Go See Run Eat Drink

Go See Run Eat Drink... done

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 20:32:00 +0000

The time has come to put this blog to bed. It’s fulfilled its purpose, and there just isn’t anything more to say on the subject. Hell, even the prodigal package from Africa has now completed its journey. Go See Run Eat Drink was always intended to be just what’s in the title: “My year travelling the world – the getting ready, the going, and the coming home.” So I wrote about getting ready for the trip – researching gear choices, planning the itinerary, and dealing with the anxieties of such a major life upheaval. And then I was off and I wrote about the trip. God, did I write – 275 posts in all. (Aside: Before leaving I told my Dad, a decidedly non-techno type, that I’d figure out how to print out the blog posts and mail them to him periodically. (Of course Karen ended up being the one to do all this… I just emailed her the files.) I even made up a binder with a nice blog-themed cover and filled it with all the posts up to that date and gave it to him for Christmas 2008. By the time I finally fetched up on his doorstep again in June of 2010 the blog printouts had swelled out of their original binder and filled TWO more, all three of which were being leant out to other non-techno people in a weird sort of Luddite Valley Post system. But honestly, THREE binders? I need an editor!)

I wrote about camping with hashers in Scotland, and hangovers in Russia and dead computers in Copenhagen and lost wallets in Barcelona and marathons in Athens and dodgy cab rides in Nairobi… and that was only the first half of the trip. I wrote about places and people and things (and food!), and also about how I felt about it all, and about when I got cranky or homesick or just tired of living out of a suitcase. There was also a lot that didn’t make it into the blog, but frankly that stuff is none of your damned business. If you wanted to get the WHOLE whole story, you should have come with me (like Laurie and Patti!).

Me and Patti. Oh, and the Taj Mahal.

And then I came home. There were a few posts after I got back, but essentially that’s where the story ended. Now my life has, naturally, entered a whole new phase. I knew when I got back from the trip that I’d end up living in a new city, with a new job, and that the blog would be over, just like the trip. It all seems like it was a hundred years ago, and now I look back at old blog posts almost as if I’m reading about someone else’s life.
I hoped that I’d be able to write some kind of grand summing up post to end it all with great insight and clarity. Clearly that’s not going to happen, so instead we exit with a bit of a whimper. As for insight and clarity, I’m not sure I can say that I was profoundly changed by my travels. I’m the same person I was before, except now I’m just a bit more, well, worldly. I think I’ve got a broader perspective now and I’m definitely more confident and more easy-going. Travelling around the world, especially (mostly) alone for an extended amount of time requires a level of flexibility that was not a big part of my personality before. And now people laugh when I claim that I’m basically an introvert. I mean you just CAN’T be an introvert when you spend a year interacting with strangers all day, every day, so I guess now I’m a recovering introvert. Also, I can sleep almost anywhere, and my hair is longer. But inside? Still Pam.

Of course that doesn’t mean nothing’s changed. On the contrary, almost everything has changed. I’m not just living in a different city, I’m living on a different continent, and that’s something I would never have contemplated if I hadn’t taken the plunge, chucked out my old life, and turned my face to something completely new. It’s not been a cakewalk so far, this new life, but I think it’s got potential, and I’m glad I’m doing it. And I’m definitely glad I did the trip. For all those of you who hear about a trip like mine and say, “Oh, I wish I could do something like that.” I say, “You can. All you have to do is quit your job and sell your house.” Easy. Ok, maybe not easy, but definitely worth it.

One of the best days of the trip. Or of my life. Standing in the water at the edge of Victoria Falls. Like I said… worth it.

And that’s all there is to say. “Go See Run Eat Drink: My year travelling the world – the getting ready, the going and the coming home.” It did what it said on the tin. And now it’s done.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

(Oh, and for those of you who want to read whatever happens to cross my mind these days… click here.)

Never say never

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 17:24:00 +0000

Cast your mind way back to January, 2010. There was I, your humble blogger, at the end of a long stint bouncing around Africa in the back of a big orange truck, sick to death of tents, sleeping bags, camp food and the continent in general. During a short pause in Livingstone, Zambia, my last stop in Africa, I packed up a load of stuff – souvenirs, sleeping bag, a camping mattress, unwanted clothing, gifts and other assorted gack, and sealed it all up in a big cardboard box swathed in an entire roll of saran wrap and packing tape. Then it was off to the post office in Livingstone where I was charged the usurious sum of 453,000 Zambian Kwacha (a bit better than $100 CAD) and trusted the good people of Zambia Post to see the whole bunch back to Winnipeg.

Fellow overland traveller Terrence, and the package, 12-Jan-2010.

And then there was waiting. Karen & Steve in Winnipeg, me in a series of other countries you’ve already heard about. And we waited. And we waited. Three months. Six months. Ten months… nothing. And I’m sorry to say that by about the 6 month mark my faith in Zambia Post was non-existent. I was quite certain that someone somewhere had helped him or herself to the interesting bits of the package and the rest was tipped into the garbage, never to be seen again. The most distressing thing was that Laurie had loaned me her much-thicker-more-comfortable therma-rest mattress before she departed in Dar Es Salaam, taking my thin-and-easier-to-pack one home with her. So that was gone, which naturally made me feel like a bit of a heel. Also gone was the sleeping bag I’d bought just for the African sojourn, and a black and white painting of zebras and a carved wooden giraffe I’d bought for myself, and some Zanzibar spices and other bits I’d bought for people.

The giraffe carving I bought at Kande Beach, Malawi, and the guy who sold it to me.

But I was philosophical about it all. Spending a year travelling as I did, with only the contents of one carry-on sized bag, I gained a more relaxed, easy-come-easy-go attitude to physical possessions in general. Especially ones I’d been parted from for months on end. So I apologized profusely to Laurie (who refused to let me buy her a new therma-rest), and had a brief period of mourning for my wooden giraffe, and got on with my life.

And now for the bit you’ve already guessed was coming.

I’d just got back to London from my Christmas break back in Canada, and I mean just. I’d fetched up at the doorstep - after three flights, two layovers, two airline-sized bottles of Chardonnay, one Gravol, an interminable wait for luggage and an hour long tube-ride from Heathrow - at about 1:00pm on Tuesday, January 3rd. At 6:15pm the same day, just as I was finishing a jet-lag defying 7km run, I got a text message from Karen:

“Check your email… now.”

Hmmm… intriguing.

The email said:

“You will never guess what Canada Post delivered today.”

Yep. The prodigal package, looking distinctly worse for wear, had finally finished its epic journey. And it managed to arrive just 30 hours too late for me to greet it myself, in person. Good timing!

Weird Food Steve received the package, and reported that it had “been through the wars”. He was also clever enough to takes some pictures!

The package, after 357 days in transit. It looks sort of like I felt in the same circumstances. In fact, this poor box was on the road for seven days LONGER than I was. No wonder it looks a bit rough around the edges… literally. (And I notice my return address mysteriously migrated from the top of the box to the side... neat trick.)

Most miraculous of all was the fact that everything that I’d put in the box a year ago in Zambia was still in the box when it arrived in Winnipeg. (Though I use the term “box” loosely, since it would best be described as a “bundle” or “lump” after 357 of RTW travel). The painting, the giraffe, the therma-rest, the sleeping bag, the gifts… everything. Even a mouldy baggie of vanilla beans purchased on the cheap at the market in Zanzibar.

So to Zambia Post, Canada Post, and whatever other postal systems were involved (Albania? Faulkland Islands? Venus?): I apologize for doubting you. And thanks. Now how about that other package I sent on the same day… to Calgary?

Pick of Pick of Pics

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 18:29:00 +0000

One other thing… I’ve decided to have a very small number of photos from the trip printed up on stretched canvas. And I’m finally going to settle in somewhere properly by hanging things on the walls. But as you can imagine picking six photos out of more than 12,000 is a daunting task. So I’ve narrowed it down a bit – here are my thoughts about good options. Please let me know what you think. Or point me back to favourites you might have seen in the Flickr feed that I’ve long ago forgotten about.

In the order in which they were taken:

Woman on the road, Suzdal

The Grand Canal, Venice

View from the Galata Bridge, Istanbul

Old Man in a sunny spot, Jerusalem

Old Man in a sunny spot close up, Jerusalem

The Dead Sea with chairs, Israel

Kids, Kampala

Fish market, Stone Town, Zanzibar

Good luck charm, Delhi

Carpet weaver, Agra

Boatman, Varanasi

Old Man, Bahkatpur

Soldier, Beijing

Monk at work, Luang Prabang

Young monks, Luang Prabang

Tourist maiko, Kyoto

Tatami Mat Man, Takayama

Home for Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 21:39:00 +0000

Merry Christmas! Yes. I know it’s been, err… a while, but let’s not get bogged down with that. Oddly, though I am still living in London, I’m writing from my real home – Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Ahhhh… is there anything that says “Home for Christmas” like snow blowing across a highway with nary a turn sight?

Getting here at all, let alone in time for the holidays, was nothing short of a Christmas Miracle given the tragi-comedy that played itself out at Heathrow Airport over the last week. For those of you living under a rock: five inches of wet snow fell in an admittedly short space of time last Saturday morning and paralyzed Heathrow to such an extent that:

Flights were cancelled for days on end and thousands, or more likely tens of thousands of people had their holiday plans ruined.
Every day the newspapers were filled with pictures of people who’d been sleeping on the floor in the airport for two or three or four nights in a row, along with tales of woe about missed weddings and honeymoons, Christmas plans in tatters, and one particularly poignant story about a terminally ill little boy who missed his flight to Lapland to go see real reindeer. (Maybe he should have gone to Covent Garden, where they had real rein deer AND women in elf costumes…)
The Prime Minister offered to send in troops to help clear the runways and get the planes moving.
Colin Matthews, the man who heads up BAA (the company that runs Heathrow) and whose name will, I hope, become synonymous with indefensible and blatant incompetence for years to come, decided it might be politic to give up his yearly bonus for 2010.
And, FIVE DAYS after a moderate snow fall that brought virtually every aspect of the English transport system – air, trains, and roads – to its knees, it was still very very unclear whether my flight would leave on time, or at all. (As an aside – Toronto’s Pearson Airport can apparently clear a runway of snow in FIFTEEN MINUTES. Yes, they get a lot more practice but honestly, Heathrow is one of the busiest, most important airports in the world. They really need to up their game.)

But miraculously, I arrived on Wednesday to find things at Heathrow lurching back towards normality enough that I only had to wait outside the terminal building in a tent for about an hour, and eventually got checked in and boarded and took off almost as if the airport knew what it was about.

Camp Heathrow…. waiting to be let into Terminal 3. They were only allowing people to enter in batches. And only if you had a confirmed flight that was actually scheduled to depart. And only within about two hours of your departure time. Then again, they did give out tea and warm bacon sandwiches and Snickers bars to people waiting. They may not have snow plows, but they have catering.

And so I made it back to Winnipeg, a mere nineteen hours and six times zones after I left the house, and then spent the next day driving for eight hours to Saskatoon, and then went to bed very early feeling every-so-slightly ragged around the edges, and then woke up at three o’clock in the morning, which turns out to be an excellent time to get a lot of Christmas present wrapping done.

And how is life in London? Well, it’s good and bad. I still feel very unsettled – work has turned out to be… challenging (to put it mildly), but I’m on to a second round of interviews for another job which is very good. Home (now in North London) is serviceable but just doesn’t really feel like home, which is not great. But I get to move back to the big, happy house in Brixton in February, which is very great. I’m hashing quite a bit, which is good and fun, but I’m not doing a lot of proper running, which is bad. And you may have noticed I haven’t exactly been blogging my face off. It’s just been very easy to let the effort and weight of simply existing in the city in these dark, damp, cold winter months to consume all my energy. (I was shocked to realize during my long drive over the frozen prairie yesterday, that it gets dark at least an hour earlier in London than it does in Saskatchewan. I leave work at 4:30pm in London, and it’s already pitch black. Charming.)

I guess what I’m saying is that the last few months have been sort of a grind. The weather, the darkness, the job uncertainty, it’s all robbed me of motivation to do much of anything. So I’ve recently come to two conclusions:

I have to get out and run more. I’ve just found a running club that turns out to do a Tuesday evening track workout at a park about ten minutes from my current digs (Hands up everyone who knew there was a 400-metre track and well-appointed clubhouse with changing rooms at Finsbury Park… yeah, me too.). And they do a Wednesday evening group run at Hampstead Heath. So that’s definitely on the agenda, along with a race registration of some kind for the spring. Maybe not a full marathon just yet, but something to get me a bit more focused.
I want to start blogging properly again (pause for delirious cheering and deafening applause….). It was always my intention to blog in London but like I said, the motivation has been lacking. It’s now clear that I simply have to force myself to do it, and I think I’ll feel better for it. There are things I’d like to tell you about life over there – quirky stuff, funny stuff, annoying stuff, interesting stuff, helpful stuff… just… stuff. And it may even be nice to continue to have somewhere to get out the demons that crop up too.

So that’s the plan. Run more, blog more, and just try to wake up a bit. However, having said that, I also don’t think that Go See Run Eat Drink is the place for this new plan. The trip – the planning, the execution, the aftermath – it’s all ancient history already. (I can barely fathom that This Time Last Year I was “celebrating” Christmas in the pouring rain on the Serengeti.) So while I plan for the blogging to continue, it’s not going to be here. I’m going to try and spend some time over the holidays getting a few new posts in the bag, and trying a new space on for size. I can promise you that the blogging won’t be as prolific as it was when I was travelling, (especially near the end, when it seemed I could write two thousand words about lint), but I will give it an honest effort, and you’re welcome to nudge me if I let things slide.

So Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and watch this space for further news…

Festive me, with Rob H’s Longer Hair Experiment still underway…

Pic of Pics: Plymouth

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 21:43:00 +0000

Me and the fambly, on the water taxi in Plymouth. (To mollify Rob H, and to show everyone that I'm still hanging in there with the Longer Hair Experiment.)

And, for those not plugged into the Twitter feed, I GOT THE JOB. I'm now working full time, and have just finished Day 3. It's good, and busy, and frustrating (already) and yet all feels eerily familiar. If I had time to catch my breath I might be able to blog about it, but I'm suddenly too busy working, searching for a long term flat, and generally trying to remember how to function when 8-10 hours a day is taken up with... work. It's been a looooooong time.

Hanging in there

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 08:59:00 +0000

(Insert obligatory apology for long long long break between blog posts here.)

First things first – I’m still in London. Well actually that’s not strictly true. As I write this I’m just outside Reading, on a train to Plymouth for a few days visiting with family. So while I am not, strictly speaking, in London right now, I am still very much more in London than I would be if I were in, say, Winnipeg, if you get my drift.

Oooh. She does not look happy about having her picture taken.

The original plan, for those who remember it from way back in July, was to hang around for six weeks trying to see if the crazy idea of moving over here and finding a job is actually feasible. That is to say, if I could reasonably expect to find enough work to survive without ending up sleeping under a bench in Paddington Station or stocking shelves in a Tesco Express. However, as the days passed it became clear that six weeks is a ridiculously short amount of time in which to restart a career that’s been dormant for a year, on a new continent. It seems that even I – world traveler, insanely popular blogger, and possessor of a now almost infinite supply of anecdotes on which to dine out – even I cannot expect to land on my feet in such a short amount of time in such a big city.

So I’ve extended the plan. I rebooked my return flight for November 1st, and am hoping fervently that I’ll get to rebook one more time and change that flight into the first leg of a trip home for Christmas. (Never mind that the change fees for two rebookings will mean that it would have been cheaper for me to get a one way ticket. We are not thinking about that. Nor are we thinking about the ever-dwindling savings account. Not thinking about that at all. Nope.)

Extending my stay in London meant that I had to find new accommodations, which was not a bad thing at all. You may have detected, in my last few posts, a certain lack of enthusiasm for the neighbourhood and flat where I spent my first six weeks. Willesden Junction was a hard place to love, and living in one tiny, stuffy, somewhat rundown room there only added to the general sense of desperation that attended my days. Yes, it’s true that the decidedly “efficient” size of the flat meant that you could fry an egg from bed, but I knew it was time for a change.

I ended up finding a place that is so perfect I could hardly have managed better if I’d been ordering from a menu. I’ve got a beautiful big bedroom in a shared house in Brixton, which is south of the Thames. (Note to those who only know Brixton from riots and unrest in the eighties – it’s WAY different now. Cleaner, safer, happier and just nicer.) The house is a three story Victorian inhabited by three other people, and it’s all clean white walls and dark wood floors and book cases and comfy furniture.

The gigantic kitchen, looking out onto the tiny but perfect back garden

There’s a washer and dryer, dishwasher, TV, DVD player, and wifi, and my housemates are friendly and welcoming and smart and play Scrabble and do crosswords and are interesting and fun. And to top it all off, it’s actually significantly cheaper that Willesden Junction. Go figure.

My bedroom. It’s about a third bigger than the WJ flat. (In fact, when I finally found a reasonable pub in WJ, there was a projection screen tv on one wall, and I swear that screen was bigger than the WJ flat. And I’m not even exaggerating this time.)

I even have a desk and a small comfy couch. Bliss.

So things on the home front are much improved. Things on the work front have improved too. I actually worked! For money! For a whole week! In two different places! I was asked to fill in at the last minute and ended up working days at one theatre and evenings at another. It made for a really busy week, but it’s a real foot-in-the-door, and I can already tell that it’s earned me not just a few extra pounds to keep the wolf from the door, but, more importantly, some more good contacts that may already be bearing fruit. Things are looking up.

