Hakone, Kyoto and Nara

I'm writing this well after we returned from our trip to Japan.  We just got so busy on our trip that I didn't have the energy to blog while I was there!  I'll just recap a few of the highlights from each place we visited to give you an idea of what we did.

On our last day in Hakone we took a quick trip up to Owakudani, a live volcano with a ropeway that takes you to the summit.  The weather was pretty bad, so unfortunately we couldn't see Mt. Fuji, but the views were still pretty amazing and it was really neat to see all the stabilizing work they are doing on the mountain on the way up:

On the way up the mountain.

Sulfurous pools at the top.  The water is hot!

Once at the top you can get an Onsen Egg (or several) which are basically hard-boiled eggs cooked in the onsen water at the top of the mountain.  The sulfur in the water turns the eggshell black.

James is so excited, he needs to be reminded to peel the egg first!

 After exploring the summit of the mountain we headed back down and started to make our way to Kyoto.  We got into Kyoto later in the evening and scored some closing-time bentos for a total of 800 yen at a shop nearby the hotel.  Yum!

On our first day in Kyoto we visited Nijojo (Nijo Castle), which isn't really a castle but more of a complex consisting of the old Imperial Palace and some higher ground with towers, where the castle used to be.  We explored the grounds for a while and then headed to Osaka to meet up with Aki and Michiko, who are friends of my parents.  The way they met is a little serendipitous; my parents were visiting Osaka and looking at a map trying to figure out where the museum they were headed to was.  They happened to be standing outside Aki's business, so he came outside to help them with directions.  Then he invited my parents over for dinner and the rest is history!  I think this is more common in Japan than in places like North America, and it's a really wonderful experience to have.  If you are going to Japan look out for locals who will befriend you, and take them up on their hospitality!

We went to Nara and visited the deer park, where we fed the deer some Shika Sempei (Deer Crackers).  Then we walked to Todaiji Temple, which has a giant Buddha statue that is well renowned in Japan.  After all this it was time to head to Aki's house for an okonomiyaki party!  We ate so much food we were completely stuffed.

Homemade okonomiyaki, Osaka style.

In front of Todaiji Temple.

Aki, Michiko, James, Me, and a Random Photobomber

At our okonomiyaki party with Obaa-chan.

Nodoka-chan, Aki, James and I.

More on our time in Kyoto, Himeji, and Hiroshima in my next post.  Stay tuned!

Mountains + Onsen = Happy Kate

I'm writing this from my Japanese-style suite at Hakone Ginyu, a traditional ryokan with onsen in Hakone.  I can hear the water trickling into the bath outside on the balcony and the occasional very loud cicada, and I have a panorama view of the green mountains beyond and manicured Japanese garden below.

Mountain view from Hakone Ginyu

The Museum also has a free foot bath,
which has floating lemons and oranges in it.

We arrived yesterday a little too early to check in, but we had lovely drinks on the balcony anyway, and then headed to the Hakone Open Air Museum.  The Museum has an eclectic array of sculptures by Rodin, Henry Moore, and many others.  There is also a two floor gallery dedicated to Picasso, where we saw some of his pottery and glass works.  I hadn't really known he'd been into pottery, so that was interesting.  Still, I prefer his paintings more. :)

At the Hakone Open Air Museum.

Curry with shrimp and onsen egg!

Since we were hungry we stopped at Woody's Bar & Café on the way to the museum.  It seems to be run by just one man and has a very cute little patio at the back, which is where we ate.  Lunch was not just reasonable, but also delicious!

Woody's lunch menu.

James on the patio at Woody's.

After the museum we headed back to the ryokan to enjoy a bath before dinner, but not before snacks which are generally provided on check in.  I thought this was just a nice gesture but apparently it's to prevent guests from becoming light headed in the bath. 


Japanese snacks including sour plum (umeboshi) and camembert cookies.  Oishii!

Close-up of bah: it's made of wood!

