Adventures in Japan

Six Geese A Laying

Every Sunday in this here town they have a Sunday market. You know what you need when going to market? Money. We woke up early and went around to all the banks Carla found last night and tried to take out some money. No luck. Feeling discouraged, we went back to the hotel to call a support line to figure out what was up. As it turns out, Carla's card only starts working in these particular bank machines at nine in the morning. I know, this country does not make any sense to me either.

Money freshly in hand, we set out for the market. We ended up not buying anything. But we did find a cool coffee shop.


That is indeed coffee Mephistopheles. Located right next to coffee house Spoon. Mephistopheles had decent coffee and the world's smallest muffin.

After a bit more wandering, we caught a bus to Katsurahama Beach. It was a bit of a blustery day to go to the beach. This may have been the coldest day of the trip. I'm pretty sure the temperature dipped into the single digits! In December! What kind of madness is this?

So it was a bit cool, but still quite nice to look at. Lots of sky and trees and water. It wasn't all that nice to listen to though. There were loudspeakers every where and there were constantly announcements being made. Hard to dig on the nature when you can't escape the ABBA muzak.


Still, surf sand and sun are an excellent combination and we enjoyed ourselves quite a bit. There were numerous informative signs scattered about the area, telling of famous people from the region. Most of them were drunks. I am not making that up, the signs told me.

The most famous resident is a chap by the name of Ryoma Sakamoto. He was one of the main movers and shakers during the Meiji Restoration era. He wanted Japan to become a more open society, join the rest of the world. He raised all sorts of ruckuses. He kinda caused a revolution. He got assassinated real good.


All the gift shops were dirty with his merchandise. Including cute little super deformed versions of him. (super deformed- an exaggerated style of drawing: very short and fat with very big heads) Super deformed Ryoma with a sword and a gun was so cool!


They were also full of dog related merchandise because, in addition to drunken poets and rabble rousers, this place is known for dog fights.

No joke.

We weren't really interested in seeing any of that, but it turns out we didn't have to worry. Some NFL player came through town just the other week and bought up all their dogs.


After the beach, we caught a bus up to the top of a mountain to go poke around.


We found statues wearing neon beanies.

We also found a coffee shop with a great view.


The place also had pretty good coffee. And pornographic comic books.

Golden

Alternate title: Golden, Pepsi, The Word Is Golden

Kochi seems pretty all right. There seems to be a lot more going on here than in Takamatsu. A lot more young people about being loud and boisterous. Just like in Takamatsu, our hotel is right next to a shopping arcade and, just like Takamatsu, most of the shops in the arcade close at 7 (we got into town at around 6:30). But at the end of this shopping arcade there is a building that contains numerous food and drink stalls. People just go there and eat and drink and hang out. I like it!

That was counter-balanced by the fact that we cannot find a bank. In Takamatstu, there was a branch of Carla's bank just a short walk from our hotel. We spent a bit of time walking around last night, followed by Carla spending and hour or so on the internet looking for a place that will give us money. We may have found one.

We had enough money to get some dinner last night. We grabbed some deep fried soft tacos at the aforementioned building of food. And then we went to a cantina. Where we got authentic cantina fair. No we didn't. Our "original soft tacos" was a plate of fillings (including hard boiled eggs and weiners) and two of some kind of flat bread. They weren't tortillas! The crust of our bacon and asparagus pizza (one of the few not to include mayonnaise as a topping) was much more tortilla like.

Our Caesar salad, which our server made sure to point out to us was a Caesar style salad and not an authentic Caesar salad, had Italian dressing.

I liked that place. It was different.

Also, we can see a castle from our hotel window. But it's just far enough away so that it looks really far away in pictures when it doesn't look nearly so far away to the naked eye.

Wow, for an addendum to Carla's post I sure typed way to much. I do go on sometimes.

Five Gold Rings?

Tyler's sleeping, so I guess it falls to me to do the blogging tonight.

Today's flavour of fun: riding trains.