My first day of work necessitated a very very early start, which meant I was walking across the Thames from Embankment (my favourite tube station) while the sun was rising over London. Yup. That’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. Even with all its frustrations, this city is still magic.

I’m impatient for the big break, but I also know I need to be careful and patient. I had drinks this weekend with a friend from the business in Canada, and a local guy who’s been a huge help in getting me connected with a lot of useful people. They were both really impressed with how far I’ve come in such a short time, and cautioned against getting nervous and taking a job that won’t be right in the long run. They think the best thing would be to get short term work in a lot of different places, which will help get me known around town, and give me experience with as many different theatres and people as possible. What I need to be wary of is ending up in a long term, full time job that takes me out of circulation and tucks me away somewhere there’s no chance of meeting new people and advancing my cause. (Like running the stage at St. Snortleby School for Girls, Slough Branch. Steady work, I’m sure, but just kill me now…) In some ways it seems counter-intuitive to reject permanent work in favour of something riskier, but I think it may make sense for the long run.

So that’s the report from the 11:06 to Plymouth. And I have to say that it’s really really nice to be traveling by train again. A proper train, that is, not a tube train. I’m very much over the whole Underground system. It’s true that it’s generally efficient, except on weekends when random closures for “planned engineering works” can shut down significant chunks of the system, which adds a frustrating level of complication to any journey. And except when there’s a tube strike that leaves one with a 45 minutes walk from Euston Station to the south bank. Or when there’s an unexplained cancellation of service resulting in everyone being ejected from the train at Queens’ Park at midnight on Saturday, leaving one walking all the way to Harrow Road only to turn in the WRONG direction on that road and spend another ten minutes walking back the way one has just come, then realize one’s mistake, causing one to stomp impatiently across the street and wait ages for a bus and get home around 2 am. For instance.

Like I said, it’s still nice to be on a proper train again.

Bucolic but unfocused view from the train. Those little white dots are sheep!

Late-breaking news: This afternoon I’m going back to a scenery shop I visited a few weeks ago to talk to the boss man about an actual job to do actual, full time paid work. It would be short term, but that’s perfect for me right now. Cross all your fingers for me!

Strike One

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:14:00 +0000

Too long again, I know. It seems the blogging habit just hasn’t carried over into my post-traveling life. That said, there are a few things to report on.

I had a job interview on Friday – my first real chance at a real job. Up to that point I’d simply been trying to meet as many people as possible in the hopes that eventually something would cross someone’s desk and they might think, “Hmmmm… I wonder if that Canadian woman is still knocking about?” But Friday? Friday was a real interview for a Production Management job with a small company opening a show in late October and then touring 5 different UK venues. It sounded like an interesting gig, the pay was enough to keep me going, and it might have been the foot-in-the-door that I’ve been hoping for. Of course astute GGSRED readers will already suspect, due to my subtle use of phrases like “might have been”, that I did NOT get the job.

Honestly, I was a bit surprised by this. I thought the interview went really really well – I think I asked more questions than they did, and found myself getting a bit excited about finally diving back into work again. Of course there were one or two stumbling blocks. I could tell they were nervous that I don’t have a real web of professional connections here yet, because small companies usually need to draw on every possible resource to get a show running. And there was a question about whether I’d still be here in the new year and into the spring, when they are planning to remount the show for some important festival and tour dates. Ultimately they said this was the reason for their decision – I simply couldn’t guarantee that I’d still be here. Never mind that there’s no guarantee that whoever they did hire won’t jump ship if something better comes along. And also never mind that it would have been simple for me to stretch the truth a bit on this point, something a couple of people have already said I should have done. But I didn’t, and they picked someone else, and I have to tell you that it’s kind of knocked me on my ass.

So it’s been an off few days. Naturally, I’m feeling down about things, and that’s coloured my whole attitude, making me focus on all the things that aren’t working. Yes, I’ve met a lot of people, but that’s slowing down. Also, even though I’m meeting new people at new theatres and production companies, it’s starting to feel a bit like I’m listening to a broken record. Everyone is friendly and helpful, but I keep hearing the same names over and over again, and it feels like I might already have almost reached to the edges of this particular web. If I haven’t already met someone, then I’m waiting for a response to an email or phonecall to them, or waiting to get contact information for them from someone else. There’s a short list of people and theatres that I haven’t tapped yet, but that’s getting smaller. Oh, and it’s now clear that I won’t be getting an interview for the Olympics position that I applied for before I left Canada. Most importantly, no one has yet said those magic four words to me: “When can you start?”

Add to this a growing dissatisfaction with the glories of Willesden Junction, and you’ve got a somewhat toxic mix. The neighbourhood is just sad. Even the local pub is kind of grubby and cheerless, and you know when you can’t find a convivial pub within walking distance in London then you’ve been exceptionally unlucky or unwise in your choice of location. I’m starting to regret my decision to stay at the tiny flat for another three weeks, but at the same time I really didn’t want to deal with the hassle of finding somewhere new, packing up, and moving. Yes, it’s poorly located, expensive and tiny, but I guess now it’s home. In fact, I’ve lived here for more consecutive days than anywhere else since I sold my house all that long time ago. But it does suck the life out of me a bit, and sometimes have to remind myself that in less than an hour I could be just about anywhere in London. LONDON! I really do need to snap out of it and at least enjoy being in the city.

Then again, to get anywhere requires enduring the tube, which has it’s own stuffy and sweaty brand of cheerlessness. Especially when the escalators in particularly deep stations stop working. Or when there’s a signal failure on the Bakerloo Line on top of a planned closure of the entire Circle Line… not that this scenario happened to me on Saturday night.

At least if I do stay the odds of me ending up in a nicer neighbourhood than Willesden Junstion are so close to 100% that it would be difficult to slip a slice of Tesco Value Pack Streaky Bacon between the two (and I can tell you from experience that Tesco Value Pack Streaky Bacon slices are so thin you could read the Daily Telegraph crossword through one).

This is NOT Willesden Junction. This is the sculpture gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum, to which I escaped this afternoon. You can tell it’s not Willesden Junction because it’s not full of shuttered shop fronts, internet cafés for making cheap international phone calls, and dollar stores.

And on the positive side (which is a side I’ve had to force myself to remember in the last few days) I still have a solid application in at a great theatre in the West End, and expect to hear something about that this week. And there’s a chance of something at a busy production company, and a faint hint of something else that was really nothing more than an almost-whispered maybe. I know I need to just keep at it, but I do feel like time is running out. My return flight to Winnipeg is on Sept. 13, and if something reasonably solid and encouraging doesn’t happen in the next three weeks, then I’m not sure I can justify changing that flight to a later date and hanging on for a few weeks or months more.

That’s life in London these days, sorry I didn’t choose a cheerier time to finally get another blog post up. At least I can report that I’m now starting to look the right way when crossing the street. This is after I literally ran in front of a bus – double-decker, of course – while on a Hash just after I arrived. I’m getting used to glancing over my right shoulder when I cross the street, but I still get an odd tingling down my whole left side when I’m crossing while looking the “wrong” way. It’s like my body is bracing for the impact it can’t accept is NOT coming.

I’m also starting to get a bit more comfortable with the quirks of language. For instance I say tube (as in London Underground Train), CV (resumé), flat (apartment) and mash (-ed potates). Words I can’t yet say without feeling like a complete fraud? Trousers, as in pants. But this is one I really need to get over because here “pants” means underwear, which means you don’t want to go around casually commenting on people’s pants. Also: quid (pound sterling), spanner (wrench), boot (trunk of car), mate (friend), cheers (thanks) and chemist (drug store). And did you know that in England a “grill” has nothing to do with a BBQ, or with applying intense heat or flame to the underside of food? Nope. Here, a grill is the broiler element in the oven, or anything that applies intense heat from above. It’s upside-down world, I tell ya.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

The first report from London

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 19:03:00 +0000

Life in London is… good, I think. My tiny short-let flat has turned out to be reasonable, though it’s smaller than it looked in the pictures (All in a chorus now: “I really thought it would be bigger!”). It’s also more run down and grubbier than would be ideal, but it’s certainly not the worst I’ve seen. After a few trips to the Poundstretcher/Dollar Store I was able to supplement the supplied amenities to a point where the place is now functional. (Still, could they not give me more than one bowl? Or a toilet seat that’s actually attached to the toilet bowl?). I was amazed at how much better I felt after I was able to convince the Russian cleaning lady in the stairwell outside my door to allow me five minutes of quality time with her vacuum cleaner. At least now I know that the layer of grunge that’s accumulated since then is all mine. And really, how can you complain too much about a place where leaving the bathroom door open allows you to watch TV while showering?

The view from my window… Ahh, Willesden Junction, thy charms are uncountable.

I’ve been here a week now and have settled in fairly well. The job hunt – my main focus – has been up and down. The first few days were great, mostly because I had several meetings set up before I arrived, the first one on Friday afternoon when I was fresh off the plane and still befuddled with jetlag. Everyone has been polite, friendly, helpful and encouraging; they seem to think that my resumé is good, and agree that I’m approaching this the right way and meeting the right people. And they gave me more names of people to reach out to, and ideas of how to proceed. But it’s also become clear that I’ll really need to pay some dues here – meet the right people and learn the ropes – before I can really be functional and therefore attractive to an employer. I think my best bet is to try and connect with some overworked freelancers who might be looking for assistance, but there’s been nothing on that front so far.

So now I’m in a bit of a lull. I’ve made it through all the meetings I arranged before I arrived, and am now in the process of making contact with the people and companies I learned about in those meetings. That’s been a predictable mixture of unreturned emails, impenetrable voicemail systems and friendly people who would be happy to meet with me but are about to leave on three weeks of holidays. After the initial rush of arriving and getting all that positive feedback things have slowed down a lot, and that’s making it hard to stay positive. I know it’s still early, but it’s hard not to want it all to happen instantly.

In the mean time I’ve been running, wandering around a few areas to try and find where I might want to live, and spending a bit of time being a tourist. What can I say? Old habits die hard, and that’s why I’ve been on three different walking tours since I arrived. I mentioned them back when I hit London last June, but they’re so good I’m mentioning them again: London Walks are fantastic. The guides are incredibly knowledgeable, fun, and friendly and I always come away feeling that was two hours well spent. Also, the selection of walks is incredible – about ten different ones on offer each day. And they all start and end at a tube station, and are utterly reliable – I’ve never shown up and been disappointed. All that for just £8. (Or £6 if you invest £2 in a discount card, which I did.)

Part of Regent's Canal, which I saw on the “Little Venice” walk on Wednesday. The canal also runs through my neighbourhood. It’s much less picturesque there – more backsides of industrial yards and graffiti and fewer million pound flats - but there’s still an even, open towpath alongside the canal which is an excellent place for a run, and only five minutes from my door.

But back to the work situation, or lack thereof, which is what this whole business is mostly about. Here’s a quote from an episode of the original UK version of “The Office”, which I watched last night on the computer. These words resounded in my head like a gong when I heard them:

“It’s better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb, than half way up one you don’t.”

Or is it? That’s the question these days. I knew when I decided to leave my job and travel that I’d be starting over when the trip was finished. But what I pictured at the time was fetching up in some large, convivial Canadian city - maybe Montréal or Vancouver - with a new, exciting, well-paying job and a cache of money to set myself up in reasonably high style. Instead I’ve landed in a pocket-sized worn out studio in an unloved corner of northwest London with a whole lot of resumés in the “Sent” box of my Gmail, and a cache of money that’s dwindling daily. Sometimes this “I’ll regret it if I don’t give it a try” business wears a bit.

What I’m starting to realize is that I need to figure out how far I’m willing to go to make this work. And I’m not just talking about how much money I can afford to spend supporting myself while I’m looking for work. I’m also talking about quality-of-life kind of things like:

How small a flat could I be happy living in? The room I’m in now is about 10’ 6” x 12’, and I’m pretty sure that’s too small. But how big is big enough? (I think that answer might be “Big enough that you don’t have to fold the bed up every day”.)
How far outside the centre of the city am I willing to go to live somewhere nice? Conversely, how tiny/grungy/sad a place would I put up with in order to be close?
Or, am I willing to share a flat? Is having more space, better amenities and a nicer location more important than having complete privacy? It’s pretty common here, even among actual grown-up people, but it’s been a long long time since I lived with roommates. Is it something I need to consider?
And on the work front: How far down the ladder am I willing to go? Would I take work outside theatre to support myself while trying to break in? Actors do this all the time, but I think I’d really struggle with it.
Or if I stay I’m able to get work in theatre, how long can I be happy in an entry-level job, and how long will I have to “pay my dues” before I really feel like I’m doing what I came to do?
And, fundamentally, is this the right thing for me? For my career? For my life? If I spend a year or two or five here in London, what does that mean for my career when I eventually go back to Canada?

I haven’t come to any conclusions yet, but these are the questions I struggle with in between crafting friendly, engaging emails to anyone who might help me get a foot in the door, trawling endless real estate listings, and walking to, waiting for, or sitting on tube trains. (Which is a whole other post. Or possibly a whole other blog.) I’ll try to keep writing about my progress, and to tell you some of the funny, quirky things I’ve already noticed about living in London, because there are a lot. Like why can’t I find any cream for my coffee? There seems to be nothing in between whole milk and pouring cream. And why do I have to flick a switch on the wall behind the stove to power the whole thing up before turning on the individual burners? Should I call a licensed electrician to disconnect the power to the stove when I’m finished, just to be extra cautious?

And now, let me leave you with these profound words, which I’ve already heard so often they now echo in my dreams:

“This is a Bakerloo line train to Elephant & Castle. Please, mind the gap between the train and the platform.”

"London Calling"

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 20:16:00 +0000

Hey, remember me? Sorry for the long break, but if you haven’t realized it yet, things have pretty much wound down here at GSRED. However, that doesn’t mean things are winding down for my life. Au contraire! In fact, all kinds of interesting stuff is happening, so I thought I should share a little update on what’s been on my mind most since I got back those many weeks ago: What happens next?

I’ve investigated a few different work possibilities, but the one thing that kept cropping up in my mind was… London. I’ve talked before about wanting to work on the London Olympics Opening and Closing Ceremonies, but my keenness for that project is related only partly to the Olympics. It’s also partly just about the idea of living in London. Add to this the fact that nothing particularly exciting has popped up on the Canadian job front, and the obvious advantage that there will never be a time when I’m so uniquely well-positioned to pack up my (now meager) belongings and try out life in another country. So I’m going to give it a whirl.

Most of you will not be surprised to learn that I have A PLAN. I’ve already spent the last several weeks spamming almost everyone I know trying to drum up some contacts in theatre in London. Finally, some of those leads are paying off and I’ve made a several connections with people who sound like they’ll help point me in the right direction. However, all this would be accomplished much more simply if I were actually in London. So, I’m going to London. I’m flying out on July 29 with a ticket whose return date is set for Sept. 13, but can be changed for a reasonable fee to any other date within a 12 month period. If all goes swimmingly and I find a good job and just want to stay and get on with things, I can change my return date to the Christmas holidays. On the other hand if the whole notion turns out to be hopeless waste of time and money I can turn tail and run back to Winnipeg after a few weeks.

Then again, why would I want to leave?

I’ve manage to find a place to stay while I’m there, though that was a bit of a saga in itself. Suffice it to say that if someone on Craiglist is offering a one bedroom flat a five minute walk from Charing Cross Station with a full kitchen, wifi, washer/dryer, and satellite tv for £35/night, the phrase “If it seems to good to be true, it probably is” should spring inevitably to mind. I asked a friend in London to go check it out and he reported that the people at the building say they do not rent through agents and a one bedroom flat goes for £171/night. This discrepancy, coupled with the fact that the agent wanted me to advance 60% of the total cost of the rental as a bank transfer to an account in his name (not even the name of a rental agency!), set off alarm bells so loud that the neighbours were complaining.

And so I find myself with a three week reservation with Shortlet-London.com, who require a mere £60 deposit (payable by Paypal), and who are offering properties whose combination of price, size, location and facilities enjoy a much closer relationship with to reality. Here are a few shots they sent of my London pad:

Full kitchen, including one square foot of eating space.

Ahhh… the old fold-down futon couch/bed. And I thought those days were behind me.

Not shown is the bathroom, window, wardrobe, dresser, tv and wifi (for a reasonable £5/week) – all the mod cons. The flat is right on the border between tube zones two and three in an area that is, shall we say, not exactly Chelsea. But it’s probably the kind of neighbourhood I might actually be able to afford to live in so I might as well get used to it. I’m not saying I’m going to end up in a cold water bedsit in Zone 37 (somewhere on the outskirts of Glasgow), but there are real limits to where I can reasonably expect to end up. It’s probably a good thing that I’m not going to be in the fabulous flat minutes from Trafalgar Square; spending a month there would probably give me a decidedly skewed idea of what life in London would be like. It’s probably also a good thing that I just spent a year making myself comfortable almost anywhere, including tiny, crappy hotel rooms. All I really have to make sure of is that I end up with something better than the Baronie.

(Note to London-mad travelling friends and relative: Yes, if I end up staying I will try to get a flat with enough room for a spare bed. But honestly, it is gob-smackingly expensive over there. I’d love to see you all, but be prepared to get comfy in a hammock slung over the kitchen sink, or, more likely, be presented with a lovingly compiled list of cheap hotels and short-term rental flats in the area. I’m just sayin’.)

