood shack cottages, and the pristine waters of Lake Baikal, we mostly passed the time by playing games, watching movies and TV on Andrea's computer, and hunting for the few-and-far-between power outlets on the train. Half of them didn't work at all, some required bribing the carriage attendant, and the rest almost always had somebody else's cell phone plugged into them. I finally found an open one, and while sitting waiting for my stuff to charge, this little Mongolian kid walks up to me, grabs my iPod touch out of my hand, and proceeds to try out every single game and app for the next 45 minutes. He occasionally asks for help when he can't figure a game out. I was captive, as I needed the charge and didn't feel comfortable just leaving it there.

Finally, we pull into Moscow. With a population of 11 million, it was by far the largest city we had visited, and the most European. I was picturing endless gray apartment blocks encircling the Kremlin, but was pleasantly surprised by its rich, varied architectural styles and (usually) modern infrastructure and amenities. Most impressive of all was the Metro, which consisted of rickety old 1940s trains surrounded tunnels carved out of pure marble and decorated with bronze statues and fancy paintings everywhere, deep underground, with escalators that sometimes take 2 and a half minutes to reach the platform from the surface. Stalin clearly spared no expense, as each station resembled an art museum or sculpture park. Too bad he made the rest of the Eastern bloc so butt-ugly!

Speaking of costliness, Moscow is not a cheap place. It makes Tokyo look reasonably priced by comparison. The cheapest black Starbucks coffee goes for 6 US dollars, and flavored drinks are even higher. Despite high poverty rates, the city also has the highest concentration of billionaires in the world. The whole city had this weird mixture of scummy cheapness alongside Ferrari dealerships and luxury watch stores.

It's also the least tourist-friendly big city I've ever been to. If you can't read the Cyrillic alphabet, you're completely lost; most signage is exclusively in Russian, even on public transport. I know no Russian but can read enough of the alphabet to get by, so we were never completely lost, but the act of simply figuring out where you are and where you're going can be pretty frustrating.

Our first day was devoted to a personal walking tour, led by a pleasant Russian lady who showed us around Red Square, the Kremlin, and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. I was excited to see the iconic St. Basil's Cathedral, which I had previously seen only in photos and on the title screen of Tetris.

Our guide told us about growing up in Moscow in the era of Khruschev and Brezhnev, and told us that the huge, impressive reconstruction of the Cathedral was the site as a large public swimming pool when she was a kid.

The next day we spent going to some interesting specialty tourist sites that we'd been looking forward to for a while. First up was the Cosmonaut museum, devoted to the history of the Soviet space program, which included a full-size reproduction of Mir that you can enter. After that, we found the Soviet Arcade museum, which housed some hilariously primitive (and occasionally fun) ripoffs of the American and Japanese games of the 70s and 80s. My favorites were the submarine games that used a combination of scale models and light guns through a little periscope. We also had fun with a basketball game that consisted of about 16 hexagonal holes, requiring you to push the correct numbered button to shoot the ball toward your opponent's basket.

Owing to restrictive Russian visa rules, we had only one more day, which we opted to spend at Gorky Park. The park itself was pleasant enough, if mostly unremarkable, but it had this peculiar kiddie area with some really strange attractions. My favorite was this, a spinning chicken spitting out plastic eggs that you're supposed to catch with a net. The best part was the music it played, which was this demented version of Old MacDonald that will stick in your head forever if you hear it even once. This bizarre carnival game lifted my spirits greatly after a disappointing visit to a Statue Park that ended up being a waste of time.

Moscow is a very cool city, but it has this intimidating quality that makes exploring it for a couple days feel a little like you got your ass kicked in a bar fight. I feel like we only scratched the surface, so I do think I'd like to return one day, as well as see other places in Russia we didn't have time for, like St. Petersburg. Hopefully, next time, the Visa won't be so expensive, or require filling out an incomprehensible form with questions asking if I've ever operated a nuclear device or have had weapons training, or basically asking me to list every school I've ever attended in my life.

The Ghengis Khan-Khan: How we hitchhiked and slept in a stranger's tent house all without dying!

2011-09-18T08:51:00.000-07:00

The first leg of our Trans-Siberian journey was an overnight train from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar. The train was clean and modern (we even had a power outlet in our room!) and the top bunks never filled up so we had the whole cabin to ourselves. The only exhausting part of the journey was the extremely long stop at the border. China's tracks are a different gauge than those of Mongolia, so we didn't get to sleep until around 2 am after waiting for the wheels to change (in addition to the usual tedious immigration procedures).

Arriving in Ulaanbaatar, our initial impression was that it was freezing. We had only long underwear and sweatshirts for warmth because we weren't expecting 36*F temperatures in September, but apparently that's the norm. The city basically has one main road that everything interesting is either on or next to, so traffic on this road is some of the slowest moving I've ever seen.

Mongolia is famously unfriendly to vegetarians, but vegetarian restaurants have become surprisingly trendy in the capital city. There were five Loving Huts alone!

On our second day, we decided to head to Gorki-Terelj National park, just a two hour bus ride from Ulaanbaatar. We hadn't realized the public bus would be filled to the brim for most of the journey, and Greg spent the whole ride leaning on an armrest. The description of the park we got online told us that there are tourist ger (Mongolian nomadic tent house) camps leading up to the town of Terelj. What we didn't realize was that our bus went the opposite direction, starting in Terelj and going through the park before heading back to the city. So basically we missed our stop. Alarmed, we decided to get off at what we thought might be a tourist camp. It was not. This was where we started to panic, remembering that there's only one bus a day.

It was just moments later that we noticed somebody else, a Mongolian woman in a traditional outfit, had also exited the bus. She must have observed our panicked looks because she quickly waved us over to follow her. We descend a hill and go through some trees before arriving at her family compound, all the while shooting each other looks of "what the heck are we doing?" Our Mongolian is as good as her English, which is to say we have no way of communicating. We pass a small house and some horses before arriving at a ger. She shoos out two people who I think are her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend before waving us in and pointing at the beds. We shrug and hand her some cash for her hospitality.

As we get settled in our toasty little tent and figure out how to load the stove, we marvel at how weird this whole situation is. Then there's a knock at the door. The daughter is there.

"日本語わかりますか？”("Do you understand Japanese?") she asks.
Without much thinking I reply in the affirmative. She explains that she forgot her mirror and we invite her in. It isn't until she leaves that we realize how much weirder this whole situation just got. Not only does this girl in the middle of nowhere in Mongolia speak Japanese, but she happened to find probably the only two white people for several thousand miles who also know Japanese. How in the world did she know to ask?

It soon got dark and there wasn't much to do. Luckily we brought entertainment. Yes, we watched Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure on my laptop in a ger in Mongolia. Because, y'know, like, Ghengis Khan's in it so it was, like, totally relevant.

The next day we thanked our host and hiked back up to the road to catch the bus back to town. Greg became fast friends with some of the local dogs along the way. Our bus passed through some gorgeous rock and tree filled sections of the park, but unfortunately we couldn't get any pictures.

Thanks to the internet, it's ok that I didn't get any photos of my own!
Back in town, we checked into a hostel. We had a personal guided tour through the intellectual museum, which was basically just one wacky guy's display of puzzles he's made and various toys he has collected. When it was time to head back to the train station we decided we didn't want to walk because we had built up a huge collection of food in preparation for several days on the Trans-Siberian railway. There seemed to be no taxis, but one of the hostel employees explained that if you stick your hand out someone will give you a ride. It worked! Surprisingly quickly, too. Two women pulled over and we told them "train station" and then they spent the remainder of the ride completely ignoring our presence. We gave them our leftover Mongolian money we hadn't been able to convert to rubles, and they seemed more than pleased with the amount even though it was less than five dollars.

Now I'm typing this on the train to Moscow, which will involve four long, shower-less nights of traveling and eating instant noodles. It's the low season, so most people on the train seem to be Mongolian merchants who get out at each stop to sell cheap track suits to immense hordes of Russian shoppers who apparently gather at the stations just to shop.

Competition for the few working power outlets in here is fierce, so I don't think I can keep a daily log of our cabin fever. I'll just type what a think will happen after my battery dies:

Andrea's Log, Day 5: The weather is nice. I have made a necklace out of Greg's intestines.

China

2011-09-17T11:54:00.000-07:00

The Vietnam/China border proved less intimidating than some of our guidebooks had promised. Our train dropped us off at 4 in the morning, so we sat outside on the steps of the Vietnamese customs building until it opened at 7. We heard stories of Chinese border guards rifling through your bags in search of (among other things) travel books whose maps dare to color Taiwan differently from the mainland. Happily, we didn't experience anything like that; one of the guards was even pretty friendly and tried to help us fill out our entry form.

After crossing a weird no-man's-land bridge over a river and passing through customs, your entry point in China is Hekou, which was pretty squalid, albeit more developed than the Vietnamese town across the river. We had a hard time changing our money at banks because it was a Sunday; a helpful young policeman tried to find us a working ATM while practicing his broken English on me, but we were unsuccessful-- you could tell he was pretty bored and was mostly just looking for an excuse to get out of the office.

Finally, we found a guy at the bus station who was not only pretty fluent in English, but was also willing to change our money at what was a decent rate considering he was the only game in town that day. We boarded the bus bound for Kunming, and proceeded to experience 10 hours of driving through some pretty incredible scenery: elevated freeways through steep mountains, supported by impossibly tall columns and winding through endless tunnels. As we got approached Kunming, we came across some bizarre, unearthly rock formations and rows of spherical trees unlike anything I've seen before. It felt like we'd entered another planet after the endless jungles and hills in Vietnam and Cambodia. We later realized that what we were looking at was Kunming's star tourist attraction, the Stone Forest National Park.

Apart from that, Kunming doesn't have much to offer tourists, but the city was pretty incredible to us at the time. I'd never even heard of the place before we started planning the trip, but with a population of 6 million, it was much bigger than any other place we'd been to up to that point. The high elevation and dry climate allowed for mid-August temperatures in the 60s and 70s, a welcome relief from the nonstop sticky heat up until then.

The city center was mostly very clean and modern-- so much so that we almost felt like we were back in Japan. There were lots of genuine high-end retail shops, and a few convincing fake ones, too. We saw two of those imitation Apple stores that have been getting some attention in the West -- I presume they were both just different enough to avoid getting shut down.

Very soon, we discovered a very different language barrier than what we'd experienced before. Vietnamese and Cambodians almost always knew a little English (i.e., just enough to get you to buy something), but the Chinese we dealt with either could speak very well or knew none at all. Having learned some Japanese in our two years living in Kanazawa, we were in the unusual-for-Western-tourists position of being able to read and write some Chinese while having zero listening or speaking ability. This proved very helpful at many points where we could have easily gotten lost, and allowed us to try things we might not have otherwise tried, but the differences between the languages sometimes made for some confusion and frustration.

Our next stop was Chengdu, and our plans to take a sleeper train out of Kunming were foiled by the mad rush of high tourist season. Our knowledge of Chinese characters allowed us to figure out that all train seats on the route we wanted were completely booked for the next 10 days. We ended up finding a company that sold us tickets for a sleeper bus, which did allow us to lay down for the night, but it was cramped, stuffy, and didn't allow you to wear your shoes anywhere inside, even on the floor of the urine-soaked squatter toilet.

Finally in Chengdu, we found another modern, relatively clean city, with hotter temperatures than Kunming, but also with a fantastic subway line that had just opened a year earlier, which clearly had borrowed liberally from the design of Singapore's own modern, efficient metro system. Chengdu is the largest city in Sichuan (also romanized as Szechuan) province; if you've heard of or tried this ultra-spicy brand of southern Chinese cuisine, this province and its capital city are the epicenter.

First up on our tourism docket was the Leshan Grand Buddha, the largest carved stone Buddha statue in the world, and, completed in 810 AD, the largest pre-modern statue in the world. With the help of a nice college student who was majoring in English at Chengdu University and happened to be returning home to Leshan on the same bus we were taking, we made it there and back entirely on public transit.

The Grand Buddha is probably the only tourist site on our trip so far that was actually bigger than I had anticipated. It was carved into the side of a mountain at the banks of a river, and required a pretty steep hike down and up to get down to the Buddha's feet, where we took the requisite pictures alongside to give an idea of the full scale of the thing.

Our other big stop in Chengdu was the Panda Research Center, where we met a fellow American, a Vermonter named Alex who is living in China and speaks the language pretty well, much to our benefit. The center had 4 or 5 red pandas, who were playing and scurrying outside, and perhaps a dozen Giant pandas, who dislike the heat so much that they prefer to laze about in the cramped (but air-conditioned) indoors in the summer, despite the enormous outdoor enclosures they had access to.

The most memorable sight was the dozen or so baby pandas, all born in the past three weeks, who were being kept in incubators to ensure their survival in the tough early months. We weren't allowed to take pictures of these guys, and it's just as well, because as infants they resemble shaved molerats and had a few more months before they grew enough hair to become recognizably panda-like.

After Chengdu, we were stuck with another bus ride to Xian, during which a very stern lady attendant vigorously enforced the no-smoking policy with what amounted to a public shaming (which didn't stop the same guy from trying to light up two more times during the night, each time resulting in the lights being turned on and a few more minutes of arguing). Xian was a lot more like the China I was originally expecting-- hot, loud, dirty, congested, and (less expected) unrelentingly dusty, so much so that we came back caked in a layer of dust every time we ventured outside our hostel.

Xian was our base point for seeing the Terracotta Army. Our experience there was a little anticlimactic; not knowing any better, we first entered the first of three buildings, which contained the iconic pits with hundreds of warriors lined up. It was pretty big, but nowhere near what we'd imagined, so we figured the other two buildings had something more impressive. Wrong! Those were mostly just huge empty pits they'd already removed the soldiers from. Apparently the excavation is ongoing-- check back in a few years and they'll have a lot more soldiers lined up.

We were finally able to secure a sleeper train for our trip to Beijing, but it required us to spend three extra nights in Xian, whose dirt, heat, and grime started to wear out their welcome. Our 100+ year old hostel was nice enough, but apart from a dollar store with some hilarious knock-off products ("Horseman" razors, modeled after Gillette, and not Crest, but "Craot" toothpaste), Xian didn't have much going for it besides terrible air quality, horribly congested traffic, and a still-incomplete subway that was months away from being usable.

Finally, we got on the nicest non-Japanese train we'd ridden thus far, and arrived the next morning in Beijing, a city whose municipality is roughly the size of Belgium, and as such would be underserved by the descriptor "sprawling". The city center is served by an excellent (if at times inconveniently located) subway system that connected our hostel's area, a cute neighborhood centered around a large Buddhist temple, and the city's main shopping and business districts.

Our first full day was spent on a Great Wall excursion. The section we went to was slightly less packed with tourists and vendors than the famed section that Nixon (among others) had been photographed at. It did, however, boast a ski-style chairlift up to the steep mountaintop where the wall was located, and an exceedingly fun slide down the hill, where you pilot a little plastic seat with wheels and a single lever that functioned as both brake and accelerator.

Our other big Beijing stop was Tiananmen Square, where a random Chinese guy insisted on taking his picture with us, solely because we were white people in China, and the Forbidden City, which was more impressive for its size and scope than the repetitive architecture.

I can't speak for Andrea, but overall I left China with a much more positive impression than I was expecting to. The people and places were enjoyable more often than not, and much of the scenery we passed by was breathtaking. The government, on the other hand, was the source of some headaches, primarily in the form of the random bus inspections by the police and the (evadable) Internet censorship. Still, we were mostly left alone. Based on what I saw, I assume it's because the cops couldn't speak English and didn't want the hassle of dealing with us; the locals probably get it a lot worse than we did. The police intrusions got less and less frequent as we traveled further north, as well.

We rose early on our last morning in Beijing. After a brief subway ride, we arrived at the train station and boarded a train bound for Ulaanbataar, Mongolia, beginning the overnight climb into the desert steppes...

Hoi An and Hanoi

2011-08-25T05:06:00.001-07:00

After the modern excitement of Ho Chi Minh City, we caught the overnight train to Da Nang so we could enjoy the seaside. The coast was littered with condo and resort developments. It was often difficult to determine whether they were still under construction or already abandoned. We stayed in Hoi An, a historic port town with a nice beach. We used the hotel's free bikes to get to said beach. We happened to pass a vegan restaurant a woman was running out of her garage. It was buffet style and quite tasty. We also explored the old town area, which is very touristy but quiet and nicely preserved.

For dinner we walked a ways out to a very local vegetarian restaurant. They had a veganized version of the town's famous dish, a noodle bowl with various "pig" parts that uses special lye containing well water. It was delicious! They also had an amazing array of pre-packaged vegetarian faux meat including pig's ears and snails.

We took another overnight train up to Hanoi. By the time we got there we were quite exhausted. We were expecting the same shocking modernity as we found in Ho Chi Minh City, but Hanoi is still a bit more old fashioned. It's nearly impossible to find a cab that'll go by the meter, so you're forced to haggle for fares - a difficult task when you don't know the true distance. Our hotel was called the "Moonshine Palace." I don't think anyone's told them what moonshine means, at least to Americans. Initially, they put us in a top floor room. Then the rain started coming down fast, and it was falling equally fast through cracks in the ceilings! We showed them the inch of water pooling on the floor and they upgraded us to the "deluxe" room for free.

The problem with having to constantly haggle with people and the rising feeling you're constantly being scammed is that you occasionally end up being stand-offish or rude to the people who are actually being helpful. We went to the bus terminal to get a ride to Cuc Phuong national park and were immediately approached by a crowd of young men trying to sell us bus tickets. We assumed it was a scam, so we went straight to the ticket window. The woman wouldn't sell us a ticket and we couldn't figure out why. Eventually an English speaking woman came out from the back and said we should sit and someone would come sell us a ticket. We did as we were told, but we were still being repeatedly approached by the men we assumed were scammers. Eventually we figured out where the bus was and got on. Then one of the "scammers" got on and charged us the same standard fare as the locals. He ended up being pretty friendly even though we had basically blown him off a bunch of times in the station. As far as I can tell the buses are privately run but the station creates a standard fare, so the companies compete to get more customers.

When we arrived at the station it was time to have yet another adventure in haggling. I thought I had read that a motorbike ride from the station to the park was only 20,000 Vietnamese dong per person. It was pouring so we wanted a taxi. A guy told us he'd take us there for 300,000, which I said was ridiculous. He would only budge to 250,000, which we thought was still a major rip off. We finally give in, but instead of taking us to a cab he sits us down at his shop and he lights up a bong. He offered us some and I can only imagine what kind of scam he runs on tourists that agree. We're there fuming about having to wait for a cab we're overpaying for when we spot a real cab. Of course our "friend" angrily follows us and tells the cab to not take any less than 250,000. We demand 200,000. After much arguing we decide we'll just walk into town and have lunch. When we finally get away from our "friend" the cab drives up and says he'll do it for 200,000. The hilarious thing was that the park station then told us that 250,000 was pretty much the standard fare. It was the first and only time we managed to haggle in our favor, and it was a total accident!

