Summary of a Sweltering Summer in Japan

Another mass travel email home (rough cut)...

Well, the old saying rang true during my boyfriend 's recent visit to Japan: it was short but very sweet, and in its wake I find myself having to get used to this "new" country all over again. I think I would have continued to be settled and not miss home too much, but when a piece of home visits, you see your other life and you miss parts of it. There is definitely something to be said for friends and family that know and love you. Not enough however to curb my desire to travel out my dreams. Not yet at least!

The scratching on my apartment ceiling slowly grew from the last time I wrote into an incessant banging and pounding. I had started to think that my upstairs neighbours were drilling a hole into my bedroom, however soon found out that they had just gotten a Doberman and now, like clockwork at certain points during the day, the dog goes a little crazy. We find ourselves drawn to the noise, as the dog runs back and forth across the apartment, like fans drawn to a tennis ball in a big match. Enough to make the sanest person go a little mad.

Another interesting incident happened at my apartment in the hood. When I arrived back from my whirlwind trip with my boyfriend, my new bike had a completely "flat as an iron" tire. I thought it was a little strange as I had not remembered riding over anything that could have created a puncture. It also seemed like a bit of a coincidence that the other two bikes that were parked in the same area as mine also had flat tires, but I decided to ignore my sneaking suspicion that foul play was involved and I proceeded to get my tire fixed. I brought my bike home feeling giddy like a kid who had just gotten their first set of wheels. As I put my bike back in the same spot, I saw a sneaky-looking Japanese man watching me from across the street and sort of half shaking his head and half laughing at me. I shook it off and resisted the temptation to call the local police to come and arrest him for looking at me strangely, and I slept well that night. The next AM as I set off to ride my "new" bike to work I realized that my tire was completely flat again. I cried foul to no one in particular and got really angry.

I asked some folks nearby what they thought of the situation. They said that someone was probably trying to send me a message that I shouldn't park my bike there. Great, I am living with a bunch of gangsters (well I am actually, they own most of our street apparently). I asked them where the "right" place to park my bike would be and they indicated on the street but said that the shop owner next door often pushed all of the bikes over if one of the bikes on the street was a millimetre over his "property". I quickly carted my bike up to the 5th floor and vowed to never park in the "wrong" spot again (and tried to think of secret spy-type camera contraptions that I could use to entrap the next bicycle tire deflator). The bike is fixed now and all is good, though I nearly break the tire in two every time I go up the elevator (I have to stand it up vertically to fit in the tiny elevator and never get it up in time before the elevator door smashes in on the tire). All fun and games…

My Boyfriend's Back

My boyfriend arrived for his two-week visit at three in the afternoon and I whisked him off from his 19-hour flight to the nearby town of Nara where they were holding their annual light festival. (You would have to be Peter Pan and able to fly in order to visit even1/100th of the festivals that take place in August in Japan). It was a sight to behold. Thousands of lantern-style candles adorned the entrances of temples and fields were full with various coloured lanterns in patterns. They had a bunch of little benches set up for viewing the lights and I bought my boyfriend  a chu hi (Japanese version of a Seagram's cooler but much cheaper) and some Japanese style crisps (rice crackers and some dried fish which we strategically attempted to avoid) and we enjoyed a peaceful reverie, reflecting and resting. One of those rare moments of peace in life where you don't feel like you should be starting to move on to the next thing. I was the ideal vision of a tourist, having purchased my souvenir lantern and special fan for the evening. I am just about everyone's target market.

On day two I showed my boyfriend around my hood and took him to the burbs to see my old house. He was pretty spent so we found the quickest way to dinner, rode on a big Ferris wheel above Osaka and crashed. The heat and the jet lag wrecked a bit of havoc on my his sensibility and he was a zombie by the end of the day. 

Kyoto was next and we decided to stay at a traditional Ryokan where my boyfriend was fascinated (read disgusted) by the cuisine. The meal consisted of insane amounts of food including pink noodles, Japanese steak, that spit-textured thing again, lots of pickled stuff, rice, a fish with the eyes still bulging moulded into a mid-swim stance, tofu…the list goes on.

