So… we went to the laundromat for Eric to do his wash. The lady that runs the place is very nice to Eric, and always shows him what size machine to use and even gives him her detergent and fabric softener.

So. Any idea how to work this thing?

I noticed that, like a lot of places that are not tourist destinations, there were absolutely NO signs in English. You see English in the transit stations and major stores…places where gaikokujin (foreigners) are likely to need help. But Eric is living among the regular people. And he can’t read much of the 3 different alphabets and symbols they use. So he gets friends and strangers to show him what to do, what to be careful of and so forth.

It’s a giant guessing game.

We went to a “Yakiniku” restaurant where you bar-b-que your food on a little grill right at your table. There’s an exhaust fan over the grill to suck up the smoke. You order from the menu and they bring out very thin slices of meat or veggies for you to put on the grill  for about 1 minute and then dip in sauce and eat.

I did not recognize most of the stuff on the grill. You would probably call it “weird” meat. When sharing food with people from a different culture than your own it’s tempting to refuse stuff you’re not used to. Of course if you are allergic, or have decided not to eat certain foods for health, religious or moral reasons you should follow your dietary guidelines and conscience. But if you can eat what’s set before you it makes the other folks very happy.

Sometimes, though, the people your visiting at testing you to see if you are brave enough to eat their national food. I have to admit there are times with somebody’s national food is just too far off my list and I have to politely decline. But I didn’t go to Japan to eat pizza or steak. I went to eat fish heads and beef guts. (Did I just gross you out? Ha ha!)

I can’t say I loved everything at the yakiniku restaurant. One chewy little number looked like grilled dinosaur skin. I ate it but would not have had seconds.  Other stuff was…well…actually quite tasty. Even the mushrooms looked strange, but they grilled up nicely. Our hosts were thrilled that I could hang with them and eat un-American stuff.

Itadakimasu! (Ee-tah-dack-ee-mahs)

So I finally got to watch Eric teach an English class (that’s his job here in Japan). He works for the Tochigi YMCA. You may know the YMCA as a place to take swimming lessons or karate or go to summer camp. In the rest of the world the YMCA is one of the important places to learn English.

Yes, they have camp and sports and fitness and life skills classes too but it’s also known for language classes. The YMCA where he works is attached to a kindergarten school. His classes are sometimes in the mornings, mostly afternoons and often evenings. He teaches everybody from 4-year olds to adults (in separate classes, of course).

I got to meet his kindergarten kiddies. They were so excited to have a real-live American to practice on. It went kind of like this:

Me: Hello!

All of them: HELLO!!!!! (they yell a lot when they’re excited)

Me (to one child): What is your name?

Child: I’m Hanako. What is YOUR name?

Me: My name is Ann. Nice to meet you (I stick out my right hand)

Child: Nice to meet you (child sticks out her left hand—the one on the same side as the hand I offered)

Assistant teacher: whispers in Japanese “other hand”, child switches hands and we shake.

I had to do this, of course for all 6 kids several times.

Besides learning to introduce themselves they are learning color words, numbers, and animals. One thing they have to learn is how to end a word with a hard consonant. Many Japanese words or most borrowed English words end in a vowel sound. “Bus” is “bus-suh”, “ticket” is “chicket-uh”, “t-shirt” is “t-shaat-zuh”. Eric was teaching them to say “baTT” and go hard on the final T. He’d point to a drawing of a bat and say “What is this?” and they’d yell out “Bat-uh!” Eric would do his pretend-growl and make an X of his hands and say “not ‘Bat-uh’, ‘BaTT’!” and they’d yell “BATT!”  Then he’d make them answer in a sentence “IT’S A BATT!”. Then he would run around the room high fiving each kid.

They are very cute and they know a lot. They can count at least to 10, know most of ther colors, and a lot of animals. They know Up, Down, and can do Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes. This song happens to be the only song I know in Japanese so I was highly amused.

I’m sorry I wasn’t allowed to take photos of the kids, but those are the rules.

It was great fun.

There was a party for me at a bar near Eric’s apartment. The owner gave the gift of a huge platter of sushi. There was also a cake!

We did our best to finish this platter!