At Cuc Phuong park we rented a lakeside bungalow and spent an energetic evening chasing mosquitos before finding the provided mosquito net. In southern Vietnam and Cambodia it typically only rained for three hours a day, but in the north it seems to rain all day and night and you get about three hours without it. This prevented us from really exploring the park, but we did enjoy the primate rehabilitation center, where we watched langurs and gibbons swing about and make some amazing loud noises. We also completed the steep and extremely slippery hike to the observation tower.

Vietnamese drivers are generally pretty crazy, but the one who took us back to the bus station should win some sort of prize. His method was to push the accelerator all the way down while continuously blaring his horn so that other drivers would get out of his way. He didn't understand that chickens don't know what a horn is, so we had a few near misses. At one point we came upon a man crouched in the middle of the road and our driver actually sped up. His only English was "only in Vietnam!" which he repeated gleefully every time he nearly pushed a scooter or cow off the road. He played us a bizarre radio program intended to teach Vietnamese children English using nursery rhymes. In one of the more surreal moments of my life, he swerved around a herd of cattle while we listened to girls with "The Shining" twins-like voices sing "Jack and Jill". Back in Hanoi, we actually had a hard time figuring out what to do. An incorrectly labeled Google Map prevented us from visiting the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum and seeing his actual body (which is only available in the morning). We did see the Ho Chi Minh Museum, which was rather odd. It has a lot of bizarre sculptures and cars crashing through walls that are supposed to represent Ho Chi Minh's ideas. Then it was an excellent dinner by the train station, and a train ride to the Chinese border.

Saigon. Shit.* *(not actually shit)

2011-08-22T06:41:00.000-07:00

We came into Vietnam with a little trepidation. Our friendly guesthouse proprietor in Phnom Penh had warned us that the Vietnamese tend to view outsiders solely as potential money sources ("wallets with legs" was the phrase he used). We weren't exactly sure what to expect when we got off the bus at Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon-- the two names are still used interchangeably), but we were pretty surprised to find a modern but still-growing big city that wasn't all that different from Bangkok or Taipei. Compared to even the most developed parts of Cambodia, it was light years ahead in terms of infrastructure and amenities.

Not sure how to find our hotel, we asked a bank security guard for directions. He wasn't much help, but a passing guy on the street who spoke some English offered to show us the way. Turns out it was just around a corner and down an alley. Not only did he lead us straight to the hotel, he didn't even ask for anything in return. We didn't completely let our guard down, but it was kind of a relief to know that not everyone was going to take advantage of the disoriented tourists.

While HCM has more traffic lights with crosswalks than Phnom Penh, many crossings are of the uncontrolled, endless stream of motorbikes and cars variety. There is something of a method to the madness-- scooter drivers are surprisingly adept at weaving around pedestrians, which means you can (and pretty much have to) walk right out in front of oncoming traffic with some confidence that you won't end up in a neck brace afterward.

After getting settled, we set out for our first day of sightseeing. First up was the Reunification Palace, which was the official residence of the president of South Vietnam prior to the fall of Saigon. The building was of a neat mid-century-meets-traditional-Asian design, if a bit empty, but you did get to see things like the actual furniture, maps, and radio equipment they used during the war. There was also a pretty swanky roof patio, and a slightly creepy, labyrinthine basement that featured a lot of empty desks with decades-unused phones and radio equipment on them.

This was followed up by the nearby War Remnants museum, which featured some leftover American jets, helicopters and tanks on the outside, and some awful, depressing (if excessively slanted toward the North) pictures of the human effects of the war on the inside, including a wing specifically dedicated to picture of birth defects caused by Agent Orange, and glowing tributes to Americans and others who self-immolated in protest of US military involvement in the region. The most interesting part was an authentic reproduction of the brick prison cells and tiny barbed-wire cages that the South used to contain Northern POWs, which offered a mirror image to the infamous Hanoi Hilton torture techniques of the North.

After that fun bit of business, we checked out Ben Thanh market, which apart from some decent hand-painted reproductions of Tintin comic book covers, offered nothing but the same old parade of tacky t-shirts, handbags, and other tourist junk. That night, we enjoyed a fantastic meal at Saigon Vegan, which was one of several restaurants that catered to our diet in the city.

The next day, we took a long trek on a near-empty public bus to Suoi Tien theme park, which I think is one of the most bizarre places I've ever been to in my life. It's got standard theme park stuff-- roller coasters, laser tag, little kiddie rides, a water park with slides-- but everything is Buddhist themed, which came in the form of numerous shrines, giant statues depicting legendary creatures, and groups of visiting monks who apparently like to take in a roller coaster and snow cones from time to time.

And did I mention the crocodile park? One of the big-ticket items at Suoi Tien was an elevated walkway above a pond with at least a hundred of those things staring out with their beady, dead eyes, in each tiny brain solely a lament of the existence of the metal barrier between it and the gawking meatbags taking photos from above. For a fee, you can tempt fate and feed them hunks of meat from a fishing pole. We declined, but watched a few others go for it. I couldn't tell you what's more terrifying-- the slow, mindlessly deliberate opening of the jaws when it sees a piece of meat in front of its face, or the deafening, heart-attack-inducing THUNK of the jaws suddenly closing at a million miles an hour.

Leaving our reptile friends behind, we continued to one of the more interesting attractions at the park, called the Citadel. You cross a bridge to a building in the middle of a man-made lake, where you proceed to take a creaky old elevator down, leading into a pitch black hallway with faintly glowing arrows on the floor. Having gone in with no idea what it was supposed to be, we quickly realized it was some kind of odd haunted house, with a shaking floor, some crude animatronic monsters and gruesome still displays, and (best of all!) some guy who grabs at your ankles from a hidden booth underneath the floor. Can you imagine having that job-- waiting in a pitch black room in the middle of a pond just for some confused people to wander in so you can grab their ankles and freak them out?

Shortly before we decided to leave, while eating some much-needed fruit chip snacks before the long ride back to the city, this adorable, smiling old Vietnamese lady comes up to us out of nowhere. She must have assumed we were French, because she told me "Bon voyage, et a vos santes"-- have a good trip, and to your health-- which was by far the most use I've gotten from my four years of high-school French in a long time, as well as an unexpectedly warm and genuine gesture.

The next day, after a couple of rounds of bowling on the fourth floor of a trendy shopping mall just to kill some time, we boarded our sleeper train headed for Da Nang. We shared a room with a nice older Australian couple, who expressed relief that they wouldn't have someone noisy who they couldn't understand, but seemed understandably wary of the 30+ hour journey ahead of them, as they intended to continue all the way to Hanoi after we got off. I drifted off to sleep a few hours later.

And that was our Ho Chi Minh City experience! Andrea will pick things up from here with our (mis)adventures in Hoi An and Hanoi.

Battambang and Siem Reap

2011-08-13T05:09:00.000-07:00

From Phnom Penh we traveled by bus for six hours to Battambang, Cambodia's second largest city (that doesn't seem especially large at all).

Our first stop was an exciting ride on the bamboo train. The French built a train line through town ages ago, but it has since stopped running. Ingenious locals haven't let this prevent them from traveling by rail. They take a pair of axels and place them on the tracks. Next, a wood platform goes on top of the wheels. The final ingredient is a small engine. The resulting ride on the in need of repair tracks is not unlike going on a seatbelt-less, flat roller coaster. There's only one set of tracks, so if you meet up with another train you have to unload, disassemble the cart, and let the other group pass.

Our friendly tuk tuk driver next took us to see a popular bat nesting spot. It's near a Buddhist temple, so the bats are protected from slingshots.

We then hiked up the seemingly endless stairs to Wat Banan. Our driver gave us a tour of a nearby cave, which was also full of bats. He also bumped into a police officer who grew up in the same orphanage as he did and they had a chat about their childhoods. After that, he spotted some Cambodian milk fruit in a tree and he climbed it to fetch some for us. It wasn't quite ripe, though, so it had a weird, sticky after taste. Our last stop was the Killing Cave. We were feeling lazy after the hike to Wat Banan, so we took up the offer of a couple of local boys to cart us up the mountain on their motorbikes and give us a tour.

The Khmer Rouge threw 10,000 prisoners down this hole into what was then a closed off cave. If the prisoner was lucky, he died immediately. If not, he probably suffered for weeks with broken bones surrounded by decaying bodies before finally starving to death. There are cases of bones within the cave, but I didn't feel comfortable photographing them. That's been a strange part of being a visitor in Cambodia. A lot of the tourism here revolves around the shocking actions of the Khmer Rouge, and it's a bit unsettling to have young drivers and guides gleefully inquire "You want to see killing fields?"

The next day we were somehow convinced to take the "scenic route" to Siem Reap. It was a pricey, slow, uncomfortable boat ride that had pretty scenery that became increasingly difficult to enjoy as more and more parts of the boat broke down and more and more tree branches smacked me in the face. After eight hours we finally made it and took a tuk tuk to our hotel.

Siem Reap is much more touristy than Battambang, due to its status as the gateway city to Angkor Wat. On our first day we completed the "Grand Tour" of Angkor, visiting the outer temples by tuk tuk. We finished the day at Angkor Thom, which ended up being my favorite Angkor temple. Built in the late 12th century, the temple has more than 200 giant faces carved in its stone.

The next day, we decided to take a break and relax in town. We ended up at Chamkar vegetarian restaurant, where we had the best meal of the trip, if not my life. The French chef operated restaurant is pricey by Cambodian standards (a whole $5 a plate!) but worth every penny.

The following day we rented some cheap bikes from a charity organization and peddled from town back to Angkor Wat. This time we completed the small loop, which is about 20km. It included Ta Phrom, where tourists like to stand in line for 20 minutes to get their picture taken in the "Tomb Raider" doorway. The funny thing is that there's a similar doorway at a much less crowded temple down the road.

Then, unfortunately, came the rain. In days past the rain hadn't started until 3 o'clock so we had planned to be back in town long before then. Just our luck, the rain came down at 11:30, and it came down hard. We ended up peddling from overhang to overhang trying to wait it out because our ponchos weren't doing much good. Eventually we decided to head out anytime the rain downgraded from torrential to simply pouring. Thankfully, it started to clear up about the time we arrived at the main Angkor Wat temple. Scaffolding prevented us from getting any decent shots of the famous approach to the temple, but the overall scale and grandeur didn't fail to impress.

Phnom Penh reflections

2011-08-10T05:14:00.000-07:00

After a lengthy flight route that involved three plane rides, three security lines and four(!) customs checkpoints, we made it, bleary-eyed but intact, to Phnom Penh International Airport. Whereas Bangkok's airport tries a little too hard to impress you with its modern design and grand scale, Phnom Penh is decidedly more modest. Soon after getting off the plane, they dump you at the customs counter, where most tourists, us included, have to fill out a form and pay $20 US for a visa to enter the country.

That's another thing. Cambodia has its own currency, the riel, but the de facto standard is the US dollar. The riel is pegged to about 4000 to 1 USD, so the result is an odd hybrid of a monetary system that uses American bills like normal, but eschews American coins in favor of riel bills. It's common here to pay for most things with US dollars, and receive your change back in riel. Once you get used to making the conversions in your head, it's easy to grasp, but the wide array of riel bills that don't have a direct US coin equivalent can be confusing.

As one might expect from Cambodia's largest city and political/economic hub, Phnom Penh is a lively, colorful city full of street vendors, food carts, precarious-looking construction sites, and (an inevitability in Southeast Asia) an endless stream of motorbikes and cheap taxis geared toward tourists called tuk-tuks streaming through cross-traffic at uncontrolled intersections. If you're walking around here and look obviously foreign, expect to be solicited for a tuk-tuk ride in broken English approximately every 15 seconds. As cheap as they can be, this city's sights are in a compact enough area that you can probably see everything on foot in 1 or 2 days if you're feeling up to it.

That's essentially what we did. We followed a Lonely Planet suggested walking tour, which was alright for a quick overview of the city center. Still, apart from the King's palace and adjacent museum, there isn't a whole lot in terms of obvious sightseeing that this city offers. The most impressive, or maybe imposing, sight we encountered was actually the American embassy, which was a wide, recently constructed building behind tall metal gates and guarded by bored-looking men who enforce the no photos policy. Also on the compound was a modern playground, presumably for diplomats' kids with nothing else to do.

Next up on our tour was the old central market, which was housed in a beautiful, distinctive dome that looks nothing like any other building in this country that I've personally seen (and anywhere else, really). Unfortunately, the hundreds of vendors it houses have only the standard knockoff jeans, shoes, bags, electronics, and tacky souvenirs that are stock in trade for these sorts of places. After wandering around there, we found relief from the heat in a fairly modern, seven-story mall that ended up being pretty similar to the old market- rows of stalls with cheap goods, only stacked vertically and air-conditioned. I needed a belt, so I got my haggling feet wet and managed to knock a couple of bucks off what was probably a fairly inflated price to begin with. Tourists can expect to pay a markup for almost everything that isn't clearly labeled.

We enjoyed a cheap, filling lunch of curry noodles, fried seaweed, and olive tofu at a nice little vegetarian place called (appropriately enough) The Vegetarian. Across the way was a slightly creepy North Korean restaurant that we were too scared to approach:

Just as well. I've read that these joints exist across East Asia, are administered by the DPRK government, and serve Kim Jong-il's choice delicacies, including, yes, dog meat. Yikes.

After lunch, we found ourselves in a bit of rain. Then a bit more. Then a lot more. Then more rain than I've seen fall at once in my entire life. After a hot, cloudless first few hours, we got soaked head to toe and ran for the nearest tuk-tuk back to our hotel, and watched the crazy flooding that happens in a drain-less city from the safety of our third-floor room.

Our accommodations were at the Europe Guesthouse, a comfortable, centrally located, yet modestly priced place two blocks from the Mekong riverfront. The proprietor is a guy named Seng, a Cambodian who grew up in France after hiding out in the wilderness with his family for two months to hide from the Khmer Rouge. He proved to be incredibly friendly and helpful, setting up our visas for Vietnam, booking our bus ride to Battambang, and arranging for a discount rate at a hotel in Siem Reap. His wife was expecting a baby within a few days of our arrival, so he was in and out after our first couple of encounters.

So, how to sum up this city? It ranges from dirty, smelly, congested and loud to beautiful, energetic and delicious. It makes Bangkok seem tame in comparison, and it's nowhere nearly as tourist-friendly or developed in terms of infrastructure and transportation. Sidewalks, if they exist, are almost entirely taken up by cars, carts, garbage, inexplicable piles of rubble, and anything else you might think of. All in all, it's a little scummy and rough around the edges without being particularly dangerous, if that's your kind of thing.

That said, it's well-traveled and semi-accessible without feeling overcrowded with other backpackers and tour groups-- probably a byproduct of visiting during the rainy season. It's dense and closely knit without being suffocating, compared to, again, Bangkok, which tended to feel either oddly empty and lonely, or overfull with scam artists and entitled Westerners with large suitcases. I wouldn't recommend staying in Phnom Penh more than a few days, but there's still a lot more to offer than what I expected, particularly outside of the usual sightseeing stops.

We'll have more later, including Cambodia's version of high-speed rail in Battambang, and exploring Angkor Wat. In the meantime, we're getting ready to leave for Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon tomorrow morning. Catch you all later...

Saying Sayonara

2011-08-03T03:44:00.000-07:00

The great around the world trip of 2011 has begun. It's been a rocky start. Did you know that the Japanese postal service refuses to ship laptops internationally? We sure didn't. Did you know that you need your personal stamp to transfer money to an American bank account? We sure didn't. Did you know our flight from Nagoya to Guanzhou, China had a stop in Shanghai? This is yet another of many things we did not know this weekend.

We spent our final Japanese weekend in Tokyo. It was a mix of fun and last minute errand running. On Saturday we enjoyed an exhibit about animator Frederic Back and not one but two vegetarian Taiwanese meals. On Sunday we hit up the Ghibli animation museum. It's a really wonderful place with lots of fun animation toys to look at. I want to live there. On Monday we visited Nekorobi, a cat cafe in Ikebukuro. Much like our previous cat cafe experience, the cats were a bit on the neurotic side, but this place had a decidedly more relaxed vibe. Plus it had unlimited drinks and cookies. Greg managed to make a friend who was quite demanding of belly rubs. I was satisfied with managing to breathe.

Now we're sitting in the airport waiting to board our flight to Cambodia. Hopefully it will be smooth sailing from here on out.

Japanese sweets: sugary play dough!

2011-06-18T18:27:00.000-07:00

Hisashiburi desu ne? (Long time no see, eh?). We're in the final stretch of our Japan stay, and we've been neglecting the blog a bit. So what have we been up to? We took a little trip to Singapore in May. Our adventures consisted mostly of eating excessive amounts of glorious food, sweating, and going to the weirdest statue park I've ever been to. We also went sledding! There was a science museum where you could get a joint ticket to an artificial indoor snow park next door so that after learning about climate change you can make a snowman in a giant freezer box in a country where the temperature is 90 degrees with 100% humidity year round! Also their airport has a three story high slide that was pretty sweet.

We're slowly starting to prepare for our Japanese departure and subsequent adventures. We're saving money for said subsequent adventures, so we're keeping our activities on the cheap side for a while. We did enjoy a Japanese candy making class last weekend.

What they're supposed to look like:

What ours looked like:

Guess I won't quit my day job… Oh wait, I totally am.

Kanaguya Onsen

2011-03-31T17:59:00.000-07:00

As radiation continues to not be threatening to most of Japan, we decided not to postpone our spring vacation plans. We headed into the mountains of Nagano (you know, that snowy place with the Olympics) to enjoy a couple of relaxing days in the hot water of Shibu Onsen. We splurged on a fancy ryokan called Kanaguya. It's said that it was one of the inspirations for the animated film Spirited Away. The atmosphere of the place was lovely, mixing large, clean rooms with really old and semi-decaying private hot spring baths. You can wander the labyrinthian hallways and jump in to any tub you like the entire duration of your stay. I especially liked a cave tub that was built into the side of the mountain.

They provided us with excessive amounts of food at both dinner and breakfast. What you see in the picture was just the beginning - they brought out several more courses after that.

We took a bus to Jigokudani Park and then hiked along a snow covered path for about a half an hour to visit the famous snow monkeys. These Japanese Macaques are the only non-human primates to live in such a cold environment. They've learned to take advantage of the local hot springs and enjoy a good soak in the tub as much as their human counterparts.