Besides trawling Craiglist and sending thousands of emails, I’ve also been spending some quality time over at my storage space since I got back to Winnipeg. My goal was to go through most of the boxes, do a bit of an inventory, and repack some items that I could have shipped overseas on short notice. I want to make sure it would be easy to ship just the things I’d really want or need – favourite kitchen knives and utensils, cool weather clothing, artwork - things that would make a place feel like home. This is in the hope that I could avoid either having to come back to sort things out later, or simply having to ship everything over at great expense. Mostly, I want to avoid opening a series of boxes in a too-small flat and uncovering the kind of things that get thrown in at random when you’re hurriedly packing your entire house up on a tight timeline. (“Really? I kept a worn ziploc baggie of twist ties and asparagus elastics? And I just had it shipped 4,000 miles? Fantastic. And thank God I’ve got that twelve pound bench vise. That’ll come in handy when I set up a little workshop in the space between the bathroom sink and the shower stall…”)

You may have detected a note of anxiety about money in this post so far, and I’d be lying it I said that wasn’t a concern. Yes, I just spent $64,000 travelling around the world, and yes, I left a good chunk of money to come home to. But I really didn’t envision having to spend a large percentage of that nest egg on a potential wild goose chase to London. So I’m stressed about money - about how much I have now, how much I might be able to earn if I actually do get a job, and how much it would cost me to live in London. But Karen pointed out something that really helped settle my mind on this issue: I’m not throwing this money away. I’m using it to try and chart the course of my career and life for the foreseeable future. I need to consider this an investment in my future (to use an annoying cliché). (Want some more annoying language? How about this: I need to embrace this change in my life paradigm.) If it doesn’t work out, then in retrospect it may seem like a foolish extravagance, but right now this feels like the kind of thing I’ll regret not doing.

So after a mere 59 days on home soil, I’ll soon be packing a (slightly bigger) bag and bracing myself for another new adventure. It all feels very déjà vu – it seems that not so long ago I was doing the rounds of lunch and coffee and dinner dates saying good bye to people and gathering all the best wishes I could. Now it’s a bit different – much less fanfare, and a whole lot more uncertainty. Last time there was a more-or-less definite schedule – I was pretty sure I’d be back within the year. This time it’s a trifle more open-ended: somewhere between three weeks and forever. All I can say is: stay tuned.

And finally (because there hasn’t been a picture of me for a while, and Rob H is probably getting twitchy) here’s a shot of me at Lake Winnipeg, where I spent a day lounging around my friend Judy’s cottage, pier and deck. Thanks Judy!

Ahhh… a perfect summer day at the lake. Not show: G&Ts that came later.

Five weeks later, a few Top Fives

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:07:00 +0000

I’ve been back for 37 days, and I wish there was more to say. I’ve got a lot on my mind but none of it is about the trip, it’s all about looking forward and that doesn’t seem like part of it, you know? The trip has faded way into the background, and my enthusiasm for the blog has faded with it. These days “Write blog post” has fallen way down on my list of priorities to somewhere after “Clip toenails” and before “Surf the web for Franklin Mint commemorative figurines of FIFA 2010 World Cup stars”. It’s just not on my radar screen.

Luckily I started these lists ages ago, and recently found new interest in fleshing them out. Everyone always asks about my favourite this or that, so here are a few thoughts on that subject. Ask me again in a few months and it would probably all be different.

(Note: the items in each list are presented in chronological order, rather than trying to rank them. And there are lots of links so you can dive back into old posts to read about stuff on the lists. Maybe this will ease the blog separation anxiety some of you were complaining about.)

Favourite Big Cities:

London, England – It’s familiar – Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace – even if you’ve never been there, it’s like you know it already. It’s just foreign enough to be interesting, but still accessible. No weird alphabet, no strange national costume, no deep-fried bugs, just that business of driving on the wrong side of the road and the charming habit of using the word “whilst” without a trace of irony. It’s also got the British Museum, double-decker buses, Roman ruins, West End shows and a proper transit system. And so much has happened there you can turn almost any corner and be confronted with a random bit of history that in Canada would occasion at least an Interpretive Centre and a small gift shop, but in London barely rates a small blue plaque. It’s big enough that you could spend your whole life there and never discover all its secrets. Of all the cities I visited, it’s the one I’d most like to try living in.
Paris, France – It’s big too, and has the same amount and depth of history as London. And it’s cosmopolitan (way more than I am), and has great food, and I can (sort of) speak the language, which makes it much more comfortable. Also, the French have something like four hundred kinds of cheese, which alone would give Paris a place on this list. I could almost live there too, but I just don’t have the wardrobe for it.
Venice, Italy – Venice was just perfect. It was the first place I went that turned out to be exactly like I thought it would be. Quiet, but also bustling and vibrant, and built on a totally human scale – no concrete high rises, no strip malls, no cars, no smog, no parking lots. Just people living in a postcard, eating great food, and taking bus boats or taxi boats or (if they’ve had a particularly bad day) ambulance boats. You should go before it sinks completely.
Hong Kong – Again, it’s big enough to have everything: museums, great restaurants, galleries, theatres, shopping. It’s exotically Asian, but still has a lot of Englishness, which makes it very easy to get around and quite comfortable. And it’s got a great metro and those clever Octopus cards.
Tokyo, Japan – Another huge metropolis, with all the amenities you could want, and some you didn’t even know existed (adjustable front- and rear-spraying buttocks cleansing, anyone?). Tokyo loses points for its bizarrely complicated metro system, but gains by being another of those properly exotic Asian cities that’s also safe, clean and easy to negotiate. And the sushi. Ahhh, the sushi.

Venice. As I’ve said before, it’s really like that

Favourite Small-ish Cities, towns, etc..

York, England – It’s got great medieval walls, and the city inside them is preserved really well. It’s got York Minster, my second favourite cathedral, and those tipsy Tudor style buildings and tiny covered alleys charmingly called “snickleways”, and a zillion pubs. Plus you can run a five kilometer route that takes you around the whole circuit of the walls.
The tipsy buildings of York
Oban, Scotland – Tiny, charming, and they make nice whisky there. I also saw the latest Harry Potter movie in Oban, so it holds a special place in my heart. And I met Tommy and Deborah there, who really made my day, and Stevie, perhaps the funniest bus driver in Scotland.
Christiania, Copenhagen, Denmark – Any residents would bristle at me including Christiania in a list of “towns” since they consider it the Free State of Christiania. The gates have a sign on them as you’re leaving that says “Now entering the European Union”. All that aside, I just really liked the vibe there. It’s not just about Pusher Street and the chance to smoke up on any number of mind-altering substances. I liked wandering through the residential areas and seeing the houses, some of which seemed to have been made out of scraps but turned into something really interesting and inviting-looking. There were also long, leafy paths that were great for running.
Bruges, Belgium – If you’re looking for chocolate, beer or french fries, look no further. And really, what else does anyone need to look for?
Granada, Spain – It’s got Alhambra, which is excellent sight, and a cool Arab quarter full of typically twisty streets. The food was great and there is still at least one bar in Granada serving free tapas with every drink.
Luang Prabang, Laos – It was the first place I went in Southeast Asia that looked like I wanted it to look. Perhaps because it’s a major tourist destination it was much cleaner and tidier than most of the rest of SEA. It was cheap (not Thailand cheap, but still cheap), and full of photogenic young monks in saffron robes. The night market was fun and extensive, and the fruit shakes were great. Just stock up on ziploc bags if you’re going to be there at New Year’s.

Another photogenic monk in Luang Prabang

Least Favourite Destinations:

Bushmills, Northern Ireland. Yes, it has the famous distillery, and the Giant’s Causeway, but the town itself has… nothing. Two nights and I was ready to walk out if necessary.
Drogheda, Ireland. When the main attraction in your town is a shrunken head, perhaps it’s time to consider relocating.
Naples, Italy. I’m sorry, but it’s a pit. The main square outside the train station – Piazza Garibaldi – is a veritable festival of idling buses, haphazardly parked cars, and overflowing dumpsters. If Naples has a good side, it is very well hidden. At least the pizza was good.
Nairobi, Kenya. It had lovely giraffes, though they were, technically, out of town. It also had a scam I almost fell for and the dodgiest cab ride of my life. Any place where everyone warns you not to go be out after dark is not a place I need to revisit.
Huay Xai, Laos. I spent three days in Huay Xai with a head cold, awaiting the next departure of the Gibbon Experience. It could have been the booby prize on a particularly vindictive Japanese game show.

Main Street, Huay Xai, Laos. All it’s missing is a dog asleep in the middle of the road.

A Few (but certainly not all) Favourite Experiences:

Walking out of the train station in Venice, Italy, and being confronted with the Grand Canal for the first time. I couldn’t believe it’s actually like that. It was like every image in my head of Venice. Magic.
Going for a hamam at the oldest bath Turkish bath in Istanbul. I don’t think I’ve ever been that clean. And it was made that much better by being there with friends, and having those same friends to go for dinner and beer with after.
Whitewater rafting at the source of the Nile River in Uganda. I signed up on a whim, and had a really excellent day. Again, because of the people. The only downside was a sunburn on the top of my legs that could probably have been seen from space.
Swimming to the edge of Victoria Falls on Livingstone Island, Zambia. When people ask about favourite moments, this is always the first one I pull out. It was one of those days when your face starts to hurt from smiling so much.
Cruising the Ganges River, India. I was nervous about this, but it turned out to be two of the most relaxing days I had all year. The boats were tiny but comfortable, and at regular intervals the kitchen boat would cruise up and give us fresh, hot chai, or some amazing meal. There was nothing to do but snooze, read, blog, chat, and watch India go by.

My gang in the raft, Uganda

A Few (but again, not all) Favourite Sights:

Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow. It’s just the most museum-y museum I’ve seen. Not all shiny and modern and full of interactive whatnots. Small enough to see it all, and eclectic enough to please just about anyone with a brain. And the architecture is all Victorian and full of vaulted ceilings and balconies and long hallways and stuff. It was great.
Sagrada Familia, Barcelona. Sagrada Familia restored my soul after the whole Barcelona Wallet Abandonment Debacle. It was just what I needed.
Wild animals on the Serengeti, Tanzania. The best part was seeing them all in their natural habitat, which meant they were all mixed up together: giraffes and gazelles and wildebeest and warthogs all just hanging out, doing their thing. It was soooo not a zoo.
The Ancient City of Petra, Jordan. Petra was one of the places I had in my sights when the whole idea of the trip was still just a vague notion. Walking through the Siq and coming out to see the Treasury building for the first time was another of those unforgettable moments.
Preah Kahn, Ancient City of Angkor, Cambodia. Of all the sites at Angkor it was certainly my favourite, far exceeding the famous, crowded and (in my humble opinion) over-sold Angkor Wat. It was mostly deserted, eminently explorable, and very Indiana Jones.

Inside Sagrada Familia

Hashes Fondly Remembered:

Setting a trail in front of Buckingham Palace, London HHH. I’d only been in town for a week, but an odd set of circumstances ended with me pushing through the crowds of gawking tourists with a chunk of chalk in my hand a mission. It was brilliant.
The Bog Hash, Dublin HHH. What a great gang, and what a riotously fun run. It was also the first and only time I ever hashed through thigh-deep peat-stained bog water.
Full Moon Pub Crawl, Copenhagen HHH. I can’t remember how many pubs we went to, which I think is a sign of an excellent evening.
Hashing the Great Wall of China, Beijing HHH. Definitely a highlight. I can’t believe I almost skipped this whole experience because I was tired and didn’t feel like making the effort. Yes, it was cold, but I hashed the freakin’ GREAT WALL OF CHINA. ‘Nuf said.
The Dead Brain Cell HHH, Tokyo. I’m not sure if you even heard about this one, but it ended with champagne, and yes, a few dead brain cells.

A wild section of the Great Wall of China. Thank you Beijing Hash House Harriers

Memorable Meals:

Every meal with Freddie, Sesimbra, Portugal. Seafood, seafood and more seafood, along with gallons of red, white, rosé and port to go with, and side order of excellent company.
First taste of real Italian pizza, Padua, Italy. A randomly chosen restaurant in between the hotel and the train station. A well-earned hunger. And a pizza menu with enough choices to be boggling. The cover charge for the breadsticks was cheeky, but the pizza was perfect.
Walnut Ravioli, Siena, Italy. It wasn’t stuffed with walnut, it was served with a sort of creamy walnut sauce. Amazing. Everything at that restaurant was amazing, even the “splee sauce”. I never learned what it was, but it was nice spread on bread.
The Green Papaya Restaurant, Hanoi, Vietnam. It was like being on the Food Network. Everything was drizzled or artisinal or heirloom. Beef carpaccio, seafood gallete, and a frozen yogurt to die for. Three full courses and two large beers, and the whole bill was only about $45.
Conveyor belt sushi, Kyoto and Tokyo, Japan. I just kept going back. I know it wasn’t the freshest or highest quality sushi by a wide margin, but I loved having the chance to try anything that looked interesting without first having to pick it off an incomprehensible menu or bust out the Japanese phrasebook.

Conveyor belt sushi, the video
Top Five Weird Foods:

Sheet o' meat, Macau. It was really tasty: juicy, sweet and salty, sticky, meaty. And damn, it would have been great with beer.
Chicken heart kebabs, Laos. I would have gone back for seconds if I hadn’t been so full of dried squid and other Lao delicacies.
Eggs-on-a-stick, Thailand. They were EGGS. On a STICK. And they’d been scrambled inside the shell. And did I mention they were EGGS ON A STICK?
Chocolate covered bacon, USA. Sheer genius.
Deep fried Twinkies, USA. Again, inspired. It elevates the Twinkie (which, let’s face it, could use a lot of help) into something… more. I’m not saying it’s on par with a sticky toffee pudding or a Paris macaron, but it’s light years ahead of a naked Twinkie.

The egg-on-a-stick man

Bottom Five Weird Foods:

Pig ears, Spain. Deep fried cartilage, thinly disguised with gallons of olive oil and a bit of spice. Too fingernaily for my tastes.
Mopane Worms, Zambia. A bit like liver, a bit like dirt. A lot like I didn’t want to eat any more.
Durian, Hong Kong. It doesn’t taste as bad as it smells, but that would be impossible.
Chow Guai Vegetable Jelly, Thailand. Black, death-flavoured jello.
Salak fruit, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The texture was nice enough, but the flavour was like buying a banana, throwing away the fruit, and eating the peel.

Leftover mopane worms anyone?

Five Things I never expected to do:

Camp on a beach in Scotland. Thank you Edinburgh Hash House Harriers (in general) and Nigel and Margaret (in particular).
Surf in Northern Ireland. Of all the places to try surfing… Northern Ireland? Also unexpected: spraining my thumb while attempting to surf in Northern Ireland. (Well I don’t know for sure it was sprained because I never had it checked out by a medical professional, but I was certainly left-handed for a while.)
Sleep off a hangover in a park in Vladimir, Russia. I have not had a sip of vodka since then. No sir, not me.
Almost fall for a street scam in Nairobi, Kenya. I’m glad Laurie’s spidey-senses were tingling on that day, because I was oblivious.
Jump off a cliff, twice, in Livingstone, Zambia. Once was apparently not enough to convince me that I really, really don’t like freefall.

A never-before-seen picture of Pam’s Feet! Gullane beach, Scotland.

And those are my thoughts for now. I can’t promise when (or even if) there will be another post, but keep checking back every week or so. You never know.

Go See Run Eat Drink... Pay

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 20:38:00 +0000

I know this post has been a long time coming, but once again I have to say that this is partly because there were a lot of numbers to crunch, and partly because I’m less and less inclined to settle in for hours of blog writing when I’ve got a new job to find and a new life to design. The end is nigh, people.

On to the numbers, but first a word on where all they all came from. Anyone who knows me won’t be surprised to learn that I was keeping careful records for the whole trip. I tried to write down everything I bought so I knew where my money was going. (This is not a new habit for me, it’s one I’ve cultivated for a few years now and also one I highly recommend.) Those numbers went into a spreadsheet for each currency or region. I tended to start a new file whenever the previous got so large and unwieldy that opening, saving and otherwise manipulating it caused my tiny computer to grind to a halt and caused me to contemplate tossing it, and all its spreadsheets, from the nearest balcony.

29 different currencies displayed for all to see at my Welcome Home Party

What I’ve been doing for the last week is going through all these spreadsheets, making sure that they included everything they should, making them all look the same, and making sure they all added up approximately correctly. I also spent a lot of time categorizing things so I could tell how much I’d spent on food, travel, accommodations, etc… Here are my categories:

Go: Airfares, visas and visa service fees, rail passes, inter-city buses, taxis, local buses, metro tickets, rickshaws, boda-bodas, cycle rickshaws and any other thing related to getting from Point A to Point B that separated me from a small or large bit of my money. I assigned the cost of airfare to the destination to which the plane delivered me, except for the two trans-oceanic flights, which I put under “Whole Trip” costs. This category also includes the costs of the Intrepid, Dragoman and Imaginative Traveller tours I did in Russia, Africa, the Middle East, India/Nepal and China.
See: Admission fees (for museums, galleries, temples, churches, cathedrals, etc…) walking tours, audioguides, trusty LP guide books, shows, movies, and activities like hot air ballooning, Tea Ceremony, lion walking, etc.
Run: Food and drink supplies bought for long runs leading up to the marathon in Athens, and Hash Cash – the fee paid to run with each different hash group (mostly to cover the cost of beer). These fees ranged from free-for-visitors to £1.00 in London up to a high of about $12.00 CDN in Singapore.
Eat: Food of all kinds: Steve’s Weird, Pam’s Normal and everything in between. Bought in restaurants, from street vendors, in grocery stores and in markets.
Drink: Beer, mostly. Also cheap wine in boxes. And that disastrous affair with vodka in Russia
Sleep: Hostels, hotels, hostals, pensiones, guesthouses etc…
Talk: Cell phone SIM cards, cell phone air time, the cell phone internet USB thingy in the UK, internet cafés and wifi internet charges
Live: A large category – toothpaste, shampoo, and other toiletries, pay-for-use public toilets, laundry, new clothes, postage, books, newspapers, haircuts, small bits of gear, blah blah blah
Give: Souvenirs and gifts sent home to others, or bought for myself. Also: baksheesh, tips and bribes of all kinds.

