Adventures in Japan

Another Video From Japan

One of my regrets from our stay in Japan was when I missed Kishen's birthday in Ninja town.

I never did make it to that ninja town, but I did make it to another. Iga was, so they say, a ninja village. Full of ninja-y goodness. If it wasn't before, it is now. Ninja houses full of weapons and hide-y holes and such. With stage shows and a museum and other assorted goodness.

Food-y goodness. Delicious meat cooked right in front of you. And awesome local beer.

And, of course, the rare and elusive ninja bento.

A Re-Begining-ing

It has almost been a year since we last posted. It has been a little over a year since we left the supreme awesome-ness that is Japan.

We miss it so.

But back to my point: it's been a year. So where the hell is the video? I had a video camera over there. I shot stuff. Lots of stuff. So where is it?

Hopefully here. Hopefully soon. I post this now because it is easy. I will work my way up to stuff that I actually need to edit and set to music and such.



I miss the holy heck out of combinis. They were almost always full of new and interesting things. Some good, some bad. Some mind breakingly weird. Like Green Tea Coke or Soy Sauce Pepsi. Those are two things out there, right now, in Japan. And I have no way of punishing my body with them. It makes me sad.

Day Today: Pictures Later

Yeah.

Day the Rest of Our Lives: Canada

This will not be broken up into days, because this is a blog about our adventures in Japan and seeing as we are no longer in Japan this log is pretty much done but Japan is in us now. So if Japan is always in us now, then we will always be in it. Or maybe not, I didn't pay too much attention during my logic classes.

But these are our thoughts as fresh off the plane re-inductees into Canadian life. Saskatchewanian life.

Dear god this place is big and flat. The sky goes on forever, there is a depth to everything that we had forgotten about.

The nights are colder than I remember. Not cold. But an overshirt is never a bad idea.

Lumsden beach is still one of my favourite places in the world.

The food is big in size and flavour (except for airport food, the most money I've ever paid for the least flavour), the beer is better than we remember.

Umeshu is loved by everyone.

Nathan and Crystal's wedding was a great. And a great way to get re-acclimated. Perogies! Caesars! Country and Western music! (seriously? Honky Tonk Badonkadonk? Really?) If someone could somehow harness Crystal's energy we would never ever have an energy crisis ever again. That girl is amazing!

Our tiny Japanese stomachs took way less time adjusting to North American serving sizes than we would have liked.

Puppies are cute.

Puppies are not cute when they pee all over the place.

We've seen hot, still days (perfect for a wedding on a beach), thunderstorms, driving rain, beautiful sunsets, lovely sunrises and all sorts of other weather. None of it sticky.

Less than a week in and I've already been visited by folks wanting to help me better understand the bible (It is never the bible though, it is their bible). They never give me a satisfactory answer vis a vis their policy on zombies.

A note to the people in Japan: I have a copy of Rock Band for PS3. I just need to get a PS3 now.

Pop music is so much better when you can't understand the lyrics.

PEROGIESBACONSTEAK!!!

Day Done: So Long and Sayonara Sapporo

This is it. The last day. And a very short day to boot. Wait. No. It was a very long day. With not enough of it spent in Japan. And most of that Japan time was spent either in or on the way to airports.

We got a nice early start, because we only had e-tickets and for some reason could not check ourselves in over the web. Still got decent seats from Sapporo to Tokyo. But couldn't book our seats from Tokyo to Toronto, or get our luggage checked through. So a little more bother than we had wanted, but still no worries.

In Tokyo we managed to grab some emergency exit seats (hello legroom!), cancel our phones (with slightly more drama than we would have liked) and pick up a few more souvenirs before catching our flight. Seriously, we didn't ever stop moving.

Which really sucked for me. Because at some point whilst I was sleeping the night before soemone replaced the inner workings of my foot with napalm. Ow. And I couldn't lag. Our flights were too close together to dawdle.

So my lower right side was in pain. Or maybe all this talk of, all of this dwelling on the pain in my foot is just symbolic. I'm writing about the pain in my foot, but really I'm talking about the pain of leaving this amazing country. But I don't want to sound like a big baby. Too manly to mention how damn near everything is moistening up my eyes (damn you vinyl cafe and your gentle pulling of my heart strings! Don't you know of my delicate state?). So instead of dwelling on the sadness of the situation, I expound on pretend podiatric pain. Subtle, eh?

Except no. My foot really, really hurts. Leaving sucks, but so does my foot.

The plane did not suck. Even though it was Air Canada.

