Steve: Yes, yes, I
know. It has been quite some time since
my last post. I am sorry. But in my defense, certain not-to-be-named
members of my family did promise to step up to bat and write this one for
me. Yes, I did also buy that swamp-land
in Florida they were selling that I was promised would be great for
development. I guess what I’m saying is
that I’m a little too gullible…
So where were we last time I wrote?
The flight out of Costa Rica was a sleepy one. The transportation company that drove us to
the airport forced us to take a 4:00 a.m. shuttle so that we could be at the
San Jose airport with at least two hours to spare. That meant getting up at 3:45, which was 1:45
a.m. Los Angeles time, and then sitting around in the airport for two hours
after we got through security in a snap.
We flew first to Denver, which is way out of the way, but is at least
better than NYC, which is where we went through on the way to Costa Rica. After customs, the security officers all
looked at us like we were crazy. I guess
most people in Denver in January don’t where shorts and flip-flops. We then boarded our connecting flight to L.A.
and arrived without incident, though a bit weary to be sure.
When we got off the shuttle at the rental car garage we
steeled ourselves for another long wait as we rented our car. To our utter astonishment we were driving out
of the parking lot less than five minutes later. In Costa Rica, you spend no less than half an
hour at the counter even if no other customer is in the office, and usually even
more than that. Rarely is the car you
reserved ahead of time ready. What the
agents are typing on their little computers is beyond me. Just give me the car already! But not in the good ‘ole U.S. of A! Efficiency extraordinaire! Maybe that worldly perspective I so longed
for in my last post can only be realized when we are back home and able to
compare cultures without time clouding our memories.
We spent the next two days in constant motion shopping and
filling out official forms and mailing things and faxing(!) things in multiple
directions. Every errand that we had
left for when things were more convenient had to get done in 48 hours. We did manage to spend some quality time with
my brother, Uncle Mike, and his better half, Aunt Kim. We also got to catch up with an old friend of
mine from highschool who actually says he reads this blog so I had better give
him a shout-out. Hey Jimbo! Carol and I even drove to Pasadena to catch
my other brother, Uncle Rob, in concert performing music he composed for his
latest CD. Cool stuff, but Carol had
trouble keeping her eyes open considering the concert didn’t end until 1:00
a.m. Costa Rica time, and that this was nearly the hour we had gotten out of bed only a single day before.
Los Angeles is already just a blur in our memories. We whisked through rental car return and airport
security and boarded a Singapore Airlines plane bound for Tokyo. This was a twelve-hour flight, but it was the
easiest twelve hours of travel we can imagine.
Singapore Airlines offered us literally hundreds of free movie
choices. FIVE movies, two tasty meals,
and unlimited snacks later we were landing and feeling sad we couldn’t stay for
more. It’s a good thing we didn’t stay
longer, as some in the family were getting far too fond of ringing the call
button and asking for another chocolate bar. We landed in the early evening,
Japan time. After a personal driver
greeted us at the airport and dropped us on the doorstep of our hotel in
downtown Tokyo an hour later, we all went straight to bed for the night at
exactly the appropriate time to go to bed.
We awoke the next morning with very little jet-lag even though we had
been awake for twenty two straight hours the day before. Perfect.
So how was Japan?
Well,
Tokyo did not disappoint.
The
metro-system is unbelievably complex.
But I now consider myself an expert.
My favorite spot was the international fish market.
Maybe twenty square blocks of nothing but
fish wholesalers displaying their wares for all to marvel at.
There was absolutely nothing that swims not
on display. Sea snakes and eels longer
than Yao Ming (yes, I know he’s Chinese, go with it), tuna so big that you needed
a samurai sword to cut it, giant squid and whale and shark and jellyfish and
ray and well, you get the idea.
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| Fish eyeballs, anyone? |
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| Now that's a knife |
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| One view from atop the sky tree. |
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| A different perspective through the glass floor and straight down. Crazy. |
The
other highlight for me was going up the Tokyo Sky-Tree tower and viewing the
sprawling metropolis from 450 meters up.
The elevator was so cool.
Absolutely smooth ascent and descent.
No way to tell you were moving at any point, ignoring the ear-popping
sensation, unless, of course, you happen to be a physics teacher who can not
help but perform certain geeky experiments when on said elevator, even when he
shares it with thirty Japanese businessmen.
For those who don’t know, Tokyo is the largest city in the world.