While taking pictures there a news team showed up and the reporter started chatting up Greg. They were trying to shoot a story about foreign tourists being scared of traveling to Japan because of radiation fears. Greg declined to appear on camera, but that didn't stop the reporter from attempting to jam a mic in Greg's face and point a camera at him anyway. We did only see one other foreigner during our entire trip, so they probably had to wait a while to find another person to talk to.

The town of Shibu Onsen was pretty empty and most shops didn't bother to open. We entered one shop so I could buy the requisite souvenirs for my coworkers and the old lady working there was bored enough to give us a personal demonstration of every item in her shop. She added up our total on an abacus despite having a register at hand. She was adorable!

That night we did have a little 4.5 earthquake but it was of the "did a giant truck just drive by?" variety rather than the slow rolling dread of the big quake.

On our final morning we hopped in a tub for one last soak. We opened the windows to watch the snow fall. I saw some mysterious shadows and thought a person was approaching. I stuck my head out to find that a monkey was traversing the pipes feeding water to the building. We declined to let him join us.

Unchi ja nai yo

2011-03-18T04:53:00.000-07:00

Alright, so Andrea and I have been inundated with requests to come home because of the nuclear "crisis" in Fukushima. I want to stress that even in the worst case scenario, we are in absolutely no danger, given that we are separated from Fukushima by 500 miles and several mountain ranges, and thus are not "down-wind" from the affected area.

Japanese officials have produced a helpful instructional video to explain the incident and its potential aftereffects, which I highly recommend:

So, if you see the map, Ishikawa isn't in the relevant blue "diarrhea" area. I think we'll be okay.

Whole lotta shakin' going on

2011-03-11T05:27:00.001-08:00

Hi there. This seems as good a time as any to finally update this thing. By now, you all have heard about the crazy-catastrophic earthquake that hit northeastern Japan. I'm happy to report that Andrea and I are completely safe, and haven't experienced even the slightest physical or property damage.

In fact, we barely felt anything down here in Kanazawa. I was at work when it happened, and I wasn't even sure it was an earthquake that I was experiencing. My co-worker seemed to think the defective ceiling air conditioner was causing the shaking. I didn't even realize the extent of the damage elsewhere until I got home... but again, most of that damage is hundreds of miles away, akin to feeling a strong LA earthquake while in San Francisco.

So, much as I would like to have an excuse to skip work tomorrow, the big earthquake was pretty much a non-event in Ishikawa prefecture. It's pretty horrfying up in Miyagi prefecture, though, with the crazy tsunami flooding and everything. There's some excellent coverage at the BBC if you want to find out more.

Don Draper exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke and replies, "I like soccer. I prefer soccer to baseball."

2010-12-06T04:21:00.000-08:00

I'm in charge of writing and recording conversational listening tests for the oral communication class at my school. To the amusement of nobody but myself I select a different show or movie to draw all the characters from for each exam. I have created a version of Mad Men in which all Don Draper and Peggy Olsen ever do is ask each other about their favorite foods and get directions to the movie theater. Emmy here I come.

Oishii, ooimo

2010-11-27T04:52:00.001-08:00

You may remember last fall that I mentioned the Yakiimo man, who is sort of the Japanese autumnal equivalent of the ice cream man. It's basically a guy who sells hot-baked sweet potatoes on the street out of the back of his truck.

Usually, it's around 9 or 10 PM when we hear the strangely ominous noise of the Yakiimo song. It's always some old guy singing in an odd warble, a capella, about how he has many delicious potatoes (oddly enough, each song seems to be unique to the individual seller!). The problem is that we hear the song, but the guy simply drives by our place, and doesn't stop anywhere nearby.

As it happens, a Yakiimo truck went by around 10 PM last night, and actually stopped across from our building! I decide to seize the opportunity, since I've lived in this country for damn near a year and a half but haven't actually had the chance tried the stuff yet.

Here's how it works: the guy's parked in his truck. You signal to him that you want some of his wares, and he gets out. You let him know whether you want a small one (300 yen, about $3.50) or a big one (500 yen, about $6). He pulls one out of his janky-looking grill, wraps it in some newspaper (!), and hands it over.

My reaction? It's pretty tasty! You can pretty much eat it as soon as you buy it, skin and all, and it (predictably enough) is sweet, and has a crumbly but soft texture. If you happen to be in Japan in the fall, I encourage you to give it a shot, but I don't know if I can recommend buying newspaper-wrapped snacks out of the back of some weird old guy's pickup truck in any other context.

Oh Yoshimi, they don't believe me, but you won't let those robots eat me

2010-11-17T02:50:00.000-08:00

A month ago we sought to book a cheap hotel in Kyoto for another Kansai region adventure the weekend of November 13th only to find none with any openings. Why? People go crazy about leaves. We're more interested in food than foliage, but we still had to pay more for a room than we would have liked.

Our only touristy activity in Kyoto was to head to the Fushimi Inari Shrine, famous for its rows of torii gates.

We headed to Nara as a day trip. The park there is brimming with tame deer, who were declared sacred ages ago. We shot a little bit of video:

The shrines in Nara had quite a few little girls decked out in kimonos for the Shichi-Go-San rite of passage celebration.

On Monday I had two of my goals fulfilled. The more short term goal was to see a concert in Japan. The second goal, which I've had since I was a wee little one, was to see a Flaming Lips concert.

Stray observations on the Japanese concert going experience:

*Japan's lack of debit cards and my lack of a credit card often leads to some interesting ways of buying things. We purchased our tickets by going to a convenience store in Kanazawa and entering the concert code into a machine. We paid at the register and the clerk gave us paper tickets. The price was as listed (no Ticketmaster-esque fees!) but there was one catch…

* The venue (the Nanba Hatch in Osaka, a medium sized theater shaped like a UFO) forced you to buy a 500 yen ($6) drink voucher. My most expensive bottle of water ever.

* The concert itself wasn't cheap either, and I've skipped going to other shows because they're almost double what you'd pay in the states.

* Japanese men seem to think nothing of going directly from work to a concert, still wearing a suit. Many of them will not even loosen their ties or take off their jackets. I'm pretty sure there are several men in Osaka who will be finding hidden pieces of confetti in their suits for weeks.

* The crowd was very well behaved. The only distractingly annoying people shouting things were gaijin, of course.

* First concert I've been to where not a single audience member smoked pot. It was likely also the first Flaming Lips show with zero pot.

For the uninitiated, the Flaming Lips are known for their loud, extravagant, punk meets acid meets theater shows, and they did not disappoint. The concert started with singer Wayne Coyne crowd surfing inside a plastic bubble, scores of giant balloons dropping, and an unbelievable amount of confetti firing from cannons. At one point I started watching a five year old girl(!) attempting to grab a balloon seven times her size and when I returned my gaze to the stage the singer was riding the shoulders of a man in a realistic bear costume and shouting through a megaphone. It was wonderful. Don't think that the theatrics are there to make up for a lack of musical ability, as they've actually managed to become talented over the years. The only slow bit of the show was when they overestimated the audience's English ability and willingness to act abnormally. A lesson I've often learned in class is that if you ask somebody here to act like monkey they're simply not going to do it. It's what the gaijin are for.

A visual summary of a Flaming Lips concert

Unfortunately I couldn't take Tuesday off because most of the English teachers had to go on a business trip so I had to run classes solo. (There's nothing I want to do more first period than teach my rowdiest, lowest level first year students on four hours of sleep…) Sadly, this meant we had to catch the train back up to Kanazawa when it felt like the concert just got going, meaning that I'm not entirely sure goal number two was fulfilled. It was nice that the venue was on the small side compared to where the band normally plays at, but the next time the Flaming Lips are around (and I have a better schedule), I think I'll have to check them out again, because I don't have nearly enough confetti and space bubbles in my life.

I'd like to conclude this excessively long blog post with one minor factoid: in Shin-Osaka station there was a robotic trash collection cart that played "It's a Small World" as it made its way through the halls.

Rushi in za sukai wizu daimondozu

2010-11-06T03:25:00.000-07:00

Today at school I saw ikebana, a Michael Jackson impersonator, and multiple students in drag. It can only mean one thing: the school festival! These are the biggest annual events at Japanese high schools, and they're basically the only times the students get to show a little creativity. The main events take place up on the stage in the gym, where much singing, dancing, and theatrical performing occurs. Some skits were just plain inexplicable, such as the guys who wore skin-tight body suits and pumpkin masks while gyrating to an Outkast song. Other skits neared meditative performance art level. I could see the group of girls who created a giant frying pan whose skit consisted entirely of them playing the role of popcorn being popped performing at some Lower East Side theater right after a Marguerite Duras film.*

I was more than just a spectator this year, as I lugged my Wii video game system and various peripheral instruments to school so that the students could partake in a little Beatles Rock Band. You see it was the culture festival, so I exposed them to the current American culture of young people obsessively hammering away at plastic instruments in front of television sets for hours on end. I spent a lot of time Katakana-izing the words to a bunch of Beatles songs only to have absolutely nobody volunteer to sing. And I was so looking forward to hearing various iterations of "Haroo, Goodobai." The drums and guitar, however, were quite popular. Inexplicably, they assigned me to the same room as the library's book sale. At least the librarian was pretty enthusiastic about my extremely noisy activity. At one point I showed a student how to control the menus so I could hop out and attend the tea ceremony I had signed up for. I guess he didn't let anybody else play because by the time I returned he had gone from beginner to Ringo equal. I may not be getting very far with trying to teach students to speak in full English sentences in class, but I'm pretty sure they've got "press the green button" down.

*Film school nerd's note: please don't try to watch a Marguerite Duras film. It will almost make you long for the excitement of Warhol's Empire. That's right, I just explained a pretentious film reference with a slightly less pretentious film reference. Gotta use that degree somehow.

Arcade Adventures

2010-10-23T17:27:00.000-07:00

Japanese arcades are not quite as glamorous as US nerds might imagine. They're loud, smoky, and at a certain point you get get a little bored with "shoot the gun at the screen as fast as you can" games. Occasionally, however, you find a game or two that makes enduring sensory overload worth it. First, I give you "The Typing of the Dead." Like many games, the object is to kill zombies. Instead of a gun, however, you are armed only with a keyboard. When the zombie uprising eventually occurs, I can only hope that they way to defeat them will be rapidly typing the Japanese words for panda and kettle.

They say that video games allow you to experience the adventures you've dreamed about since childhood. Well who hasn't dreamed of being a frustrated, under-appreciated Salaryman? In this game you play a balding company man who sits down to a well deserved rest at dinner with his family. Only your children have decided they'd rather talk on their cell phones and play with their Gameboys than show you their appreciation. What's a father to do? FLIP THE DINNER TABLE!

Yes, that's it. You flip a little table up and get points for how much damage you cause. Brilliant.

Maybe "Height-Impaired II" would've been a bit more sensitive

2010-10-17T07:07:00.000-07:00

Japan is famous for its small, boxy cars, but inside they're generally not all that different from an American compact or subcompact.

On the other hand, this model, which I spotted on a car lot here in Kanazawa, takes the cake for space and size efficiency (if not style or sleekness):

What kind of name could this car have? What pithy noun or adjective could sum up this lime green... thing? Maybe something bland along the lines of Corolla, or possibly some kind of pun on the small size and higher efficiency of this kind of tiny, single-occupant vehicle?

Midget II. Yeah. Makes you wonder what Midget I looked like, or even if there was one; given the profound lack of disregard for coherency in English names and labels here, I wouldn't be surprised if Midget II was actually the first and only.

Pika Pika Kanazawa

2010-10-04T05:16:00.001-07:00

Excerpts from a neat long exposure flashlight animation project filmed in our city a couple years ago.

Konnichiwa. Ron Howard desu.

2010-09-22T21:17:00.000-07:00

Greg managed to get two days off in a row for once, so we took a trip to San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf.

The journey was hardly epic. In our continuing quest to see garish American culture through the eyes of the Japanese we ended up at Universal Studios Japan in Osaka. They had a whole mini San Francisco land that had the various signs and outward appearences of San Francisco landmarks but none of the substance. Or the homeless people. Here's "The Haight." I guess the Japanese think hippies are half sea horse?

They did however have a mega-sized Mel's Diner. The menu was limited to basic burger, fries, and a shake combos, although they were all scaled down to a quarter of the size of their American counterparts. I think my Dad would have cried at the sight of the size-of-a-redbull-can milkshakes. Not to mention that the combos were going for $17. Ahhh, Japan.

I think Universal Studios Japan just inherited rides that were no longer popular in America and dubbed them into Japanese. What's hilarious about this was how manly they made everybodyl seem. Ron Howard sounded like he would kick your ass in a dark alley. The only exception was the Terminator 2 ride. Arnold sounded more human than ever.

I'm not a pervert. I'm just a person who can understand your shirt.

2010-09-10T01:50:00.000-07:00

Japanese camera phones have the unfortunate feature that you can't turn off the extremely loud fake camera shutter sound effect. I say this is unfortunate not because I want perverts to take up-skirt shots of me on the train (which is why the feature is required), but because it prevents me from serendipitously photographing the amazing t-shirts I see on a daily basis. My recent favorite was a teenage girl at summer camp whose shirt boldly declared "Let's be hippies! MARIJUANA," but this was replaced today by a woman's shirt bearing the words "Now that the kids are older, let's talk about duilding a new addition onto the house" in the spot American girls reserve for tramp stamps. Yes, I know that's a d.

Let's understanding

2010-09-03T06:01:00.000-07:00

After you've been at the English teaching game in this country for a while, a certain cynicism inevitably sets in. Whether it's bored, unmotivated students, unhelpful co-workers, or burnout from teaching dozens of different classes the same old thing every week, grousing about respective work situations is a frequent topic of conversation whenever ALTs and/or eikaiwa folk get together.

Beyond that, though, I think a lot of people would agree that the worst aspect of teaching English in Japan is often the teaching materials you're supplied with. It's filled with ridiculous, cheesy songs and completely unrealistic spoken dialogue sequences, often with bizarre, non-standard English that no native speaker could even dream up. I mean, I remember dumb stuff like this when I took French in high school, but the Japanese have practically turned it into an art form, all the while not noticing how completely ineffective it is, not to mention despised by teachers and students alike.

So it's with that in mind that I, and probably every other person who has taught English in Japan, found the following video completely hilarious. Someone took the audio CDs from Eigo Noto (English Note, the standard middle school English textbook) and created a video around them, which... well, just watch. You might not appreciate it as much as someone who's had to actually use materials like these, but it's funny nonetheless.

Kyoto, please

2010-08-16T17:49:00.000-07:00

It was Obon in Japan, meaning Greg and I could easily get some time off. To reward myself for another exhausting and bug bite filled three days at the prefectural English summer camp, we decided to head down to Kyoto for a few days of food, walking, and monkeys.

This was taken at Cafe La Siesta, a tiny place that was essentially made for us because it has an extensive vegan menu and it's devoted to retro video games. The place had stacks upon stacks of Famicom games and little TVs scattered about on which to play them. Greg is enjoying a game of Puyo Puyo while we wait for our food. We also had excellent meals at Mumokuteki, Cafe Proverbs, and Falafel Garden, the closest falafel place we've managed to find yet is sadly more than two hours away.

We did a lot of walking and exploring on this trip, but it was difficult. A kind shop keeper explained to us that out of all the cities in this area of Japan Kyoto is the most humid. It made it a little easier to come back to Kanazawa where it takes a good twenty minute outside to be sweating buckets rather than Kyoto's three. One hike made difficult by the heat was the journey up to the Iwatayama Monkey Park in Arashiyama. Here's a little monkey action for you:

Kanazawa Hyakumangoku Festival

2010-06-05T18:23:00.000-07:00

Roadside kitsch

2010-06-01T04:22:00.000-07:00

This weekend was spent looking for some of the stranger local tourist attractions. First up we returned to Takayama, but this time we visited the Hikaru Museum, which is apparently run by some religious cult that thinks we get all of our feelings from light or something. They have a massive building that's eerily empty. We walked into the enormous lobby mid light/laser/music show, which was truly bizarre. Other exhibits included a dinosaur fossils, recreations of ancient works of art, and a giant room containing an enormous statue of the cult leader standing on a UFO. We also later visited their huge temple which contained a fish tank that stretched the entire length of the giant pulpit and they offered us free sake on the way out. Seemed a little too "try the Kool-aid!" to us so we declined.

On Sunday we decided to explore a little more of Ishikawa's Noto Peninsula. Our first stop was Hakui, Japan's UFO capital. They celebrate this status with a little museum. The girl selling tickets was very excited to repeat her speech encouraging us to take the "おもしろいエレベター”　(interesting elevator) all the way to the second floor. It consisted of a black light and some glowing stickers. Up top the exhibits were a little more impressive, consisting mostly of life-size models of various spacecraft. Also present were several UFO photos, and this adorable alien autopsy model:

Besides rubber aliens, Hakui is famous for a beach you can drive on. The novelty of driving on the beach wears off after approximately 50 feet.

Our friend's car is adorable. There's an all electric version and if I were forced to drive for some reason I'd probably get one.

Next we went to the Ganmon caves, but the stop after that was probably the most pleasant serendipitous discovery. I was under the impression that I had been made aware of all of the Noto's tourist attractions, but somehow I missed THE SINGLE GREATEST SIGHT IN ALL OF THE NOTO. Screw Senmaida. The Wajima morning market? Fuggidaboutit. This, my friends, is the longest bench in the world. It goes on forever. Marvel at its beauty.

Taiwan roundup

2010-05-11T05:31:00.000-07:00

It's coming up on a week since we got back from Taiwan, and I still miss it a little. I don't miss the hotter-than-you'd-expect-for-May weather, but everything else was great. I thought I should mention a couple things we neglected to mention in earlier posts:

- We visited Taipei 101, the 2nd tallest building in the world.

- We went to Window on China, a kids' theme park that inexplicably focuses on scale dioramas of things like shipping containers and power plants (as well as some impressive historical displays. There's also an adjacent section, accessible only by minature train, that's more like a carnival/theme park, with decidedly less educational value.

- We took a very long and windy bus ride to Yehliu Geopark, a naturally occurring beachside of some of the most bizarre rock formations I've ever seen.

-We hit up no fewer than three all-vegetarian buffets.

At two of them, you pay by weight, so I ended up with this fairly large meal for about 3 US dollars:

(That vaguely brown-purple mass on the bottom was one big chunk of stinky tofu)

- And we went to the Taipei Zoo. Here's some video of both of their pandas:

One nice touch is that there are poo-related factoids in all of the bathrooms. This one reveals the heretofore unknown depths of kangaroos' depravity:

Oh, so that's what that rotting garbage smell is!