But Carla spent scads of time making sure that we were going to be flying on the newest of the new. And it paid off. The seats were comfy and they all had their own entertainment units. And our seats had legroom to spare. From time to time Carla would stick her feet straight out and wiggle them. And giggle. And I think the altitude had some kind of healing properties. My foot felt much, much better.

The free booze was a delightful bonus.

And the entertainment options were a perfect balance of stuff we wanted to see (Charlie Wilson's War) and stuff that would put us to sleep (10,000BC). We wanted to make sure we had enough sleep to make it through a full day in Toronto.

We kinda sorta did. Make it through the day. We stayed in a hotel near the airport but nothing else. There was nothing to do but notice how annoying it is to understand everything on TV. And how big serving sizes are and how much everything costs.

We missed Japan before we left, now we miss it more.

The Post That Ryhmes With Fun

Yup. Back in the Queen city. Landed and safe and decidedly non-corpsified. And playing with a pretty puppy.

A Quick Note

I had wanted to be done with the blogging before we left this country, but my words aren't working right now. Sorry.

We have to catch a plane in a few hours, so I reckon we should get some sleep.

The last day and a half of blogging should hopefully be up within a couple of days.

And we will be landing in Regina around 10 am on Thursday.

Good night.

The Last Full Day In Japan: Sapporo and Otaru

Everything today had an extra layer of crispy sadness. 'This is our last trip on a JR train.' 'This is our last soft ice cream cone.' 'This is our last sunset.' And so on.

We really don't want to leave. It was kind of exciting when we left Canada lo those many years ago. Because we knew we would be back. But this is slightly less concrete.

We will be back, but a lot of people will have left by then. It will not be the same.

I had all kinds of lovely and poetic turns of phrase running through my head today, things that would be lovely to see on this very page.

I could remember, maybe, but I don't want to. I don't want to think about it.

I'll just think about what we did today.

We went to Otaru today. It has glass and canals. There was one stretch of the canal that was particularly scenic. You know how I could tell? Not because I said aloud, "This one stretch of the canal is particularly scenic." because I didn't. But I did see a good dozen arteests painting that small stretch of canal. That is in addition to other arteests selling their wares, mainly photos and pictures of the canal.

All the pictures and photos looked nice though.

The other thing that Otaru is known for, as I mentioned above, is their glassware. I could not say for sure, as I did not see any of it. My foot and leg were feeling quite awful and I did not want to slow Carla down. I like glassware. Carla likes glassware. And not just shotglasses.

She kept sending me texts about how lovely the glassware was. She was incredibly taken with a lot of what she saw. She is not all that easy to impress, so I have to say that the glassware there is super duper.

I also cannot tell you if the locally brewed beer is any good. It was just too expensive, so we did not partake.

Instead we went home and watched some crazy Japanese TV. For the last time.

Day Next to Next to Last: No Offense, But We Dont' Want To Leave

We wanted to go to a scenic nearby town. But we got lazy and did not. Maybe tomorrow. Instead we did some more poking around Sapporo. There were a lot of parades going on today.


But not big, fancy parades. Small parades, they had to stop tor traffic. But there were tonnes of them. It was odd.


We wandered around the shopping district and the night life district and up and down many many covered arcades. Always coming across another parade or two.


Somewhere in there we stopped for lunch. Sapporo is known for its soup curry. As soon as I heard that, I knew I had to try it. Carla was much more wary. To her soup curry brought to mind really watery curry. But I talked her into giving it a go. Actually, I think this sign is what finally turned the tide.


And the soup curry was delicious!


I don't know if you can see it all that well, but there is a quarter chicken in my soup. And half a potato, half an egg, half a green pepper, a giant wedge of pumpkin, a giant wedge of carrot, some eggplant, and some corn and cabbage. Patrons are given the choice of how spicy they want their curry. I chose the hottest option. I was sweaty and numb by the end of lunch.

My foot feels numb almost all the time now. Unless I try to walk on it. Then it hurts.

It hurts bad. So bad that I am actually taking pain killers. I never do that. I am a Lukiwski, we are stupid pain magnets. I threw myself down a flight of stairs 28 times. My brother fell off the roof of a house. My father got hit in the face with a baseball bat. My uncle got pummeled with a phone. Said phone had just been ripped out of the wall. This is my heritage. This is what we deal with. We shrug it off. I tell you this to impress upon you how much my foot must hurt.

The painkiller helped a little. As did the all-you-can-drink at the izakaya. The drinks were good and plentiful and so was the food. Here is a picture of me enjoying the food.


This is a nice picture of our hotel.