First we rode the "One Man Densha", which apparently means "one car train". Because that's all it was. One car. With a toilet in the back. Kinda like a cross between a long-haul bus and a streetcar. The One Man Densha went as far as Tokushima, where we got off and had some lunch. So far so good. The train was comfortable and the view was scenic. Did we take any pictures? No.

Next we caught a regular three-car train to Awa-Ikeda, smack in the middle of Shikoku. The seats on this train weren't as comfortable, and for the first 90 minutes, the view wasn't as interesting. But as we got closer to Awa-Ikeda, the scenery became more dramatic. Still no pictures, but we're getting there.

Our final train was another One Man Densha, but this one didn't have a toilet. Or forward-facing seats. And it was definitely more crowded. But the scenery out the windows was stellar. Steep valley walls and misty mountains gave way to a full-on gorge. The rocks were craggy and the water was amazingly blue, spanned by an nigh-infinite variety of bridges. It was tough to take pictures in low light, through the trees, from a moving train, but we did our best, which amounts to this:


All told, the trip took 8 hours, and now we're in Kochi, in our new hotel, which is far superior to our last hotel, and we're tired, and it's time for bed.

Two Things

First of all, I hope I didn't give the impression that we disliked the mist. Far from it! The mist was awesome. So atmospheric. Seeing shapes emerge from the fog never got old.

Why does everything I type sound sarcastic?

Also: happy anniversary mom and dad and mom and dad!

It had to happen eventually

We've had great weather so far on this trip, but it was only a matter of time until we got rained on (maybe even eventually snowed on). We purposely didn't pack umbrellas to save space and weight. This being Japan, we figured we could easily buy some cheap ones from a convenience store if the time ever came that we needed them. Well, we sure wouldn't have minded having some umbrellas today, but this morning on the way to the train station there was nary a combini to be found. How can such a big station not be anywhere near a convenience store? Honestly! There weren't any cafes open to serve us breakfast, either. Except Starbucks, but that certainly doesn't count.

Happily, when we got off the train in Kotohira, there was a bucket of umbrellas free for the taking just siting beside the exit. And no, we didn't just swipe some poor station employees' umbrellas while they were working; they really were free for the taking. Those umbrellas kept us dry all day, then we dropped them off at the station before we caught our train home.

Sometimes, Japan is awesome.

Four Calling Birds

Where the heck did we go today? They had it on signs all over the freaking place, but now I can't remember it. Wait... we were in Kotohira, but the signs all had "Kompira" on them. Yeah. This place never makes any sense to me either. Kotohira is famous for having a lot of stairs.


Seriously.


And we climbed all of them.


In the rain.


You know what we had for dinner last night? Udon noodle soup. Know what we had for breakfast? Udon. Lunch? Udon. Know what's tasty? Udon.


It was misty all morning. And it just kept getting mistier and mistier the higher up the mountain we climbed. We climbed fairly high.

Here are some pictures from about the halfway mark of our trek up the mountain. This is a picture of some binoculars that people use to take in the beautiful views afforded them:


This is a handy dandy picto-map explaining just what all of that vastness before you is:


This is the view (note the edge of the picto-map in the lower corner, just to show I ain't no leg puller):


I don't think you get just how misty it was. It was so totally misty.


These girls were just a couple seconds ahead of us. When they passed us, one girl said "Haro!" followed by "I'm tired!"


You still just don't get it, do you? The mistiness? Here is a video of Carla going for a walk in the mist.


She was never seen again.

Carla and I made it up to the top, looked around, said hello to all the people who had passed us, took pictures that looked mainly like this:



Geddit? It's all white! We took our pictures and then went back down the mountain. The going down seemed to go way quicker than the going up. Odd, that.

After all that we ate some udon, shopped for tchotchkes and took a tour of a sake brewery. Then we went to an izakaya that served locally brewed beers. For a country that drinks as much as Japan, they really don't have a lot of microbreweries.

Three French Hens

Today was to be one of our few laid-back, relaxing kind of days on this holiday trip, so what happens? I wake up at seven and can't fall back asleep. Figures.