2010-05-07T06:36:00.000-07:00

One of my prime objectives in coming to Taiwan was to find and eat stinky tofu. For the uninitiated, it's basically tofu that's been marinated in some kind or another of rotting, fermented goop. I've seen TV shows about how they make it-- usually, it involves a big plastic tub full of this incomprehensible black slime, full of weeks-old rotting vegetables and god knows what else. It has a characteristic odor comparable to limburger cheese, or worse, but it's an extremely popular mainstay at restaurants, night markets, food stands, and anywhere else you can imagine. It's almost impossible to walk down a busy street in Taipei and not have that familiar and vaguely nauseating stench waft your way.

The problem with it (from a non-animal-eater's point of view) is that if you pick any stinky tofu vendor at random, you can never really be sure what they put in the marinade. It could just be old, putrid vegetables, it could be fish eyes, it could be squid guts-- hell, it could be liquified hog uterus for all you know. There are even stories of less-scrupulous sellers in mainland China who use human feces to speed up the fermentation process. Taiwan is considered to be decidedly more sanitary in their practices, but it's still a gamble, especially if you have any dietary restrictions.

Even if I could speak Chinese, the vendors are reluctant to divulge the contents of whatever toxic waste they've submerged the tofu into, since it's kind of a trade secret that results in each stand's unique flavor. Despite my enthusiasm, I didn't want to chance picking a street vendor at random while not knowing if my tasty fried snack had been in an open-air jug of chicken intestines for the last month.

Fortunately, the Supreme Master came to my rescue. Long story short, Supreme Master Ching Hai is the leader of a vaguely cult-like group that owns dozens of restaurants around the world and promotes a vague message of vegetarianism, humanitarianism, and general weirdness. I don't buy into her claims of divinity, but her restaurants can always be counted on for a tasty, reasonably-priced and animal-product-free meal, and as far as cults go, hers seems more benign than most.

Her group is based out of Taiwan, so there are no fewer than 12 of her Loving Huts in the Taipei area alone. One of these specializes in stinky tofu, so I insisted we make a stop at this place, despite Andrea's reluctance. Once inside, we went for two variations on the noodle bowl, which each boasted a half-dozen chunks of the fetid bean curd.

The verdict... not that bad! Pretty tasty, actually. We got the impression that Loving Hut's stinky tofu was a bit toned down for easily-startled foreign diners.

Our guess would later be proven correct at Raohe Night Market. Another popular weekend gathering place, Taipei's night markets (Raohe is one of several) are jam-packed full of food carts, tea stands, knock-off clothing and shoe stalls, and lots more. Somewhat dejected that I wouldn't be able to get the full stinky tofu experience, I happened upon a food stand that contained not only the familiar characters for Cho Do Fu (the stinky stuff), but also the standard Vegetarian Food marker! 40 Taiwan Dollars (or about $1.20) later, here was my result:

Garnished with a sweet, BBQ-like sauce, and with a side of pickled cabbage, presumably as a palate cleanser. It doesn't work.

So, here's the verdict on this one: this night market food cart version of stinky tofu was a lot stronger than the Loving Hut version. The fact that it's fried reduces the initial odor somewhat, but it more than makes up for that once it gets in your mouth. I actually liked i t quite a bit, although I had a hard time getting the taste out of my mouth for the rest of the night, despite a much-needed fruit juice intervention.

So, for the prospective Taiwan traveller interested in this fair-yet-foul dish, what's my advice? Know a few basic characters and phrases, know where you're going and exactlyhow to get there (a map, along with a good sense of direction or, failing that, a compass, is key), and try really hard not to let the smell dissuade you. You will find the putridity surprisingly rewarding!

Wulai

2010-05-04T18:40:00.000-07:00

On Monday we took a bus out to Wulai, a hot spring town about an hour out of Taipei. It was a far better experience than any Japanese onsen I've been to yet. First of all, it's free. It's outdoors alongside a river so you have a magnificent view. This means that it's also co-ed and requires swimsuits, which is a plus. The water has no sulfur so it's not stinky. We changed into our suits at the makeshift changing shacks, rinsed off, and picked a pool. It was a far more relaxed atmosphere than the Japanese onsen. There were dogs lounging around the pool and people were passing around bowls of food. We moved into a hotter pool after that. I only got up to my knees but Greg managed to sit for a few minutes. After much goading by the locals we went down to the river itself. The runoff from the hot spring ends up there, so it has the bizarre effect of making the surface near scalding but anything two inches below the surface is incredibly cold. I swam a few circles for a few minutes before heading back up to warmer waters.

We visited an aboriginal restaurant for lunch. Andrew Zimmern visited the same place on Bizarre Foods:

Although our vegetarianism forced us to decline the bees and the rotten jar of meat, we did enjoy the very tasty betelnut flower salad. The nuts themselves are commonly sold by scantily clad women on the side of the road to passing truck drivers. It has the effect of keeping the chewer awake and his mouth bright red. We have declined to give it a go. We also had a mushroom and rice dumpling, bird's nest ferns, and really delicious fried balls of taro and mochi.

Our last stop in Wulai was the waterfall. You ride a gondola to the top where they have some sad looking outdoor activities and a very out of place haunted house ride. We also enjoyed the rope course.

On the way back to the bus stop from the gondola you can ride a tiny, rickety train that was previously used to transport logs up and down the hill. All and all it was a very worthwhile day trip from Taipei.

Taiwan: my tummy loves it

2010-04-29T05:39:00.000-07:00

The first week of May in Japan consists of a series of holidays lumped together called Golden Week that effectively give everybody the week off. We've decided to spend our Golden Week in Taipei, Taiwan. It's been a while since we've been dumped into a country were we've had zero language ability. I think I'm physically incapable of controlling the tone of my voice. If anyone's witnessed the horror of me playing the Rock Band video game on vocals, you'd know I fail even the easy level. Thus, tonal languages are not for me. Thankfully transportation has been ridiculously easy thus far. The subway is very simple, and, unlike Tokyo, the maps are always bilingual. Weirdly enough our travel agent booked us at a hotel catered to Japanese cliental, but I guess it's nice to have everything in a language we can sort of read instead of one we can't read at all.

So far, we've been EATING. Taiwan is incredibly vegetarian friendly. This afternoon we planned to have lunch a fancy veggie buffet but our map was wrong. Once we had given up and started to search for a different place to eat we actually passed a tiny dive of a vegetarian shop. This has never happened when we've traveled before. Thankfully we've memorized the characters for vegetarian restaurant. As we stood looking confused at the menu painted on the wall, a woman came up and spoke nearly perfect English and offered to help us order. Greg ended up with a veggie beef bowl and I had some sesame noodles. Our massive meals were only about a $1.50 each. That's another thing I'm loving about this place; it's so cheap. I've heard it's expensive compared to most of Asia but compared to Japan I feel positively rich here. I bought a giant cup of tea for $1 and used my new favorite food selection method of smiling and pointing randomly at the menu. It's worked great so far.

After lunch we went to the Miniatures Museum of Taiwan, which basically consisted of many impressive dollhouse scenes. Weirdly enough, most of them seemed to have been built by bored mid western Americans. Here's a tiny playroom:

There was one that looked like a crazy cat house, complete with litter box using kitties:

After that we hit up an electronics market and then we went to Taipei 101, the former tallest building in the world. The world's fastest elevator shot us up to the 91st floor in 37 seconds flat. The weather wasn't great, so here's the best shot I could get:

Visibility decreased rapidly beyond that point. You also get to see the Super Big Wind Damper that keeps the building from tipping over. Yes, that's the official title.

Then we headed to a vegan hot pot place and ordered entirely too much food. The concerned and friendly English speaking waiter had to walk us through what to do because we are useless foreigners. I went with the super spicy Szechwan pot and although my mouth was on fire it was divine.

Other observations thus far:

The smells are intense. Japan never really smells like anything but walking down the street here it goes from intensely horrible to intensely awesome and back again every few seconds
Traffic is insane. There is not an inch of sidewalk without a scooter parked on it. We've nearly gotten hit a few times and we already witnessed an accident.
I've seen a few stray dogs but it's weirdly not depressing. They're really friendly and well fed so I think street vendors look out for them.

A cat house

2010-04-04T01:06:00.000-07:00

Being unable to visit Caramel in Oakland has left Greg sorely in need of some kitty time, and Japan has just the thing for people like him. Cat cafes are places you can go to, well, hang out with cats. Sounds pleasant in theory, but the thing is that when you've spent money to hang out with cats you expect the cats to put in a little effort to hang out with you. Cats, however, do not understand this basic tenet of capitalism.
Nekoburo is on the top floor of the huge Tokyu Hands DIY store in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. Each cat has a break room with some sort of theme. It reminded me of the orphanage in John Waters' Crybaby. "This is Olive and he enjoys washing dishes and leopard print chaise lounges."
When not lounging in their oddly themed rooms, the cats spend most of their time competing with each other for high ground where people can't reach them, and running away from the paying customers. The only person in the building who managed to get some kitty head scratches in was Greg, naturally.

Tokyo Dizunii, please!

2010-04-03T19:54:00.000-07:00

As you might've already seen from Andrea's photostream, we went to Tokyo! Not just to Tokyo, but Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea.

Tokyo Disneyland is pretty much what you'd expect (near-identical to the Anaheim one), although there are few neat touches.

After diligently standing in line for a Space Mountain FastPass, we saw that the wait for Star Tours wasn't too bad. I can't emphasize to you how surreal seeing an animatronic C-3PO speaking Japanese can be at 9 AM after a long, sleepless overnight bus ride.

There are popcorn stands everywhere, with flavors ranging from chocolate to caramel, and lines as long as some of the rides themselves. This one is actually selling curry-flavored popcorn.

Standing in line for the Haunted Mansion.

These were the only vending machines I saw inside the park. They were in Tomorrowland, if it wasn't obvious.

Yes, we did the teacups. We were happy that we hadn't eaten anything immediately beforehand.

Unfortunately, since we went on a Sunday, the lines were insane. If you imagine a typical crowded day at Disneyland and triple it, you might have an idea. We managed to get FastPasses to most of the rides we wanted to get to, although Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters was jam-packed from the 8:00 AM opening onward and perpetually had a 3.5+ hour wait. If we had opted for the FastPasses, we would've had to come back at in about 10 hours.

The next day was reserved for DisneySea. This is the strange new themepark that has a vague nautical feel, along with some equally impressive line waits. Through both days, though, we managed to only have to stand in a long line once, for the Tower of Terror. I managed to finish half a book in the 2.5 hours we were waiting.

This park's gimmick is that its various lands are meant to look like seaport styles from around the world. There was Italy, New England, Middle East, Jungle, and late-19th-century New York, among others. There's also a giant volcano, which houses the Journey to the Center of the Earth and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea rides.

Inside the volcano. You don't actually get to go in the submarine, unfortunately. 20,000 Leagues is a cute but kind of disappointing ride where you go in a miniature faux-submarine that's not actually underwater and see a bunch of weird fake-looking sea-people who resemble geckos. I would've been more disappointed if I had waited 3 hours for it, but we grabbed a pass for it instead.

Journey to the Center of the Earth was more fun, but had some of the same dinky, silly-looking animatronics. The weird thing about DisneySea was that, except for Tower of Terror, it seems like they spent all their time and money making the exteriors of the rides look good, and then skimped on the rides themselves somewhat. Center of the Earth at least managed to redeem itself with a (brief) roller-coaster portion.

In the upper right is the Tower of Terror, which is a free-fall ride in the dark. It was a long wait but I'd say it was worth it.

In addition to the innumerable popcorn stands, DisneySea was also big on churros. Here, Andrea holds two black sesame-flavored churros (yes, black sesame!).

So, that was the first two days of our journey! Fun times all around, even if it was pretty chilly and windy at times. It's easy enough to get to from the Tokyo city center that I'd say it's worth it if you have an extra day or two there and aren't sure what else to do.

Japanese Alps, please

2010-03-15T01:55:00.001-07:00

This weekend, we decided to get one last taste of the snow by heading up to the Japanese Alps. The train ride in to Takayama was absolutely gorgeous. We arrived Friday evening and stayed at a hostel. In the morning, a hostel employee drove us to Shirakawago, an adorable village that was isolated from the rest Japan for a long time. We in fact had to drive through Japan's second longest tunnel (30 miles) just to get to the village. It's famous for this unique style of farm house designed to withstand the heavy snow the area receives. Each house has a thick triangular straw roof. You might notice there's no chimney. There is a large fire burning constantly in each house, and the homeowners discovered that the intense smoke prevented bugs from destroying the roof. It makes breathing difficult and every surface gets coated with black ash, but, hey, no bugs!

Here comes the sun-- wait, scratch that, it's just more rain...

2010-02-28T16:52:00.000-08:00

Today (at least over here), it's March 1st. After two chilly months, the snow is almost completely gone save a few slush piles up in the hills, and we're back to our regularly scheduled programming of rain, and temperatures in the low 50s. Apart from one bizarre sunny day in the upper 60s, it looks like this what we can expect for at least the next month.

The last sign of snow was only a couple of weeks ago, so I'm almost still in the mentality that I need to be prepared if I have to hole up in the apartment in case of some kind of freak blizzard. Fortunately, at the local sporting goods store, there was at least one food I knew I could count on:

This, boys and girls, is canned bread. More specifically, it's Sabaibaru Pan, or Survival Bread! I rest assured that I can tear one of these open next time there's a snowstorm and it's impossible to get out (read: most likely never, or if it does happen, in about 9 or 10 months).

Speaking of winter food, neither of us has yet to track down the elusive yakiimo man. I hear him and his damn "YAAAAAAAAAKIIIIIMOOOOOO" song every couple of days, but he only seems to drive by, headed off to places unknown. Just once, I'd like to walk down a street in our neighborhood and see him open for business, selling his delicious roasted sweet potatoes. But no, it's always at some crazy hour (seriously, I've heard it at 9 in the morning and 11 at night) in which he's just zipping by our building, leaving only an aroma and a creaky ballad about potatoes in his wake.

"Sukiyaki" - it's not just for dinner

2010-02-16T19:02:00.000-08:00

This song, popularly known as "Sukiyaki" (aka the Japanese hotpot dish) in the U.S., is a jaunty little number about a lonely, sad walk in the night. The actual name is "Ue wo muite arukou", or "Looking Up While Walking." Its freak popularity in the US came when a DJ in Washington state played it on a lark, and suddenly found himself with a hit!

The singer, Kyu Sakamoto, is considered one of the most influential Japanese musicians. Sadly, he died in what ended up being the deadliest plane crashes in history in 1985.

Thanks to Jeff Oliver for forwarding this to me!

I'm still pretty sure a first grader can out talk me though...

2010-02-04T04:06:00.000-08:00

We are officially Japanese 1st graders! Well, language-wise anyway. Thankfully we both passed the JLPT 4 quite easily, which apparently means we have mastered 80 kanji and 800 words. We both know more than that, so next December we hope to shoot for a higher level...

...which brings me to the second topic of this post: we're staying another year! It was a tough decision, but we haven't been able to travel nearly as much as we've wanted to and, let's face it, this is pretty easy money. I've pretty much gotten the hang of things at work and next year will be even easier because I can recycle lesson plans from this year. Besides, neither of us has really figured out what we want to do when we get back, so hip-hip-hooray for procrastinating!

Because we're sticking around we've made a few upgrades to our living situation. Japanese homes typically don't have an oven, but they'll often feature a "moven" microwave/toaster oven combo. We didn't even get that. We have finally given in to our grumbling tummies' demands for fresh baked goods. We got an adorable little table top electric oven off of Amazon and I'm totally in love with it. Here's some bread I made (real bread, with crust!). It works surprisingly well.

I'm lazy so I usually just run amazon.co.jp through google translate when I'm shopping online. This makes shopping far more interesting than it is on boring old amazon.com. For example, we needed a table to put the oven on top of:

Our table table table table is working out quite nicely.

Today some of my students at the special needs school told me about Setsubun, which is when Japanese people celebrate the coming of spring by having beans thrown at them. This seemed ridiculous until I had to tell them about Groundhog Day.

Japanese second hand sporting goods: cheaper than renting

2010-01-29T02:18:00.000-08:00

A quandary:

So we want to give snowboarding a try. There's a bus that will take us straight to the resort so that's no problem. The problem is that renting a snowboard setup costs about $40 whereas buying a decent looking board complete with boots and bindings at the second hand store a couple of miles from us costs only $25. We have no idea if we're going to enjoy snowboarding enough to ever do it again. WHAT DO WE DO?

Mameshibaaaaaaa

2010-01-26T00:02:00.000-08:00

These days, it seems like whenever you're sitting down to a nice, relaxing meal containing peas, beans, or pretty much anything round or oval, one of the little buggers wakes up and starts telling you things you'd rather not know! Or at least, that's the way it is according to this set of commercials:

As you might've guessed Mameshiba is Mame (the Japanese word for bean, as in 'edamame') plus Shiba (as in Shiba Inu, the Japanese breed of dog!). You can see these odd bean-dog characters on all sorts of merchandise around here, but I have no idea if they are trying to sell anything beyond that. If anything, they might make you less likely to eat beans.

(via Japan Newbie)

You're Easy Breezy and I'm Japanese-y

2010-01-25T02:28:00.000-08:00

Although I enjoy more than the occasional Japanese film, I must say the music in these parts has failed to capture my interest in any way. The closest thing I've found to a decent Japanese indie-rock group is Eastern Youth, but they, like almost all Japanese bands I've stumbled upon, are a bit over produced for my tastes and pale in comparison to the American bands they list as their influences. The singer does get points for dressing up like Enid from Ghost World for no apparent reason, though.

My students are no help. In various classes I've given out "about me" surveys where the students are supposed to list their favorite Japanese and international bands. In the international category all but one student listed Michael Jackson's "Thriller" as their favorite song. The one that differed? He picked NOFX's "Bob", so he is my new favorite simply because he has the exact same taste in music as I did when I was a freshman in high school. There is always one and only one kid who differs from the crowd in each class. In another class when I surveyed students about their favorite movies I got 29 Harry Potter's and one "The Godfather parts 1 and 2 but not 3." Guess who my favorite kid in that class is?

The other interesting thing about these surveys is getting to know the completely nonsensical names of various Japanese bands. Here are a few:

Funky Monkey Babys

GReeeeN (capitalization and number of e's has been crosschecked)

Glay (a purposefully Japan-ized version of the word "gray")

SMAP

Porno Graffitti

And my personal favorite, Mr. Children, which is an incredibly popular band fronted by men in their 40s and not, to my surprise, Pedobear.

P.S. The title of this post comes from a very popular song with hilariously terrible English lyrics, although admittedly not as terrible as this awful "I almost didn't realize that's supposed to be English" heavy metal song.

Japanese movies, please

2010-01-23T22:53:00.000-08:00

Some Japanese cinema weirdness for your consideration:

From the Academy Award winning studio that brought you Spirited Away comes a children's film about raccoon-dogs and their magical inflatable testicles that save the day:

Next up we have a film appropriately named Robgeisha. FRIED SHRIMP:

The question here isn't why are the buildings bleeding. I think the question here is why in other movies are the buildings not bleeding.

