Sydney's Visit: Part 2!

Welcome back!  Sorry there has been such a delay between parts of this edition, but my so called vacation require some extensive recovery time.  

Sydney's family in Japan.  From left to right and top to bottom:
Katsumi, Shannon, Donavon, Julia, Sydney, Naoe,
Conner and Liam.

Sydney has and aunt, Shannon, and an uncle, Donavon, who both live in Nagoya.  They each moved out here years ago, and both are married and have families here.  Shannon married Katsumi, and they have a daughter named Julia.  Donavon married his lovely wife Naoe, and they have two sons, Conner and Liam.  These are the folks that I spent Christmas Day with this year.  Both families live in Nagoya, and while at Christmas dinner, we decided that it would be fun to meet in Kyoto for a few days of sightseeing and family time.  So, after our very Japanese breakfast at Sansuien Onsen, Sydney and I hopped on a train bound for Kyoto.  We arrive in Kyoto a little earlier than we anticipated, so we had some time to kill before Shannon, Donavon and the gang arrived to meet us.  Being that we were in one of the most interesting and beautiful cities in the world, we decided to kill our time at Starbucks.  After a nice cup of coffee, we meet the gang and embarked on our journey to see as much of Kyoto as possible in two days.  

Our first stop was Kinkakuji, which in Japanese means the golden pavilion.  Apparently, some very wealthy Japanese guy a long time ago decided that he wanted to build a golden house.  Most people would have thought that and dismiss it as a wild fantasy, but this guy didn't give up that easily.  He built a pavilion, and completely covered the whole think in gold leaf.  Just having a gold house wasn't good enough though.  He then decided to surround the whole thing with a magnificent garden, a small shrine, and pond.  The man definitely didn't lack ambition.  Apart from simply staring in awe at a gold house, we also got our new year's fortunes at the shrine.  It was a pretty simple task, we just dropped our two hundred yen in a slot and a piece of paper popped out with our fortunes.  Sydney, Katsumi and I were both very fortunate.  We all received Dai Kichi fortunes, which means excellent!  I don't normally give these sort of things a lot of credence, but Shannon's fortune definite made me stop and reconsider for a moment.  Her fortune was less than lucky.  It said she would have bad luck that would be difficult to shake.  The next place we visited, Shannon was trying to take a picture of a garden, and she dropped her camera in the lake!  Talk about bad luck!

Shannon's camera disaster happened at Ryoan-ji.  Ryoan-ji is a Zen Buddhist temple that features a very famous rock garden.   The garden was really interesting.  The first time I visited a rock garden was at Nanzen-ji in the height of the fall color season.  Around that time of year, Kyoto seemingly doubles in population, and the normally serene temples begin to resemble the streets of downtown Tokyo.  So, my first experience was less than relaxing.  This visit, however, took place in the heart of a Kyoto winter.  The garden was much calmer than in my first visit, and we had a chance to take some pictures that didn't feature the tops of people's heads.  We also had the chance to actually stop and think.  Zen rock gardens are definitely one of my favorite experiences in Japan.  Surrounding the rock garden was a more traditional, wet garden with trees, flowers and a beautiful pond.  

After Ryoan-ji, we walked to a really cool little print shop near the garden.  The shop sold all kinds of beautiful Japanese style woodblock prints.  All of the originals were very expensive, but I bought a few postcards featuring some of the art.  They also had a little stand with a pre-carved woodblock that you could ink up and print yourself.  It was a great way to entertain the little boys who were definitely getting tired after a full afternoon of walking around gardens.  

Our last stop for the day was at our hotel.  We stayed at a very nice place called the Westin Hotel Kyoto.  Our rooms were very nice, and the view was great.  The first picture at the top of this page was taken outside of our rooms.  The hotel had its own garden.  After we checked into our rooms, we went out in search of dinner.  The place we found was an okonomiyaki restaurant near the hotel.  Okonomiyaki is a little difficult to explain, but this website does a pretty good job: http://www.japan-guide.com/r/e100.html.  It sounds a little weird, but it is definitely delicious.  Mine was a beef and shrimp combo, and Sydney got Mochi cheese.  Mochi is a sort of sweet rice paste that also sounds weird but tastes delicious.  

After dinner, we called it a night.  

They next day started bright and early with a wonderful breakfast.  I am a sucker for American breakfasts, and the Westin did not disappoint.  It featured a worldwide array of food.  I feasted on pancakes, an omelet and some delicious kiwi yogurt.  After breakfast, we headed to the Haien-jingu, or Haien temple.  This was on monday, January 9th, which is a national holiday in Japan.  The holiday is called 'Adult Day' and it marks the day when twenty-year-old Japanese kids become adults.  This was a perfect day to be sightseeing in Kyoto, because all of the new adults were visiting the temples dressed in their kimonos!  So we were lucky enough to see beautiful places full of beautifully dressed people.  Sydney and Julia spent a large portion of the day taking surreptitious pictures of girls in kimono because they were too shy to ask them for pictures. 