I could not have done this by myself

It’s a combination birthday (for another guest) and welcome (for me) cake!

It is possible to buy baseball game tickets at the ATM at the “konbini” or convenience store. Most konbinis are either Lawson Station or 7-Eleven stores. You need to be able to read Japanese, though so Eric’s friend Yukiko did the honors and got us tickets to Wednesday’s Honshu Giants major league game in Tokyo!

Arigato gozaimas, Yukiko-san!

I have no idea why the Lala Square mall building has eyes. I do know you can see it on Google Earth. It’s an 8 story building with lots of shops. I went to a couple of stores and got some travel items and some awesome leg warmers for this coming winter.

Look for Lala Square, Utsunomiya on Google Earth and see the eyes.

This machine sells tickets for different noodle-bowl meals at the train station. You look at the picture, put money in the vending machine, choose the corresponding ticket and hand it in to get your meal.

Look at the photos and choose

Pay and choose your ticket

Utsunomiya is famous for its gyoza (Chinese dumplings). You may have had the same thing when you order from a Chinese restaurant at home. Why is a Chinese dish so popular in Japan? There’s got to be a story in that but I don’t know the answer. I do know that Makafuko’s makes excellent gyoza!

Crispy on the outside, soft and yummy on the inside!

We took a long train ride to an awesome area in the mountains called Nikko. (“Nee-ko”). It’s a series of huge temple buildings built in different styles. We were in a rush because we took the wrong railroad to get there and only had 90 minutes of touring time before closing. Also it started to rain. The area is lush and green, moss covers everything. The buildings have astounding carvings, statues, paintings, gold and other decorated metal. There are several sections where you cannot take photos. You remove your shoes to go into the more sacred areas. We didn’t get to everything but we saw the important stuff.

This is just one of many temple buildings

These monkeys represent “Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil, and See no Evil”

This is one of two giant statues that guard the main entrance.

Look closely at the designs hammered into the metal of these posts

So, let’s say it was back-in-the-day and you built a house on one end of a new street. You could claim house number 1. Let’s say after a couple of years 17 other people claimed addresses on your street, then you built a shop next to your house. The shop address would be 19, the next number available.

It really makes you think about how US addresses are numbered. In most of the US, every street is divided into plots or sections and those have been assigned numbers before anything is built on it. When you build a house, you already know what the address is going to be. You also know how far you are from the boundary line. The first block counting from the boundary line has addresses from 1 – 99 and even if nobody uses all 100 spots, the very next block addresses start with 100, the block after that starts with 200. On top of that, we put all the even-numbered addresses on one side and the odd-numbered addresses on the other.

This makes pretty much every city in the USA some kind of system. If you said you wanted to go to 506 Winter Street, Big Town, PA (I made that up) you know a lot: the state, the town, the street, the block, which side of the block and the house number.

I wish somebody would take control of the addressing system in Japan.

To get home from a party that Eric’s friends threw for me (which was fun!) I had to give the taxi driver a card that my hostel had given me with the hostel’s address. As an experienced driver, this gave him a general idea of what part of town to drive to but he still had to call the dispatcher to locate it properly. Instead of looking for a sign with a building number he was looking for the name of the hostel.  No numbers.

I forgot to get the card back from him, so I need to stop at the front desk today and get another one.

BTW (that’s “by the way”) the taxis are SO CLEAN it’s amazing. (Well, Japan is pretty amazingly clean everywhere). Every taxi has seats that are covered with sparkling white lacy cloth. Not: used-to-be-white-but-now-something’s-spilled-on-it, they are actually: just-came-out-of-the-laundry white. I wonder if drivers take them off every night and get them cleaned?

Questions:

What does your house address say about where you are located? What number, side, street, town, and country is your address?

Do you know how to address a letter to yourself? In what order do you put the information? (Bonus: In Japan they put the prefecture first….what is a prefecture?)

What are some places in your life that are very clean or sanitary? Tell why cleanliness matters in those places.

When I landed and got through immigration (permission for my “body” to enter the country) and Customs (permission for my “stuff” to enter the country) my son, Eric was waiting for me in the main waiting area. (By the way, there was sumo wrestling on the giant TV) he was happy to see me but a little frantic.