Finally, here's a movie I've come to appreciate more since working at a Japanese school. The plot of Battle Royale is that every year the government selects one poorly behaved class, ships them off to a deserted island, hands each student a deadly weapon, and informs them that only the last person standing will make it out alive. Lots of blood follows.

Perhaps the best thing about the movie is that every time one of the 42 students is killed, a counter appears so you can keep track of the score.

Yes, Japan has many excellent, more serious films, but it the end it's lowbrow weirdness that keeps me coming back for more.

Indoor thoughts on outdoor frigidity

2010-01-13T19:30:00.000-08:00

Attention West Coast/Southwest people: you ain't got nothin' on us, weather-wise.

Not only do we have a bone-chilling snowstorm, we're also getting thunder and lightning. Fortunately, today is one of my days off, but in a few hours I'll go trudging through the foot-high piles of snow and slush that have accumulated on our street to Japanese class. Fun!

Though if you are reading this and live anywhere that's substantially colder/snowier (Colorado, etc.), I'll add that we have to go through the winter with no central heating or insulation. So suck on that!

What we do have in the way of staying warm is this:

Kerosene heater! This magical device makes things non-Arctic while indoors, all while emitting poisonous carbon monoxide fumes, requiring you to periodically open a door, window, or vent, thus sucking out all the accumulated hot air. Kinda defeats the purpose, but I'll take what I can get; we went through all of December without turning this sucker on, and that's not a mistake I intend to repeat!

Now I can finally check off "ride around in a giant pineapple" on my must-do list

2010-01-02T02:11:00.000-08:00

How was your Christmas Eve? Besides the aquarium, ours was primarily spent here:

One of the first things we knew we had to seek out in Okinawa was Nago Pineapple Park. It's an entire theme-- well, I shouldn't say theme park, because that implies something a lot bigger and more expansive than what's actually there-- but it's dedicated completely to pineapples and various pineapple-derived products. That said, it's pretty great, for reasons that'll be obvious:

Within seconds of entering the park, you're offered the chance to buy a picture of yourself with a person in a giant pineapple costume. We declined. We were more interested in the big-shot feature of Nago Pineapple Park: that you can ride around in one of the above self-guided pineapple carts on a track around the fields and through a big greenhouse. All the while, you're treated to an incomprehensible and grammatically questionable tour recording in the language of your choice, explaining how the same kinds of pineapple plants, ferns, and various tropical foliage you can see there were also featured in "The Jurassic Park."

If you'd like a taste of the tour, here's a brief 19-second video I shot while inside:

And this is a baby pineapple:

Alas, the tour didn't last forever. I did manage to capture the last moments we had before our cart disappeared from sight:

Once you're done with the tour, you get to head indoors, where there is (inexplicably) a history lesson regarding Christopher Columbus:

Columbus was a controversial figure in history, but this is the first time I'd seen him accused of being a pineapple.

After that is (inexplicably) a little Christmas display:

And then, (inexplicably) a mini-museum dedicated to some neat-looking shells:

And finally, a treat for the boozehounds: the wine tasting! They make all sorts of crazy wines out of pineapple, four of which you get to try in a little Dixie cup. Verdict: I'm not a fan of alcohol. I was much more into the subsequent juice tasting, which included various pineapple blends, and even bitter gourd juice, which wasn't half bad. Following that, you can try all sorts of pineapple-based cakes, chocolates, pies, and whatever other ridiculous other things you can think of. They even had pineapple soap.

And last but not least is the obligatory gauntlet of every Japanese tourist trap, the omiyage shop! Because a cultural site just isn't complete without a crowded store to buy various overpriced boxes of individually wrapped sweets for your co-workers. Most of this stuff wasn't even pineapple-related.

And thus ended our magical day at Nago Pineapple Park. But we didn't come away empty handed! We had to own a piece of the memory. We may not have a full-size pineapple cart to ride around the cold, slushy streets of Kanazawa, but we did bring home a little one of our own:

On top of everything else, at the stand out front, you can get a mixed mango/pineapple juice with tapioca pearls. That stuff is heavenly.

And when you consider that it's only a ~$5 USD admission price, you can't possibly go wrong. If you're in Okinawa and going to be anywhere near the aquarium, you have no excuses.

Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium

2010-01-01T04:06:00.001-08:00

We're back from our lovely Okinawa week. I'm sure we'll post a lot about our trip, but if you're a picture person you can see my pictures from the trip here.
On our second day we went to the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium. It's the second largest aquarium in the world, and one of only four aquariums that house whale sharks. The 1,981,290 gallon tank also holds the largest manta rays I've ever seen. It's been done a million times (and by people with better equipment), but here's a video I took of the tank:

Oh, Okinawa

2009-12-23T03:57:00.001-08:00

We have arrived in lovely Okinawa, where it is wonderfully warm (mid 70s) and pretty. Want to know the best thing about Okinawa? AMERICA.

Look at how American sized that root beer is. Okinawa is the only place you can find A&W restaurants in Japan. In general, root beer is incredibly unpopular here. As a cruel joke on my students I once had them try it and write a review of how it tasted. One girl ran from class gagging.
All America is awesome joking aside, it is a little strange to see American military types wandering around a Japanese city, but thankfully they don't dominate the place quite as much as I had been led to believe.
We've so far struck out in the vegetarian restaurant department. We were really looking forward to going to a vegetarian Taiwanese place that allegedly had a menu of more than 80 faux-meat dishes, but it seems to have closed permanently. Then we tried another place and found it closed for the holiday (it's the Emperor's birthday). We did manage to find an Okinawan place with enough stuff to keep us filled. I'm not a huge fan of goya (Okinawan bitter gourd), but if you mix it with enough tofu and sauce it'll do the trick. We've also been enjoying some sweets. This thing is sort of a Twinkie with sweet potato where the cream would be, and behind it is delicious black sugar coated peanuts.
Tomorrow we're off to the aquarium and a pineapple theme park!

SNOW!!!! and various other tidbits

2009-12-19T00:36:00.001-08:00

It's snowing!

In typical California transplant fashion, on the first day of snow I was delighted and frolicked and skipped about joyously finding everything prettier with a little snow on it. Then on Friday the train was delayed and it was so windy the snow was blowing horizontally directly in my face. Also, Japan has an annoying lack of interest in both insulation and central heating. Thus our apartment is the same temperature inside as it is out in the snow. It is officially warmer in our refrigerator than it is in the kitchen it sits in.

A couple of weeks ago Greg and I took the JLPT 4, which is the lowest level Japanese proficiency test. We were already at the level of the this test when we first arrived, so we're both pretty sure we passed. Most of the people in our Japanese class took the level 3, but because my listening skills are rather terrible I think I'm happy with the decision to go for the sure thing rather than the "maybe if I'm lucky." If I can get my listening (and speaking, even though that's not tested) up to snuff, I hope I can maybe skip a level next year and go to the new "2.5" test.

Friday night was my school's bonenkai, a traditional year end party, the purpose of which is to drink until you forget all the year's troubles. It was at an onsen, but I managed to avoid the whole awkwardly taking a bath with coworkers thing by having my dip just 15 minutes before the start of dinner. After dinner it was on to karaoke. I, as usual, declined to sing. I find it amusing that when I tell people I can't sing they always say "I can't sing either, it's ok," and then 10 minutes later they're on stage singing brilliantly. I have yet to meet anyone here worse at carrying a tune than me. There was a bingo game and the first three prizes were pretty nice: a flat screen TV, a bike, and a digital camera. Beyond that were mystery prizes wrapped up. Naturally I got 4th place and had to go for a mystery box which of course was filled with 30 packs of meat filled instant ramen. Sigh. I had a lot of opportunities to practice my horrible Japanese before conking out in my room. The teachers must have stayed up at least an hour later than me and drank a ton more than me and yet they were all up at 6:30 am bright eyed and genki, waking me for breakfast.

What amuses me most about enkais is that because of Japan's very strict drunk driving laws (which prohibit you from having even a sip of alcohol before getting behind the wheel) the teachers usually take the school bus. I think that as a high schooler I would have been quite amused by the idea of my teachers, drunk and rowdy, cruising down the highway in the school bus late at night.

On Wednesday we're headed for Okinawa for a hopefully warm and pleasant Christmas.

Odds and ends

2009-12-10T22:29:00.001-08:00

After a couple of months in employment limbo (I had been hired but wouldn't start until 2010), I have now been hired at a job that's given me immediate work and am actually going around to various places in Ishikawa and Toyama to impart my English-speaking-abilities and exotic gaijin-ness on various impressionable Japanese youngsters. I imagine I'll have more to say on this soon, but I wanted to share a couple of things I've found since I've been out and about a lot more.

First was something I found at a mall arcade. Gambling in the form of slot machines and pachinko parlors is ubiquitous here in Japan, and often you'll find it side-by-side in the same arcades with games meant for kids and teenagers. You'll occasionally see some surprising and odd versions of these machines (I can think of Super Mario-themed gambling machines just off the top of my head), but I've never seen a Pac-man one before. This is at the Apita in Toyama City:

This next photo is a little hard to read. It's a sign at a train station in Komatsu, Ishikawa, and it says in both English and Japanese: "DO NOT ENTER THE TRACK. When you drop something on the track, please tell the station staff immediately."

What's funny is that this station, like a lot of non-major stations in suburban and rural areas, didn't appear to actually have any station staff. All there is to it is basically a little shed on each side of the track where you can buy your ticket from a machine, plus a public toilet and bike rack. So, implicit in this sign's message is "If you drop something on the track and don't want to risk getting yourself pancaked like a cartoon character on the front of the train, you're SOL."

Step 1: Unfold. Step 2: Ride.

2009-11-26T16:53:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone back in the US! Things are decidedly more sedate here. It's already Friday morning on our clock, for one thing.

One issue I thought deserved some re-visiting was the issue of bicycles. Yes, I gave up my dream of the impossibly-cheap folding bike. But! I did manage to settle for the somewhat-more-believably-cheap folding bike (or, if you prefer, oritatami jitensha), at our local Sports Depot. Check out what $150 gets you:

That is, it gets you surprising quality. The Ignio model at Sports Depot was the next-cheapest option to the $100 bike I could find. I had the choice of orange, white, or black-with-sparkles, so I think that choice was clear.

The way it works is you take the above locking mechanism in the middle of the frame, turn the silver handle around, and pull up. Then, boom! Turn around the handlebars and it folds in like so:

Alternate angle:

It has a couple of neat features. Unlike Andrea's bike (heh heh), I've got 6 gears to work with! Hers is completely gearless, which she good-naturedly reminds me whenever I speed past her on a bike with wheels 1/3 the size of hers.

One advantage her bike has over mine, though, is that her bell is more traditional than mine (pull the lever, and it rings several times in quick succession). Mine is a little cheaper, and thus a little harder to operate. You flick the little plastic bit, and it dings the bell one time.

You're supposed to use it when you're obstructed in front by pedestrians who are moving too slow and/or taking up too much room on the sidewalk. I'm generally too timid to use it, anyway; you attract enough weird looks from older people just by being not-Japanese. Instead, I've become a fast student in the art of delicate maneuvering between people.

Andrea's bike also has its own built in locking mechanism on the rear tire. I just have a standard separate lock-and-key.

Generally, it's enough to lock the rear tire to the bike frame, since apparently no one would go to the effort of stealing a bike that they couldn't ride. The likelihood of our bikes getting stolen at all is very low, anyway, but Kanazawa is supposed to have a bigger bicycle theft problem than your typical Japanese city. Of course, like most bikes, mine is registered with the local police department, so if they can read my scribbly kanji handwriting, they'll know where to return it if it shows up somewhere it shouldn't.

And that's all there is to it! It's intermittently cold and rainy these days, but there's still occasion to pull it out and go for a ride. A couple of our favorite restaurants are easier to get to by bike than bus, so it's helpful in that respect. Hell, just getting downtown takes the same amount of time, so might as well get some exercise out of it.

Of course, on rainy or goddamn-air-feels-like-the-Arctic days, it sits, helpfully folded up, in this corner of our (inexplicably astroturfed) balcony, sharing space with our massive air conditioning unit, a silver panel covering an emergency ladder hole, and several tension rods meant for hanging laundry.

Have to go in Japan? Expect the unexpected.

2009-11-22T16:26:00.000-08:00

Via the great blog An Englishman in Osaka comes this inexplicable restroom sign:

All I can say is that at this point, I'm very rarely surprised, but almost always amused, by this sort of thing. Pointlessly decorative cartoon characters are de rigueur on all signage, regardless of purpose. The thing that's so peculiar about this sign is that the cartoon characters are more creepy than cute. I half-expect that giraffe to have been taken off of a wanted poster.

Of course, creepiness aside, that sign is a little more user-friendly than this one (from Engrish.com):

Good to know! Thanks, I guess.

Natadera and getting naked.

2009-11-21T16:41:00.001-08:00

Natadera is a combination of a Buddhist temple complex, Shinto shrine, and a wild garden located in Komatsu near the Kaga border in Ishikawa. The most remarkable thing about it are the tunnels carved into stone that you can explore.

Natadera is famous for its autumn foliage, so last weekend Greg and I headed down there to have a look.

It's a lovely day trip from Kanazawa. More photos on flickr, naturally. We had also made it a goal to go to an onsen while down there, as the area is rather famous for them. We wanted to go to Yamanaka, which looks lovely and was recommended by a few people, but it turns out there is no way to directly get there from Natadera even though they are not that far apart. We saw that the tourist loop bus we had taken to the temple also went to Yumenoyu so we decided to give it a shot. It was, ummm, a bit awkward. It really felt more like going to a crowded YMCA pool where the water is really warm and everybody's naked. And for some reason 80 year old ladies really like to sit next to me. I think we'll do a bit more research and find something more relaxing next time.
On Monday I had two aunts and an uncle swing by for a visit, which was great. It was wonderful to see familiar faces. Who's next to visit? You?

Crazy soda addendum

2009-11-15T05:24:00.000-08:00

As Andrea helpfully reminded me, I would be remiss to point out what is probably the weirdest soda of the bunch that I've tried thus far:

This stuff is called Curry Ramune. You might be familiar with Ramune in its normal form, which is a sweet, syrupy drink that you add carbonation to by popping in a little marble at the top. This stuff, if it wasn't obvious, is curry flavored, complete with offensive Indian stereotype on the label. So, not the usual grape/melon/whatever fruit flavoring you can think of that Ramune normally engages in.

They offer it (presumably as a joke) at Spice Box, our favorite little Indian restaurant in downtown Kanazawa. I was on the receiving end of a dare to try this stuff, and naturally acquiesced. I asked the head waiter about it, and he warned me that it wasn't very spicy. So, of course, I had to try the extra-spicy version! He helpfully explained that the extra spicy version wasn't particularly spicy, either, given the delicate Japanese palate.

So, yes, I tried it-- and it wasn't half bad. It was more like a strong ginger ale than anything, but with a little added spice kick. Despite its pseudo-Indian-ness, it felt like an odd accompaniment to our South Indian-style dosas, sort of like having root beer with sushi. But if you ever get the chance to try it, might as well; it's not going to set your throat on fire, and you can rub it in other people's faces that you've tried something they haven't, even if they don't especially care one way or the other.

Crazy soda roundup

2009-11-14T00:33:00.000-08:00

Surprisingly, Japan doesn't really have the breadth of strange soda flavors that its other innumerable culinary oddities might lead you to believe. What it lacks in breadth, though, it more than makes up for in terms of depth; flavors that don't quite reach Jones soda proportions of intentional weirdness, but that you would never even think someone would make.

First off, we have the special Pepsi flavor that was available when we arrived: Pepsi Shiso.
Shiso, for the uninformed (which included myself until recently), is a minty herb known as Perilla or Japanese basil in English. I was a little dubious, but felt like I should try it anyway; turns out I was right to be dubious! Not outright disgusting, but definitely not something I'd have again.

The next one is odd:

I guess this was a summer flavor that had stuck around long enough to be put on sale. I tried it, assuming based on the picture that it was candy apple; and yes, it did have a very strongly candy apple-like taste. But if you actually translate what it says on the label, it says it's candied apricot. It tasted a lot more like candy apple to me, though, so either it was somehow mislabeled candy apple soda, or it was a candy apricot soda that really failed at tasting like apricot.

Finally, here it is, my white whale of soda flavors:

Azuki Pepsi! If you know me, you've probably experienced my azuki obsession in one way or another. Azuki bean paste mochi, azuki popsicles, azuki soymilk... if it's azuki-flavored, I have to have it immediately-- which is why hearing about Azuki Pepsi so greatly piqued my interest. This flavor is new but it's been around over a month, and I've looked and looked and couldn't find it anywhere... until tonight, when we visited a grocery store called Valor for the first time. I nearly freaked out in the soda aisle; there it was, finally!

So, flavor verdict on the soda I couldn't find for so long? ...Eh. It's alright. It tastes more like Cherry Coke at first, but there's a distinct azuki aftertaste. So, not amazing, but not exactly worth going out of your way for. Oh well.

Overall, kind of a mixed bag in the weird soda flavor department. It's a lot more middle-of-the-road than the infamous Jones Soda holiday packs, which range from extremely delicious to vomit-inducing (Pepto bismol flavor, anyone?).

Speaking of those holiday packs, there's a new update of the perennial Turkey and Gravy soda... Tofurky soda! I don't really get the point, because the original Turkey soda was a vegan imitation flavor, anyway. I am dying to know what it tastes like, though, but they apparently don't ship to Japan. Sad.

In which I talk about food...again....

2009-11-03T04:47:00.000-08:00

The high school I work at has a rather massive farm in the back. Occasionally the agriculture students will come to the teacher's room and sell what they've grown. Because I'm so desperate to have the students like me I typically buy whatever they have whether I need it or not. This is how I ended up with nine persimmons. I ended up vegan-izing a baked persimmon pudding recipe and cooked it in the rice cooker.

One of the advantages of experimenting with foods I've never eaten before is that you can't tell how off the mark it is. I thought vegan rice cooker pudding was rather tasty.

Next we had to figure out what to do with chayote. I have no idea why they had chayote at my school. It's a Central American vegetable. Greg managed to make them into a quite lovely soup, though.

It's sort of fun that being here has led not only to experimenting a lot with Japanese foods, but to trying out interesting recipes from all over.

Japanese melon bread, please

2009-11-02T02:57:00.000-08:00

Before coming here, I thought a lot about all the foods from home I would miss, but never put much thought into the idea that I would eventually become enamored with certain Japan only treats that I will miss when I come home. My first obsession that I will surely miss is available at a bakery at the train station.