Our next stop was at the Kyoto Handicrafts center, which is essentially four floors of souvenirs for tourists!  It was fantastic.  I saw so many things that I wanted to give to people, but my eyes were definitely bigger than my wallet.  So sorry mom, you won't be getting a 150 dollar tea set in the mail, and Cindy, that 300 hundred dollar tapestry stayed firmly on the shelf.  And most of all, sorry to Marcus who won't be getting his full samurai sword set that I know he wanted this year.  I imagine that this is a lot like what hell would be for Santa.  All the gifts in the world and no way to give them.  

Anyway, after the souvenir store, we walked past a pagoda on our way to Kyomizu-dera.  The pagoda's name escapes me at the moment, but it was very cool.  I learned later that every pagoda is a symbol of the Buddha's tomb.  Our walk took us through another Kyoto shopping district for tourists.  Sydney and I went a bit overboard on the sugar by buying ice cream and then sampling almost every sweet that was offered.  One of my favorite foods in Japan is Matcha ice cream.  Matche is green tea flavored!  Delcious.  After surviving the shopping streets, we made our way to Kyomizu-dera.  Kyomizu is famous for its fresh water springs that are supposed to either make you more clever or beautiful or healthy, depending on which of the springs you drink from.  Kyomizu-dera is a truly beautiful place in every season.  Winter is, in theory, the least beautiful time to see it, and it still blows my mind.  

After Kiyomizu, Sydney and I parted ways with Shannon and Co.  They drove us to Kyoto station, and managed to catch a limited express train back to Tsu.  

I think that is enough for tonight.  Check back soon for a report on Sydney's experience guest-teaching English for a couple of days!

Sydney's Visit: Part 1

Sydney came to Japan and
promptly fell alseep.  Lame.

Sorry its been a while since my last post, but I have been too busy having fun to stop and write!  When I last wrote, I had just come down from the mountains of Nagano.  I write to you know safe and sound from the confines of my nice warm bed.  Between Nagano and this nice warm bed were Tokyo, Akame Falls, Kyoto, OBC, and Tokyo again.  Oh, and Sydney showed up!  In order to keep this as readable as possible, I think I am going to make this blog a two-parter.  That should allow me to include as many pictures as possible also.  I do love the pictures.


Let me start with a brief rant.  The night bus is terrible!  I have ridden it a total of three times now, and it is an experience that I would rather not repeat.  Slightly cramped, busy, lots of bouncing.  Not all that conducive to sleep.  On the other hand, it is a very cheap and efficient way to travel.  Hop on a bus in Tsu, wake up in Tokyo the next morning.  Handy. 


With Sydney slated to drop in on Tokyo at around 3 in the afternoon on Wednesday the 4th, I decided to take the night bus in order to get to Narita on time.  The night bus got me to Tokyo station at about 7:00, so I actually ended up having to kill about 5 hours.  Tough job in Tokyo.  That was meant to be sarcastic, but given that I knew almost as little about Tokyo as its possible to while still knowing of its existence, it actually was a little tougher than I expected.  I ended up taking the easy way and just walking around.  Turns out there's rather a lot to see in Tokyo.  I went to Shibuya and Harajuku stations and just sort of wandered around for a couple of hours.  Shibuya is possibly the coolest place I've seen in a while.  Shibuya station is the home of one of the busiest intersections in the world as far as pedestrians go.  Every time the traffic signals switch to red, they switch to red in all directions.  The five-way intersection then fills with a few hundred people all swarming in opposite directions.  It was honestly a bit like watching the entire population of Asian Lanesboro move through an intersection at the same time.  

Sydney was a pretty happy
camper too!

After wandering Shibuya for a few hours, I hopped on the Narita Express and went to find Sydney, and find her I did.  Japanese people don't really do public displays of affection, so I think we might have weirded out the locals with what might have been the longest hug on record.  I was a pretty happy camper.  After the aforementioned hug, we hoped on the Nozomi Express Shinkansen and headed home.  We ended up back in Tsu at around 10:00 pm.  Sydney didn't sleep much on the plane and I didn't sleep at all on the bus, so by the time we made it home, both of us had been awake for a solid 30-40 hours.  The best part of the whole thing was definitely waking up the next morning and teaching English.  Sydney was kind enough to join me, and she definitely made teaching easy for Thursday and Friday.  All of my students really enjoyed having a new person to question and new English to learn.

 After a few days of teaching though, we decided it was time for a brief holiday.  So, we hoped on a train and headed to Akame Falls.  Akame Falls is in Mie (my prefecture) and is home to a river with 48 lovely waterfalls.  It also hosts a few hotels, both western style and Japanese.  We were pointed towards a specific place called Sansuien Onsen by my friend Marshall who had stayed there a few years ago with his lovely girlfriend Ai.  Sansuien was beautiful, and the falls did not disappoint.  