If you've never enjoyed a Japanese bath before, it's definitely an experience worth trying!  There are usually communal, gender-segregated baths for people to enjoy but some people find this 
intimidating (since you don't wear bathing suits in Japanese baths).  The water is very hot and relaxing.  There are no bubbles are soaps in a Japanese bath, you just soak and enjoy the scenery (and at onsen they usually arrange it so bathers have a beautiful view to enjoy).


Private Japanese bath on the balcony.

Traditional alcove in Japanese rooms.

After the bath, we relaxed for a few hours before dinner time.  At a ryokan you usually have dinner in your room, and it's usually kaiseki-ryoori, kind of like Japanese haute-cuisine.  We had many courses, each very small in size, but ultimately as a whole very filling.  My favorites were the milk gelatin and lily bulb paste (not sure if the translation is exactly right), the sashimi, and the pumpkin and orange jelly.  

Appetizer course!  Apple wine, steamed sweet potato mixed with soymilk, topped with sea bream, crab and sauce.  In the middle is milk gelatin and lily bulb paste.

Second course: Japanese soup made of matsutake mushrooms.  It also contained shrimp and fish.

James enjoying the sashimi course, wearing yukata.

Entrée #1: Broiled harvest-fish with miso sauce, edible chrystanthemum dressed tofu, steamed taro, broiled ginkgo nuts, pumpkin and orange jelly, salmon wrapped around sprouts.

Dessert course: Japanese-style tiramisu and kaki (persimmon).  Served with green tea.

 

We got two free drink cards so after dinner headed to the bar to enjoy some beer.  It was very empty, but there was a nice view and it was quite cozy.  Another thing about a ryokan is that you wear yukata, and so we wore that to the bar as well.  There was still time for another bath, which at night is just as pretty as in the day because the garden is lit up and the mountains have lights from the roads and cars.  Luckily they are too far away to see! ^_^

After a great rest on traditional Japanese futon beds, I'm now enjoying the sunrise and waiting for breakfast, after which I'll probably enjoy yet another bath!  Then it's off to the mountains for some sightseeing before heading on to Kyoto.

 

An Overdose of Ghibli

We have now seen two additional Ghibli art exhibits since our trip to the Ghibli Museum on Day 1.  The second was at the Tokyo Metropolitan Edo Tokyo Museum and the third was at the Edo Tokyo Open-Air Architectural Museum.  The first exhibit focused mainly on the studio's new film,  "When Marnie was There", but since it was entirely in Japanese we couldn't figure out much about the story.  On the next day we visited the Architectural Museum and had to go through another, very similar exhibit, although this had more art from other films along with reconstructions of the houses in them.  We tried to leave the second exhibit half way through but one of the Museum staff made us complete it!  No main exhibit for you until you finish your dose of Ghibli!  While we do enjoy Ghibli art, we were keen to get onto the main focus of both museums.

Ototoi: Day 5
The day before yesterday we started the day off at the Tokyo Metropolitan Edo Tokyo Museum.  I can't say enough of how aweome it was.  This is a gigantic museum with life-size reconstructions, models, and priceless archeological objects describing the history of the Nihonbashi (mainly) area, or old Edo (now Tokyo).  The best thing about this museum is the army of volunteer guides who speak a variety of languages.  We got a guided tour, just for the two of us, from an older man who was born before WWII and lived through it.  His descriptions of the exhibits were extremely informative but he was also able to add his own personal experiences from the past 80 years.  He is a living historical treasure and it is wonderful that the museum can provide access for visitors to people like him.  I'm not sure we would have learned as much from only the English language pamphlet the museum provides, as much of the didactic material on display is in Japanese only.

After the museum, we headed up to Asakusa for a look at Senso-ji shrine and some lunch.  We got our fortunes at the shrine; James got a "Best" fortune while I got only a "Final Small" fortune.

Best Fortune!

Small Final Fortune :(

From Asakusa we took a cruise down the Sumida river to Odaiba.  Odaiba is a weird area in Tokyo Bay; there are some malls, a giant ferris wheel, and a beach that you can't swim at (although we did see a windsurfer).

View from the river cruise to Odaiba.

Other things not shown in this post: view from the ferris wheel (scary!), the Takoyaki Museum (not really a museum, and no free samples :(), Toyota showcase, and a trip to the Lego store.