This is a wonderfully redundant creation consisting of melon bread filled with melon cream, and it is awesome. You quickly learn in Japan that any bread that has enough room for cream in it will in fact have cream in it. It is usually awful Hostess-esque white fluffy goop, but the melon cream is luscious and subtle. I'm utterly addicted.

I've heard November is supposed to be a wet month in Kanazawa, but I had no idea the temperature would immediately drop 20 degrees and start pouring the moment it struck midnight at the start of the month. It's a chilly 41 degrees tonight, but nothing makes me quickly forget waiting for a train in the freezing rain without a jacket as quickly as a post-work melon bread and coffee soy milk.

La Toyama deliciosa

2009-11-01T00:37:00.000-07:00

Not to brag, but we have a lot of great amenities in Kanazawa-- much more so than I was expecting before we got here. Among them is restaurants; we're no Tokyo or Osaka, but we've got a surprising diversity and variety of cuisine for such a small city.

Sorely lacking in our restaurant scene, though, is Mexican, or anything even vaguely imitating Latin American food. Coming from a place where we were a 10 minute walk to 5 dollar burritos the size of your thigh, it was little rough to go without it. I've found a taco shell kit imported from Australia that's alright (particularly if you happen upon a ripe avocado), and we bulk-ordered black beans, but somehow, home-made approximations of taqueria food just aren't the same.

So imagine our surprise when we found out that there actually is a Mexican restaurant just one prefecture over-- in Toyama City, of all places!

Toyama is kind of the red-headed stepchild of the Hokuriku region. It's a mainly industrial town that got flattened in World War II, so there's not much to speak of historically, architecturally, culturally, or pretty much anything-ally*. It doesn't help that it's butt-ugly, even by Japanese city standards, and seemed pretty dead even on a Friday night. But somehow, that didn't stop us. We came to Toyama determined to experience all that there is, and we pretty much did; we went to La Yuuki!

Presumably the only Mexican restaurant for several hundred miles, La Yuuki has maybe 10 seats and is staffed solely by a friendly Japanese guy named Hiro who speaks good English. He's never been to any Spanish-speaking country; he learned Mexican-style cooking from a guy he knows in Tokyo who also works at a Mexican restaurant. But indeed, he learned it well.

Our meal began with home-made tortilla chips and guacamole-- incredible! Maybe it's withdrawal talking, but these were some of the best tortilla chips I've had in my life. And the guacamole was perfect! Rich, creamy avocado in a country where you're lucky to find one that isn't green and hard as steel.

Hiro graciously accommodated our dietary preferences, as his otherwise-vegetarian dishes often have ground beef added to them. Andrea had a chili-bean burrito, and I had spinach-mushroom enchiladas; both were tasty and surprisingly on the mark, considering how hard it is to find authentic ingredients here. We had a seat at the bar, right in front of his kitchen; we got to see him at work, and he clearly knew what he was doing.

Toyama is about an hour on the local train, or half that on the express. With this in mind, next time we have the craving, I think I know where we'll be headed.

*I should mention that Toyama has another advantage over Kanazawa: unlike our slow, confusing, and inefficient bus network, they have what appears to be a functioning and useful light rail system, where a fleet of both modern and old-streetcar-style vehicles have their own dedicated lanes. Kanazawa apparently has enough money for giant train station decorations but not enough for a functioning transit system in a city where people would actually use it. Having been stuck in traffic on a Kanazawa bus, I can tell you that I certainly would!

I've got a bike, you can ride it if you like, it's got a basket, a bell that rings and things to make it look good

2009-10-24T01:35:00.000-07:00

As Greg mentioned, I recently acquired some new wheels. There are a few rivers running through Kanazawa, and I've been wanting to take a bike ride along one of them for a while now. Like most Japanese bikes, my new ride is a single speed number completely lacking in suspension, but Kanazawa is pretty flat so it's not much trouble. Plus, it makes up for it by having an adorable basket, light, and a built on tire lock.

The river has a wonderful bike path along side it. Along the way I spotted one of Kanazawa's very own love hotels. I imagine its motto is "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and let them have sordid affairs in hotels you can rent by the hour!"

Eventually the path dumps you in a nature reserve that also has a water slide park in it. It's eerily closed and empty this time of year.

Other random sights along the way included a woman walking her cat (strangely common here) and an old man who was playing fetch with himself. He would pick up a tennis ball and bounce it out in front of him and then walk to wherever it landed and repeat the process. What?

Finally, after about 10km, I hit the Sea of Japan. Sorry folks, no views of the Koreans.

The impermanence of things

2009-10-23T05:22:00.001-07:00

The well ran dry for a bit when it came to blog post ideas. Then, after an impromptu trip to hardware/furniture/bicycle megastore Musashi, something new and exciting to talk about popped into my head-- bikes!

I'm one of the rare few who own neither a car nor a bicycle. I don't know why-- I used to have a bike and rode it pretty frequently as a kid until around age 12, when teenage suburban laziness set in and thus I had no real interest in going anywhere if it wasn't by car. One I hit 16 and could drive myself, forget it!

Around that time, my bike riding just sort of fell by the wayside and never resumed, even after I-- involuntarily, due to a reckless tailgater-- gave up the car permanently. I lived in a city with good-enough public transit and enough things within walking distance that it might have sped things up a bit, but it wasn't really necessary. And it didn't help that I was slightly terrified of San Francisco drivers' recklessness and all-too-frequent blindness to anything crossing the street.

So what better place to get back into bike riding than Japan? Even in Kanazawa, which is very sprawly and car-oriented outside of the dense city center, you will find that Japan is one of the, if not the most bike friendly country in the developed world. Bikes are everywhere; they're cheap, they're plentiful, and (best of all for a chicken like me!) you can ride them on the sidewalk, avoiding all that crazy street traffic. This is especially good for me, as our building is situated on a fairly busy 4-lane street on a direct route from the train station, with a fairly high speed limit and all of the craziness that might suggest. Biking on our street is not for the faint of heart, although I occasionally see it happen.

Like I was saying, Andrea and I happened to be at Musashi-- an odd big box store that resembles a cross between Home Depot, Wal-Mart and Ikea-- when we saw their outdoor bicycle display. She immediately fell in love with one cute little model with a basket on the front. Meanwhile, I became interested in the folding bikes, simply for ease of storage and the possibility of shipping it home later on when we move back to the States. Then, I saw it-- one folding bike, a Musashi house brand, that looked just as good as the others. Best of all, it was only 9500 yen brand new, or around 100 bucks. That was by far the lowest price I'd seen on one of its kind! Considering that we've found it next to impossible to find used bikes for sale anywhere in Kanazawa, this was probably as good as it would get, price and quality-wise.

We both had to wait for our respective paydays to return to claim our models of choice. That day (today) finally came, and we took off with anticipation to Higashi-Kanazawa station, just down the road from Musashi. When we came up to the bicycle area, our hearts sank-- our favorite models were gone, taken off display, presumably meaning "sold out." While Andrea found one close enough to her original favorite, all of the other remaining bikes they had were almost twice as expensive as the one I had my eye on, which is more than I'm willing to spend at this point. It never crossed our mind that they might be gone so quickly, although perhaps it should have.

Despite being a wealthy country with an endless array of every conceivable consumer good, Japan has an odd habit of pulling certain things off the shelves for no reason, or intentionally limiting supply, or making things available for a limited time only. This is most obvious at the grocery store-- a certain product might be available for 2 weeks straight in great abundance, then mysteriously disappear for weeks, then suddenly reappear for a few days, then disappear for a few days, etc. This happened with soy ice cream at the train station's grocery store, a good I happen to know isn't in particularly high demand in this country. But it's true of lots of other things-- just because there's 20 of something innocuous today doesn't mean it will be there tomorrow.

The lesson, kids? When you're in Japan, don't take any purchasable good for granted, because it may very well disappear for no discernible reason whatsoever, especially at the least opportune time. I'll keep my eye out for another great bike deal, but I'm not keeping my hopes up.

Round one, fight!

2009-10-14T01:27:00.000-07:00

If you grew up in the Bay Area, you've probably been to at least one Scandia birthday party. You might have thought it was fun. You were wrong. It was not fun. This is due to the fact that Scandia is not Round 1, which only exists in Japan.

Round 1 is Scandia on steroids. I don't even know where to begin. For about eleven bucks you get 90 minutes of unlimited access to an arcade, ping pong, bowling, roller skating, mini motorcycles, mini golf, badminton, fishing (yes, live fishing), basketball,

batting cages, karaoke, virtual golf, billiards, archery, volleyball, tennis, and even a mechanical bull. Yes, we rode it.

Inexplicably, Round 1's mascot is a white lady in a feather headdress.

Melor Mejor

2009-10-07T17:38:00.000-07:00

Wednesday was pretty dull at school. All my classes were canceled so that students could prepare for the school festival, so I basically alternated my time between saying hi to the kids, studying Japanese, and staring into space. Then around two an English teacher walked by my desk and said "the typhoon will be at midnight," and then kept on walking. This was the first I'd heard about this, so I was a little surprised to say the least.

At three the principal announced that students didn't have to come to school Thursday. My American mind immediately went "oh, I don't have work tomorrow. Pajamas and video games, here I come!" This is so predictably American, in fact, that a teacher turned to me and said "the students won't come, but the teachers still come to watch the school. In America, this is strange, isn't it?" So I resigned myself to another day of sitting at my desk--or perhaps holding up trees that were about to fall or repairing roof leaks or whatever else the purpose of having teachers at school during a typhoon is supposed to be.

It's rainy and windy now, but I guess it headed east so we haven't had it that bad. Just seems like what would be called a regular old storm in the Bay Area.

On a semi-related note, at the end of the day a teacher I've never spoken to before came up to me and said in impeccable English, "Do you understand tomorrow's schedule? It is because of the typhoon. In America, this is called a hurricane, isn't it?" This is my first secret English speaker encounter. I'm sort of hoping all of the other teachers are secret impeccable English speakers too, and they will slowly reveal themselves to me, as my Japanese doesn't seem to be improving at all. We've finally signed up for classes, though!

More adventures in the kitchen

2009-10-07T11:45:00.000-07:00

Okonomiyaki, for the uninitiated, is a big fried vegetable pancake with various ingredients and toppings, most popular in the Kansai region of Japan (particularly Osaka) and in Hiroshima. Okonomiyaki restaurants are frequently equipped with hot plates directly in front of the customers so you can assemble your own ingredients and fry it however you like.

Given that okonomiyaki batter typically includes egg (and possibly some type of dashi, a broth that more often than not contains fish), I'm not likely to experience the joy of restaurant okonomiyaki any time soon. But why should that stop me? Thanks to my trusty cookbook, I can prepare some of my own.

Here's the result:

This the second time I've made okonomiyaki. This time, I included sweet corn kernels, fresh shiitake mushrooms, green onions, and cabbage. Slathered on top are a store-bought tonkatsu sauce, which is kind of like a mild barbecue sauce, and a home-made tangy mayonnaise that uses silken tofu as a base, also taken from this book.

I was surprised how much easier it seemed the second time. I'd removed a step by using store-bought sauce instead of making my own, but the first effort left the kitchen counter covered in flour and cabbage bits. This time, things were a lot more orderly, which my OCD-addled brain is much happier about. The other thing was that the mushrooms came out really juicy and tender, which was nice. The overall quality of various mushroom types here seems to be much better (albeit based on my limited experience with them so far!). Maybe they just match my cooking style more. Who knows?

As you can see in this Wikipedia article, there are all sorts of regional variants that involve different types of toppings (noodles, etc.) and different methods of preparation. I think I have my work cut out for me in the coming months!

Flavorful fall in Kanazawa

2009-10-05T05:12:00.000-07:00

Soymilk has sort of been the unsung staple food in my diet. I use it in just about everything; on cereal, as a creamer in tea and coffee, in cookie and cake batter, and various other recipes... but apart from one very sugary brand from Singapore called Yeo's, I've never really been that keen on drinking the stuff by itself. It's not awful, but still not good enough to drink a glass of it unless you've had a mouthful of some rich chocolate dessert thing that you need to wash down.

I'd heard several times that the soymilk in Japan is not good. Coming here, I didn't know what to expect; on the first night we came here, we took a trip to the grocery store on the bottom floor of our building. One of the things we immediately latched on to was Cocoa Krispies (pretty the only U.S. cereal widely available here) and the only soymilk brand, which had a friendly (if all-Japanese) green and white container with the now-familiar characters that read tounyuu.

This stuff tastes pretty different from your standard U.S. brands (Silk, Vitasoy, etc.) but the effect is the same: not good enough to drink on its own, but fine as an ingredient or complement to other foods. It wasn't until we took a trip to the Hyakuban-Mart, a slightly upscale supermarket inside Kanazawa Station, that I saw how much wider the Japanese soymilk world is!

They all come in single-size cartons, and by my count there were at least a dozen flavors! Banana, strawberry, black sesame, jasmine tea, azuki bean (my favorite)... so many to choose from! I've tried almost all of them, and they're fantastic. One of the best yet is a seasonal flavor that they've just recently come out with for the fall:

That, my friends, is ~~fried~~ roasted sweet potato-flavored soymilk. The taste is great, but I think I love the idea of it more than anything.

The only bad part is that all of these flavored soymilks only come in these small sizes. I would probably buy a gallon of the azuki bean flavor if I could...

Speaking of sweet potato, Andrea and I had the interesting experience of being woken up at 8 AM Saturday morning by a fried sweet potato (yakiimo) vendor with one of those annoying loudspeaker vans that I thought had finally gone away. He had an oddly sad, minor key melody to promote his goods, along with lyrics very loudly proclaiming the deliciousness of his yakiimo.

So I guess this is how you tell it's fall in Japan: yakiimo everywhere. Forget leaves changing and any of that other crap.

And finally, this is how you can tell it's no longer summer in Ishikawa:

Hey, I'll take it over summer!

But where's the super zutsuki?

2009-10-01T01:28:00.001-07:00

Hakui is a small city about an hour north of us. (Special trivia, the city's name, 羽咋、 translates to "mouthful of feathers"). Besides a UFO museum, the city is famous for its annual Sumo festival, which we were lucky enough to attend this year.

It's in a natural outdoor amphitheater, the oldest of its kind still operating in Japan. It's an amateur tournament and totally free. We were much closer to the action than if we had spent the hundreds of dollars it takes to see a professional tournament.

Since it was an amateur tournament, some of the wrestlers were almost comically small. This little guy was quite spirited, though, and held his own in the first round.

Second round not so much.

There were some pretty spectacular throws over the course of the evening. After the final match each team carried a wrestler on their shoulders all the way to a shrine almost a mile away.

Love Hotels: cheap and surprisingly sanitary Japanese accomodation

2009-09-30T01:58:00.000-07:00

In Japan, it's pretty common to live with your parents until you get married, but where can young couples go to escape the prying eyes of their elders? Love hotels exploded in the 90's and Osaka is the best city to find a huge variety of them. They can be rented by the hour, but, as more and more travelers are finding, they're the cheapest way to sleep a night in Japan if you want a private room a bit larger than a capsule hotel. They're also super foreigner friendly in that at many of them you don't have to make any human contact at all. Typically you walk into a lobby which is eerily empty and see a big light up display of the available rooms. Hit the button for the room you want and take your receipt to the door, which will probably be flashing. Here's the scary part: the door will lock behind you. You can't freely enter and exit the hotel, so once you're in you're in.

During the boom love hotels got outlandish. Themes can be pretty extreme, but eventually hotel owners decided that girls don't think sleeping in an exact replica of subway car is that great of an idea. Most rooms these days are less alien autopsy and more Holiday Inn. So in Osaka we decided to give the love hotel experience a go. Besides, it was a holiday and we didn't have reservations anywhere anyway.

We declined to stay at Hotel Beaver. Creeeeepy. We ended up at La Foret, which was definitely on the tamer side of things. We did, however, select the tackiest looking room (complete with zebra couch and weird blacklight patterned ceiling). It had far more amenities than any other hotel we've stayed at in Japan, (free karaoke, free video games, giant spa tub!) and at least it lacked the bed bugs of a certain temple we spent twice as much money on in Koyasan.

Super fun electric excitement please ok!

2009-09-29T04:06:00.001-07:00

Like Andrea mentioned, we spent the first few days of our vacation in Koyasan, alternately gazing at enormous temples and graveyards, fighting off insects, eating tasty shojin ryori, and getting scolded for every little mistake by a Buddhist monk with a hunchback. Once we were done there, we headed back to our original transfer point, Osaka, to take in the contrast of big city life.

Osaka is a much bigger city than Kanazawa, at about 6 or 7 times the population. As the largest municipality of the Hokuriku region, Kanazawa has most of the amenities of a large Japanese city, but we lack a lot of the esoteric niche areas and stores you'll find in Tokyo or Osaka.

We spent a large amount of our time at Osaka's Den-den Town, an area devoted to electronics stores, video game stores, arcades, collectibles, and numerous other subcultures with varying degrees of weirdness. Case in point, there was actually an entire multi-level store devoted to Gundam robot toys and models. Not my thing, but I guess it's sort of nice to know that it's there, and that a store that big can be devoted to something that specific and still be sustainable.

It was the second time we'd ever been to Den Den Town (and Osaka in general), and what we were most interested in returning to was a pair of game stores devoted primarily to the burgeoning trend of retro gaming; that is, the console systems of the 80s and 90s, such as the NES, Super NES, Sega Genesis, etc. The best known of those two stores was Super Potato, which is widely regarded as the mecca of old and rare game cartridges and disks. Not to be overlooked is Retro Game Revival, less than 100 feet down the block, which doesn't have quite as impressive a stock but generally has cheaper prices and some occasional good finds among the innumerable shelves of games you've never heard of.

Here's a Mario statue inside Super Potato, plastered with various fliers and hand-written signs:

The one thing we were most excited about coming with was this:

This is a generic version of the Famicom, or the Japanese version of what we know in the US as the NES. This one happens to be shaped as a miniature cocktail-style arcade machine. Sadly, the joystick doesn't work, and probably would be too small to be useful if it did; but two of the buttons function as on/off and reset. It now sits beside our TV any time we need an NES fix, Japan style.

Of course, the machine itself is useless without games, and boy, what games we found in various used bins and crammed anonymously in endless shelves!

What you see to your left is Transformers: Mystery of Convoy. When I saw it, I thought "Cool! A Transformers game for only a buck! Might as well give it a shot." What I didn't know is that this game is notorious in Japan for how horrible it is; in particular, the game is so pointlessly difficult that you die after one hit. You get hit once, you die. You touch an enemy in any way, you die. Unless you time everything perfectly, this will happen within about 10-15 seconds of the game starting. I haven't even made it out of the first level after trying about 20 times and I'm not sure I'd be willing to try. Still, I am happy to own a piece of gaming history, even if it's only historical for being a piece of crap.