After Kyoto we were off to Tokyo. Tokyo was great and I enjoyed it as much as before. I tried to show my boyfriend some of my favourite sites that I had seen on my last trip, with some small additions including the morning fish market. We visited the market in a daze on our first day there, after having "slept" on the night bus to Tokyo and arriving at the ungodly hour of 5am. The fish market was truly fantastic. With mini fish scooters threatening to run you over at every turn, fresh fish sludge seeping through our sneakers and the constant roar of merchants, fishermen and buyers hammering out their deals, it was a live-action thriller not to be missed.

Batter UP!

The first night we were lucky enough to get tickets to a baseball game in Tokyo Dome. Baseball games in Japan are, I'm convinced, like none other in the world. With screaming fans and tried and tested chants created for each player, sung in unison by the entire stadium at the exact same time, banging little plastic bats violently together or on the backs of seats. It could make a baseball fan out of even the greatest critic (that being me…teehee). But it was far from rowdy and uncontrolled. While the voices were loud and the fans engaged, there were no messy waves attempted, not a whole lot of random shout-outs to the players and not a whole lot of drunken idiots. The beer girls wore cutesy outfits matching the beer they were serving with kegs on their backs and the food was cheap and ranged from pizza hut to somewhat stale french crepes. We ended up seeing two games in Tokyo and I changed favourite teams each time, donning a baseball cap for one team on the first night and baseball bats for the other team on the second night.

Climb Every Mountain

I then decided that mid-trip it would be good to skip a night of sleep and climb up Mt. Fuji overnight so that we could be at the top in time to watch the sunrise. This is meant to be a life-affirming experience. It was the thing to do at least and I am not one to miss a must-do life event. We had been very busy in Tokyo and were probably not prepared for what lay ahead. At 4:00pm, we got a bus (very dirty and smelly) that took us to the base station of Fuji which is apparently where you can get some good pictures of the mountain. Well, the clouds didn't allow for that so we ended up in the most desolate little town in the middle of nowhere with nothing to see. We had to get another bus at 9:30pm to take us to the 5th station of Fuji (where everyone climbs from) so we could start to climb at 10:30pm and then be at the top for sunrise (at 4:51am). We briefly contemplated climbing the whole mountain, but quickly abandoned what in retrospect would have been an insane idea (would have taken us like 15 hours to climb up).

We luckily wandered far enough that we found a strip mall and after that we went for dinner (Korean BBQ) and then headed to the bus station. I recognized a guy on the bus and it turned out he went to Western when I was there and was the roommate of my boyfriend in 1st and 2nd year. "It's a small world after all".

The climb was pretty brutal. If it weren't for the lack of sleep, rocks, light rain, wind and hundreds of people 'stopping and going' the entire way up, combined with trying to maneuver the holding of a flashlight (which died about 1 hour from the top) it would have been a swell climb. Each step up the rough patches I treated as an exercise in self-help. I kept equating the journey to those suggestions in self-help books to keep your eye on the obstacle right in front of you, picture the goal at the end of the journey and every once and a while sit back and appreciate where you are and make sure that you are indeed on the right path. As a result of these conditions, it did feel like quite an accomplishment to get to the top in one piece (especially since halfway up there was a big sign with the picture of a man in a suit and a kid being blown off the mountain by what I can only assume was a very strong wind. Or a push by a particularly aggressive senior mountain climber of which there were many).