Today we went to Shikoku-mura. It's a park that contains recondtructions of traditional buildings from all over Shikoku and surrounds. I'll guide you through some of the highlights.

The first thing we encountered was a vine bridge. These were used in the mountainous areas of this region. They were also scary as hell if the one we crossed today is any indication.

This is the bridge:


These are the gaps on the bridge:

This is my foot in relation to the gaps in the bridge:


Not cool, man, not cool. Especially if this was above mountain chasms, man.

This is an ancient Kabuki theatre:


There were a lot of old houses that had been moved from wherever and relocated to this park. A lot of these houses had straw roofs. Very thick straw roofs.

This is a picture of my hand and a straw roof:


This is an old Japanese residence, inhabited by freaky clay people about to be abducted by aliens:


There was a lot of meandering up and down and all around within this park. Attached to this park was a small gallery designed by the same guy who designed most of the galleries/museums we went to yesterday. Tadao Ando! That's the guy's name. Anyhoo... this gallery was quite small. No, sorry, the gallery was big and industrial looking, but the amount of artwork contained within was fairly paltry. Luckily there was also a waterfall garden complete with a nice view of the city.

This is not a nice picture of the nice view we had:


The city is bigger than it seems. Not that you can tell.

So. The waterfall garden. There were waterfalls and there were roses. Here are some roses:


And here is a rose with a waterfall in the background:


The garden was kinda cool. You notice that the sound of the water gets louder the farther down in to the garden you go. But it is really noticeable when you work your way back up. The sound gets less and less with every stair you climb.

This is a picture of a lighthouse from an island that officially did not exist during the war:


In addition to the lighthouse, there were lighthouse keeper houses on display. They were all designed by some British dude. The walls were 60 cm thick. That made for some interesting windows.

This is a picture of the vats they used to use when brewing soy sauce:


I put an empty can of cola (Bingo Bongo grape cola) in the frame to give you an idea of the size of the vats. To give you an idea of the size of the can of cola: it was the size of your face!

We saw a lot of other cool stuff. We also debated doing other things, but decided to take it easy. We had a couple of fantastic sandwiches and some awesome udon (seriously, our food has all been great in Takamatsu) and then settled in for a long night of blogging.

And now the blogging is done and the sleeping can begin!

Two Turtle Doves

We got up at 6:30 today, December 26th, and not even for crazy good deals on electronics. Nosir, today we got up early for art. There is an island near here, name of Naoshima, that has been all artified. So we got ourselves on a ferry and got ourselves over to that there island. And Carla didn't get sick. Yay!

We disembarked (saw a sign that read "Thank you for the embarkation of today") and took pictures of the welcome pumpkin.


Then we took a picture of this tree because it reminded Carla of the sad little Christmas tree from the Charlie (not Charlize) Brown Christmas special.


Then we took a picture of them both together.


Then we rented ourselves some bicycles because Carla read on some blog or in a travel book that bikes were the best way to get around the island. Here's something that you may not know: blogs and travel books lie!

It wasn't as bad as that, I guess, but there were a lot of hills and wind-y roads.

Our first stop, at the top of a hill, was a museum. The Chichu Art Museum. Chi means land and chu means middle or in. This huge space contains work by only four artists. And on of the artists is the guy who designed the museum itself. His art is the art space. It was very odd. Very industrial, but built into the hillside in such a way that it blended in beautifully. But the inside seemed kinda prison-ish. All concrete and brushed steel. But then you'd turn a corner and all the angles tilted oddly and it didn't seem so jail-y. The first artist (not counting the architect) whose work we took in was Monet. There was a room devoted to his Water Lilies works.

First, you had to take off your shoes and walk through a room whose tiling and climate made us think of an indoor pool and then you saw the Monet room. It was big, square, and white. Lit entirely with natural light or so we were told. All the corners were rounded and in two of those corners stood gallery employees who just stood there quietly. Judging. Well no, probably not judging, but it felt like they were.

And quiet! It was so quiet! Yet echo-y. It freaked Carla right out.