I also bought an Ultraman game for 300 yen (a little over 3 dollars). Hey, it's Ultraman... he flies around and blows stuff up, so it'll make for a fast-paced action game, right? Wrong. Turns out it's a ponderous RPG where Ultraman begins by talking on the phone in what looks like a hotel lobby, and then goes outside where he engages in molasses-slow turn based fighting against the same three enemies every 5 inches or so. Lesson learned; cheap for a reason, I guess.

The exception to the various disappointments in random games we picked up is that I found a 100-yen sumo wrestling game that I'd never heard of before. It's mostly repetitive, random button-mashing, but it's a lot more fun than either of the other games I mentioned. Unfortunately, I think the reason I may have it got it so cheap is that the graphics are glitchy, possibly due to the cartridge being damaged.

So, all in all, despite the disappointments I mentioned, I'm pretty happy with my 20 dollar faux-cocktail Famicom. It's just one more piece of evidence in my ongoing series of discovering just how much Japanese kids have it better than we ever did.

One other neat part of Den-Den town is Super Position, a tightly-packed and often-crowded store devoted to all those toys and things that are available for sale in capsule machines. Rows of machines like these are fairly common (although not as common as drink vending machines, which you can see about every 10 feet, even in very rural areas!). So, if it's ever been sold in a capsule machine in the last 2 decades, it's probably at Super Position.

While there were a lot of neat little toys, nothing really demanded that I buy it until I saw this:

That's right. It's a capsule toy of a capsule toy. It's about an inch and a half tall, and inside the upper chamber you'll find miniature capsules. And the thing actually works; if you turn the little dial, out pops a capsule. It's too small to actually contain anything, but for 3 bucks, the idea of it was too irresistible to not buy.

Veggie Osaka adventures

2009-09-28T02:08:00.000-07:00

I have a confession. When I go to restaurants, I don't eat Japanese food. Well, most of the time anyway. I've had some wonderful uniquely Japanese food experiences (conveyer belt sushi, okonomiyaki, etc) but a lot of the time I go for the international places, and our trip to Osaka was no exception. This entry acts as a mini-guide to vegetarian dining in Osaka.

We arrived at Namba station, conveniently close to one of our first destinations: Den Den town (Osaka's electronics, video games, and all around nerd district). Greg remarkably remembered the location of a nearby Indian restaurant. Lala had a large selection of decent tasting veggie curries, but it wasn't especially vegan friendly. Greg ended up with a yoghurt dessert he couldn't eat and the mango juice he ordered was suddenly a mango lassi when it appeared.

For dinner, we went to Axum, probably Japan's only Ethiopian place. Remarkably, the owner remembered us from our previous visit over a year ago. He didn't, however, remember that we are vegetarians so we ordered an item that had no meat listed in its ingredients but it actually had beef in it. He was kind enough to replace the dish with something we could eat. Totemo oishikatta desu yo!

The next day we intended to eat at Cafe Millet, an organic vegetarian lunch place, but, alas, it was closed for the holiday. We headed back to the station and decided to give a random Japanese style curry place a try. Unfortunately they used the same curry sauce for all the curries, so even though we ordered the vegetable curry we ended up with some stringy meat bits in our meals. Moral of the story: never trust the Japanese curries.

That night we ate at Kathmandu, a Nepalese place. It gets my vote for the best meal we had in Osaka. We split an oh so wonderfully spicy soy bean salad (the crunchy nut kind!) and then I had an eggplant and potato curry.

We liked Katmandu so much we tried to go back for lunch the next day, but it was closed. Instead we ate at Maharaja, an Indian place in the basement of Umeda station. We've never had problems getting vegetarian food at Indian places, and the owner spoke English, so I'm not sure what went wrong but we soon found that one of the two curries they gave us had chicken in it. Sigh.

I didn't discover until our return that Osaka has a really good (well, by Japanese standards) mexican place called El Pancho. I think we've exhausted most of the activities we actually want to do in Osaka, but I think we might return just for BURRITOS.

Kitchen curiosities, part 2

2009-09-27T06:39:00.001-07:00

I have a lot to report on our extensive traveling, but I wanted to mention one of my discoveries prior to coming to Japan..

...which I guessed, correctly, would mostly feature ingredients that would be easy to find in Japan. This has certainly proved true for the Japanese-style recipes, of which I've tried several. For example, here's my take on Tonkatsu, which in its original form contains pork; instead, per the recipe, I've dredged pressed tofu in a sticky batter, coated with bread crumbs, deep fried and added a tangy tomato sauce, all over rice.

More recently (read: 3 hours ago), I tried my hand at yakisoba, which is a fried vegetable and noodle dish, also featuring a sauce mainly comprised of tomato, soy sauce, and mirin (sweet cooking wine):

(Sorry for the blurry image. My camera bites.)

At first I was hesitant to start cooking again, because going to buy groceries here and using varyingly strange and different ingredients was such a jarring and alien experience. Cooking in a lot of ways needs to be in a comfort zone for me-- I have all the ingredients I need, I know where all the various utensils are, I know what setting on the stove dial produces how much heat, etc.-- otherwise, it feels wrong, and you can likely taste it in the results. I'm happy to report that as I'm getting more comfortable in our kitchen here, the subsequent food is a lot better.

Okunoin cemetery

2009-09-27T03:28:00.001-07:00

The main draw for us to go to Koyasan besides shojin ryori was Okunoin cemetery, Japan's largest. It's set on a beautiful hillside, surrounded by giant cedar trees.

As we tend to do, Greg and I went exploring off the beaten path. The further away you get from the crowds, the more broken and moss covered graves and statues you find.

You also find more mosquitos, spiders, and then I almost stepped on this guy:

We headed back to the main path after that. A few of the tombstones are fanciful, such as this blowfish one. Perhaps it's for someone who lost his life to Japan's deadliest dish?

Allegedly there is a marker put up by a pesticide company to show respect to all the bugs they've killed, but we never spotted it. There are also a few corporate plots. I wonder how many years you have to put in as a slave like salaryman for the Panasonic corporation before you get a spot in their plot? More pics up on flickr.

Adventures in health care

2009-09-26T06:32:00.000-07:00

When last we spoke, I mentioned there were a few bugs in the temple we stayed at in Koyasan. (I'll eventually post more about our trip). I thought I had walked away with a few minor bites on my hands. They started to get a little itchy on Thursday. Last night, we caught a lovely sumo tournament in Hakui. By the time I returned to Dean's apartment that night, my legs were feeling a little uncomfortable. I lifted up my pants and

OHJESUSWTFHELL.

I thought I'd sleep it off but I awoke in the morning to find that not only was the mess on my legs bigger and redder but in fact my arms, back, neck, and chin were all similarly horrifying. I got some cream but it didn't seem to accomplish anything. Dean's neighbor, the brilliantly good at speaking Japanese Sarah (my new personal hero), happened to be on her way to a clinic so I decided to tag along.

By coming to Japan I was automatically enrolled in the national health care plan. That's right, folks: socialized medicine (dun dun dun). So after waiting in line for eight hours I was told by a death panel that I was too useless to live and promptly euthanized.

...Actually the whole thing took about a half an hour and cost me twenty bucks including the ointment and pills they gave me.

Japanese temple lodging, please

2009-09-24T05:36:00.001-07:00

Japan decided to lump a bunch of holidays I don't know anything about together so I had a five day weekend. Instead of "respecting the aged" and whatever else I was supposed to be doing for these holidays I decided to visit Koya-san, the headquarters of the Shingon sect of Buddhism located in Wakayama prefecture. It has 120 temples that offer lodging, so in making my selection I used the scientific method known as "hey, this one's ten bucks cheaper!" The primary draw of staying in a temple for Greg and me is they are pretty much the only places in the country that understand vegetarianism. When I mention that I'm a vegetarian here in Japan, the conversation usually continues as follows:

Japanese person: But you eat fish?
Me: No, no animals.
Japanese person: So octopus is ok?

Buddhist temples, however, specialize in a cuisine called Shojin Ryori, which is always vegan. By staying at a temple we were assured two carefully prepared vegan meals a day. We ended up at the Haryo-in temple. I must say, I kind of wish we had sprung the extra ten bucks to stay elsewhere. Firstly, they had two kinds of slippers out front: nice looking ones and cheap, crummy looking ones. We were quickly informed that the nice slippers are for "Japanese only." This rule was pretty firm. We saw a mixed couple and the Japanese man was allowed to wear the nice slippers while his Western girlfriend had to wear the vinyl ones. At this point I'm pretty well accustomed to the various rules about shoes (put the slippers on before going inside, take them off to go on the tatami, put them back on to walk to the bathroom, take them off and put on the toilet slippers to go in the bathroom, etc) but the monk in charge was watching me constantly, just waiting for me to slip up. And the room had bugs in it. Lots of bugs. Food was decent, though. But then I got scolded for putting my tea cup on the food tray instead of the tatami. Ugh.

Scene from a Japanese classroom

2009-09-18T05:23:00.000-07:00

Me: Who is your favorite singer?

Student: I like pornography!

Bridge to somewhere (i.e., 3 or 4 meters across)

2009-09-16T01:22:00.001-07:00

I've been meaning to comment on this for a while. About 2 blocks down from our building (between us and the train station), there's this huge, completely inexplicable pedestrian bridge:

This is literally the only pedestrian bridge I've seen anywhere in the entire city of Kanazawa. Andrea claims to have seen one other one, but I chalk it up to heat-induced hallucinations. In some of the busier areas of town, you can find underground walkways, but no real bridges like this.

This one is no mirage, though; it exists, and it exists for no purpose other than to save you a few negligible seconds in walking 100 feet in either direction to a crosswalk. Still, I guess it's not completely useless; it takes a good two minutes for the lights to change, which doesn't seem like much, but I'm used to the wait being much shorter, especially on what seems like a moderately busy 4-lane street.Maybe you could save yourself time, if you just missed a crosswalk light and ran the whole way.

Another curiosity:

On the bridge end near our side of the street are these characters, which read "Horikawa-machi" or "Canal Town", the name of our specific neighborhood. On the opposite end, it reads "Konohana-machi", which is the name of the adjacent neighborhood; our street, as you might've guessed, is the dividing line.

It might seem strange (especially if you're familiar with San Francisco and the ridiculous arguments over neighborhood boundaries) to have such clearly delineated neighborhoods, but they serve a purpose: neighborhood names basically replace street names in Japanese city addresses, and each block and building are assigned a specific number.

This system is the other side of the coin from my earlier post about the convenience of package delivery: addresses are near-useless strings of building names and numbers that only give you a vague idea of where something generally is. If you ever come here, take our advice, which we learned the hard way: draw a map or get very specific directions about where you want to go. You'll save yourself a lot of time and frustration!

Thursdays: the best/worst day of the week

2009-09-11T02:40:00.000-07:00

Somewhere, somehow, the rumor got started that Japanese kids are intensely studious and well behaved. I am here to tell you that this is mere myth. While the few top tier schools might have those stereotypical students, I've discovered that the rest of the schools consist of students attempting to avoid drawing any sort of attention to themselves. It turns out that in Japan a passing grade is 30%, something you can pull off just by showing up. There's not even a need to stay conscious. On Thursday I have what is by far my worst class. There're some really wild kids in it and I'm technically not allowed to discipline them so it's completely out of control. I leave exhausted and hating my job and certain I can't do this for more than a year.

But then I go to Sogo Yogo Gakko. It's the special needs high school I teach at on Thursday afternoons. The school is split into two groups: physical and mental disabilities. At first I was a little alarmed that kids who are perfectly capable mentally have to go to a separate school just because they're in a wheelchair, but the school is so wonderful that I'm pretty sure I would have preferred it over a "regular" high school. It's enormous, (it serves the entire prefecture), beautifully designed building just erected a few years ago. There are more than 150 teachers there, and they're all young, friendly, and care deeply about all of the students. The teacher to student ratio is something like 1:3. My largest class has five people and the smallest has just one student. I adore them. They actually talk to me. They want to talk to me. The first year students exceed the level of many of the third year students at my base school. It's so dramatically different from the class I have in the morning that I don't want to leave when the day is up, and I imagine I could do this job forever.

Election? What election?

2009-09-10T06:16:00.000-07:00

All the hoopla surrounding the election really seems to have died down. Most of the formerly-ubiquitous campaign posters have been torn down, and apart from the occasional news article things seem to be back to normal, which fortunately for us means no more irritating megaphone vans. Save for a few newspaper articles, it's almost like it never happened... that is, until the DPJ actually takes power for the first time in the coming weeks. We'll see how that turns out.

Despite my own interest in the subject, I know a lot of this stuff can be pretty boring in the abstract. That's why I found this hourlong documentary that ran on PBS so fascinating: it's a rare look inside the Japanese political machine, through the campaign of a young, inexperienced candidate.

The candidate, Yamauchi, is an admitted LDP ringer from Tokyo who was sent by the party to run to fill an unexpected vacancy on Kawasaki's City Council. This is a documentary where the LDP bosses really don't come off well, in both their tactics and their attitudes toward the newcomer. Yamauchi himself comes off as a sincere and affable guy (if not especially principled), and you can tell during more candid moments how much he resents the way he and his wife are treated by the party.

There are some unique aspects to the campaign gauntlet that I found quite interesting, but some of the ridiculous events he's forced to participate in are definitely reminiscent of the more embarassing political stunts that seem so common in our own election season. And, yes, like any respectable Japanese candidate, he has his own irritating megaphone van.

Here's the official description:

This is democracy — Japanese style. Campaign provides a startling insider's view of Japanese electoral politics in this portrait of a man plucked from obscurity by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to run for a critical seat on a suburban city council. Kazuhiko "Yama-san" Yamauchi's LDP handlers are unconcerned that he has zero political experience, no charisma, no supporters and no time to prepare. What he does have is the institutional power of Japan's modern version of Tammany Hall pushing him forward. Yama-san allows his life to be turned upside down as he pursues the rituals of Japanese electioneering — with both tragic and comic results.

A little context: this was filmed in 2005, when the LDP was at the height of its modern power under Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who was exceedingly popular primarily for his hairstyle. No, seriously. He was a self-described reformer who made a lot of big promises and charmingly impersonated Elvis from time to time, but only really succeeding at two things: privatizing the postal service and pissing off millions of Chinese and Koreans by visiting shrines dedicated to World War II-era war criminals. Spoiler alert: you'll get to see ol' "Lionheart" himself making a half-hearted speech at a campaign rally for our guy Yamauchi!

You can watch it online right now for free: POV: Campaign. Even if you're not into politics, this is an entertaining little documentary on its own merits.

Only in Japan: Non-horrible mail service

2009-09-08T06:01:00.000-07:00

You know how in the last post, I was talking about what I'd miss the most about Japan? Forget what I said. What I'll miss the most is their system for delivering packages.

In the States, unless you shell out a lot of extra money, you're basically at the mercy of USPS/UPS/Fedex's whims when it comes to getting a parcel in the mail. They could drop it off at 10, 12, 2, 5... who knows when, or even what day? Their general attitude seems to be that we should be grateful that they even bother to show up.

And god help you if you ever actually have to sign for the damn thing. I swear that our postman in San Francisco would intentionally wait until I left the house to "attempt" to deliver a package. That would inevitably lead one of those horrible notes that signified the need for a lengthy and unpleasant trip to the post office. And don't even get me started on the time I had to borrow a car and drive 10 miles to a far-flung industrial park in South City just to pick up a UPS package full of instant noodle lunches.

In Japan, this would rightfully be seen as an obscenely stupid way to do business. The default shipping option here will allow you to select not only the precise date of delivery, but a 2 hour time window in which the package is guaranteed to arrive. And, these time windows typically can go as late as 9 or 10 at night. Imagine that; you can actually opt to receive a package at a time you're going to be home! It's incredibly convenient and it basically renders tracking codes obsolete. Who cares if your package is in Wichita, if you know that you can set your watch by its arrival?

This system is extended to a place that is obvious but seems like a stroke of genius: airports. When we arrived at Narita Airport outside of Tokyo, we had some enormous suitcases and backpacks that we opted to bring with us on the plane because shipping from the U.S. to our apartment would've been cost-prohibitive, to put it mildly. I would've had to drag these giant things with me all the way from the airport, onto two trains, and then stuff them in my small ryokan (cheap traditional-style hotel) room. Then, once the stay in Tokyo was done, I'd have to bring them on train packed with commuters to meet Andrea, and then I'd have to find room on the bus to Haneda Airport. I wasn't looking forward to it, but eventually I found that there was a better way.

I was kind of dumbfounded to discover that at Narita, there are companies who were willing to send a huge, heavy suitcase and a huge, heavy backpack 300 miles, directly to my apartment, between the hours of 8pm and 10pm on the exact day we arrived, all for a flat 16 bucks per bag. And sure enough, on the day of our arrival in Kanazawa at around 9pm, there was the delivery guy with the backpack and suitcase I'd last seen 5 days earlier on the opposite side of the country. And best of all, the one or two fragile items I'd packed were completely intact.

I have a tendency to rave enthusiastically about certain things, but I don't mean to paint a completely rosy picture of what it's like here. It's been more than 5 weeks, and I've fully come to realize many of the minor and major irritations that come with living here. I could probably rattle off half a dozen right now, most of which probably involve the summer heat/humidity and our apartment's lack of insulation from said heat/humidity. But sometimes, seemingly to make up for its more prominent faults, this country completely knocks it out of the park, and it makes you wonder why we don't do things more like them.

Kitchen curiosities

2009-09-07T04:24:00.000-07:00

Two items, submitted for your approval:
1) Garlic. Not just any garlic, though; "Inspirational" garlic. Tasted like regular garlic to me, but maybe inspiration has a subtle flavor.

2) Morinaga Pancake Syrup. Helpfully classified as "Keki shirapu", and at the bottom, we're reassured that it's "Mepuru taipu." Ingredients are basically sugar, sugar, and sugar.

But wait, what's the deal with that cap?

If you open it up on top, it has a very fine spout. Can't get much syrup out of there quickly. But that looks like a second pull-tab underneath... it is! And you get a larger spout:

All of this on a cheap bottle of faux-maple-syrup I got at the grocery store downstairs. I think when I move away from Japan, I'll miss the banal ingenuity the most.

A hundred hand slap in the face of one-party rule

2009-08-31T06:37:00.001-07:00

You've probably heard by now that the long-reigning LDP has been completely pwned, to use a political science term. I thought I should give a closer insight into one small part of the enormous DPJ wave: Kanazawa City, a.k.a. Ishikawa Prefecture's 1st district.

Japanese politics is sort of like The Bachelor, in that media outlets give a rose to each winner. The runner-up, rather than walk away empty-handed, receives an orange rose(?), so I guess they're a little more generous here. In this result, the top guy is the DPJ challenger to the 2nd guy, the LDP incumbent. Kind of a close race; in fact, Ishikawa was one of the last holdout prefectures where they couldn't call any of its three races for several hours because the results were so close.

