By the Skin of our Teeth

Our last day in Japan was action-packed.  We wanted to make the most of our remaining time Tokyo, which is such an amazing city it is a crime to waste even one minute here.  So we were up and running early today, knowing we had to be back at our hotel by 3:00 to leave for the airport.  

Our first stop was the Tsukiji Fish Market, the largest fish market in the world.  Ninety percent of Tokyo's seafood passes through this market on a daily basis. It was interesting to see this place in action and to see the variety of seafood they deal in.  The one downside?  The largest fish market in the world also equals the largest fish smell in the world.  It wasn't super stinky, per se, but you definitely couldn't mistake where you were.  From at least two blocks away.  

There has always been one reason and one reason alone I've really wanted to come to Japan.  Sakura.  We've been fortunate to be in Japan at this time of year.  It is cherry blossom (sakura) season and we managed to time our trip just right.  The sakura started blooming a couple of days before we arrived, and by the end of our trip, they had reached their peak in Tokyo.  We had seen the sakura trees blooming all over Tokyo, but usually just a few trees here or there.  There was no way I was leaving Japan without seeing the sakura on a large scale, so after the fish market we headed to the west side of the imperial palace grounds for some sakura viewing.  Sakura are a huge deal here.  Everyone loves them.  There are huge sakura viewing parties in parks all over the city where people just come and spread out their blankets, have a picnic and sit back and drink in the exquisiteness.  And the Japanese not only love Sakura for their beauty, but interestingly enough, for their flavor.  At this time of year the stores are loaded with sakura-flavored teas, jams, crackers, candies and pastries.  If you can add sakura to it, the Japanese are all over it.  Evidently the flavor is sweet and delicate.  Jill tried some sakura crackers and said they were surprisingly good.

Here are some pictures from our walk near the imperial palace.  It was so breathtakingly beautiful, the pictures just can't do it justice.

After our sakura viewing, we had some last-minute shopping to do so we headed out once again to the Nakamise shopping street, one of the overcrowded shopping areas that we had been in at the beginning of our trip.  We thought that maybe it would be less crowded, being a Thursday.  Boy, were we wrong!  It was every bit as crowded as it had been on Saturday, if not more so.  It's kind of hard to power shop when you're surrounded by hundreds of people and can barely get near the shops, let alone inside.  Let's just say that we were up to the task.  We've had to learn how to gently but firmly elbow our way through airports, subway stations and crowded streets.  Dangle the opportunity to buy more useless souvenirs in front of us and it's on for sure!  After all the crowds that we've been in in Japan, Ashley said that she finally gets why, when we go to places like Disneyland, she is always getting bumped and pushed by the large tour groups from Japan and they never think anything of it.  To us here in the States, that behavior is rude.  Her new insight, after fighting the crowds of Japan everywhere we went is that in Asia, pushing is not rude, it's necessary.  If you want to move, you've got to gently push and bump your way along or you're never going to get anywhere.  And no one there thinks anything at all about being pushed or bumped.  I can't tell you the number of times I accidentally bumped into someone and turned to apologize and they hadn't even registered the fact that I had bumped them.  Such an interesting cultural difference.

We left Nakamise at 2:00, thinking that we'd have plenty of time to make it back to our hotel to load up the bus and be on our way to the airport, but ran into a snag at the subway that forced us to take a different subway line that took us somewhat out of our way, which in turn put us behind.  By the time we finally arrived at our station, we nearly had to run the six blocks to our hotel to make the bus to the airport on time.  We made it by the skin of our teeth, but hey, if we weren't pushing the limits to eke out every last minute of fun, it just wouldn't be us.  

It was a whirlwind trip, but we all had a great time.  Our tour guide, Yukiko-san, was very sweet, if a little too quiet and soft-spoken for our group, but she managed to escort us around Japan and show us some amazing sites.  Our tour group was fairly nice, too.  Overall, a great trip and great memories.  Now it's time to rest up and start learning some Vietnamese.  We leave for Vietnam in exactly six months and three days!  Signing off until then.  Sayonara!

    

Lost in Translation

We've noticed something while shopping around Tokyo.  There seems to be a bit of a penchant for putting English slogans and labeling on Japanese products, especially t-shirts.  Now, if you happen across some of this stuff in higher-end stores, you'd never think anything about it.  It reads just like it would in America.  However, if you're shopping in some of the more touristy or funky areas, the results of their translating efforts range from strange to downright hilarious.  Take a look:

Pinch of salt?

My select to cookbook?

Wasabi salt

Crunchy?  Chunky?

AKA a washcloth

And  the winner for our favorite lost in translation item?