After spending what felt to be the appropriate amount of time appreciating the Monets, we left.

The Monets? Really quite awesome. Every time I looked at them I saw something new. And the difference between looking at them from across the room and right up close was nutty.

Next up was James Turrell. Never heard of him before. He likes light. Don't we all. His first piece was a cube of blue light projected into a corner. I liked it. The next piece was "Open Field" or, as we took to calling it, "The Blue Room". You walked up some shiny black stairs into a featureless, foggy room lit all in blue. It was very trippy. The next piece was "Open Sky": a small, square room with a very high ceiling with a smaller square cut out of it so the sky could be seen. This day, the sky was very blue.

The last artist on display in this museum was Walter De Maria. His piece was a huge room (it was really, really big!). The room was rectangular and laid out kinda like this: the entrance was on one of the narrow ends of the rectangle, through the entrance was a landing, then a flight of stairs, then another landing, then another landing. In the middle of the middle landing was a massive granite sphere. The sphere was polished to a shiny, shiny sheen. It reflected all the room around it. All around the room around it were placed triptychs of wooden shafts of various polygonal shapes. The wooden shafts were also coated in gold. Shiny. The roof was arched slightly, and the was a rectangle cut out of the roof directly above the sphere. And there was no roof all along the edges of the room. So the room was lit by nothing but natural light. So the room changed appearance every minute of every day. Different angles from the different shafts caught the light and reflected it onto the sphere in the middle.

I really, really, really liked that room, I wish I could've stayed in it and just watched the day go by.

But we had way more art to see.

So we rode to the next museum. No we didn't. We rode up a winding road and then stopped to admire the view of the museum we had supposedly been riding to. The we squealed our brakes down all the way down and backtracked to where we had wanted to go. We stopped off for a very average lunch with a very nice view. There was a lot of art just out and about in this area. We took some pictures.

That is a very wistful pumpkin.

That is a scary cat.


That is both a portrait of Carla and a self-portrait of myself.

There were many other bits of art all around the island but some weren't all that great to look at and some were not all that easy to photograph well. Mainly, I'm just getting tired of typing about art. And we saw lots more. Some good, some great, some not so much.

After the museums and galleries, we went to the art houses. I'd explain, but it's fairly self explanatory: they are art and they are houses. Here's a picture of one of them:


After all that, we rode our bikes back to the dock, parked them, gave back the keys and got on to the ferry back home. Great timing, that.

Once back on the mainland, we hit an Indian restaurant. The night previous I had promised one of the guys who worked there that we would have dinner there tonight. I'm so glad I did, cuz it was freaking awesome!

Speaking of awesome: you know what's awesome? Gyoza. You know what is even more awesome? Gyoza where you replace the regular gyoza wrapping with chicken skin and then deep fry them. So good!

I hope that's it cuz I still have another day to blog about. Vacations are hard work!

Art Ain't Cheap

Today was the day for the island of art. Which is to say, Benesse Art Site Naoshima. About an hour's ferry ride from Takamatsu, it consists of a couple art museums, a series of art hotels and a number of special art installations. It's pretty expensive to stay in the hotels, but in retrospect I think we should have done it. Not just because it would have really enhanced the Art Site Experience (as I'm pretty sure it would have), but because our hotel in Takamatsu is pretty awful. Not only does our room reek of stale smoke, the walls are paper, paper thin. We can hear our neighbour talking. We can hear our neighbour coughing and spitting. We can hear our neighbour urinating. We can hear our neighbour's phone vibrating in manner mode. I'm pretty sure we can smell our neighbour smoking. He buys cheap cigarettes, and a lot of them,it would seem.

Also, the cleaning staff seem far from meticulous.

Another bad decision I made recently: renting bikes to get around Naoshima. Standard Japanese bikes are not made for climbing hills. Or for people with legs anywhere near as long as ours. Add to that my uncanny ability to choose the steepest and often longest of all possible routes from point A to point B, and I think it might have actually been faster for us to walk around the island.