The DPJ candidate prevailed, ousting the incumbent LDP member whose prior occupation was listed as "pro wrestler." Not sumo, from what I gather, which is kind of disappointing. The LDP's political philosophy (such as it is) is pretty terrible in its emphasis on a kind of socially conservative, semi-corrupt stagnation, but how cool would it be to be represented in government by a sumo wrestler?

And not to be overlooked in third place was the Japan Communist Party candidate, who eked out a respectable 4 percent. As you might imagine, Kanazawa's kind of a hard place to peg politically.

Speaking of sumo, Andrea and I might have the opportunity to attend a sumo tournament up north in Hakui, which is also Japan's UFO capital. We'll keep you updated, since I'm sure you'll want to know if we see any large men in loincloths getting beamed up into a flying saucer.

Japanese apartment, please

2009-08-30T05:48:00.000-07:00

Elections, please!

2009-08-29T04:44:00.000-07:00

During US election season, anyone with a TV or radio will typically have to brace themselves for a deluge of negative political ads. "Senator Jones says he won't raise your taxes, but can you really believe him after he cheated on his own wife? Who will you cheat next, Senator?"

Well, folks, I'm here to tell you that the Japanese have a political messaging system in place that is somehow even more obnoxious and abhorrent-- and I should know, since the election is tomorrow and despite the result being something of a foregone conclusion, the media machine is still going full tilt.

If you've ever seen the Robert Altman movie Nashville, you're already familiar with this campaign style: a van or series of vans with loudspeakers that will drive around town all day, blaring political messages and propaganda to anyone within earshot. Unfortunately, their paths seems to often include the street we live on, and our windows don't really have much in the way of sound insulation. And these suckers are loud-- I assume the thinking is that the louder and more obnoxious they are, the more likely people will be to vote for them. Okay; maybe that works here, I'm not sure.

I'm sure the two main parties, the Democratic Party and Liberal Democratic Party (confusing, eh? Not to mention that the Liberal Democratic Party is the more conservative of the two...) have been using this tactic. Without an obvious sign, though, figuring out which van corresponds to which party can be tough. Squeaky-voiced women are the usual messengers, and their voices are heavily distorted due to the volume being cranked up so high. It doesn't help that my Japanese listening skills are weak, so I don't really pick up most of whatever messages each van might be blaring. I gather that the bulk of what they're saying is "Please vote for [Candidate X]! Please vote for [Candidate X]! Thank you very much!"

Occasionally, you'll see them as you're walking on the street, and the most noticeable ones are always the weird fringe parties. Two stand out in my mind: one is the Happiness Realization Party, whose two main platform planks are happiness realization and being excessively paranoid about North Korea. They're run by some kind of cult group that I don't really understand, but they're nice, they wave from their van, and they have a happy, colorful light-blue van with cartoon birds on it. So, given that they're not likely to pick up any seats in the Diet, I'm okay with them.

At the other end of the spectrum is a party whose name I don't know, but their platform is not that difficult to glean. They drive three huge, menacing black buses in tandem adorned with blood-red lettering and angry, hoarse men shouting through the loudspeakers. The best part is that each bus has its own distinct message going, so the effect is something like three loud, pissed-off men shouting completely different things at you through megaphones all at once, which I imagine produces a totally incoherent noise assault even if you can understand what they're saying. I was later told that they're the "We don't like foreigners" party. Somehow I got the message even when I didn't catch the words.

America has plenty of its own xenophobic lunatics, but they generally have the decency not to rent enormous, intimidating black buses and shout things at you from the street. Instead, they show up at town halls, have their adorable "tea parties" and write anonymous Internet comments about Obama being a Kenyan-born Muslim Communist, and when you have the luxury of being 3000 miles away from all of that, it's all very amusing. But the difference is that in two days, the vans here in Kanazawa will be gone, while back home, the armed peanut gallery will be making noise for as long as I can foresee.

If you want to read more about tomorrow's election and the (major) Japanese political parties, be sure to check out the excellent English-language blog Observing Japan. You might think of it as 538.co.jp.

Freshness Burger: adventures in the "quality, noun" school of Japanese dining

2009-08-29T00:14:00.000-07:00

Freshness Burger is a chain of slightly fancier than average fast food restaurants in Japan. They allegedly have a veggie burger. Allegedly, this is what it looks like. It consists of tofu, lettuce, tomato and AVOCADO. This is the closest I’ve gotten to an avocado in Japan: looking at the picture on the menu at Freshness Burger. I have come to the unfortunate belief that the vegetable burger does not actually exist. Every time I get up to the counter and ask for “bejitabaru bagaa wo hitotsu onegaishimasu” the girl does this adorable thing where she nervously smiles and makes an x with her pointer fingers and covers the vegetable burger on the menu before saying “sorry, sold out.” Every time this happens I sigh and order the fried potatoes. I have come to the following conclusion: the vegetable burger only exists on the menu to sell the fried potatoes. Freshness burger lures in the weary vegetarians with the promise of the cheap burger-like meal they’ve been missing so long and then forces them to buy either the fries or onion rings when they actually get to the counter. The avocado is probably the giveaway. Of course they don’t have avocado.

A trip to Freshness Burger is not a complete disappointment, however, because once you have procured your fries you can hit up the condiment bar.

As you can see, the condiment bar allows you to “taste original with the spice in the world!” They have some sort of intense garlic sauce that makes my mouth water and produce bad scents just thinking about it. I will use freely indeed.

Noto, please

2009-08-27T02:01:00.000-07:00

When we heard we were being placed in Ishikawa-ken, they didn't didn't tell us where in the prefecture we'd actually be. We feared the Noto. The Noto Peninsula is not for the weak. It's rugged, an earthquake destroyed most of what little train infrastructure they had, it gets a hell of a lot more rain than places like Vancouver or Seattle, and the high schools there mostly focus on fishing. We were relieved when we got Kanazawa, but still knew we wanted to visit the Noto. Kris and Dean both live up north and were staying with us for the weekend so we decided to use up the rest of my cultural furlough heading back up with them.

First we took an accidental trip to Toyama. Did you know that the train to Wakura Onsen splits and half the cars go to a completely different prefecture? We sure didn't!

Eventually we got to Wakura Onsen.

We were going to take a bus to the Noto-jima Aquarium but a kind cab driver gave us an offer we couldn't pass up so we got in. He started pulling over and asking us if we wanted to take pictures of various things and my heart started to sink thinking he was trying to run up the fair. Once the meter reached the price we had discussed, though, he simply shut it off. He got us a discount at the aquarium and told us how to catch the bus back, too. Only in Japan.

The Noto reminds me a lot of the Olympic Peninsula. It's what western Washington would look like if it rained twice as much so that the greenery looked impenetrable and they didn't do so much logging and they put vending machines up every thirty feet.

From Wakura Onsen we took a train to Anamizu. We ate at CoCo's, a faux-American diner. Kris had the taco salad. It had hard boiled eggs in it.

We had to stand on a dark road and wait for a bus to the Noto airport, which was where Kris's car was parked. We've become so used to Japanese punctuality that we started to panic when the bus was four minutes late.

We got the car and made our way to Wajima for their big festival, the Wajima Taisai. The point of the festival seemed to be to give groups of people so heavily intoxicated they can barely stand twenty foot tall lanterns to carry around. Sometimes they would inexplicably spin them as fast as they could, inevitably injuring half the people trying to carry the heavy thing.

The other point of the festival is to try to get other people as drunk as possible. Poor, innocent Greg was handed a huge water bottle shaped jug and somehow assumed that it would actually contain water. In Japan if your blood alcohol is anything above zero you can't drive, so this gulp was the first time Greg has officially been drunk by the standards of the law. The guy who gave Greg the bottle told us he's been to America three times. Each time was to go to the Grand Canyon.

I've been concerned at my job about trying to get kids to speak English because the majority of them seem to be painfully shy. At the festival, however, we were insanely popular. Apparently the best way to get kids to speak English is to get them incredibly drunk. I must have had about fifteen "America, high five!" conversations with intoxicated 15 year-olds.

Eventually we turned in for the night. If I am to continue with the Noto as Olympic Peninsula metaphor, Kris lives in Forks. Actually, Forks is more densely populated. He's the only Westerner within a 30 minute drive. The next day he took us to Yanagida's official restaurant/pirated movie rental house/library/internet cafe/used car lot where the owner kindly obliged all of our vegan/vegetarian requests. Our four course feast cost us all of six bucks. Kris is going to be ridiculously rich by the end of all this. He has a three bedroom house to himself and he only pays a hundred dollars a month for it.

The Noto is gorgeous, but it was nice to get back to Kanazawa where you can actually half understand the old men sometimes.

How is bagel formed?

2009-08-26T02:32:00.000-07:00

We were in Tokyo for 3 hot'n'muggy days before coming to Kanazawa, and in that time I've basically come to understand what it's like to be a glazed ham in an oven. This is my roundabout way of explaining why I haven't been posting, which has about 75% to do with constantly feeling like I'd been in a sauna for 3 weeks straight.

Anyway, when I was hanging around Tokyo, the OH WOW HOLY SHIT NEW AND EXCITING food was apparently thus:

Like most Japanese bread products, "BAGEL" is overpriced, poofy, greasy, and distinctly unsatisfying on multiple levels. Oh well. At least they have baguettes that are decent here! Not to mention my new favorite "can't believe it's vegan" item, which is a green tea-based bread roll with sweet red beans (aka azuki, Hokkaido's own highly addictive cash crop).

Oh, and to follow up on Andrea's last post, I thought I should give mention to something we found adjacent to the train station in Hakusan, which we dubbed the best/worst playground of all time:

When you're done watching the trains go by while sitting on a bell pepper (or, if you really want to go crazy, a lemon!) then you can drink out of the semi-decapitated penguin's skull. Then go ride a panda like a horse!

Japan has this weird dual thing going on when it comes to children's play structures. Either they're crazy-technically-advanced and elaborate and make me jealous of kids who grew up here, or they're these depressing, rusted, low-rent playgrounds that look like they came out of some demented Soviet politburo trying to crush children's will before they grow up to be counter-revolutionaries. Lesson learned: if you're going to be a hyperactive, hard-to-please Japanese child who's easily entranced by flashing lights, best to stick to a major city.

Haku-san adventures

2009-08-26T01:05:00.000-07:00

On Sunday we attempted to play tourist with mixed results. First, we had lunch at Noppokun, a vegan cafe in the southern section of Kanazawa. They have a fun system where they have sample dishes next to little knitted balls. You fill your rice bowl with the knitted balls of the dishes you want. I had a salad that was quite good, tempura that was super good, and curry that was nice but Greg has made equally tasty Japanese style curry at home for cheaper. After eating we went to the organic grocery they have on the first floor and found VEGAN DOUGHNUTS. If there's one thing Greg never expected to find in Japan, it has to be vegan doughnuts. Surprisingly, they also had a few frozen veggie meat substitutes.

Our next stop was supposed to be Tedori Gorge. It looks very pretty, but it is hard to find precise instructions about how to get there. I thought I had read it was near Tsurugi station so we got out there and walked along the river for a while.

By the time we had reached the final station on the train line we could tell the gorge was a lot further than anticipated. We switched plans and visited Shirayama-hime shrine. Then we took a gondola up to Shishiku, a peak that has skiing in winter, but mostly acts as a launch point for paragliders during the summer. Even though they were inexplicably shaped like tater tots, Greg enjoyed his vegan doughnuts.

The top of Shishiku has many depressing activities for children. For example, they have depressing polar bear playgrounds.

They also have depressing astro turf sledding.

Kenroku-en and Modern Art

2009-08-21T16:43:00.000-07:00

After far too many days without a break, I finally had two days off to check out my new home, Kanazawa. Since we’ve landed it’s been unbearably hot and humid. My San Francisco fog accustomed body does not approve of the sudden change in climate I’ve forced it through. I’ve never before been in a place where it can be in the upper 80s and suddenly start pouring rain extremely hard.

On my first day off, however, I quickly learned that the rain is something to be thankful for. It was the first day without overcast skies since I got here and it was absolutely unbearable.

So we went to Kenrokuen, Kanazawa’s main tourist attraction and rated as one of the top three gardens of Japan. As pretty as it might be I didn’t enjoy a minute of it because I spent the entire time running from shaded area to shaded area, keeping an eye out for benches should I need to pass out. I got a few pictures, but I think I’m going to wait until fall before I head back.

Lucky for me, the Museum of 21st Century Art is across the street from the garden. A significant portion of it is free, including the air conditioning! The building is a giant circle and they have art bikes you can take a lap on.

This an awesome if a little OCD ongoing exhibit in which the artist is creating a giant maze entirely out of salt.

A dip in the pool sounds good right about now…

Japanese internet, please

2009-08-21T01:40:00.000-07:00

We finally have internet!!! Here’s a too long summary of events you probably shouldn’t bother reading to get you up to speed.

August 2: We land in Tokyo and have to split up at the airport. I take a bus with the other JETs to Keio Plaza Hotel, a pretty fancy place in Shinjuku. I immediately pass out because I’ve been awake for 22 hours.

August 3: I sit in a giant room with 600 people listening to long speeches. I finally meet half of the new JETs in my prefecture and we all go out for karaoke that night.

August 4: After another day of meetings and workshops Greg and I escape to have dinner at The Loving Hut, a vegan restaurant run by the all knowing Supreme Master, who apparently has restaurants scattered across half the planet. She is a creepy cult figurehead, but how I love her food. We then hit up Odaiba, a man made island that has a lot of arcade and amusement attractions. We see thousands of people looking at a giant robot as “Auld Lang Syne” plays over loud speakers.

August 5: We wake up super early and take a bus to Haneda airport where we catch a plane to Komatsu in Ishikawa. They had stressed how important it was to look our best so everyone is in suits. My supervisor shows up to pick me up in jeans and a t-shirt. In the car we listen to The Eagles and Christopher Cross as he seems to take the most ridiculous route to Kanazawa. I’m glad I don’t have to drive here, as we seemed to be spiraling our way up the coast by making a long series of right turns through residential neighborhoods. We grab coffee, go to my main school for all of three minutes, and spend an hour signing papers for the apartment. Eventually we make it to the apartment, and find that all of the furniture has been taken apart and stored in the bedroom. We have a long night putting it all together.

August 6: My supervisor picks us up and we have a hectic day getting our personal seals, gaijin cards, bank accounts, and cell phones. Paper work is extensive and everything seems to take an hour longer than you’d expect it to in America.

August 7: My first day at school. It’s summer vacation so I basically sit at my desk all day. I have to introduce myself to the principal in Japanese in a very formal manner which is a little scary and it’s very hard to get any questions answered but other than that it goes ok.

August 8-10: I still haven’t had a day off and I would kill for one but instead I have to head up the coast to Hakui to help run a summer seminar for English students. It’s a pretty relaxed atmosphere and we mostly just play games with the kids. I meet all the other Ishikawa high school JETs and immediately have to get naked with them because the facility’s baths are Japanese style. On an unrelated note, the Japanese sure do love their Michael Jackson.

August 11-12: I finally get two days off and Greg and I spend them exploring Kanazawa. More on this later.

August 13-17: Ishikawa JET prefectural orientation happens. There’s a bar crawl Friday night that Greg and I go to just to meet people, but being the nondrinkers at a bar crawl isn’t much fun so we head back to our place at midnight. Kris from Alabama and Dean from North Carolina both live in the Noto Peninsula which is hard to get to from Kanazawa, so they crash at our place for the weekend. We go on a walking tour and a special diets tour.

August 17-18: On Monday I go to a team teaching workshop. Tuesday I finally go back to school. I work on my self introduction lesson.

August 19: Ishikawa ALTs (assistant language teachers) have this wonderful thing known as cultural furlough that lets us have five days off work to travel within Japan whenever the students are on vacation. If I had more time to plan I probably would have taken a trip to Hokkaido to take a break from the humidity, but instead Greg and I take a slightly less epic trip to the Uniqlo near Kanazawa University. I buy a thin cotton skirt because it’s bloody hot.

How are you gentlemen?

2009-07-30T20:20:00.001-07:00

Guten tag mis amigos, this is Greg. I don't have a whole lot to add to Andrea's post thus far (we're in the middle of a harried packing'n'moving frenzy) but I thought I should drop in to mention that I, too, have reasons for wanting to live in Japan that are as vague and imprecise as the Japanese language itself.

During our two-week stay in April 2008, I took so many photos that I swear I could feel my digital camera getting heavier as the trip progressed. In doing so, I found an image that I think expresses the real motivation for this upcoming odyssey of ours. More than the impressive natural beauty, fascinating history, technological marvels... more than any of that crap, the real reason I want to move to Japan is because I want to fully experience a culture that was capable of producing this:

What you see above is an arcade game in which you throw as many little plastic balls into an oversized novelty Cup of Noodles in 60 seconds. The lid-flap-thing curls up and down with an indescribably odd quivering motion. As you might imagine, American Skee-ball just doesn't compare.

And that, folks, is how juvenile I really am!

Japanese blog, please.

2009-07-29T17:30:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Andrea and Greg's blog, Japan, Please. I had debated whether or not to do the blog thing for our time living in Japan but then I remembered the formula: young+white+middle class+living in a country where English is not the primary language=blog. Please enjoy and comment. If you're bothering to read this I probably know and miss you.

When I tell people I'm moving to Japan to teach English the first thing they usually ask is why I picked Japan. I think my desire to live in the country can be summed up by a story about when I visited Japan a year ago. Greg and I went to an indoor arcade/amusement park in Tokyo called Sega Joypolis. We eventually decided to go on something called "The Room of Living Dolls." We entered a dark room with our young Japanese ride operator. He pointed to some chairs and said, "please." He gestured toward a doll sitting at the head of the table. He was probably supposed to give an elegant speech about the significance of the doll, but the best he could muster was, "Japanese doll, please." He repeated this a few times, directing us to various other dolls scattered about the room. He then pointed to the headphones on the table and said, "headphones, please." We put on our headphones and our host bowed, said, "please," and left us alone in the now pitch black room. For the next seven minutes we listened through our headphones to the sounds of a woman telling what was likely a ghost story with increasing intensity. We couldn't understand a word of it. Sometimes she would scream. Sometimes it sounded like she was eating something. Once or twice our seats dropped down an inch or so. At a seemingly random point the lights came back on and our host returned. He pointed to the door. "Please."

Simply reading this, it probably sounds rather mundane, but it was really one of the strangest things I had experienced for quite some time. And that's what I liked about it. I'm so accustomed to how everything works in my home country that it was starting to feel a bit dull. I want to go to Japan because even something as dumb as going to an arcade becomes a thrilling experience due to the fact that I have absolutely no idea what's going on.