I will let the pictures do the talking for most of the rest of the description.  Sansuien is about a 10 minute ride from the station, so they run a car service to and from the station, hotel and the trail head for the hike.  We got picked up around noon the car took us right to the trail.  We hiked for about three hours, and the place really was mind-blowing.  Not very many places make me wish I had invested time in photography classes, but this was definitely one of them.  The people at the park office were almost as wonderful as the scenery.  Sydney and I needed a ride to the hotel when we finished out hike, and they staff were kind enough to call the hotel, walk us to the proper waiting area, and serve us some delicious tea while we waited.  As soon as we got to the hotel, we realized two things.  One, we had come to the right place.  Our little cabin was gorgeous, and the whole place looked just amazing.  The second thing we realized was that Sydney was not going to be doing much conversing with the staff.  Almost nobody spoke English, and the one staff member that did would have been in a zero beginner class at OBC.  It was a Japanese intensive night and morning for me!  I was pretty proud of myself though.  We made it through with relatively little difficulty and had a pretty wonderful night.  

I think I am going to stop there for tonight.  Check in later for parts 2 and possibly 3.  Enjoy the pictures!

New Year, New Blog Post

Well,  I survived.  I made it back home at about 1:30 this morning.  My vacation was a rousing success in the sense that I had a marvelous time.  It was an abject failure in the sense that I now need a second holiday to recover properly from the first!  The whole thing was a great adventure, full of first experiences.  I took my first night bus, saw snow in Japan for the first time, and had my first Onsen experience.  Lets tackle those in order, shall we?

It was still dark when we got there!

First:  night bus.  I met Etsuko at Tsushimmachi (the train station nearest me apartment) at about 8:45 pm to take a train to Nagoya.  Tomo joined us at the next station and we enjoyed a thoroughly uneventful train ride the rest of the way.  We got to Nagoya station around 10:oo pm and went to find our bus, which left from a different part of the station.  We eventually found it and we took off for Nagano at 11:00 or so.  The bus ride was uneventful for the most part.  We stopped a few times on the trip, once to pick up more people and a few times for bathroom breaks and to get snacks and drinks from vending machines.  It was interesting to make the journey at night.  I left Nagoya, where it was cold, snow-less and dark, and arrived in Nagano where it was cold, very snowy and still dark.  I wasn't really able to sleep much on the bus, which doesn't bode well for my upcoming trips to Tokyo, but it is a cool way to travel.  


It made a spectacularly long day though.  I woke up around 8:00 am on the 30th of December, didn't sleep on the bus that night, snowboarded ALL day on the 31st and went to a New Years party on the night of the 31st, getting to bed around 1:00 am on the 1st.  Loooooong day.  

The first day in Nagano was fantastic though.  The weather was absolutely gorgeous.  It was about 35-40 degrees or so, and perfectly sunny.  Flat out gorgeous.  In a way, it was almost nice to get there so early in the morning.  We got our lift tickets at about 7 am and managed to get a few runs in on the freshly groomed trails.  It was quite nice!  At about 10:00 am or so, the bottom of the mountain was so full of people that didn't quite know how to snowboard or ski that it was impossible to make a good run.  So, we went up the mountain!  It was a truly magnificent day.  

Our cabin

We called it a day pretty early in the afternoon and retreated to out cabin down the mountain a bit.  Our cabin was attached to a backpackers hostel.  The hostel had a bar that was hosting a New Years party, with djs, music and lots of booze.  I headed over the bar early because Etsuko and Tomo were sleepy and napping and I was bored.  I played a couple games of pool with a New Zealander named Ben who was going to be dj-ing the dance later.  The bar was owned by an Aussie and his Japanese wife and the clientele was pretty heavy on the gaijin.  They had a lot of foreign beers, including Murphy's Irish Stout on tap and a bunch of Aussie beer in bottles.  I met a ton of new people from all of the world, and most of them even spoke English!  I also met a Russian couple and a bunch of English speaking Nihon-jin.  It was a great night with some pretty cool people.  


It definitely made for a late start the next day though.  We had intended on waking up moderately early.  However, 11:00 am rolled around and we were still in our cabin getting ready.  We finally got back on the mountain at about noon and got in quite a few runs before we had to call it quits.  


That night, we were all feeling pretty sore, so we decided to head to an onsen at a hotel nearby.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of an onsen, it a public bath.  Onsens are super popular in Japan, and many of them are fed by natural hot springs.  The one went to was had an indoor and outdoor bath.  Before you get any crazy ideas, they are gender separated!  It was a generally enjoyable experience.  The hot water mixed with being outside surrounded by snow was pretty wonderful.  Very relaxing.  Sorry to disappoint, but there are no photos to accompany this paragraph!!

Snow :)

The third day, we actually managed to wake up on time, and in the middle of a snowstorm!  It was fantastic!  At our cabin, it was only lightly snowing, but at the summit, it was really coming down!  We were on the mountain for about 4 hours or so, and I probably saw about 10 inches of accumulation.  It made for some fantastic runs, but absolutely terrible visibility.  We left the mountain around noon and got on a bus headed south back to Mie.  The traffic coming off the mountain was atrocious, and the bus ride that was supposed to return us to Tsu by 10:30 pm didn't arrive until after 1 am.  It was terrible!  But the snow, the boarding, the parties and the trip in general were definitely worth the extended bus ride.  


Happy New Years everybody!!