I separated out some expenses that I thought really applied to the trip as a whole. That’s where those ocean-crossing airfares went, along with the cost of the new computer, new camera and iPhone, and the big chunk of cash I lost along with my wallet in Barcelona.

Also, a word about currency exchange rates, and that word is: “Ugh”. They fluctuate all the time, so I just picked one rate for each currency that was something close to what the real rate was when I arrived and left it at that. There’s a huge margin of error here, but too bad.

So how does it all shake down? Well, it seems that travelling the world for 351 days cost me about $64,000, or $182.00 per day. I suspect that’s pretty high, and that many hardier backpacker types could do it for much less. To them I say: “Go ahead. Be my guest. And have fun with your dehydrated cup-o-noodles and your twelve-bed dorm rooms and your dodgey, smelly, glacially slow intercity buses. If you’re looking for me I’ll be over at the bar having a drink and waiting for them to call my flight.”

Here’s a look at my big tally-up spreadsheet:

The red numbers are the three highest in each column, the green are the lowest. Ooohhh… conditional formatting! (Sorry these numbers are so tiny and fuzzy, but that’s what happens when you try to cram 424 numbers into 600 pixels. Click here to see the Google spreadsheet, which is still a Work In Progress.)

And what do we learn from these numbers? Surprisingly, Russia turned out to be the most expensive place overall. This is partly because of the cost of getting there, and partly because I was on an Intrepid Tour, which adds substantially to the cost of visiting. Also, I was only there for a short time so that expensive airfare was only averaged over ten days. Denmark clocks in as second most expensive, again partly because the airfare from St Petersburg was not cheap, and I didn’t stay long. Also, as I mentioned when I blogged from there, Denmark is freakin’ expensive. And it turns out that Japan was expensive, just like everyone says. It’s number three on the overall list, and number one for both food and accommodations.

As for the cheap spots? My numbers are skewed; Singapore and the U.S.A top the list, entirely because I stayed with friends who gave me a free bed and fed me (Uganda, which also falls into the “generous friends” category, was fourth cheapest). Third on the list is the perennial favourite of cheapskate travelers the world over: Thailand. It really is cheap. I remember thinking that when I was there – that even when I tried to indulge myself, I still couldn’t manage to spend more than about $10 on a meal, and the hotel room (once I moved out of the fancy place) was ridiculously cheap.

A caution to anyone who might be tempted to use these numbers to budget their own trip: Your mileage will certainly vary because every choice I made every day had an impact on the bottom line, and everyone makes different choices. The fact that Hong Kong was relatively cheap for mean doesn’t mean it would be for everyone. And I spent more money in Greece than many people might, but I was being more self-indulgent there than in other places. Oh, and speaking of self-indulgent – look at all that red in the VACATION row! Top three for Eat, Drink, Sleep, Live and Give. What can I say? I was a good vacation. And I’m still not going to tell you where I went.

Other random thoughts and caveats:

It’s really not possible to feed yourself as a tourist in Malawi on 63 cents a day, although I suspect many Malawians might. That number is so low because I was eating all my meals with the big orange Dragoman truck, which was part of the cost of the tour. That 63 cents per day was the average cost of me buying cold drinks and snacks outside the food provided by the tour.
Similarly, do not plan to travel to Thailand for a mere 55 cents per day. I was already in the region and took a cheap (but comfortable and air-conditioned) minibus across the border from Laos, so the “GO” part of Thailand was misleadingly cheap.
Seeing things in Zambia was expensive, but included some really cool big ticket items: walking with lions, riding in a helicopter over Victoria Falls, the gorge swing and other adrenalin activities and, of course, the swim and breakfast at Livingstone Island at the edge of the falls. All expensive, but mostly worth it. (Similarly, Turkey included the hot air ballooning, and Belgium included a guided tour of WWI battlefields.)
Macau is unfairly tarred as the most expensive place to eat, but that’s because I was only there for a day and I went for a really nice dinner. Please don’t skip Macau because you think it’s over-priced.

And that’s what it all cost. Go ahead and ask me specific questions in the comments, but I’m not going to get into any blow-by-blow stuff. I deliberately decided not to give you the country-by-country, day-by-day costs because:

That’s a bit personal, thank you very much, even for someone whose life has been on public display for a year.
It is a LOT of numbers. No really. A LOT. Did I mention there were eleven spreadsheets?
No one would get any further than about Day 6 because it’s so boring to go through that their eyes would start bleeding within minutes.

The paper wallet. Still hanging on.

And now, a few fun numbers that don’t have dollar signs attached:

351 days on the road
33 countries visited
158 different beds slept in
72 city maps fruitlessly consulted and roundly cursed
29 different hash trails run with 27 different hashes in 21 countries
24 flights composed of 37 flight segments on 17 different carriers
23 languages misunderstood
17 guide books consulted, abbreviated, mangled and discarded (15 LP, 1 Rough Guide, and 1 other)
29 currencies gushing in an endless stream from 1 paper wallet that’s seen better days
17 metro systems navigated
21 overnight journeys by train, bus, plane and ferry
38 Weird Foods sampled
12,861 photos taken, which is an average of 37 per day
1 trip of a lifetime

Oh, and also for the record, I swam in the Atlantic off the southwest English and Northern Irish coasts, and in “the Med, the Red and the Dead”, the Indian Ocean, Lake Malawi, the Zambezi River (Victoria Falls!), and the Nile.

And how am I doing these days? Pretty well, thanks for asking. I had a nice visit with my sister and family in Calgary, I’m on version 973 of my resumé, and I’m slowly devising a plan for the next few months that I’m both excited and nervous about, so I think that must mean I’m on the right track. My sum-it-all-up blog post is not even a vague spark in the back of my mind yet, but some day I’m sure my random impressions will coalesce into the grand finale we’re all hoping for. Yup. Any day now. Yessiree.

More aimless thoughts on being home

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 02:47:00 +0000

It’s been eleven days since I got back to Canada, so there must be something to say. It feels strange to leave it so long between blog posts, but we’ve all got to get used to the idea that it’s not going to last forever, and there honestly doesn’t seem to be much to say. It’s time we started weaning ourselves off this thing. I know I owe you a post about how much the whole adventure cost, but I need some quiet time to sort through the eleven different spreadsheets involved. (Yes eleven. When I tried to do all countries in one it made my computer run slower than an Egyptian overnight train.)

So what’s been happening? Well, I had an excellent Welcome Home party last weekend. If you were in Winnipeg and didn’t come then you’re a big loser (Craig, Dorothy, I’m talking to you…). Not only did you miss a great party, endless rounds of “What was your favourite country?” and a chance to see my one hundred trillion dollar bill, you also missed the chocolate covered bacon!

The chocolate covered bacon salute!

And there was cake! I even got to pick it out myself! It had writing AND balloons! And it was chocolate! (And apparently I’ve reverted to age 4!)

Just like when I left town last year, I was reminded of how many great friends I have in Winnipeg, and I wondered how I ever managed to leave. I spent the whole evening bouncing around trying to spend time with everyone and mostly failing. By midnight, with rain falling outside, a hardy few of us remained in the living room while I blathered about geckos and tried to answer weird questions like “Where was the worst toilet?” (Mount Sinai. Though there was a train toilet in France that ran a close second. It was missing the critical flappy bit that covered the hole to the tracks, hence the updraft from the moving train caused anything that was intended to fall down to instead be sprayed upwards at an alarming velocity and coat every surface in the cubicle. On second thought, maybe that one was the worst…)

And just to prove what great friends I have, how about this for a cool Welcome Home present?

It’s a box of locally acquired Weird Food! There’s dried squid, canned jackfruit, pickled lotus root, green snack cakes, dried mango, apple sticks and, best of all: “chewy milk candy with purple yam and gelatinous mutant coconut” GELATINOUS MUTANT COCONUT!!! FiF, you rock!

All that Weird Food reminds me of the funniest comment of the week, which came from Karen. On my first day back, as she and Steve were getting ready to make supper, she called out to me from the kitchen, “Is there anything you don’t eat?” Then there was a pause, and then a defeated, “Never mind.” Heh.

I spent most of my time in Winnipeg in a whirlwind of lunches, afternoon coffees and suppers, trying to see everyone I wanted to before I packed up AGAIN. It was great, but felt rushed at times. Why the rush? Well, I’m currently engaged in my Triumphant Return Tour of Western Canada (TRToWC), and I felt like my family in other provinces might appreciate seeing me in the flesh some time before Labour Day. As easy as it would have been to continue lounging in Steve and Karen’s spare room, I knew I really should get on with it.

I had a surprisingly difficult time packing for the TRToWC. I’m so used to carrying the bare minimum of clothing that being presented with three suitcases worth of choice was frankly overwhelming. And how is it that I managed, suddenly, to be the custodian of four pairs of running shoes in various states of wear ranging from brand new to shocking? Luckily, any clothing from storage that’s worn below the waist was immediately taken out of the running, as were a few shirts that had a bit too much gaposis in the frontal region. Still, I was left with a dizzying array of t shirts and running clothing, and more socks than I’ve seen in one place in months. I’m now traveling with the Aeronaut and a whole other suitcase, and though I feel a bit sheepish about this considering my zealous defense of one bag travel, I can’t deny that it’s intoxicating having such choice. (Oooooh, lots of big words in that last sentence. And I didn’t even use a thesaurus!)

And now I’m in Moose Jaw, which hopelessly devoted GSRED readers will remember as the first stop in last spring’s Western Canadian Farewell Tour. It was a nice drive, and it’s great to be back in control of my own travel schedule, no longer subject to the iron-clad timetable of Japan Rail, or forced to arrive three hours before takeoff. Many people find driving on the prairies boring, but I love it. It sounds like a cliché, but it’s true: there’s nothing to get in the way of the view.

Aaahhh! Now THAT’S a view! (Even if it is Regina…)

I’m also spending a bunch of time sending emails about possible job opportunities, or at least it feels like it. In reality there are only two or three avenues that I’m seriously pursuing, and they all seem to be the kind of thing that requires a few tentative inquiries and a lot of waiting. I need to keep reminding myself that it’s still very early and maybe it’s a bit much to expect to land on a Monday and have the rest of my life figured out by the end of the week. It’s just that I’ve spent the last few years with a pretty clear plan, so it’s disorienting to be facing such uncertainty. I know, I know, everyone tells me I should just relax and spend some time “processing” everything I saw and did in the last year, but what does that even mean? I have no idea. All I know is that right now the burning question is “What happens next?”

Home again, home again, jiggety jog

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 20:44:00 +0000

I’ve been back for five days now and my thoughts are still scattered, not because I’m overwhelmed with the enormity of what I’ve done or anything so grand and arrogant as that. It’s more that my days are full of small, busy, pleasant tasks that occupy me enough that I don’t spend a lot of time sitting around contemplating Deep and Meaningful Things. Consequently this post is simply a random collection of thoughts from the last week, but you should really be used to that by now.

It was great to get back and be greeted by Karen and Steve, who met me at the airport and stood up and cheered and waved their arms and rang cowbells in the morgue-like arrival hall when I emerged from US Customs. Thanks guys!

My triumphant (weary) return

Yep, Karen and Steve have been great – offering their spare room, wifi password and kitchen, even if their stupid gas oven is stupid and their stupid smoke detector is even stupider. Here’s a tip: when preparing to cook two pounds of bacon, first remove the battery from the smoke detector in the hallway. Or as an alternative, use the smoke detector as a signal of when to remove the trays of bacon from the oven. I like to call this the Mom Method. (Hi Mom! Love you!)

Why was I cooking two pounds of bacon? (Aside from the fact that two pounds of bacon is an inherently good thing in and of itself.) Well Karen and Steve are generously throwing me a Welcome Home party tonight and we decided that it would be necessary to have some kind of Weird Food to offer. Unfortunately the stock of pig ears, mopane worms and black jelly was shockingly low at the local Superstore, so we decided chocolate covered bacon would be challenging enough to be in the right spirit, and easy to prepare (it does only have two ingredients after all). So that’s why I was cooking up a mess o’ bacon, which Karen and I spent a happy morning dipping in melted dark chocolate wafers. The result was, I think, the apotheosis of the chocolate covered bacon form, and far surpasses the Santa Cruz Boardwalk variety. The differences are many. First we bought maple-smoked bacon, and cooked it to chewy perfection, as opposed to the American variety which was at the overcooked crumbly charcoal stage. Also we chose dark chocolate instead of milk, and after dipping we scraped off some of the excess coating to achieve the perfect chocolate-to-bacon ratio. And we left a small bit of bacon exposed at one end of each strip, which we dubbed the “Bacon Handle” and has the effect of being a convenient place to grab, and shows off the fact that there really is bacon in there. And when we taste-tested the cooled pieces later this morning? Well, let’s just say that chocolate covered bacon has rocketed to the top of Karen’s list of favourite things, and with good reason.

Karen’s Vanna White impression, showing off one of three trays of chocolate covered bacon

Besides experimenting in the kitchen, I’ve been letting lots of people buy me lunch. Apparently I’m going to be dining out on my adventures for a long while. It’s been really nice to connect with friends I haven’t seen in a while, though I’m already getting a bit tired of the questions. “What’s it like to be back?” “What was your favourite place?” “How are you adjusting? Isn’t it culture shock?” “Are you finally going to wear some different clothes?” “Are you contagious? If I stand too close will I catch anything?” Blah, blah, blah. The answers, in short are:

Nice. Boring. Good. Weird. Normal. Exactly the same as when I left.
Seriously? I went to 123 different cities, towns or discrete geographic locations. You want me to pick ONE PLACE?
Just fine, thanks. No.
Yes. Thank GOD.
I’ll let you know, the test results aren’t back yet.

Being back has been strange and not. For instance, I thought it would be odd to drive again after a year but there wasn’t a even a moment of hesitation or awkwardness when I got behind the wheel. It was like no time had passed since I’d last stepped on the accelerator; the weird thing was actually how NOT weird it was. I drove downtown and had to cruise past my old workplace while I was looking for parking. (Note: It turns out that looking for parking is one of the things I did not miss at all, and I didn’t even realize it.) Driving in that neighbourhood was weird because it was sooooo familiar. I guess I got used to everything being new and different all the time, so it was shocking to round a corner and see a view that was so deeply etched into my brain that I felt like I could have driven it with my eyes closed. (I didn’t.)

Already the trip seems a bit remote, and when I think back to the early parts it’s kind of like a dream. I’ll be talking to someone, relating stories about the traveling and remember something startling like the fact that I walked with lions in Africa, and I can’t believe it’s possible I could have forgotten something like that. And that leads to the story about swimming at the edge of Victoria Falls or hot air ballooning over Turkey, and I start to feel a bit arrogant or something. I sense that for the rest of my life I’m going to be able to pull out a travel-related anecdote on just about any subject imaginable. “Ah yes, the bi-metallic question. Fascinating. That reminds of a strange thing that happened to me in Mto Wa Mbu. Oh, you don’t know it? Charming little town in Tanzania. Grow a lot of bananas there. Anyways as I was saying, there I was in Mto Wa Mbu…” It’s all a bit traveler-than-thou, if you know what I mean. I apologize in advance for this, and you should all feel free to yawn pointedly if I get too tedious.

How do you forget something like this? I suppose by doing a hundred other things in the subsequent months.

And here’s something I’ve been waiting about a year to sample: Pam’s Normal Food! This morning after my run I got to have a boring old favourite that used to be a staple part of my diet. It's nothing special, which is the whole point – just a toasted whole wheat bagel sandwiching an egg, cheese and sliced tomato.

Ahhh…. And see that shirt? You’ve never seen that shirt before, have you? That’s an old favourite too!

It only took about a day and a half for me to start feeling a bit lost and aimless. It’s true that I’m back in Canada and my round-the-world traveling is over, but I’m still going to be living out of suitcases for the foreseeable future. Don't forget that I have no job and no house, so I'm very uprooted right now. I need to start looking for work, but I think that process is going to be a slow one, and it’s a bit discouraging that I really don’t know when or where I’ll finally have somewhere to hang my hat. I’m really starting to crave having my own space. This is partly because I went and investigated my storage locker to make sure that everything was still ok, and so I could retrieve a suitcase of clothes. Therefore the bedroom I’m camped in seems absolutely crammed with stuff and I feel a bit overwhelmed by it. Then I realized that it’s really not much stuff at all – a grand total of two suitcases and one box. It’s just that I have nowhere to put it all to keep it organized. I used to dream about passports and airline tickets and exotic locations. Now I dream about having a closet.