We ended up back in Shinjuku for dinner and ate at Lumine Est, mainly because we were too tired to go anywhere else.  We found an udon restaurant that had a 'drink buffet' (mostly different kinds of tea); you also get three appetizers and one main dish, all for under 1000 yen!  It was very tasty!

More on Day 6 coming soon!

Day 2: A Trip to Ueno Park

On our second day in Tokyo we traveled to Ueno park to visit the Tokyo National Museum.  This museum actually has several buildings and we went through two of them, containing priceless anitiquities mostly from Asia and the Middle East.

On the way to the museum we picked up a 'Grutto Pass' which provides discounts or free admission to galleries, museums and other attractions in and around Tokyo.  It costs 2000 yen but since we have visited six locations so far, it has been worth it (we still have one day left in Tokyo so will probably visit a few more).

We had lunch at Katsukura which provides unlimited side refills (the main dish is Tonkatsu).  I've eaten there before but forgot about making your own sauce. 

After lunch we headed to the Shitamachi Museum.  Now, this is a very small museum, and it has very little English didactic material.  What it *does* have, however, is a volunteer English-speaking guide who will give you a private tour with detailed explanations of everything.  The museum shows how people lived at the end of the Meiji period and really gives visitors a good understanding of daily life then.  I really recommend a visit if you are in Tokyo! 

Finally we headed over to the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum where we saw an exhibit of art produced by people with Downs' Syndrome.  It was interesting to see the efforts being made to support and encourage the artists.

After a fruitless search for the Ueno Ume no Hana branch, we headed to Ginza to get a free wifi pass from the Mitsukoshi Department store.  This has not proved terribly useful and I haven't even found a place to activate it yet.  Instead we find the JR Yamanote line stations have free wifi and have been making use of that.  Next to the Mitsukoshi is the Bruges Belgian beer bar, though, so we enjoyed some beer and moules frites there. 

A Backwards Post

I've gotten behind in blog posting so I'm going to work backwards in an attempt to remember all the most important stuff about our trip so far.

Yesterday (Day 4)
Yesterday it was Monday, a day when almost all the museums are closed.  Unfortunately for us, it also poured almost all day, so that didn't leave us with a lot of options.  We started off by heading to Omotesando, where there is an Aldebaran Atelier in the Softbank store.  One of my friends works for Aldebaran which is how I found out about it; we wanted to see the cool robots (Pepper and Nao) in person.

Here's a video of Nao showing us how he can stand up all by himself!

After visiting Nao and strolling up and down Omotesando Dori, we headed to Akihabara for any Tokyo visitor's obligatory visit to Electric Town.  We went to Don Quixote so James could see the discount store and all the amusing items it carries:

We also visited Yellow Submarine and looked at all the board games they carried, and went to a neat artist/boutique collective set in a converted heritage railway station:

 

I remembered Akihabara as not being particularly interesting.  On this visit we noticed the proliferation of Maid Café signs (these are cafes where the waitresses dress in maid outfits) and ads with anime-style female characters in various states of dress (or undress, as the case may be).  What's disappointing is that this area is a huge tourist draw and it seems this is at least partially targeted at a foreign demographic.

After visiting Akihabara we headed to Ueno for a super delicious lunch at Ume no Hana.  I discovered this tofu-centric restaurant chain in 2010 while visiting Kyushu and really loved it, so had to go again this trip. 

Here are some of the delicious items we tried:

I couldn't wait to take a picture! ^_^ Oishiiiii.

Chawan mushi and tofu salad with Satsuma!

Crab + tofu ball in broth!

Deep fried manju and ebi with lemon and salt.  I loved the lemon squeezer, want one!

Tofu + shrimp shumai with ponzu sauce.

Miso soup, assorted vegetables and pickles, rice with mushrooms.  Delicious green tea.

Delicious dessert!  There's mocha, almond ice cream, candied almonds, different kinds of fruits (mango).  Accompanied by hoji-cha.

James enjoying dessert.