Japan is a court reporter's nightmare, lol!

Vending Machine Culture

It seems that the Japanese are crazy for vending machines.  They are absolutely everywhere.  You'll find them in the subway stations, the highway rest stops, around parking lots and on practically every corner.  We'd just be walking down the street, and boom, there's another vending machine.  And I'm not talking about your standard Coke machines or the little vending machines that you can get a Snickers bar or a bag of crackers out of at home.  Japanese vending machines pop out everything from drinks to ice cream to hot cooked noodles and chicken dishes and even sushi.  It's unbelievable the things you can get out of a vending machine here in Japan.  Here are just a few of the vending machines that we encountered along the way.

Of course, we couldn't just see all these vending machines and only buy something as ordinary as a drink, which of course we did do.  Ashley really wanted to try some kind of hot food.  After some deliberation, she chose the french fries.  We figured that there wasn't too much you could do to mess those up.  Ordering cooked food from a vending machine is quite adventurous enough, thank you very much, without adding the threat of salmonella poisoning from tainted chicken.  So we dropped in our coins and the vending machine adventure began.  About four minutes later, out popped some piping hot french fries.

Surprisingly, the french fries were pretty good!  Maybe next time we'll really live on the edge and try something wild and crazy - like ice cream. ;-)

I Think We're Going to Need an Instruction Manual

The potties in Japan are interesting.  Yes, I said interesting.  I know, I know, what could be all that interesting about a toilet?  Well, first of all, unlike in China where you were fortunate to find any kind of sit-down toilet instead of a squatty-potty, in Japan there are lots and lots of traditional sit-down toilets.  And these are not just your run-of-the-mill porcelain thrones, either.  These things have command centers.  

The first time we encountered one of these toilets in our hotel room, Ashley and I thought we were going to need an instruction manual - or a Ph.D. in astrophysics - in order to use the facility.  It was more than a little intimidating.  Fortunately, on closer inspection, we noticed that there are pictures and a few English words, so we finally figured it out.  Another thing that Japanese toilets have that American toilets don't?  Heated seats.  Kind of a shock at first when you're not expecting it.

Here's a public toilet.  You are completely enclosed in a little room, floor to ceiling.  The command center is there, but also a contraption on the wall to hold your baby or young child so that they're not playing around on the floor while you use the facility.  Oh, and most public Japanese toilets have one more feature that their toilets in hotels or homes do not.  Most public toilets also play music.  No, this is not a signal to start playing a game of musical toilets.  It's to ensure your privacy in case there are any - ahem - indelicate noises emanating from your toilet room.  The Japanese - they think of everything! 

 Toilet room fully enclosed from floor to ceiling and labled so you know what's inside - squatty potty or sit-down potty.

Wall-mounted command center.  Note the speaker above for music.

And here's the child seat inisde the stall.  Pure genius!

Memoirs of a Geisha - or Not

After our trip to Arashiyama, we were off to what had been billed in our itinerary as a geisha performance and traditional Japanese dinner.  We were all looking forward to it.  How cool to be able to see the fabled geisha in their enviornment performing their arts.  Oh, what castles we had built for ourselves in the sky, and oh, how they fell at our feet like so much sand.

Our tour bus picked us up at our hotel and dropped the group off about a mile away from a place called Gion Corner, where we were to see the performance.  The walk to the geisha performance was probably the highlight of the whole deal for most of us.  We walked right through Gion, the geisha district, both going to and coming from the performance, and the walk back to the bus was at night so everything was all lit up and really beautiful, especially with all the cherry trees in bloom.

All the way to performance, we saw posters advertising what we thought we were going to see.  And we did actually see a little bit of traditional geisha arts.

Playing traditional instruments - this was expected.

Japanese tea ceremony - also expected.

Flower arranging - no surprises here.

Traditional geisha dancing - I think we were all looking forward to seeing this the most.  And then....

There was this creepy thing, accompanied by three men banging on drums.  This was followed by an ancient "comedy" act that was so not funny I didn't even take a picture of it, which was then followed by this...

This is a giant puppet held and operated by a man in a suit and two dudes dressed all in black and looking for all the world like ISIS executioners.  ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Yeah, to say we just didn't get it is the understatement of a lifetime.  The geisha stuff took all of about ten minutes and the rest of the hour was filled with this other stuff.  It was interesting to see these forms of entertainment that are so unique to the Japanese culture, but I think it was really lost on almost every last American in the group.  

Fortunately, the evening was salvaged by our traditional Japanese dinner.  

This was Ashley's, complete with sashimi and tempura and a nice steak.