It takes about 3 hours by bus to get to his town, Utsunomiya, and the travelers hotel (called a hostel) registration window was due to close before we got there. Eric called the manager and explained the delay. The manager graciously agreed to stay late and wait for us.

Now we needed a faster way to get to Utsunomiya, so Eric traded in the bus tickets and we bought two train tickets. One for the Narita Express to get us INTO Tokyo and one for the Shinkansen (high speed rail) to get OUT of Tokyo and up to Utsunomiya.

Buying a ticket is easy. finding the exact-right rail line at a major station when most of the signs are in Japanese is hard. Between my elementary studies of Nihongo (Japanese) and Eric’s 5 months of experience we figured out the ticket and asked a lot of questions. Every major station has either a police officer or some other uniformed official standing by to help travelers. But you don’t have to always find a uniformed person.

When we were looking for where to stand in line for our reserved shinkansen seat Eric asked other people in line whether we were in the right place. Everybody we stopped was helpful. (Remember this, the next time you see foreign visitors looking puzzled….see if you can help!)

When we got to Utsu, we still needed to get the address of the hostel, Weekly-Sho and addresses in Japan are NOT ORGANIZED LIKE OURS!.  More later, perhaps on this. Eric asked the けいさつかん (keisatsukan) Police officers where to find the hostel. They looked it up on a giant map, wrote the address on a piece of paper. We took the paper to the taxi stand (helpfully there was a sign that said TAXI in English) and gave it to the driver. The driver called his dispatcher to find out where that address was actually located…because you can’t locate an address by any organized system and he drove us there.

The manager was waiting outside for us. What a relief!

I have been chasing the sun this whole trip, it was daylight outside the plane the entire 13 hours but most of us slept as much as we could. Still the time difference is disorienting. My body thought it was morning and the sun was just setting in Japan.

After a long sleep I’ll probably be adjusted.

Questions:

Why do you think the addresses are not arranged like ours?

The way locals treat visitors gives a city or country a certain reputation. What are things in your city or country that give visitors a good opinion when they visit?

On the other hand, I knew I’d be walking many blocks in Manhattan, traveling up and down escalators wheeling heavy bags and riding a bus and two trains. I decided to wear the brace.

When I got to JFK I looked for a restroom where I could get the brace off (it’s under my pants) but there was nothing in the check-in area. So I had to go through security, explain about the brace and have a “pat-down” from a female TSA officer.

She was very professional and I felt funny because I knew people were looking at me and thinking “Whoa! What did THAT lady do?” After she felt the brace she took a special wiping cloth and wiped it all over the brace then put the cloth through a machine that checks for dangerous chemicals.

It came up clean and I went on my way.

I think there is more food in JFK waiting areas than most restaurant districts. Every nationality, every level of expense.

So here are your questions:

What is the TSA and why do you see them at airports?

Name some things that people wear that might set off a security scanner.

Tell about a time you went through security at an airport.

My plane is about to board!

Sayonara!

Ann

My son, Eric is living and working in Utsunomiya in Tochigi Prefecture (which I suspect is like a state.or county to us). He teaches English to kids and adults and works for the Tochigi YMCA. I am excited to go visit him even if it’s only for a week!

How to get to Japan; first piece of advice: don’t Google Maps! They suggested that I drive across the USA , then kayak to Hawaii, the kayak to Japan! Hilarious!

My method is to take the $5 Megabus to New York, the subway to Kennedy airport and a plane to Tokyo Narita airport.

Here are questions for you :
How many time zones will I be in during my trip?
What is the airport code for Kennedy airport?
How did the two airports (Kennedy and Narita) get their names?
Why is kayaking to Hawaii a bad idea?

Write back if you can!

Ann

To be honest, even though I had some really great experiences, I’ll be glad to be back to the regular schedule. People kept telling me how lucky I was to be able to sleep late and do whatever I wanted. It didn’t always work out that way. One day I didn’t get anything done on my list of things to do until about 2:00 in the afternoon and I felt really horrible about it.

The good side was the ability to travel; to New Orleans in April, to Scotland in May-June, and to New Mexico in August.