I went into the bathroom at the top, had a little cry and felt a bit invincible…for about 3 minutes before I felt wretched, realized I looked like I was sweating, on drugs and hadn't slept for a year, and I was so cold I thought I was going to throw up (don't ask me how all of those things are connected). I tried a puff of my oxygen tank (which let's face it was a bit of a rip off. I mean Mt. Fuji is only as tall as Whistler) but that didn't help with the nausea. I think the oxygen tanks were for the smokers (pretty much everyone), as they would take a drag of their cigarettes and then inhalation of their oxygen tank, very productive! I went and found prime seating for the big event, watched the brief moment that we all assumed was the sun rising (which with the cloud cover looked like blue mist), and I said "that's it…we're going down". The trek down was three hours of torture as our tired legs pounded on a slippery slope of gravel. I was in a state as there was only one washroom the entire way down, which was lined up for a good 30 minutes. Once arriving at the front of the line I had to wade through the remnants of leaky pipes and my nausea threatened to erupt let me tell ya! What a journey.

Festival Life

After spending another day back in Tokyo, we hopped on the Shinkansen to Shikoku to check out one of the most famous festivals in Japan, the Awa Odori. The shinkansen is really pretty incredible. On a normal express train from Kyoto to Osaka it takes about 1 hour. On the Shinkansen it takes about 12 minutes. Unbelievable. We arrived in Tokushima, Shikoku a little worse for wear after a three-hour bus ride to the island, and were excited to check into our hotel, the Avanti. We were stunned when we arrived. The owner had told us it was 30,000 yen/night for the 2 of us which is about $350 Cdn. Turned out to be 13,000 yen but it was probably worth about 2,000 yen. It was seedier than many of the hostels I stayed in during my trek through Europe (maybe time has weakened the details of those memories), but the owner was a sweet little old man who treated us well and I subsequently felt guilty for my disgust at the place. The following night we checked in to what seemed like the Park Plaza !

The Awa Odori is this incredible festival where the whole island it seems converges in Tokushima, wearing traditional costumes, and dances in a parade to traditional drum music in a 6-hour parade which runs for three nights straight. I have never seen anything like it. The energy makes you ecstatic to be alive. It could wake even the sleepiest soul.

My boyfriend and I planned to dance in the festival together on the second night, but he sprained his ankle (or so he keeps telling me ;) ) on the second day there and I had to dance alone (what else is new!!). I went to a workshop to learn the dance and I joined about 200 other commoners to dance in our place in the Parade. I can just imagine what the spectators thought when our group of poorly coordinated, inebriated, shabbily dressed motley crew came jerking by. And if you want to blend into the crowd as a foreigner in Japan (not that you ever will)… the best idea is not to go in a parade to dance along a crowded street. I swear a path cleared around me and I was a focal point for many. After about 30 minutes the stopping and going of the parade was a bit tiresome and we grabbed a bleacher seat and watched the more professional troupes sail by.

Next, we decided to travel down the coast to find some of the "best beaches" in Japan. We checked into the White Beach Hotel where the owner treated us like royalty, driving us everywhere we wanted to go. We went out for Dinner and found ourselves at "Aunt Dina's American Café" specializing in curry and ethnic food. Well, this American café didn't have a single person that could speak a word of English and zero ethnic food. But, dinner was amazing nonetheless. Before making our way to our next stop, Hiroshima, we went snorkelling. The snorkelling was decent but their equipment sucked. My mask kept leaking water, and my boyfriend's broke.

Hiroshima and Goodbyes

Hiroshima was a beautiful city. They've really made an effort to make the city a "happy" place that promotes peace and harmony. I think that is the only way to make it liveable for the people there.

We then visited the famous floating shrine in Miyajima, but while we were there the tide was not high and therefore all we saw was a really big shrine sitting on the beach, its' base filled with crustaceans. Still a sight!

Last day I stuck true to my Type A personality and I dragged us around town to finish everything on the master "To Do" list. There was fancy sushi, Karaoke, famous crepes, souvenirs, and the list goes on for miles. It was fun and busy, and sad as the end of the trip had arrived and it is never easy to say goodbye. The airport was, as usual, painful. Not at all like the blissful symphony of hellos and smiles and hugs depicted so movingly in Love Actually, but a sad collection of souls in transit.

And as usual, I've made a long story long!

Take care and PLEASE send me your news!!!

Immerse yourself in your life. Make every single moment count.