But the art stuff itself was all pretty cool. I'll leave it to Tyler to talk about that. I think we can all agree that he's the arty one here.

A Partridge In A Pear Tree

On this day of Christmas, Carla and I woke up early and got ourselves on a train. We're taking in some new sights. Down Shikoku way.

We didn't take the Shinkansen this time. There are these crazy cheap tickets you can get, but you have to take local trains. Which takes longer, and you have to transfer a lot more often, but it ain't so bad. Here's a brief word from our Carla:

We're off to see Shikoku! It's the smallest of Japan's four big islands, just a bit southwest of Osaka. We're doing it all by local train, which is very cheap, but a bit of a logistical nightmare. I thought I had all the transfers perfectly choreographed, but as it turns out, at Aioi Station the trains don't quite line up and we had to walk about 20 metres down the platform to make our connection. Except we couldn't really walk, because everyone around us was running. One guy just about fell onto the tracks trying to get past me. It was nuts! And then we all waited for two quiet minutes until it was time for the train to leave. Sometimes, this country is really weird.

Yes, wife of mine, that was indeed strange. And that train that we rushed on to was not made with us in mind. Not that it was horribly uncomfortable, but we couldn't see out any of the windows. They were to short and we were too tall. Here is a picture of my view:


That was a bit dull. The music made things a bit more interesting. There was a guy standing next to us singing along with the music on his iPod. I think he thought he was singing softer than he actually was.

We transfered from that train to a train that crossed a vast expanse of water. Japan has a lot of islands. Pretty islands. The bridge we were on had a lot of beams that got in the way of all the pretty islands we saw. Here is a picture of the beams:


We made it into Takamatsu around lunchtime, so we had some lunch. Then we went to Ritsurin park. It is famous or something. The day was grey and kind of overcast, so most of our pictures didn't turn out. But here are some that did:






Some notes on the trains here: They run on diesel. They have way fewer cars per train. The doors are not automatic. It is all a little off putting.

There is a park near our hotel. It was filled with Christmas cheer this evening.



There was also a big mural/art type thing made entirely out of noodles. And old Japanese dudes kept coming up to me and talking to me in Japanese. One dude told me that God was in his heart. And mine too. The other guy made way less sense. I think he was telling me that Japanese girls are hot. Cuz they are criminals.

That's all for tonight. I was supposed to be asleep a while ago. Carla already is. And the spell checker ain't working. So I apologize for all my many faults. Happy Boxing Day all.

No He Can't, He's a Pig

Two posts within one week? This might possibly the greatest Christmas gift ever! Just a quick post wishing you all of the best and none of the worst.

Happy happy and Merry merry everyone.

Wii Fit Says I'm Fat

Stupid jerk video game! Not that it's really a game. Not that it's not.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. Today.

Nosir, I'm here to cram nearly a month's worth of happenstance into one haphazard post. Let's see if we can hit all the hallmarks. First, the apology for the lack of updates: sorry 'bout that.

Let's do this reverse chronological style!


Just last night Carla and I found ourselves in Kobe looking at the Luminarie. The Luminarie are Christmas lights. A lot of them. And people come to see them. A lot of them. Which is why we've never gone to see them before.


Carla, for those of you who may not know this about her, is not a people person. She is barely a person person. You put thousands of people into a smallish area, all of them trying to take pictures, all of them pushing, all of them with educated elbows, and you get an angry (nigh apoplectic [needlessly flowery phrasing:checkamundo!]) Carla.


But this is our last chance at seeing Luminarie, and Carla was in Kobe already (Shopping. She hates that too.) so we decided to give it a go. Oh yeah, it was raining. Japanese people would call it raining, Vancouver people not so much. The good thing about the rain was that I'm sure it thinned the crowd and it made everything all shiny and reflective. The bad thing about the rain is that everyone was carrying umbrellas and the pointy bits were right at our eye level.


The good far outweighed the bad. We had a fine time. A fine, slightly moist time. Moist and then muddy. The last part of the Luminarie was like a castle made of light. Surrounded by a moat of mud.