The trip to New Mexico was my biggest adventure. As a Boy Scout leader I have always wanted to go to the scout’s most impressive summer camp, called Philmont Scout Ranch. Philmont is a HUGE area in the  mountains of New Mexico that’s set aside for teams (called crews) of scouts to do 10-day backpacking trips.

Now you may have been to summer camp where you did fun stuff all day and then went home. You may even have been to sleep-away camp where you lived in a cabin or bunk house. If you are a Cub Scout, Boy Scout or Girl Scout you might have even been to a camp where you lived in a tent. But unless your family likes hiking deep into the back country of America you might not have had to carry your tent, your changes of clothes, a gallon and a half of water, food for 3 days, tent, rain gear, sleeping bag, flashlight, toilet paper, sunscreen and bug spray in a large backpack.

That’s what you do at Philmont.  Plus you hike up and down mountains about 6 – 10 miles a day.

Ten miles is the distance between GFS and my house in Drexel Hill!  Ten miles is like walking from Chestnut Hill to the Plymouth Meeting Mall and then back to Chestnut Hill.

10 miles round trip from CH to the Mall

Most of our backpacks, fully loaded, weighed 30 to 40 pounds. That’s like walking to the mall with somebody’s little sister on your back.

Ok, now put the mall at the top of a mountain.  THAT’s what Philmont is like.

This is called the Tooth of Time

So why in the world did I want to do this? Because I’d heard it was AWESOME, hard to do, and reserved for people who had really trained for it. (I’m nutty like that).

So all year, since the fall of 2007 I was practicing with my team. The crew was 6 teenage boys, 3 teenage girls, and three other adults. We hiked in the Wissahickon first (about 4 miles), just to get used to carrying heavy packs. Then we took two hikes in the Pennsylvania mountains along a trail called the Appalachian Trail (about 30 miles in a long weekend). This helped us in several ways.

1) We learned about hiking, finding and purifying water, and working together without getting on each others’ nerves (mostly)

2) We learned about what heavy equipment we could get rid of or trade for lighter stuff. My first sleeping bag was 6 pounds. I got a better one that was 1 1/2 pounds.

heavy backpack

3) We practiced doing without normal stuff you have at home (like flush toilets, hot water, a fridge, and television).

yep, a two-seater potty

4) We built up our muscles for climbing rocky hills.

We flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico for two days of getting used to being over a mile above sea level. The air has less oxygen  in it and your first two days you are likely to get sleepy, have trouble breathing when you work hard, and get nasty headaches. This mostly goes away in 2 days.

We did fun stuff like hiking, taking a tram car up to the top of a cool mountain, and kayaking on the Rio Grande River. (Except I fell out and almost drowned, but everybody else had fun.)

river rafting

Then we went to Philmont, sorted out our gear, met our Ranger who trained us in what to do in case of bears, or lightning, or getting lost.

Then we hit the trail. After two days the Ranger left us and we were on our own. It was harder for me than for the kids but they were very encouraging.

Almost every day we hiked to a different camp in the mountains and each camp had a special activity. We climbed huge poles, we explored a mine, we rode horses, we did a forest fire-protection project, we milked a cow, we shot old fashion rifles, we threw tomahawks.

climbing a spar pole

getting ready to ride

clearing underbrush

I really thought I couldn’t keep going, then one day there we were on top of a tall mountain!  We did it!

At the top of Mt. Phillips

Sunrise on top of the Tooth of Time

After 10 days we hiked back into the base camp and received our special arrowhead-shaped patch.

Our crew with Arrowhead patches

Almost all of the kids want to go back someday.  I don’t know about me. But I’m glad I did it.

So, now it’s back to regular work, setting up computers and so on. Happy New Year, everybody!

Actually, it would probably be the same as it is now, but you’d be going to bed while the sun was still pretty far up in the sky. Your bedroom would need darker curtains. Along with being light until late, the sun also rises in Edinburgh at around 4 AM. Naturally this changes gradually during the year and by the summer solstice (later this month) there area about 17 1/2 hours of sunshine.

In nature most things balance out over a period of time. So, what do you think happens in Winter?

4:30 AM

10:30 PM