So that’s the state of the union five days after touchdown: essentially fine, if a bit aimless. Now has anyone seen where I put my black running socks? I’m sure they were in the second pile from the left…

Hard-earned travel tips from one who’s been there

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:38:00 +0000

I know you’re all waiting for some grand summing up of my big adventure: profound insights, life-changing realizations, blah blah blah. All I can say is I’m working on it, but don’t hold your breath. Instead here’s a much more practical offering: a bunch of random tips and observations on long term travel that I think I now have the resumé to offer with a certain gravitas. In no particular order, take them as they come.

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Upon entering a new hotel room in a dodgy part of the world (Africa, Asia, the Middle East) check that the hot water, heating, air conditioning, kettle, internet or other amenities work properly. It's much more likely you'll get moved to a new room if you haven't exploded all over the first one before discovering there's no hot water and the shower sprays sideways onto an electrical panel.

The smallest hotel room of the trip – Jerusalem. You are viewing a less-than-single sized bed, which took up exactly half of the room. The bathroom was about 1” wider than the toilet and you stood in the doorway to use the sink. 200 shekels per night.

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Always carry the business card of your hotel or hostel, or at least write down the name so you have something to show a cab driver to get you home. If the language does not use the Roman alphabet, get someone at the front desk to write it out for you.

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Carry chocolate. Or candy. Or whatever makes things better when things are bad. God help you if your comfort food is Waldorf Salad or Baked Alaska.

Sweet shop window display, Barcelona

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Always have a book, or iPod, or Sudoku or other distraction, preferably more than one. Travel involves waiting. It is inevitable.

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Be methodical and disciplined about packing. Have a list and check it every time, or risk leaving your last pair of clean underwear mating with the dust bunnies under your bunk bed in Bratislava.

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Always carry some kind of ID. A drivers license is good for this. It's official, and has a photo, but it's not the end of the world if you lose it.

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In galleries, museums and other sights always take the guided tour, especially if it's free. You may see a smaller part of the collection but you'll get a lot more out of it.

Me at Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow. Certainly one of my top five museums for the trip, which included a brilliant, free guided tour.

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Carry a photocopy of your passport information page with you all the time so you don't have to pull out the real thing to fill out paperwork. This also helps the authorities to know what embassy to contact when they pull you out of a ditch.

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Shampoo is everything. It cleans hair, bodies, clothes and dishes. What else would you need to clean? (Well, teeth I guess. Toothpaste is allowed.)

Electric on-demand hot water heater in my B&B in Bushmills, Northern Ireland. They are everywhere. Why don’t we have these in North America?

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Don’t be afraid to ask for help, directions or advice. People are usually friendly and genuinely want to assist. If they aren't they can be blogged about without mercy. The flipside to this is that people who seek you out to help you should not always be trusted, it's more likely you'll be the victim of a scam if the other person approached you first.

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Pockets are handy. Pockets with zips are better. Pockets with zips and snaps are better still. Pockets with zips, snaps, padlocks and armed guards are recommended for the Delhi metro.

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McDonald's is not the devil. If nothing else, the bathrooms are always clean. (But some of them actually require you to punch a passcode printed on your receipt into a lock on the door. France, I'm talking to you.)

McDonalds, Nezsky Prospekt, Russia

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Carry a stash of US dollars in a secure place, just in case. A couple hundred dollars should be enough, though Intrepid travel normally requires to have quick access to about $400 when in dodgier regions, in case you need to get out of the country fast. Smaller bills are better. 20s are good. If you don't have US dollars, euros are the next best.

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Don't be lazy about locking things up and keeping your valuables secure. The one time you leave your moneybelt unlocked in your hotel room (even if the room itself is locked) could be the one time it's not there when you get back. Also, ALWAYS lock your bag up on overnight trains and keep small valuables close to your head while you sleep. You may feel like a geek, but it's better than being a victim.

Jess, on one of four overnight trains in China

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Trust your instincts. If a street or shop or person seems dodgy just don't go there. There will always be another one.

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Haggle over prices when it's culturally appropriate, but don't get obsessive about it. Remember that you may be arguing over 50 cents, which is nothing to you but could be significant to the vendor.

Carving stall at Kande Beach in Malawi. I got a very nice carved giraffe here that I carefully mailed home from Livingstone, Zambia in the middle of January. It still has not arrived, and I suspect it never will.

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Don’t feel bad about taking a break from local food or culture. If you feel like you need a burger and a night of "Dancing with the Stars" in your room, do it.

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Get comfortable doing laundry in the sink, but understand it has its limitations. I found it helped to think of laundry treated in this manner not as "clean" so much as "thoroughly rinsed".

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Wet sink-washed clothes should be wrung out vigorously, then wrapped in a dry towel and wrung out again. They'll dry much more quickly after the towel treatment.

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Eat in sometimes, especially breakfast. Sometimes not having to venture out and stomach the local pig knuckle soup at 8am is a good thing.

Then again, sometimes you need the Full Irish Breakfast, including half a pint of Guinness. Like after arriving in Amsterdam on an overnight train after waking up to discover the dining car has been replaced, in the night, with several grim sleeper cars from Poland.

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Try not to stress about the cost of changing money. A percentage point here or there is minor in the scheme of things. Accept that converting currency is part of the cost of international travel and move on.

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Where it's safe and reasonably priced, rent a bike. It'll let you see and do more with less effort.

Sizing up bikes in Yangshuo, China

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Pack earplugs and be prepared to get comfortable sleeping with them. The same is true for eye masks.

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There are a few things that turn up just about everywhere: Coca Cola, Pringles potato chips, and Oreo-ish cookies. They are the holy trinity of long term travel snacky comfort food.

Well I didn’t say they were NORMAL flavours, just that they were there…

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Carry a small quick-dry towel in your daypack. They’re good for drying your hands in public bathrooms, wiping the sweat off your face, and when dampened can be used for a quick sponge bath that’s remarkably refreshing, especially useful after crawling out of the jungle following a 12km hash run.

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Bookstores in the larger airports will almost always have a good selection of guidebooks.

Excellent used bookstore in Hanoi, Vietnam

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When you check a bag for a flight have them stick the baggage claim tag(s) in or on your passport instead of your boarding pass. You're much less likely to lose track of your passport than your boarding pass or e-ticket printout.

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Don't ask a local person “Where should I go for ramen?” Instead ask them, “Where do YOU go for ramen?” There's a big difference.

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And finally: I know it's practical and probably more secure, but I'm telling you this as a friend: wearing your daypack on the front makes you look like a dork.

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That’s all I’ve got right now, folks. More profound thoughts to come, if I can manage to marshal them at all. In the mean time I’m relaxing in Winnipeg getting used to being somewhere where I can read all the signs and understand every conversation around me (which turns out not be a very good thing…). It’s all bit weird but it also has its compensations, like being able to walk into a kitchen full of familiar, favourite foods, or go for a run on streets I’ve run a hundred times before, or turn on the TV and watch a hockey game. So life is good, and some day soon I’ll figure out what happens next.

Steve’s Weird Food for America: the fry-fecta!

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:42:00 +0000

First, a bit of non-food business. I’m home. Or at least I’m in the last place I called home: Winnipeg. After traveling for 351 days I’ve finally gone so far east that it turned into west and have ended up back at the very house from which I launched this crazy adventure. It will take a while for me to formulate some thoughts on this momentous occasion, so in the mean time let’s talk about the last triumphant Weird Food Adventure.

Weird Food Steve, the world-weary traveler, and the endlessly helpful Karen in the kitchen in Winnipeg, all modeling Japanese yukata imported via San Jose.

You didn’t think I was done did you? Just because I was on my home continent? Just because the number of days left in the adventure could be counted on one hand? Ha! Not when there was a whole new country’s worth of weird food out there, and certainly not when it was a country that has given us fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on a stick, garlic ice cream, and reindeer dogs. (No, really.) America’s Weird Food potential could not be ignored.

I have to thank my hosts for leading me to what turned out to be Weird Food Mecca – the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. This is a permanent carnival on the Santa Cruz beachfront with roller coasters, carnival games, and enough artery-clogging food to stain a warehouse full of brown paper bags into glassy translucence. It was perfect.

The Santa Cruz Boardwalk

Our first stop was Marini’s candy shop, famous for salt water taffy, candied apples, caramel corn and…

Yes, you read that right: chocolate covered bacon!

Unfortunately, the boardwalk outlet of Marini’s only carried the milk chocolate variety (the flagship store downtown also stocks dark chocolate) but nonetheless I went ahead and ordered three pieces, which came to a grand total of $3.16. Each piece was thickly coated with chocolate and had, as advertised, a nice crispy strip of bacon inside. It was creamy and sweet and a bit salty and smokey, but mostly just chocolaty and crunchy. And the verdict? Six thumbs up: all three of us agreed that it was definitely worth another try, and the three slices disappeared fast. If there was any criticism it was that we thought it needed a bit higher bacon to chocolate ratio, and all agreed that the dark chocolate variety would probably be more sophisticated and generally superior. Further investigation is required, which I leave to Amy and Randy who I suspect will seek out additional samples on their next trip to Santa Cruz. They’re like Weird Food Deputies!

Amy and Randy, doing their Lady and the Tramp impression over a piece of chocolate covered bacon.

Our next stop was a short stroll down the boardwalk (which was, disappointingly, all concrete, with not a board in sight…). It didn’t take long to reach this stall:

Deep Fried Twinkies! Oh yeah!

That vendor was selling two items on the must-try list, not only deep fried Twinkies (on a stick, no less!), but also deep fried Oreo cookies – 3 per serving. I got one order of Oreos and two Twinkies because Randy was man enough to join me in the grand experiment, whereas Amy pleaded that she was afraid of developing spontaneous diabetes and could barely be convinced to try a single bite. No matter, soon enough we were seated and ready to dive in.

Me and Randy with one order or Oreos, one Twinkie with powdered sugar and chocolate sauce, and one Twinkie with powdered sugar and strawberry sauce. (I recommend viewing the entire series of ten Twinkie-tasting photos as a slide show over at Flickr. Amy was diligent in her role as photographer of the event, so you can get an almost flip-book style bite-by-bite documentary, including one photo in which I appear to be pontificating with Randy about the whole experience as if we were on the Food Network, which clearly we should be. Or me at least.)

Twinkies first: Nice. Sweet, yes, but the heat from the fryer partially melted the “cream” (or, more accurately: Kreeeeem TM) and the whole thing was quite moist. Surprisingly, I preferred the strawberry sauce to the chocolate, because even my prodigious sweet tooth found the chocolate sauce added to the powdered sugar and the Twinkie a bit too sweet. On the other hand, the strawberry added just a hint of tartness that blended well. Here I have to report that Amy vociferously objected to my use of the word “tart” in the same sentence, time zone or continent as a deep fried Twinkie, but she was clearly suffering from insufficient sugar intake and so could not be taken seriously.

Close-up of the Twinkinum Arterius Impedimenta, subspecies: Common Cocoa

With Amy’s fat/sugar level dangerously low, we moved quickly to the deep fried Oreos. I declined to have any sauce with the (the same chocolate and strawberry were available) but this turned out to be an error in judgment. An Oreo cookie is an inherently dry item to begin with and the batter around it didn’t add much moisture to the mix. We all agreed that the flavour was good, but decided they’d be best with a cup of coffee.

Me and the deep-fried Oreo. Last Weird Food of the trip.

After the tasty but arid Oreos we really really needed something to drink so we stopped for lemonade at a stand near the exit. True to form Amy had the traditional variety, but Randy and I had Cherry Lemonade (which Amy pronounced to be “cough syrup” after a small taste). No matter, because it was wet and cold and had the added advantage of turning my tongue red, giving a good photo op before we piled into the car for the drive back to San Jose. Off we drove into the sunset, awash in the satisfaction of having risen to the Weird Food Challenge, and only slightly queasy.

Me, my cherry lemonade, and my red tongue, after finishing the last of 38 different weird foods on the trip

Nine and a half hours in San Francisco

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Mon, 31 May 2010 06:01:00 +0000

It’s been a good few days in California. I arrived after my overnight flight feeling jetlagged and exhausted but I took a whole day off from being a tourist and got to sleep in, do laundry, manage a bit of shopping, blog, and make dinner for my hosts. It was great, and the jetlag hasn’t been nearly as bad as I was expecting.

First though, a brief diversion about my trip from Japan to California. I mentioned that I stopped in Vancouver to have coffee with friends so I’m honour-bound to include them here because I promised Steve, and he’s been a faithful blog-lurker since Day One. Also, he bought me a latté at the Starbucks. Rob and Steve: It was great seeing you guys, thanks for making the trip out to the airport. I hope you liked the green Kit Kats

Rob H, Me and Steven G., at the lovely Vancouver Airport. The photo is not great, because Rob managed to find the one guy in the Vancouver airport who, when presented with my camera, could not figure which way to point it and spent a few fumbling moments with the lens pointing at himself. So the fact that there’s a photo at all is a minor miracle.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled California blog post: On my second day in San Jose I got up at a more reasonable hour and caught the train into San Francisco for a day of proper tourist business. Because at least for a little while longer, that’s what I do. The train from San Jose to San Francisco took about an hour and a half, and I arrived in town at 11:00 am. It was a strange feeling to get off the train with no guide book, no map, and no plan. Perhaps it’s a bit sad, but as soon as I walked past a bookstore I jaywalked over and hit the travel section (California shelf). I came out a few minutes later with a tiny, cheap guidebook, an excellent map of the transit system, and the personal advice of a woman in the travel section. I felt muuuuuuch better. Brimming with confidence, and with my transit map in my lap, I boarded the “F Market” streetcar and headed for the seashore.

Inside the “F Market” streetcar

I got off at the stop for Pier 39, which is a popular tourist destination, if your idea of tourism is buying craploads of cheap tourist tat of every description and eating until you can’t move. There was no doubt I was in America. It seems that the whole northern tip of the peninsula on which San Francisco sits has been turned into one long street of shops and restaurants, with very occasional alternative diversions. Even after having been in the retail heaven of Tokyo, it was a bit much. There was one store called, I’m not kidding here, “Who You Callin’ a Crab?” which sold nothing but crab-related products. There were several stores selling only wacky socks. And if you wanted anything you could imagine with the Golden Gate bridge on it, well, let’s just say your search would not be arduous.

Pier 39 did have one non-consumer-related attraction, though, and it was a good one: sea lions! It’s not clear why the sea lions have chosen to hang out on the docks near Pier 39 – they used to sun themselves on a place called Seal Rock, but gradually migrated to Pier 39 around 1989. I thought they were fantastic – cute, and ungainly on land, but incredibly lithe in the water. And I couldn’t believe how they were able to get themselves up onto the floating docks – they seem to just launch themselves out of the water.

Video of the sea lions at Pier 39

After that I wandered along the Embarcadero, and I admit I did a bit of shopping. I bought a pair of jeans! I haven’t worn jeans in almost a year, so I was a bit giddy when I found a pair that fit properly and weren’t nearly as enormous a size as I feared. And now I can walk around in my jeans feeling like a normal person instead of a cross between a Mountain Equipment Co-op catalogue model and a hobo. It’s great.

My walking eventually led to Ghirardelli Square, which is where the famous Rice-a-Roni Streetcar turns around to head back across the city (though it’s more properly known as the Hyde-Powell Streetcar). I thought about taking a ride but the lineup to get on was ridiculously long, so I decided this was going to have to be one of those must-do things that just didn’t get done. Luckily Ghirardelli Square is also the home of the Famous chocolate makers, and the site of their flagship store where they give away free samples of Ghirardelli chocolate to anyone who walks in the door. Nice place, even though the woman at the ice cream counter gave me some advice that was in direct opposition to the information on my transit map. I scarfed down a few more squares of free chocolate and then followed my own counsel and was able to find the right bus stop and the right bus to take me to the Golden Gate Bridge, which was my next stop.

The bridge was excellent and well worth the bus ride, even though I was accompanied an obnoxious herd of thirteen-ish year old boys who spent the whole time talking loudly, posturing, and generally being as unpleasant as thirteen-ish year old boys can be, which is to say very very very very very unpleasant. Bridges in general are a favourite of mine, so a classic like the Golden Gate Bridge was a real treat. I especially liked the cross-section they displayed showing what the main cables of the bridge are really like – they’re HUGE! You really don’t get a sense of that when they’re hundreds of feet away.

This cable is just over three feet in diameter and is made up of 27,572 individual strands.

I also walked out onto the bridge itself and took approximately 732 photos (all on Flickr), and had a very nice visit.

Mandatory shot of me at the Golden Gate Bridge

Back on the bus again (minus thirteen-year old boys) and my next stop was Golden Gate Park. (Note to those of you not familiar with San Francisco geography, as I was until I arrived: Golden Gate Park is not named after the bridge. In fact, it and the bridge are both named after the Golden Gate, which is the name for the opening into San Francisco Bay. Hence, when the channel was bridged, they called it the Golden Gate Bridge.) Golden Gate Park is a big rectangular green space on the western side of the peninsula, similar in shape to New York’s Central Park, but 20% bigger – just over a thousand acres. I walked from the bus stop at the centre of the southern edge of the park, past Stow Lake, a Japanese Garden that I declined to pay $8.00 to enter, a lawn bowling club and the large, open Bowling Green. I was having a nice walk towards the east end of the park but at the very end things started to get a bit dodgy. I think there’s a fairly large community of homeless people who camp out in that area, and there seemed to be some vociferous conversations going on among a few of them that were vaguely worrying. I sped up a bit until I was walking right behind a normal-looking couple who I estimated could be counted on to point the police in the direction in which my unconscious body was dragged if things turned ugly, and made it out of the park without incident.