Ototoi (Day 3)
On Sunday we were scheduled to meet my friends the Watanabes and their family for lunch.  We met originally in 2005 when my dad was visiting me.  We had taken the train all the way from Futako Shinchi station in Kawasaki to Kasama, a small town renowned for its pottery in Ibaraki prefecture.  Along the way these two people were sitting across from us, even after we transferred trains.  When we got to the station I was trying to get directions at the Tourist Information Office when they approached us and asked if we'd like to share a taxi to the local shrine.  Well, we did so and since then we have visited their home in Yokohama and they have visited ours in Vancouver. 

On this visit, we had a delicious Cantonese multi-course lunch at Heichin Low restaurant in Aobadai.  It was neat to travel along the Den en Toshi line again, which is how I used to commute to and from work each day when I was an English teacher.

After lunch we visited Shinjuku Gyooen park.  Unfortunately I later found out someone with Dengue Fever visited some Tokyo parks and was bitten by mosquitos, and now they are trying to spray to kill them all so they don't spread it.  I was eaten alive at the park but hopefully they got the infected mosquitos before our visit!  I guess we'll know in the next week or so...

After the park, we headed to Ebisu for the excellent Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.  The main exhibit right now is the work of Akihiko Okamura who covered the Vietnam War, along with other conflicts around the world.  It was very interesting to see coverage of the war from the Japanese perspective, and the photographs were stunning.  I highly recommend a visit.

We finished off the day with a visit to the Yebisu Beer restaurant (not much of a museum) and some yummy stout.  We also took a look from the top of the Ebisu Garden Place tower for a nice view of Tokyo.

I'll split the other day into a separate post for brevity!  Stay tuned...

Kate on Holiday!

It's been a while since I took a long vacation (about a year in fact, not including the winter holidays which are more about visiting family than new experiences abroad). This year we decided to go to Japan, because James has never been and we thought it would be a pretty easy trip.

To start things off we're in Tokyo for just under a week. It's been 10 years since I lived here, and on the surface things look and feel very much the same. When it rains there's still that smell that's vaguely reminiscent of the toilets at the train stations; the buildings look the same and there doesn't seem to have been a lot of new construction. The signs are still translated in that charming but not-quite-right way. People exhibit the same friendliness I encountered before and though James was skeptical it would happen, we've already had breakfast with someone from the countryside who wanted to practice English. :-)

Some things are different, though. A pleasant surprise (which I didn't observe in non-Tokyo locales in 2010) is the reduction in public smoking. We haven't been to a restaurant that allowed smoking yet, and even at the Hachiko exit at Shibuya Station they have an enclosed area for smoking now. There doesn't seem to be so much smoking on the streets, either. It's really a great improvement and I'm super happy since this was the one downside of visiting Japan I'd been dreading.

The Plane
I knew the trip was off to a great start when we boarded the plane and were treated to the new Delta instruction video, featuring tribbles (yes, tribbles)! Very entertaining. We took a direct flight to Haneda which is really convenient - we're staying in Shinagawa which is only about 10 minutes from the airport.

Day 1: A 9 Mile Walk
Jet lag is really tough, meaning we had a very early start.  The hotel we're in provides breakfast so we had that at 7 am, then killed time in Shibuya for a while.  We visited the Starbucks overlooking the famous Hachiko crossing, across the street from where I used to work.  My old school is now an Aeon English conversation school, so in a sense it's still there!  After strolling around the area for a bit we headed to Kichijoji, where we walked through Inokashira park and James was introduced to the sound (it seems nearly deafening, it's so loud) of cicadas in summer.

You have to go through the park to get to the Ghibli Museum, which houses exhibits (and due to its design is an exhibit all in itself) on the anime of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.  Movies like Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and Nausicaa are examples of these films.  The building is amazing, with kid-sized nooks and crannies to explore, beautiful stained glass windows, and a life-size Laputian robot on the roof.  Unfortunately they don't allow photos, but I highly recommend a visit if you are traveling to Japan!  The best exhibits were the spinning 'analog' animation machines and user-operated film playback displays. We also really enjoyed the short animation they showed in the theater.

After a walk back to Kichijoji we had lunch at one of my favorite chains, Ootoya.  The food is still yummy!