It is packed tighter with high-rise buildings
like Manhattan, but that dense downtown look goes on in every direction farther
than the eye can see from hundreds of stories above ground.
Think Los Angeles, only every square mile of
it as packed with buildings as dense as downtown.
And the neon lights at night rival the Vegas strip.
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| Drink vending machines are everywhere in Japan. The cool part is that they sell as many hot drinks as cold. The red labels are for the hot drinks and the blue for the cold. |
We saw some cool temples and gardens and such but that isn’t
really what Tokyo is all about.
The
kids and I went to an indoor amusement park (Sega-world) and rode roller
coasters and such in the middle of a mall.
The mall itself was decked out to look like Venice and the Greek islands
and other European locales, complete with marble statues and ceilings with
virtual reality cloudy skies and rainstorms.
These people really know how to go overboard.
Even though we were indoors it felt like we
were on the Mediterannean.
We got treats
at Beard Papas and rode go-carts at the Toyota showroom and gawked at Hello
Kitty stores and Pokemon displays.
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| So many pagodas... |
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| A typical temple. |
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| A typical front gate to a typical temple. |
We had a spanking good time enjoying Japanese futuristic
decadence. But video games and virtual reality are not
the only side of Japan. We were soon on
our way to Hakone, a sleepy little village in the foothills of Mt. Fuji. Again, what I remember most is the
transportation. We took one taxi on either end of the trip and no
fewer than five separate trains to get from Tokyo to our hotel in Hakone. Every transition was a mad rush to catch the
next train, five suitcases and six backpacks in tow. Carol’s mother was along for the Japan
portion of our trip, and you’ve got to give her some credit, because those
transitions were tough for me, much less a grandmother. To make things even tougher, she had the
stomach flu for that day of travel.
Hakone was breathtakingly beautiful. On our one full day there we took a taxi to a
cable car to a gondola that carried us over the mountain to a lake where we
boarded a “pirate ship” for a cruise amongst the snow. We were supposed to be treated to views of
the backside of Mount Fuji from there, but the weather did not cooperate. It was not a huge loss. The rest of the landscape was gorgeous, and
we did eventually get to see Fuji-san out the window of our train back to
Tokyo. The pirate ship was a real kick,
but it was in the low twenties on the lake and frostbite was not out of the
question. A bus ride and a taxi back to
the hotel and we had just spent an entire day in Japan without ever boarding a
train! The hotel was a quaint little
traditional Ryokan hotel where you sleep on a thin mattress directly on the
bamboo-matted floor in your provided kimono and slippers. No chairs, in fact no furniture of any kind,
when the mattresses were in the closet, other than the low table set up for
tea. The bath was a public affair and Josh
and I got very familiar with some old dudes who were obviously more used to the
idea of bathing naked with other men than we were. We kept our eyes closed in there, but the
food was certainly eye-opening. Since it
is so far from any civilization, the hotel offers both breakfast and dinner as
part of the room charge. So we got four
extremely traditional Japanese meals that are indescribable at best, but that
doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.
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| Fuji |
There were twelve courses at dinner. I could identify maybe three of them. Broth with balls of thingamajiggers and a
salad(?) full of whatchamacallits. Fried
things on boiled stuff. How ‘bout some
of this here slimy yellowish paste?
No? You want some more of those
chewy balls in that sour gelatinous stuff?
Howz ‘bout this here meatcakefruitbread dish. Everything was a derivative of some kind of
fish or squid or octopus or eel or sea cucumber. Seriously, even the vegetables were
unidentifiable and fishlike. I ate it
all and raised my fists in the air in triumph, not so secretly coveting Josh’s
kids’ meal of shrimp tempura and lettuce.
I didn’t get any lettuce. And
tempura was far too pedestrian for the adult meal. No, we got eyeballs and intestines and
tentacles, lots of tentacles. Josh even
got a freakin’ burger one night. We
asked the next day if Chloe could please have the kids’ meal as well, since she
didn’t find much that she could force past her lips, but that was out of the
question. She was over the age of 11 and
therefore not entitled. The morning meal
was equally large, equally slimy and equally abundant in fish. We thought we were adventurous eaters and we
thought we liked Japanese food. This
place kicked our collective ass.
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| Part of breakfast |
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| I came, I saw, I conquered. That is just butter in the square dish. |
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| Wondertwin powers, activate! |
Aboard a few more trains and then back into the 21st
century, we next got a healthy serving of Kyoto, with a side of Nara. First meal in Kyoto? McDonalds.