That landed me at the end of Haight Street, hippie central in the 1960s and still home to spaced-out oddballs of all stripes. I had a really nice supper there at a funky café (though in fairness everywhere in Haight was funky) where the young guy behind the counter asked me for I.D. when I ordered a beer, thus instantly catapulting himself to the status of Favourite Food Service Professional of All Time.

See what I mean about the funkiness thing?

After supper in Haight I kept walking, aiming for Castro, and went past a nice park and up some very steep hills. It turns out the route I chose required me to climb a fair bit, only to descend precipitously a few blocks later, but I guess that’s just life in San Francisco. Still, the steepness of the streets was startling. Some of the sidewalks even had shallow steps.

If the street had been leveled, this is how slanty the houses would be.

Castro was a great neighbourhood – the heart and soul of San Francisco’s big and lively gay community. I was there on a Friday evening and the whole place was just buzzing – people out on the streets, packed into restaurants and bars, and chatting with friends. It was easily the friendliest, most comfortable part of San Francisco that I visited and I found myself wondering if there might be a job opening or two worth considering in the Bay Area. The vibe was really nice.

The rainbow flag which flies over Harvey Milk Plaza, peeking out from behind a block of Castro. The plaza commemorates the San Francisco city supervisor and gay rights activist who was assassinated in 1978. (You know: the guy in the Sean Penn movie. And don’t try and tell me you were all “Oh-yeah-Harvey-Milk-I’m-up-on-that-noise” BEFORE you saw the movie…or is that just me?)

From Castro it was another ride on the streetcar, which included a free performance by a couple of San Francisco’s more colourful characters. Then I had a short walk down 5th Street, which also turned out to be… colourful, so I was happy to see the bright lights of the CalTrain station before the sun set completely. An hour and a half later I was safely back in San Jose and ready for bed. It was a good day in San Francisco, though a ridiculously short amount of time to see anything but the barest snippet of the city. I’d definitely like to go back some day, especially if young food service professionals keep implying that I’m under 21 years old, and they’re still giving away chocolate. I mean what’s not to like?

Final thoughts on Japan

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Fri, 28 May 2010 02:18:00 +0000

As I write this I’m comfortably ensconced in the living room of friends in San Jose, California, jetlagged but conscious. This is after a Day 346 in which I packed up in Tokyo and then visited a museum and an electronics megastore, had more conveyor belt sushi, took the train to the airport, flew overnight from Tokyo to Vancouver, crossed the International Date Line, had coffee with Rob H and Steven G in the Vancouver airport, flew from Vancouver to San Francisco, got picked up and driven to San Jose, napped, and went out for dinner before collapsing into bed at 10:00pm after the longest Wednesday of my life. I’ve got a few days here in the San Francisco area, then it’s home to Winnipeg on Day 351. So the Fat Lady is certainly warming up in the wings, but it ain’t over yet.

There’s still a lot to say about Japan. For instance, I haven’t really talked about the language at all. I found it a much easier to pick up than any of the other Asian languages, mostly because it doesn’t have those maddening tones that make proper pronunciation so difficult. The script, on the other hand, actually employs three different systems all mushed together. Kanji are the borrowed Chinese ideographs that represent whole words or concepts; it’s generally agreed you need to know about 2,000 of these to be considered literate. Hirigana are symbols that are building blocks to forming larger words; they’re complete syllables like ka, sha, ti, tsu, cha, and so on. There are 46 of those. And then there’s katakana, which represent the same syllables as hirigana, but are used for words borrowed from other languages, mostly English. If my name were to be rendered in Japanese it would be done using katakana and would come out something like Pa-me-ra: パメラ. I think this is why the Japanese have such trouble with R and L. There is no L sound in Japanese so R is used as a substitute when they adopt words from other languages that use the L sound. So naturally they have trouble pronouncing L sounds to begin with, and they have trouble remembering when to use R and when to use L when speaking in English). Some excellent Japanified words that would use katakana are things like: “wa-ru-do kap-pu” and “to-ra-be-raz chek-ku”. See if you can figure out what those are.*

And did I mention that there is always a free, clean public toilet around when you need one? Like the vending machines, just when the urge swims into your consciousness, you look up and there they are. And you know how I’ve complained a few times about countries where no one can ever give you change for a large bill? In Japan, vending machines will all take ¥100 notes (that’s a $10 bill) and the local 7-11 won’t bat an eye if you give them a ¥1,000 note for a bottle of water.

Speaking of vending machines, how about some fun vending machine food? I never found any really weird stuff in vending machines, though you can get hot cans in coffee and tea in many. And I did run into these things in a machine in Kyoto, and subsequently saw them in convenience stores too. I couldn’t help but think of soylent green when I saw the package, but it turned out just to be dull and dry chocolately flavoured cookie sticks.

Soylent Yellow

How about a weird drink to wash down your “balanced food block”? Believe me, you’ll need it. Well you could do worse than a refreshing bottle of squid juice! Actually it’s hard to imagine a worse concoction than squid juice, but luckily this turned out to be surprisingly tame.

Nicely chilled and ready to drink!

The most interesting thing turned out to be the bottle. It was sealed with a glass ball stuck in the top of the neck. To open the bottle you pull off the plastic cap and peel it apart to turn it into a sort of plunger. Then you put the plunger on top of the ball and smack it with your hand. This forces the glass ball down into the wide part of the neck of the bottle and lets the beverage flow around it. Apparently it’s very retro. And what does carbonated squid juice taste like? Cream soda. No, really. I think the squid ink was only used for colouring because it really just tasted like cream soda. Phew. Talk about dodging a bullet.

And I have to show you this short video I took on my first night in Tokyo, as I was wandering through the Akihabara area. It's... well, it's kind of a car vending machine:

Now, back to some sightseeing. I mentioned in the last post that I’d hoped to get out to the Hakone area, and I actually managed to do that on my last day in Japan when it finally stopped raining. Hakone turned out to be a bit of a bust, but that wasn’t due to the scenery, it was simply because I was trying to fit two days worth of sightseeing into about six hours. First I made my way by bullet train to the city of Odawara. There’s a castle there, and since I hadn’t seen any Japanese castles yet I figured it was worth a stop. It was, but only barely. The original castle dates back to the 15th century, but was demolished in 1872 by order of the Meiji government. The current castle was rebuilt in 1960 and though it’s pretty on the outside the inside is fairly modern looking and filled with case after case of only mildly diverting artifacts. At least they had the decency to build it a short walk from the train station.

The donjon (keep) of Odawara Castle

After hopping onto a slow local train in Odawara, I made it to Hakone-Yumoto, where the wacky transport starts. First is the switchback train, an antique two carriage affair that chugs up the side of a mountain using three switchbacks with a maximum grade of about 8%. They're a bit startling at first, those switchbacks, because the train pulls into a station and then pulls right out again back in the direction it just arrived from. Of course it switches to another track as it’s leaving, but it’s still disconcerting the first few times it happens.

Insufferably arty shot taken on the switchback train

After 45 minutes the train drops you off at the base of the funicular line, which climbs up Mount Soun-zan and deposits you at the cable car station. The cable car then travels over a remarkably blighted valley that looks like a strip-mining operation but is actually a sort of geologically unstable area over a volcanic rift.

A look at the rift, including the operations that are attempting to stop the mountain from continuing to slide away

The volcano is called Owakudani, and at the top there’s a short but smelly walk to view the sulfurous steam bubbling out of milky white pools of water. After Owakaduni it’s possible to take another cable car to the top of Togendai and then visit Ashino-ko Lake where they have tourist boats that are purported to look like something out of “Pirates of the Caribbean”. Unfortunately my schedule meant that I only had time for a quick hike around the windy, stinky slopes of Owakaduni before I had to start retracing my steps back all the way back to Tokyo. I did, however, find the time to indulge in the volcano’s famous weird food: black eggs! These are plain eggs that are boiled in the sulphurous water of the volcano, which causes a checmical reaction that turns the egg’s shell totally black. The legend is that consuming one will add seven years to your life. They’re sold in packs of five (35 years) for ¥500, and EVERYONE tries them while they’re at the top. So many hard boiled eggs have been consumed in the area that in places it looked like the ground was paved in tiny shards of broken eggshell.

Black on the outside, but plain old white on the inside. They tasted like… boiled eggs. The taste could not hold a candle to the eggs-on-a-stick.

I had to rush back to Tokyo because that evening I was having dinner with Paul and Takako, the dynamic duo who smoothed the way for me the whole time I was in Japan. For their grand finale they invited me over for supper and whipped up a Japanese feast of roll-your-own sushi cones and takoyaki. Takoyaki (literally meaning fried or baked octopus) is a party food that I first saw at the food fair on the temple grounds during Aoi Matsuri in Kyoto, though I didn’t know what it was at the time. And what is/are takoykai? They’re bite-sized fried dumpling sort of things with a chunk of octopus in them, and with tempura bits, pickled ginger, and green onion. At fairs the vendors make them in huge cast-iron grills, but at home people have special little electric tabletop versions. They’re yummy, and get topped with mayonnaise, okonomiyaki sauce, flakes of nori (seaweed) and katsuobushi, which are micro-thin shavings of dried fish that wave like a living thing when the heat from the takoyaki rises past them. It’s fun and tasty.

Paul and Takako, tending to the tokoyaki, with partially devoured plate of assorted raw fish in the bottom right. (My new favourite is hotate – raw scallops. They are soooo yummy.)

And after dinner Paul gave me a ride back to my hotel on the back of his motorcycle. He’d picked me up by the same mode, and I loved having a chance to see Tokyo that way. You get a much better view from a bike than you do from a car. After dinner we took the scenic route through Shibuya crossing, which is lit up like Christmas at night.

More video! This is us pulling up to Shibuya crossing just before the pedestrians start their massed scramble through the intersection.

We also went through a few back streets in Shibuya, and I got to see some of the famous “love hotels”. The entrances are shielded from view so you can’t be seen entering or leaving, and they all had signs outside advertising the “rest” rate (just a few hours) and the “stay” rate (overnight). Paul told me he’d read a statistic that said the average stay in one of these places was 45 minutes. That’s the average, which means half of the people who come must stay for less than that... We also drove past the Tokyo tower, and over into Odaiba for a look at the bizarre Fuji TV headquarters “Death Star” building. It was a great ride, and a perfect way to end my last night in Tokyo.

Tokyo Tower. Nine metres taller than the one in Paris on which it was based.

On my last morning in town I finally made it to the tiny Shitimatchi Museum, which was conveniently located next to the train station I needed for the trip to the airport. I stuffed my big bag in a locker at the station (there are always lockers at stations) and went to check it out. It was great – charming and compact, and offering a free English guide service that I took advantage of. The museum is dedicated to showcasing a tiny bit of the Edo period Shitimatchi area, a work-a-day neighbourhood of shops and tenements. The whole main floor was not much bigger than an average Starbucks, and had a recreated tenement house on one side and a recreated shop on the other. The second floor had some fun games and toys you could try and a few interesting displays. My guide was a friendly woman who showed me around for 30 or 40 minutes and when I turned to leave the woman at the front desk stopped me and pulled something out from behind the counter. As she offered it to me she said, “Present”. It turned out to be an amazing bit of origami – an octagonal box with a perfectly-fitting lid that appears to use no fewer than sixteen separate pieces of paper. I have no idea why she gave it to me, but I was blown away. What a great way to end my time in Japan.

My good bye gift from Japan

Yep, Japan was charming right to the end. For instance, on the train I took out to the airport they switch the orientation of the seats at each end station so that they’re always facing in the direction of travel. That’s nothing special; the shinkansen clean-up crews that descend on the train at terminal stations go through each car and spin the seats by unlocking them with a foot pedal and swinging them around. However the Keisei Skyliner to Narita Airport did this all automatically. I looked over as I was waiting for the train doors to open and saw all the seats in the car spontaneously spin themselves around. I love Japan.

And now I’m in America for continent number 4, country number 33, and bed number 158. In a few days my long journey will be over, but don’t despair. I’ve still got a few things on my mind so you’ll have to endure some more of my long-winded ramblings before we can finally put this thing to bed.

* “Wa-ru-do kap-pu” is World Cup. “To-ra-be-raz chek-ku” are traveler’s cheques. I love that.

Two Rainy Days in Tokyo

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Thu, 27 May 2010 00:43:00 +0000

I had a spell of wet weather while in Tokyo, but I tried not to let it get in the way of things. On Sunday I met up with ever-helpful Paul and Takako and they gave me a quick tour of the area around Shibuya. Shibuya Crossing is, as Paul describes it, the picture postcard shot of Tokyo: tall buildings covered in video screens, traffic, the world’s busiest Starbucks, and a timed surge of humanity every few minutes when the whole intersection is given over to pedestrians as a giant scramble corner. (People in Saskatoon: remember those?)

Shibuya Crossing, through dirty window, in the rain

I also got a picture of me at the statue of Hachiko, the little dog whose story is essentially that of Greyfriars Bobby from way back in Edinburgh: faithful hound who came to Shibuya station every day to await the arrival of his master and continued to do so after his master’s death, until his own death 11 years later. The statue is famous, and I hear the dog himself is preserved through the miracle of taxidermy at the National Museum.

Me and Hachiko, in the rain

Paul and Takako and I wandered around the area a bit, and they gave me the Coles Notes version on lots of different odd Japan things that we happened on, like game parlours (as distinct from pachinko parlours). The game parlours seem to be filled almost entirely with variations on the old “claw” machines where you try to pluck, nudge or otherwise persuade some article inside the case to drop into the chute below where you then claim it. There were the mandatory stuffed animals of all descriptions, but there were also silvery sort of briefcase things with skull-and-crossbones motifs, and in Kyoto I even stuff like boxes of Ritz crackers and bags of cookies in these machine, which seems like a really cumbersome way of doing your grocery shopping.

And there was the Taiko Hero game! Actually, I don’t know what it was really called. I call it Taiko Hero because it was just like Guitar Hero, but with Taiko drums. There were two drums in front of the machine and you had to bang away at them in sequence with the dots that scrolled past on the screen. Red dot meant bang the drum. Blue dot meant whack the edge. BIG red dot meant whack the drum really hard. And yellow seemed to mean go nuts on the drum for the duration of the dots.

Me and Takako (hidden behind me), in a head to head Taiko Hero duel, seeking refuge from the rain.

I’m proud to report that even though Takako is Japanese and hence must have an inborn cultural advantage, and despite the fact that for half the game I thought that blue dot meant whack the SIDE of the drum, not the edge, it still ended up being Canada 55,570 - Japan 43,370. The Maple Leaf forever!

After that vigorous session of taiko drumming we visited a store called Tokyu Hands, which was one of a chain of enormous crafty-ish stores that carried a little bit of everything. There were seven floors and they stocked pet and garden supplies, knitting stuff, sewing notions, fancy stationery, ordinary stationery, games, puzzles, cell phone accessories and ornaments, kitchen, bath and linen supplies, luggage, rubber stamps, stickers, foot care products, tools, building materials, Father’s Day gifts, travel gadgets, and on and on and on. It was a bit overwhelming, but at least it was out of the rain, and I was able to pick up a gift and some origami paper.

Eventually we made our way up to Harajuku, an area that’s normally famous for the cos-play people that come out on the weekends to strut their stuff in weird and wonderful costumes. However, did I mention it was raining? Well the cos-play gangs don’t tend to come out when it’s wet, for fear of matting their fun-fur or streaking their hair dye or something, so there wasn’t much living scenery that day. We did have fun poking around a ¥100 Shop (Japanese dollar store) and then Paul and Takako delivered me, on time, to my next appointment of the day. I tell you, I’m a freakin’ social butterfly in Tokyo.

This appointment was a GSRED first. For the first time I was to meet someone who knew me only through the blog. Charles found GSRED through a link at the Tom Bihn site (the company that makes the Aeronaut, the bag I’ve carried around the world, and to which I have referred many times). He wasn’t related to me, or a friend, or someone who’d been referred to the blog by one of those two classes of people, and those are the only three kinds of readers that I’ve really considered might exist. So when Charles sent me an email saying that he’d been reading the blog and lived in Japan and would be happy to help me out with Japan stuff if I needed it, or even just go for a coffee or beer, I figured I should take him up on that.

I’ll admit I was a bit nervous because you really never know when someone is going to turn out to be a mouth-breathing, cyber-stalking freak. But then I realized that I’d just spent the better part of a year meeting and drinking beer with total strangers, so there was no reason I should exclude this guy just because he’d been taken the trouble to read my blog, and apparently liked it. Actually, the fact that he likes the blog is a sign of great intelligence and discernment. You should all give yourselves a pat on the back for being such a high-brow crowd.

And of course it all turned out fine. Great, in fact. We got along right away and spent most of the afternoon hanging around chatting. Charles is a teacher from the States who’s lived in Japan long enough to be fluent in the language and, I think, to call it home. He had a lot of interesting stuff to relate about life in Japan, and about his travels (the Galapagos Islands! Cool!). We talked about my travels too, and what it feels like now that they’re almost over. (Unreal. Sad. A relief.) Most people who hear about my trip ask me what my favourite place was, but Charles asked me something no one else has asked yet: “If you could go back to one place before your trip was over, just for a short while, where would you go?” (Ireland. I missed too much there. Like pretty much the whole country). And I told him something weird that I realized recently: I can’t remember what my socks look like. Not the ones I’m wearing, obviously. I mean the dozen or so pairs of non-traveling, non-quick-dry, normal, everyday socks that are waiting for me in a suitcase in Winnipeg. This was an oddly disorienting realization.