This was my gluten-free version.  Steak and veggies, no tempura, different kind of sashimi, no whatever that is in her yellow bowl, no sauce and no green tea-covered jelly dessert.  Instead I got some yummy fruit, salad without dressing and french fries, of all things.  That's another thing the Japanese seem to like - french fries.  They're everywhere.  They're on every buffet, even breakfast.  Very strange.

The green leaf in the upper left corner is actually the lid to your own personal grill that they came around and lit for us. After letting it heat up for a couple of minutes, you remove the lid and grill your own meat and veggies to your liking.  It was really fun and a nice way to end a busy day in Kyoto.

Monkeying Around in Arashiyama

On Tuesday we decided to strike out on our own in Kyoto.  We wanted to go Arashiyama, an area in the northwestern corner of Kyoto where there is a famous giant bamboo grove and a monkey park.  So once again we hopped on the subway and we were off on our adventure.  We thought that we had seen the worst Japan had to offer in the way of crowds.  I mean, you've seen the pictures of shopping in Harajuku and the Nakamise shopping street.  Let me tell you, nothing could have prepared us for the subway in Japan during the morning commute.  It made BART during rush hour look half empty.  You BART riders out there know how packed the train cars get during commute hours.  Imagine being on BART, packed in like sardines and absolutely knowing for sure that not one more person can squeeze into your train car.  At home, people standing on the platform will realize that there is no more room either look for another car or wait for the next train.  If you can't get through the doors, you can't get through the doors, right?  Wrong.  Evidently, we Americans have it all wrong.  In Japan when the subway car is packed, you somehow squeeze in 20 more people.  Clearly, Japan has a no-man-left-behind policy.  In Tokyo, they actually have "pushers," people whose job it is to push more people into the train cars.  You just can't even believe the amount of people squeezed into the space.  You are packed in tighter than tight. 

So after our exercise in Japanese togetherness, we arrived in Arashiyama to see the famous giant  bamboo grove.  It took us a while to figure out where we were going, but we finally found it.  It was really pretty.  I used my phone on panorama mode to take a picture of the girls in front of the bamboo to give you an idea of just how tall it was.

Then it was off to see the macaques of Arashiyama.  These are the same monkeys that you see in the "snow monkey" pictures.  We had to hike up a big, really steep hill to get to them and at the half-way point Mom decided that she was done, totally over it, and she sat on a bench to wait for us.  I think the sign said we climbed up 160 meters, which is higher than Kyoto Tower.  It was quite the climb, but it was so worth it!  This is the view from the top.  

The monkeys were amazing!  There are more than 130 macaques that live up here and they just roam free and walk right around you.  They warn you going in not to look them in the eye and not to try to touch them and you are supposed to stay a  minimum of 10 feet away from them at all times; however, if you're still, the monkeys will just walk right by you.  I looked over at Jill at one point and one was literally inches from her.  These are wild animals, but they seem to be pretty accustomed to humans.  

One of the highlights of our visit with the macaques was the opportunity to go into a wooden building that has wire walls on three sides.  Arashiyama totally got it right and put the humans in the cage, not the monkeys.  You can buy apple chunks and peanuts to feed to the monkeys.  They just climb up the outside of the wire and reach right through and you hand them the food.  It was so amazing!  You really got to see these little guys up close.  Ashley was feeding one monkey in particular for quite a while.  He loved the apples, but we discovered he didn't really like the peanuts.  She handed him the first peanut and he ate it.  The second peanut he held in his lips and then spit it out on the ground.  The third peanut he held in his hand and then dropped it on the ground.  When she handed him the fourth peanut, he took it and threw back at her.  Message received!  This was one little monkey with monkey-tude! We were totally cracking up at him!

After all the monkeying around, we headed back down the mountain and stopped for some soft-serve.  It was a very warm day and we needed to cool down after our trek.  One thing we've all noticed here in Japan - the Japanese people are wild about soft-serve ice cream.  Everywhere we go there seems to be a soft-serve ice cream stand on every block.  Sometimes there's more than one per block.  And they all have long, long lines.  And interesting flavors.  I've never had soft-serve in the States that came out of the machine with chunks of stuff in it - like almonds in the chocolate almond flavor that I had yesterday, or chocolate shavings in the mint chip or cookie pieces in the cookies and cream.  And usually in the States your choices of soft-serve are chocolate, vanilla or swirl.  It's pretty cool to see flavors like green tea and cherry blossom, although none of us have been brave enough to try the more exotic flavors.  

After our visit to Arashiyama, our day was far from over.  We had an excursion booked with our tour group to see a geisha performance and then attend a traditional Japanese dinner.  More  about that in my next post.