I’m ashamed, yes, but my burger never tasted so good. Carol’s tasted suspiciously like teriyaki
though. Poor Josh was the one feeling
sick now, so he didn’t get to partake in the sinful American yumminess. He spent most of the days train trips with
his face buried in a Ziploc bag, dumping bile for lack of any food left in his
system.
The rest of the eating on the Japan trip was all about sushi
and tempura and noodles and anything we recognized on the menu pictures. It was much more our speed, and usually
pretty yummy. But Japan isn’t only about
food and trains, though in reality, that’s what I’m going to remember about it;
food and trains. The temples and castles
and shrines were incredible. The golden
palace in Kyoto is stunning. One Shinto
shrine just south of the city was absolutely awe-inspiring. You could walk for miles through thousands of
these symbolic Shinto gates up the mountain.
In Nara, the famous bronze statue of Buddha that weighs over one-million
pounds and is housed in the largest wooden structure in the world, is worth a
mention too. The kids’ favorite
highlight was the thousands of wild deer that roam the city in Nara and buck
you until you feed them. The number of
deer cracker vendors in town rivals the number of deer.
Two conflicting outlooks seem to be vying for supremacy in
the overall culture of Japan. It is the traditional, formal, honor-based, samurai-sword
bearing, kimono-clad old school, versus the super high-tech, neon-lit, high
volume, electronic laden, purple haired, in your face new school. It is seemingly a schizophrenic culture with
two hard to mesh identities. We enjoyed
both sides but felt out of our comfort zone in each as well. We appreciated the history and the formality
but missed chairs and carrots. We loved
the Shinkansen (the bullet trains) that flew across the countryside, but we
could have been a bit better served by a little bit less efficiency at
times. At one point we ran to a platform
in Tokyo station to catch a train to Hakone having just disembarked from a
local metro train. The train was a
bullet that was supposed to leave the station at 12:08. We boarded it at 12:04, huffing and puffing
after the kilometer long dash through the enormous station. There were people in our assigned seats! A travesty!
Unheard of for Japan! What
gives? Oh crap, this isn’t our train, is
it? Quick! Get off!
Get that luggage off the rack!
The door closes in Carol’s face.
We’re stuck! This train won’t
stop for an hour, and when it does, we’ll be in Okinawa, or somewhere similar.
(Yes, I realize Okinawa is a separate island, it’s called hyperbole, people.) Bang on the doors! Let us off this train!!! Help!!!!!!
Stupid gringos – part 5.
Yes, they heard us. We
seem to be blessed with an incredible amount of good fortune to compensate for
our equally large portions of stupidity.
They opened the door. That train
left at 12:06. Ours took its place in
the station at 12:07. We had one minute
to figure out if this was the right one.
Japanese is not an easy language to read on the fly! And wouldn’t you think a 500 passenger train
about to embark on a two hour journey at over 100 mph would need to sit at the
station for more than 60 seconds? You’d
be wrong. And so were we.
But did I learn my lesson?
Of course not. Fast forward three
days. We are in Nara, exhausted from a
long day of Buddha gawking and being chased by hungry deer. Carol has the stomach virus now. Grandma is spent from the forced march to the
shrine. We are back at the train
station. Our train isn’t coming. We’ve been here for over twenty minutes. No sign of our train. The one on the other side of the platform has
been sitting there all of this time, packed with people, but not our train. This is highly irregular. Now if we were still in Costa Rica, this
would be par for the course. But this
was Japan we were talking about, and they schedule their bowel movements with
an atomic clock! So Carol says we should
ask someone. Which means I should go ask
someone. She does the reservations. Communication with the locals falls squarely
in my domain. I go over to the conductor
of the train on the other platform to ask what gives. He ignores me through his window. I wave my arms, and raise my voice. It is as if I’m a ghost. “Fine, you don’t want to speak through the
glass? No problem.” I board the train to talk to him with nothing
but air to separate us. The door closes,
the train starts to move. “Are you
&^%#$ing kidding me? Stop the
train! You were literally sitting here
with doors open for almost half an hour.
You pick this five-second span to get moving? Stop the &^%#ing train!!!!!!!!!”
Visions of Okinawa riddle my consciousness again. He stops.