We talked over coffee and then over lunch, and Charles took me to a big bookstore with a large selection of English books. This was lucky because my latest disposable paperback was almost finished and I needed something to tide me over until I got back to English-land. It all ended up being a great afternoon, and I feel like I met a good friend. Thanks for not turning out to be an axe murderer, Charles!

Me and Charles, in front of Shinjuku Station, the busiest train station in the world, in the rain.

On Monday I’d hoped to spend the day outside Tokyo in the Hakone region, which is full of nice scenery and wacky forms of transport like switchback railways, funiculars, cable cars and cruise boats that look like Disney pirate ships. But that kind of thing is no fun in the rain so instead I decided to stick around Tokyo. My first stop was to be the famous tuna auction at the Tsujiki fish market, where ten thousand dollar fish are auctioned off at an ungodly hour every morning. It’s supposed to be fascinating, and the sashimi is as fresh as it comes. But if you’re plugged in to the Tokyo tourist scene at all you know that the tuna auction has been closed to tourists, off and on, for months. Apparently the crowds got a bit out of control and some particularly gormless and half-witted tourists actually got in the way of the buyers while trying to pose for photos, and some even touched the fish, so you really can’t blame the Tsujiki people for being touchy about things.

They’ve now decided to limit the number of people allowed to view the auction every day and restrict them to a particular viewing area, so you have to get in early to get a spot. Very, very, very, very early. The auction starts at 5:00 am, so I got up at 4:00 and got a cab (because of course the subway does not run at that hour). When I got there it was immediately obvious that what the LP said was true. This is not a place for tourists. This was an enormous, working fish market with big trucks everywhere and zillions of foam coolers full of every imaginable species of fish and little motorized carts zooming all over. I was trying very hard to stay out of the way of those little carts, but then one of them pulled right up to me and the driver turned around and told me to hop on! The guy was incredibly friendly and zipped me right through the whole warehouse kind of place to where the tuna auction is held, at the back. It was really really cool.

In fact, it was by far the coolest part of the morning, because I quickly found out that the spaces to see the tuna auction were all full. And then there was a Japanese security guard type guy with a hat and a walkie-talkie who seemed to be telling everyone that the whole area was closed and could we all please bugger off. And then there was a huge lineup of people at the place I assumed to be the sushi shop. It was at this point that I decided to give up and start my day over. So I legged it to the nearest metro station (which was running by this time), went back to my hotel, and went back to bed. I didn’t even get any photos. It was a total bust.

When my day started for the second time it was still raining, but I was much happier. I spent a pleasant, slow afternoon doing a bit of souvenir shopping in the Asakusa area, near the famous Asahi Brewery. I say it’s famous, but really I think it’s only notable for the gigantic golden statue of a sperm on the top of the building.

Well what do YOU think it looks like? (… in the rain)

That night I had weird food, and then suddenly it was my last full day overseas. More on that in another post, along with as many random observations about Japan as I can remember and make worth reading about. For now let’s leave me content but damp after two days of rain.

Steve’s Weird Food for Japan: the trifecta

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Wed, 26 May 2010 00:20:00 +0000

There has been a lot of weird food in Japan. In particular, I’ve been a bit obsessed with the amount of matcha-flavoured stuff I’ve encountered. Astute GSRED readers will remember that matcha is the particular type of powdered green tea used in the tea ceremony, and for some reason it’s a popular flavour that gets added to, well, just about anything. Pretty much any food you encounter has a matcha variety, identified by a particular shade of green packaging, and a particular shade of green food. Let’s have a look:

Matcha-flavoured cheesecake. This was the only “matcha” food I had that actually had any matcha flavour at all, due to the fact that I think it was sprinkled with real powdered matcha. This gives a decidedly bitter topnote to an otherwise pleasant cheesecake.

Matcha Kit Kat. I love this. It’s a Kit Kat, but it’s GREEN. Tasted just like it was covered in white chocolate - no matcha flavour, just generalized creamy sweetness. (I also saw banana flavoured Kit Kats, and heard they have strawberry as well.)

Matcha Oreo Cookie Candy Bar. Green crunchy oreo stuff.

Matcha Balls. Little crispy sweet balls covered in the ubiquitous green creamy coating.

Matcha and black bean donut. Again, no matcha flavour, just a cake donut that happened to be green, and studded with things that look like chocolate chips, but are actually beans. The fact that Asian cultures persist in the belief that beans are a dessert food is weird.

Matcha chocolate chip cookies. Again, chocolate chip cookies… but they’re GREEN.

Matcha mousse. Lovely, creamy, and with the faintest hint of matcha.

Matcha caramels. The weirdest of the lot. They are presented in tiny flat cellophane wrappers that you peel open like those Listerine breath-freshener sheets you stick on the back of your tongue. This reveals a square of very squishy goo that you pop into your mouth. It’s definitely caramel, but there may have been a vague note of matcha too. But really, shapeless green goo? That has to qualify as weird food.

But that’s not the weirdest food I had; that honour goes to a meal I ate in Tokyo on my second-last night there. I got some advice from the very friendly guy at the hotel desk and headed out to a local place that turned out to be quite fancy, though surprisingly reasonably priced. (This was mostly in comparison with the tempura meal I had the night before which, while pleasant and tasty, clocked in at a budget-busting ¥8778. More than $90. Ouch!). And when I opened the menu I saw right away that I was going to be able to make this a Weird Food trifecta – starter, main course and dessert. How could I not?

My started was based on an ingredient called yuba, which is soy milk skin. The LP says, “Its creation is a labour-intensive process in which soy milk is allowed to curdle over a low heat and then the skin is plucked from the surface.” Yes, first they curdle the milk, and then the nasty skin that forms on the surface? The bit you’d normally skim off the top and throw out? That’s the bit they keep. However, the way I had it prepared it was really nice. The menu described it as “baked fresh yuba and cheese”. It came in a very hot little dish, bubbling away, with small pieces of toasted baguette on which to spread it, and it was really nice. Creamy, a bit cheesy, and with no trace of skin-ish-ness.

Baked yuba and cheese

The main course was the real centerpiece – that which I’d specifically sought out as the Weird Food of the night. The Japanese call it basashi, but the English speaking world would describe it as raw horse meat. It’s a real delicacy, served sashimi-style with slabs of fat and a light dipping sauce.

It’s a delicacy, I’m telling you

The basashi was, well, sort of like you’d expect any raw red meat to be. It was chewy and a bit stringy, and the bits of fat between were tough (not like a melting lardy kind of thing). There wasn’t any strong flavour at all. I tried a few of the pieces of fat along with the meat, but decided it was better on its own. Better being a very very relative term here, sort of like you might describe the third season of “Heroes” as better than a boot to the head. Truthfully, it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t really… anything, which makes me think I’ve been doing this for too long.

On to dessert, and we’re back to that bean thing again. My choice was “yam pancake with sweet bean jam and ice cream”. Among the other choices was black bean ice cream. I’m telling you, this place was a Weird Food gimme.

Dessert

It was very nice, though I still can’t get over the sweet bean thing. The flavour is sweet, but the texture is… bean. I suppose it’s not miles from carrot cake, or candied yams. Entirely cultural, I’m sure.

And to top it all off I had to try a glass of sake, which turned out to be much much bigger than I expected. The “small” glass I had was 180 somethings, mililitres, I guess. It seemed like a lot, and it was poured right at the table. The glass was set and then carefully centred in a large wooden coaster with a high lip. Then the glass was filled. And I mean filled, until the sake reached the rim. I was impossible to lift it without spilling, hence the heavy-duty coaster. It was nice enough, but by the time I got through the whole glass I was ready for bed. After all, I’d had soy milk skin, raw horse, and bean jam. What else could I do that day to top that?

Bed time

The Big Mikan

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Mon, 24 May 2010 02:21:00 +0000

I’m told that’s the nickname English speakers use for Tokyo - The Big Mikan. (Mikan means mandarin orange). So I’m here in the big city, the last overseas stop in a string of stops so long that people’s eyes glaze over when I’m asked to list them. And I’ve checked in to my last hotel room. The hotel room I’m in now, however, was not the first place I stayed in Tokyo. I decided that one of the things I needed to do in Japan was to stay in a capsule hotel, so I booked into a place at Asakusa (not to be confused with Akasaka…) and checked in when I got off the train from Takayama.

I’ll admit I had some preconceived notions about what the capsule hotel would be like. I imagined floor after floor of spotless, space-age capsules arranged with same-floor access to pleasant common areas and with communal toilets, showers and a bath close by. The capsules would be small but cozy, with tv, alarm clock, power outlets and maybe even internet. Spacious lockers would secure my belongings right next to my capsule. It would all be clean, efficient, aesthetically pleasing, and display one or two unforeseen but brilliant little bits of hospitality or technology, like sliding doors that would automatically open and close to seal off the capsule, making a whooshing Star Trek noise when they did. This is Japan, after all, I’ve come to expect nothing less.

Not surprisingly, I was mostly wrong. The capsule hotel I stayed in did have rooms spread over many floors, but it shared those floors with a bunch of other things. The place was generally run down, and the services were scattered all over. My capsule, #8021, was on the 8th floor, and shared the room with 23 others. There were toilets and sinks in the next room. Lockers were there too, but were awkwardly shaped, like interlocking Ls, I suppose to allow you to hang up clothing in the tall part. Large bags had to be left unsecured, or put in pay-as-you-go lockers on the 2nd floor. Luckily I was able to rearrange things to be able to fit everything important into my locker, but it was a bit of a pain.

The weird-shaped lockers

There was a communal bath on the 9th floor, divided between men and women. The only showers were the ones next to the bath. They’re a particular sit-down type that you find at onsen all over Japan. And because I happened to have my camera with me when I was investigating, and there was no one using the place at the time, you get to have a look. You’d normally use these shower stations to wash yourself thoroughly before getting in the bath. I I’m used to having a shower in my room at other times, so maybe this is what communal showers are always like in Japan.

The sit-down showers

And just because I can, here’s a look at the bath. It’s much more utilitarian than the ones I’ve had in nicer hotels.

There was wifi internet, but it was on the 2nd floor, along with a tv and a bit of a lounge area. The 9th floor had laundry machines, the baths, and a reasonable view over the river. And once I got over my initial disappointment at the decidedly non-Flash Gordon-like atmosphere, I realized that it did indeed have everything I needed. If I thought about it as a hostel with slightly more private bunks, then it all seemed pretty reasonable. And for ¥3,240 per night in Tokyo, you can’t really argue.

And the capsule itself? It was about 1 metre x 1 metre x 2 metres (one tatami mat), and had a very 1960s moulded plastic kind of flair. It did have a tv, though I didn’t bother with that because, like lots of TVs in hotel rooms in Japan, it had an impenetrable vending machine pay card system for viewing any channels other than those showing Japanese game shows. It also had a digital clock and a small shelf and a light with a dimmer switch. The opening could be covered with a rolling blind, and once I was ensconced for the night, it was pretty comfortable and cozy.

The capsules

All in all, the capsule hotel wasn’t bad, but I was very happy to move to my “real” hotel the next day. It has a full-sized bed, desk, internet, balcony and a very very small kitchenette. It’s my last hotel room of the trip, and it is certainly worthy of that honour.

Once I’d safely moved hotels, it was time to actually see something of Tokyo. My first stop was the Edo museum, which was really excellent, giving a great overview of the history of Tokyo (which used to be called Edo) during some of the most interesting periods. Better still was the guide service that was offered. The LP indicated that English guides were available, and signage at the museum seemed to confirm this, so I presented myself at the guide desk and expected to be given a pamphlet, or, at best, an audio player. Instead, I was presented with a perky Japanese woman who was my personal guide for the next hour and a half. It was an outstanding service – all volunteer, and totally free. She took me through most of the displays, explaining things I wouldn’t have understood on my own, and even took a photo.

Me in a traveling palanquin sort of thing

I spent a very happy morning at the museum, had lunch, and then went back for a bit to see some of the exhibits I didn’t have time for with my guide. Then it was time for the other big event of the day, and when I say big, I mean BIG:

SUMO!

I was lucky enough to be in Tokyo during one the three grand sumo tournaments held each year, and when I realized this, and found out that I could get a walk-up ticket on Friday morning, I was there in a flash. (Well, actually I was there after a frustrating ride on the Tokyo subway, more on that later). The ticket was ¥2,100 for an all-day seat anywhere in the very last row of the very top balcony. The nice thing is that most of the people who attend these tournaments only come for the later matches of the day when the highest-ranked wrestlers are competing. This means that lots of good seats stay empty during the afternoon so it’s quite normal to camp out in a better seat than you’ve bought until someone with a real claim to it comes along. And that’s just what I did.

Sumo is fascinating, partly because it’s full of tradition. The matches take place in a ring called the dohyo, which is made out of straw rice bags arranged in a circle and then mostly covered with clay and dirt so that only a slight ridge is exposed. A new dohyo is constructed for each tournament. The one at the national sumo stadium also has a large roof structure suspended over the dohyo, meant to resemble a Shinto shrine. The rules of sumo are simple enough, the bout is one by the first rikishi (wrestler) who either forces his opponent to step out of the ring, or to touch any part of the dohyo with any part of his body other than the soles of his feet. Sometimes matches are over in seconds, sometimes they last a minute or two. Interestingly, there are no weight classes in sumo, so a small guy can be put up against a monstrous mountain of flesh, and that’s just his tough luck. These are the kind of matches the crowd really gets behind, but they usually end up the way you’d expect, with the little guy tossed out in short order.

What takes the most time is all the ceremony and posturing that goes on before the bout starts. There’s a lot of pomp involved, including the ceremonial arrival of the fighters in each division at the beginning of their day’s session. They parade in wearing nothing but their mawashi (the loin cloth/waist band thingy you’ve all seen) and an elaborate and colourful silk apron with rich embroidery and fringe (costing up to ¥500,000). And each bout is preceded by the sing-song announcement of each fighter’s name, performed by a specific person. There’s also lot of symbolic and aggressive posturing by the rikishi who, at the highest levels, are allowed to spend up to four minutes preparing for the match by getting set into the crouch position, glaring at each other, and then walking back to their corners for more ritual cleansing, scattering of salt in the ring, and general gamesmanship. This just gets everyone – the fighters and the crowd – more and more worked up before the initial clash.

And lucky you, you get to see some video of one of the sumo matches I saw. This is two of the higher ranked fighters, who came along later in the afternoon. They’ve just finished about four rounds of posturing, crouching, getting ready, walking away, slapping themselves, cleansing themselves, throwing salt, and generally trying to intimidate the other guy. (And look at that guy on the right, sitting down. He’s huge! I think they just classed him as a new planet…)

I really enjoying watching the sumo, partly because they had an excellent and informative English pamphlet available, which helped immensely. I spent a couple of hours there, wandering around the stadium, watching matches, reading my pamphlet, and just enjoying myself. It was a great afternoon.

I mentioned that I’ve had some trouble with the Tokyo metro system. It turns out that the Tokyo metro/subway/trains are a bit too Kuala Lumpur for my tastes. There are several different companies running trains around the city, and they don’t always play nicely together. For instance on the morning of sumo, I strode out confidently and bought a ticket from Asakusa station, planning to head to Ryogoko, just one change and two stops down the line. It turned out though, to be a case of you-can’t-get-there-from-here. I needed to be at a different Asakusa station, on a different line (Asakusa on the Asakusa line, not Asakusa on the Ginza line. Silly me). That station was a few blocks from where I started, and necessitated me buying another ticket. Then I got to the interchange station and discovered that Tokyo defines interchange in much the same way that Kuala Lumpur does meaning, it seems, that any station within a 1.5km radius of can be considered “connected” to the station you’re changing from. Considering that Japan is so very good at so very many things it’s odd to me that the transit system in the country’s largest city should be so… meh. People who live here tell me that once you get used to it it’s very efficient and you can get anywhere and blah blah blah… to which I say: Tell me that the next time you have to walk three blocks between the Asakusa line and the Odeo line in the pouring rain. And if it’s so easy, then why does everyone have some kind of application on their phone to help them navigate the system? I rest my case.

And how about a few more thoughts on vending machines? Remember how I mentioned that the TVs in hotel rooms require cards you get from a vending machine? The same thing was true when I went to buy laundry soap so I could do some washing at the capsule hotel. I managed to convey the idea of “laundry soap” to the mostly uni-lingual desk clerk (though of course he was a lot more bilingual than I was) and he kept pointing behind me and saying “30 yen”. I turned to where he was pointing and faced some kind of vending machine. It was covered in buttons labeled with Japanese characters, so I punched the one that said ¥30, shoveled in some money, and was rewarded with… no, not a packet of soap. I was rewarded with a tiny ticket. I turned 180 degrees, advanced one step and presented the ticket to the desk guy, and he presented me with a packet of soap. This seemed an oddly complicated system. Surely it would be simpler if I could have given the guy ¥30 and he could have given me the soap, and we could have eliminated the machine entirely. However, in retrospect I realized that by using a ticket machine like this for all kinds of odds and ends, the hotel managed to avoid having their staff handle any money. It’s actually kind of smart. (Hey wait a minute! They took my money when I paid for the capsule… so much for that argument.)

Ticket vending machine outside the ramen restaurant where I had supper one night.