After that, we went looking for food. There was a burger place that we wanted to try. So we tried to try it. But it was closed. Then we looked around for somewhere to eat. We found a place, but it was to close in 15 minutes. I was beginning to feel a bit discouraged. But Carla never gave up hope. We found a place, an izakaya. A Kobe specific izakaya. It was tasty and beery and good.


Random tree picture GO!


Before the lights was The Go! Team. That was a week ago Wednesday. Here is where I rant for a bit. I've become a bit of a live music addict. I make it to at least a gig a month. I've found a lot of great (interesting at the very least) bands in this country.

(Large parenthetical aside in the middle of a largely parenthetical rant: I've also become addicted to Indie Canuck Music. Someone is going to go out gigging with me once we land back in the frozen North. It sure ain't gonna be Carla. See above re. Carla v. Humanity)

It's not the Japan bands that cause me distress. It's the bands from abroad. The Go! Team is awesome. Their music makes me so dang happy. Their live show in Osaka was on a Wednesday night. A Wednesday! What the heck is that happy horse pucky? And their set started at seven. A live show starting at 7?!? There was no opening act.

!?!?!?!?!!!

I work til 7:30 every day. I am the only English teacher at my school. I asked (pleaded) for time off and was rebuked. People suggested I call in sick. Ben suggested I crap my pants. I probably payed that more thought than I should have. But I can't leave my kids in the lurch like that. So I taught the hell out of them and then hauled ass into Namba to see what I could see. I got to Club Quatro just in time to hear them start Huddle Formation which is just one of my most favourite songs evar! I was ready to pay 60 bucks to get in, but the girl at the till pulled out their set list and showed me that there was only three songs to go. I put my money away. Sadly.

But I bought a shirt and a not available in stores CD. And I got the CD signed by the band. That was pretty cool. I told them that they should start later next time. They seemed sympathetic to my plight. A couple of the bands members hail from Japan, so maybe they'll be back. Probably the day after we leave for Canada. Jerks.

Seriously: seven pm on a Wednesday?

Keeping on the music scene, the last thing to blog about was an Asa Kusa Jinta gig. This gig was in Kyoto. At a University. Boy do I love University gigs. But Universities gigs here are way different than ones back home. They don't drink here. Once they're legal (21), they do, but not so much before. I remember like 10 free pizza and beer things within the first couple months of starting at the U of R. It was weird seeing all these college kids not being all Animal House-y. Odd.

In fact, we all (me, Paul, Jackie and Ben) got cracked at one point or another for carrying alcohol around on school grounds. This was an outdoor event. It was some kind of fund raiser thing. It was free to get in but every group, club and/or loose affiliation of students had a stall set up selling various foodstuffs. For some reason my brain switched over to Buffalo Days mode and I ate way too freakin much. It was unpleasant. And sometimes tasty. But who could refuse a bunch of giggly girls trying to entice with their broken English. Any time I acquiesced, I received applause, cheers and jumping up and down. Any time I spoke Japanese I received gasps of awe. I think word got round that there was an idiot white guy willing to cram anything into his mouth if you begged enough, cuz they sure got pushy near the end there.


Asa Kusa Jinta, as ever, rocked. They rocked with a w. They rocked so hard a mosh pit just appeared out of nowhere. That rarely happens here.

You may wonder why there are so few pictures of these gigs even though most of this post has been about them. Well, what with those deeply disturbing Draconian copyright laws being debated right now over there in CanadaLand, I'm not sure what's even legal anymore(hi dad!). Your money is worth more than theirs now, you don't always have to do what they ask.


One other thing, we had a second make your own pizza night. It was just as tasty as the first time. My sloppy joe pizza was not as successful as my potatoe salad pizza (so tasty! so deadly!) But it was better received than the crab brains pizza.


There. That was a pretty good post: pretty pictures, pointless purple prose, other words that start with p. Still... it is missing something. Well, I didn't work in any obscure and/or horribly dated pop culture references. And I didn't promise to try and post more in the future. To make up for the lack of those I give you these!