He calls it in. “Permission to
open the doors?” “Hai, let the stupid Gringo
out.” “You’ve put me off my schedule by
15 seconds now. I hope you’re happy.” That’s the face I get when I say my overly
contrite thank-you’s and bow multiple times as I back off the train. Our train never did come. That is because we were on the wrong
platform. There are two green line train
platforms bound for Kyoto. We should
have known the difference. After all it is
written there plain as day on the sign, in bold Japanese characters.
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| At least we know it is platform 5! |
We left Japan just as we had found it.
We didn’t break anything, we think.
Though with all of those buttons on the
toilets it was touch and go for awhile there. Seriously, I understand the Bidet thing but what were the other 13
buttons for? I certainly wasn’t going to push them to find out!
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| A typical Japanese toilet. |
We said
good-bye to poor Grandma in the airport as she had to wait seven hours to board
her flight back home but we had to get moving for the next leg of our
adventure.
Once again, we got to use
Singapore Airlines, so once again the flight was so painless that I’m not sure I
really was ever on an airplane.
Three
movies later (“Lincoln” was awesome, “Argo” was pretty darned good too.
Can’t even remember the third one…) and we
were in Singapore, otherwise known as the Land of Oz.
This place is so clean you could eat off the subway
track. Everything is in English, as it
is the official language. Though when
you speak to a native, you can’t understand most of what they are saying as the
Malay accent is so thick. But there is
no issue with boarding the wrong train since reading is a breeze! We walked the Riverwalk and ate at the famous
hawker stands. We clicked lots of photos
at the crazy hotel with a full size cruise ship on top, fifty stories or so up. We debated whether or not to board the
largest ferris wheel in the world and decided to save the hundred bucks to
spend instead on Cambodian visas that probably won’t arrive in time. That story is for another post, as the ending
to it has yet to be decided.
Our new best friends, Dan and Annette, whom I met briefly
twenty years ago, have housed us for four nights and fed us most every meal
along the way. So we have plenty of
extra money to waste now. Not a
problem. Wasting money is a specialty of
ours. Dan has driven us back and forth
to downtown a couple of times and the drivers here are crazier than in Costa
Rica. Though that perception may be due
to the fact that they drive on the wrong side of the road here (damned Brits!)
and so crazy lane changes are also coming from an unexpected direction. I’m just glad we have worked it so that I
don’t have to drive here, or anywhere in Asia, for that matter.
In Singapore, a family of four can have a fantastic meal at
an upscale hotel restaurant for an ungodly price, or can have a fantastic meal
for eight bucks when bought from the hawkers on the street.
We’ve done both.
Singapore food is a combination of cuisines
from every Eastern Asian nation.
The
choices are endless.
Carol ate this
fruit called durian which smells so bad that it is banned in most locales, but if
you plug your nose and tilt your head to the left between 25 and 35 degrees
from vertical, you can actually enjoy the taste, or so she says.
I ran for the hills when I caught a
whiff.
The natives supposedly love
it.
They just have to wait to eat it
when they are downwind of a skunk or a city dump.
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| Part of a whacky new city garden at the marina in Singapore |
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| Chinese New Year celebrations are in full swing in Singapore. Chloe, of course, was born the year of the golden dragon. |
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| Yes that is a cruise ship on the 57th story of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel. |
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| And here is the view from the top of that hotel. |
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| And in another direction... Singapore is beautiful at night. |
We have basically spent most of our time chillin’ out at the
Hagawiesche’s beautiful house enjoying talking to people other than ourselves. We are refilling our energy reserves for the
bus to Malacca, Malaysia tomorrow. From
there we bus to Kuala Lumpur, fly to Angkor Wat, Cambodia, and then continue on
to Thailand. The destinations are
getting more exotic, and with that we get more nervous. The problem with all this travel is that one
only gets comfortable in a place just in time to leave it for the next
one. But the experiences are piling up
and I, for one, am the better for it.
Sometimes I think I am the only one in the family who is enjoying
him/herself. The incessant planning has
worn Carol thin, and the kids would be happy never to see another subway system
or temple or waterfall and just want to play video games. But that is just what they’ve been able to do
here in Singapore. Josh has played Mario
Cart for nearly forty-eight straight hours with Brian and Adam, Annette’s sons, and
Chloe is already pretty tight with their thirteen-year-old daughter Gabby. They don’t want to leave this oasis of
western wonderment, and I can’t say that I blame them. But leave we must. Next time I write it might be from on top of
an elephant…