 

Without wifi or cell data it's pretty hard to find your way around; I'd wanted to eat at Ume no Hana but we couldn't find it.  Will have to try again somewhere else this trip.

 

We also took a quick trip to Shinjuku to take a look at the city from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (free!) and get a copy of Metropolis from the Tourist Information Office there.  After that we walked to Tokyo Opera City which has a great (also free!) exhibit on art and technology (NTT Intercommunication Center).  Highly recommend this!  My favorites were the spinning animation machine and the laser art.

 

Even though we were taking the trains between areas of the city, we still ended up walking about 9 miles!



Aloha! A Hawaiian Holiday

Over the past two years I've been working horsebackriding into some of my travel experiences.  It's something I did for many years growing up, having been a pretty horse crazy kid.  Last year I visited Iceland with my friend Kerry, where we happily tölted through the volcanic landscape.  I also went on a ranch trip with my dad, and we saw a tonne of wildlife (deer, moose, bears, eagles, and coyotes) riding through the forested hills.

This year my Dad and I visited Hawaii, since I got the week of the US Thanksgiving holiday off and November is a generally unpleasant month weather-wise in the Pacific Northwest.  We went on two spectacular rides through very different regions of the Big Island: the Waipi'o Valley, with its lush, tropical rain forest, rivers and black sand beach, and the Kohala Ranch, situated on the North Kohala Coast mountains with its seemingly endless fields and open-range feel.

Here are a few pictures:

A misty midday ride through the open range grass fields on Kohala Ranch.  That's me on the right with my trusty pal Gunner.

A slightly damp trip through the Waipi'o Valley with Sierra.  Some of the rivers we rode through came up to her belly!

While not on horseback, we rode around the island in style:

Of course we did a few other things while on the Big Island, including a visit to the volcano, snorkeling, and swimming.  One thing I did not know was that Hawaii is home to some amazing petroglyphs.  We took a short hike to see some:

Have you been to the Hawaii?  I'm always looking for good travel ideas, so let me know if you have some for my next trip!

DC Trip

Friends and I are travelling in Washington DC prior to the upcoming Grace Hopper Conference.  We arrived yesterday for a delicious Ethiopian meal.  Our enjoyment was tempered only by the realization that smoking on restaurants is not prohibited here. :(

Today we enjoyed several Smithsonians, saw the White House from both angles (including its kitchen garden and lone beehive), the Washington Monument and the Post Office Tower.  We also stopped by the Washington DC Turkish Festival for the most delicious Turkish-flavoured gelato (honey & fig and turkish coffee).  Miranda also shared some delicious baklava.

Pictures to come soon!

New York, New York!

The summer has been whizzing by and it hasn't been without its share of adventures!

It started out with a trip to New York.  I've never been and was very excited to see the Big Apple for myself!  Here's a few of the highlights...

Delicious food!  

Samosas on our last day there	Peking Duck for dinner
Delicious breakfast at Le Quotidien	Quick breakfast at an Italian cafe near the Museum of Natural History

My most favorite meal was probably at Nobu Next Door, where we tasted melt-in-your-mouth tempura, had fresh, delicious sashimi, and an excellent chocolate souffle/mousse.  

Fabulous Sights!

We visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art (easily my favorite, I could look at ancient Greek urns for days, apparently), the MOMA, the Museum of Natural History, the Guggenheim, and of course all the touristy things like Central Park, the Empire State Building (we went for sunset, very pretty), and Staten Island/The Statue of Liberty.

On the roof of the Met with my sister Anthea.  Sadly, no patio cafe to be found.

Outside the Museum of Natural History

That's Entertainment!

There's no time to be bored in New York!  We saw everything from subway entertainment:

To taiko drumming at the Uniqlo store:

To 'roller dancing' in Central Park:

Finally, of course we had to go to a Broadway show.  What better than "Spiderman, Turn Off the Dark" - a show that has made headlines in more than one way.  The show was pretty entertaining - although I wouldn't call it a critical hit. We really enjoyed it, all in all.

We dressed up! ^_^