So that was my first few days in Tokyo: capsules, vending machines, subway frustrations and sumo! And now I’ve had two solid days of rain, and am getting a bit frayed. It’s a cool city, but it’s less cool in the rain. Perhaps this is good though, because I’ve only got two days left and the rain is making me feel like that will be just fine. Two days. Too weird.

Tatami mats in Takayama

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Sat, 22 May 2010 11:00:00 +0000

I know I have been unreservedly lavish with my praise for Japan so far, so I feel like I need to admit the few things that I find annoying about being here. So here you go, the things I don’t like about Japan:

Hotels have slightly less-than-generous check in and check out times. Check out is usually 10:00 am, which is a bit early for comfort. Check in is rarely before 3:00pm, which can also be annoying. And there’s really no room to move on those times. 3:00 is 3:00, do not ask about getting in earlier. I arrived in Granada, Spain after an overnight train ride at about 7:30 am and was genially shown to my room at 7:31; I can’t imagine the apoplexy that would cause here.

A couple of times now I’ve come up against maps that are oriented with some direction other than north at the top. This is maddening, especially when you’re confronted with two different maps of the same place, one with north pointing to the right, and one with it pointing to the left.

Despite the fact that the country is spotlessly clean it’s often ridiculously hard to find a garbage can. I have no idea what Japanese people do with their garbage, though if there’s like me they end up carrying it around for hours as if it’s some kind of precious keepsake.

Toilets are bizarrely and unnecessarily complicated. They usually have long instruction stickers posted nearby telling you how to operate the various automatically telescoping nozzles that spray parts of your anatomy which, if you are from North America, are probably not accustomed to being sprayed at all regardless of the many combinations of water temperature, angle and pressure you might be presented with. And sometimes toilets do things all by themselves. I first ran into this in a hotel in Kyoto when I sat down and the water started running immediately. I swear my first thought was, “Has my ass become so wide that I’m sitting on one of the little buttons on the side control panel?” Then I realized that there was a pressure-sensitive switch. I have no idea what this was for. My best guess is it’s just there to make noise to mask the sound of whatever you’re doing, which seems incredibly wasteful. In Turkey I was asked not to wash out my laundry in the sink because it used too much water, but in Japan they’re literally flushing it down the toilet. (Then again they also have clever all-in-one toilet/sinks where the toilet tank cover is a shallow basin and the water that fills the tank when you flush first comes out of a faucet above the basin so you can wash your hands with it before it flows into the tank. Clever.)

The instructions for my first Japanese toilet, at Narita Airport. I rest my case. (Also: “Equipment to cleansing the buttocks” Hee hee!)

But on to Takayama, which I liked very much, partly because it had almost no temples and the ones it did have were easily avoided. It’s a small city (population about 95,000) and most of the interesting bits are easily reached on foot. It’s got an excellently preserved section of Edo Period homes (1600-1868), a few of which you can tour through, but most of which have been turned into restaurants and shops selling tourist tat, sakē, ice cream, glutinous rice balls (err… yum) and zillions of these creepy faceless dolls called saru-bobo (monkey babies) in sizes ranging from key-chain to impossible-to-pack.

I think it’s a town bylaw that every shop in the city sell some form of saru-bobo. I’m surprised they let me leave without one. (I did buy a souvenir though, a lovely wooden lacquered tray that’s very plain, very Japanese and not creepy at all.)

The big sight to see just outside of Takayama is the Hida-no-Sato village. It’s a collection of dozens of traditional homes that were dismantled at their original sites around the area and rebuilt in an open air museum. I arrived early enough one morning to avoid most of the crowds and had a very nice, quiet time wandering in and out of the buildings . I also borrowed the free English audioguide (On cassette! Remember those?); it talked about the styles of architecture, the various industries villagers would have engaged in (like silk production), and the lifestyle of the people who lived in the houses.

One of the steeply pitched, thatched roof houses of Hida-no-Sato. They’re steeply pitched to shed the snow, which falls up to 8 feet deep in this mountainous region. It’s nice to be back in a part of the world where people have snow scoops leaning next to the back door.

One section of Hida-no-Sato contains the homes and workshops of artisans who live and work at the park, demonstrating their craft and selling their artwork to tourists. There were supposedly workshops for pottery, weaving, lacquerware and carving, but they were almost all closed the day I was there. There was one old gentleman in one of the historical houses demonstrating how to make straw sandals. Like everyone in Japan (except tour guides) he wasn’t exactly gregarious, but he let me take some pictures after I asked (in Japanese, even!). The sandals themselves look remarkably uncomfortable, but it was interesting watching the man work.

Straw sandals, under construction

And just because I’ve got bandwidth up the wazoo here in Japan (which can be uncomfortable, but the toilets have a setting for it), here’s a video I took of a clever bit of water-powered machinery at Hido-na-Sato.

The automatic banging device

I did enjoy some local cuisine in Takayama, which is most famous, culinarily speaking, for two things: hoba-miso, a particular type of local miso served on a mulberry leaf over a ceramic burner (miso is the ubiquitous soybean-derived salty paste that’s used to make miso soup), and Hida beef, cousin to the renowned Kobē beef, and famous for its quality and marbling. Of course I tried both. I went to a very local place recommended by my hotel and had the miso (described by a friend’s traveling companion as “cat barf on a leaf”) which turned out to be really tasty in a salty, savoury, umami kind of way. It was also quite nice when spread onto thin slices of Hida beef grilled on the same ceramic burner. And it all goes down a treat with a glass of cold beer to put out the fire that’s lighted when you apply a slice of molten-miso-covered beef directly to your tongue.

Hida beef. Marble-licious.

Because Takayama is so compact I ended up being able to delve into a few more corners than I expected, which is how I found myself rushing to take a seat at a Karakuri puppet show. Karakuri dolls are clockwork-driven creations originally from the Edo period; their most famous incarnation in Takayama is on elaborate parade floats that are brought out every year for the local festival. The floats are oddly tall and skinny, and I walked past a couple of three-storey garages in town with very tall doors where parade floats are stored. The karakuri I saw were smaller than parade float ones, ranging in size from about 18” to 36” high. They were quite impressive, too. Controlled by a series of rods and mechanisms, there was a karakuri that could climb steps with nothing connected to the bottom of his feet, one that swung through a series of trapezes, and even one that could write calligraphy on a piece of paper. I managed to get a video of part of the show, which was completely fascinating and charming:

Karakuri in action

I mentioned that Takayama has an excellent stock of historical homes, and I toured through two of them that have been preserved in the northern end of the city. Both had been home to merchant families and were collections of tatami mat rooms, large and small, that could be reconfigured with sliding screens. The screens might be opened to allow a view of the garden, or closed for privacy, or removed completely to join several small spaces into one for a large celebration. It’s a very different style of design than we’re used to in the west. Here’s an excellent introduction from a pamphlet I picked up at Yoshijima House in Takayama:

“The rooms with tatami, or straw mats, not only in Yoshijima house but in most traditional Japanese houses, possess no fixed function. The function of the room is determined by the objects which are placed in them. For example, by placing a portable dining table in a room, that room becomes a dining room. If fine zabuton, or floor cushions, are placed in the room, it is now a guest room; when bedding is placed in the room, the same room is transformed into a bedroom. Furthermore, the furnishings, hanging scrolls, etc., would be changed to fit the seasons or the ceremonies to be undertaken in a particular room.”

A typical 8-tatami mat room

Again and again in Japan I’ve run into the “tatami mat” method of measuring floor space. The size of a single tatami mat differs slightly in different areas of Japan but is always around 3' x 6' and always a perfect 2:1 ratio. All of the indoor living space in the historical homes I’ve seen have floors covered with tatami mats, as have several hotel rooms I’ve stayed in. And whenever they describe a room in one of these historical structures they almost always start by telling you the number of tatami mats covering it. (“This 8-tatami mat room was used as a resting place for guests before blah blah blah…” or “This large 49-tatami mat room can be divided into three different spaces with the use of sliding screens.”). One of the most famous rooms at Ginkakuji is called the Four-and-a-Half Tatami Mat Room, capitalized here because that particular room came to be a model for similar rooms all over Japan. And I think this method of measuring space is still used today. When he saw the picture of my ryokan on Miyajima Paul was quick to point out that it was a 12 mat room, generous indeed since many modern apartments are only 8, or sometimes just 6 mats.

I also noticed that the importance of the room can sometimes be divined by the elaborateness of the binding along the sides of the tatami mats. The mats in servants’ quarters might have no binding at all, whereas everyday rooms could be bound in plain black or blue. And I saw rooms for important guests or for the master or mistress of the house where the tatami mats had been bound in patterned fabric.

A stack of tatami mats in a shop in Takayama

And it’s not just the historical homes that display particularly Japanese characteristics. The modern places occupied by the normal people of Takayama were wonderful too, in a very Japanese way. For instance, windows facing onto the street are almost always frosted or covered in rice paper. In addition there’s usually a slatted wooden screen of some kind in front of that and sometimes a bamboo blind hanging in front of that. Very private, and so very Japanese. And the gardens in front of the houses are fabulous too – compact, spare and thoughtful.

A normal house in Takayama

I loved wandering through those traditional Japanese homes with the tatami mats, the sliding rice paper screens and the woodwork burnished to a smooth, deep brown colour. Again and again I’d turn a corner and be faced with some perfectly designed space with a single scroll of calligraphy hanging in an alcove and a view over a fantastic garden; it was all really peaceful and calming, and I liked it very much. As I get closer to having my own space again I wonder how much my experience in Japan will affect how I chose to design where I end up living. I don’t think I could manage the completely empty look – I like a good couch and a proper bed too much for that. But Paul’s words echoed in my head as I stood in those rooms and my mind whirred thinking about how I might fit my own life onto 8 tatami mats. I’m definitely going to miss life on the road, but at the same time I can’t wait to get back and see how it all unfolds.

Pick of Pics: Kyoto

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Fri, 21 May 2010 12:00:00 +0000

These are "tourist geisha", visitors to Japan who pay to be made up as maiko and wander around the streets for a few hours. They're much more amenable to photography than the real thing.

Japan’s greatest hits: tea, origami, geisha and sushi

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Thu, 20 May 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Kyoto is one of Japan’s former capitals and is often regarded as the home of the country’s traditional culture – those Higashiyama things we talked about already. I figured this made it the perfect place to experience that culture first hand, albeit in a touristy kind of way. My first stop was a place called Wak Japan, whose brochure I picked up in my hotel in Kyoto. Geared to foreign tourists, I figured it might not be super authentic, but would give a reasonable glimpse at some of the more refined Japanese arts. I chose to do two programs in one afternoon: tea ceremony and origami.

The tea ceremony was held in a lovely tatami room that looked onto a tiny, perfect garden. I was expecting to share the experience with a bunch of other Western tourists but it turned out that everyone else in the group was Japanese – six women from other parts of the country who were in Kyoto as tourists themselves. It seems the Japanese are great fans of traveling within their own country, which I think is great and perfectly understandable. Apparently this was an unprecedented occurrence, such a pronounced Western/Japanese imbalance, and the woman running the program was worried about me. Ha! Little did she know that she was dealing with an experienced world traveler who would no more be thrown off by a room full of Japanese tourists than she would by a delayed flight, a lost wallet or plate of worms.

The tiny perfect garden

It turned out to be very nice being with all those Japanese women. They were super polite and friendly and very concerned about making sure I understood everything and had a good time. The only difficult part was spending so much time sitting on the floor. This is something I’ve found to be common to most Asian cultures, this ground-level existence, and even though Japan gussies things up with tatami mats, it’s still damned uncomfortable spending that much time kneeling. I was largely crippled when the hour was finally over.

Luckily most of the commentary was conducted in English, since it’s normally done for foreigners. I learned about how the green tea is grown, picked, dried, and ground into matcha, the special powdered tea used in the tea ceremony. And then we got to watch one of the women at Wak perform the tea ceremony.

She entered in a beautiful kimono, knelt down in front of the water boiler and began. All of the movements in the tea ceremony are prescribed – how the cloth is held and folded while wiping the tea scoop, how the tea bowl is washed and dried, how the water scoop is grasped and released. It was in some ways rigid and yet also very graceful. And once the water was poured over the powdered tea and whisked into a green froth, it was presented. Presented to me of course, because all the other women insisted that I should have the first cup. I was instructed in the proper way to receive the cup, bowing with hands flat on the floor. Then I placed the bowl between me and the person next to me and said in very coached Japanese, “Excuse me for going before you.” And to the woman who made the tea, “Thank you for making this tea for me.” There was a specific way to hold the bowl and a specific way to drink it, in three or four gulps, one right after another. And there was a specific sort of inhaling slurp noise to be made at the end to indicate that the tea was so excellent you just had to suck back every drop. Then the bowl was to be placed back on the floor in front of you. After that, it’s customary to pick up the bowl again and inspect the decorations more carefully, handing it around so others can see it too. Appreciating the artistry of the bowls and other utensils is all part of the experience.

Each woman in the group was served a cup of tea made by our hostess, then it was our turn to try making tea ourselves, and who was first up to bat? You guessed it! I acquitted myself pretty well, though I had to start over once because I added too much water to the tea the first time. (I plead inadequate instruction.) Despite that initial misstep everyone was very impressed with my whisking. Apparently foreigners almost never get the tea whisked into a proper froth, so there were many murmurs of appreciation at my savant-like whisking skills.

Me getting ready to make tea

I was very pleased to have the chance to experience a tea ceremony from both sides, and it was nice to do it with real Japanese people instead of a load of whisk-challenged foreigners. The two women conducting the experience were lovely and friendly. One of them, Asa, was also the one who sat with me for another hour (on stools, thank God) teaching me some origami. I was the only one who’d signed up for origami that day so it was just the two of us, which made for a very genial time. I took the opportunity to quiz her on how to say a few Japanese phrases, and we folded and chatted and had a great time. And apparently it’s not just my whisking skills that are above average because Asa was very impressed with my origami too, and with my grasp of the concept of wabi, as evidenced by my wallet. (See, I told you people comment on it!)

A few of our origami projects – flower petal boxes and spinning tops

On my last evening in Kyoto I joined a walking tour of Gion, the most famous geisha district in Japan, and the setting for much of the popular novel “Memoirs of a Geisha”. The tour was called “Night-time Exploration in Gion” and promised to explain the history and life of the traditional geisha in Kyoto, while walking the backstreets of Gion. It was only ¥1,000 ($10.00 - what a brilliantly easy exchange rate! Just one more thing to love about Japan.) and turned out to be worth much much more than that. Emi, our guide, was fantastic and gave us exactly what the tour promised, so I can tell you some really interesting facts about geisha.

Emi, standing beside Gion’s Shirakawa River, reciting the poem inscribed on the rock behind her. It’s by Isamu Yoshii (1886-1960), and translates something like: “No matter what they say, I love Gion. Even in my sleep, the sound of water flows beneath my pillow.”

First of all, they are not called geisha in Kyoto. It’s apparently quite insulting to call the Kyoto variety geisha. The term used in Kyoto is geiko (“GAY-ko”), which differentiates between the Kyoto variety and the much less traditional Tokyo type. And it’s important to understand that geiko are NOT prostitutes. They’re entertainers highly trained in traditional Japanese arts like music and dance. A qualified geiko makes her own money by attending parties held a tea houses and entertaining the guests there with performances, games and sparkling conversation. They’re expensive, sought-after and somewhat mysterious. The cost to the patron for a 90 minute party with one geiko and one apprentice (not including food) is about $1,000.

The other world we learned was Maiko (“MY-ko”), which is the term for an apprentice geiko. Emi talked a lot about the maiko, and it was fascinating. They usually start their apprenticeships around age 15, and serve a probationary year as a sort of house-girl/maid in the boarding house they move into. Every maiko is sponsored by a boarding house mother who pays for the girl’s board, training and clothing for her entire apprenticeship, which is usually about five years long. After the girl’s probation period is over and her boarding house mother determines she’s fit to become a maiko, the real work starts. She must learn traditional arts, keep her hair up in an intricate style all the time, attend parties along with a qualified geiko, and earn enough money to eventually pay back her boarding house mother. It’s a weirdly archaic lifestyle, and fewer than 40 maiko are now known to be living in Gion. The total number of maiko and geiko combined in Kyoto is around 300, whereas at the height of their popularity several hundred years ago, there were as many as 3,000.

Maiko are not allowed to go out except in traditional dress, and that dress is elaborate. They’re not allowed to have cell phones, they’re not allowed visits from their family and they only get to go home very rarely, maybe once a year during a big festival. It’s a very restrictive, difficult lifestyle. But if a girl survives and flourishes, she can become a geiko, earn her own money, go out on the street in normal clothes and live in her own house. And popular geiko can earn a lot of money. It’s estimated that the number one geiko in Kyoto earns as much as the CEO of Toyota.

We were lucky enough to see a maiko as she was leaving her boarding house to go to a party. Naturally, they are kind of tired of tourists trying to get photographs of them, and they move quickly to get where they’re going, so let's just call this an action shot and leave it at that.

She was moving fast, despite wearing those crazy shoes!

Emi told us a lot more about Gion, and geiko and maiko, and about the tea houses and the tea house parties within. There’s just too much rolling around in my head to tell it all here, but it was fascinating. (This Wikipedia article is really good and tells a lot of what there's no room for here.) I finished that tour happy with life and ready for supper, which means it’s time to talk about food again.

Specifically, let’s talk conveyor belt sushi! I found a place in the LP that was so great I went two nights in a row and stuffed myself. It was a long counter with seats all around and a couple of sushi chefs in the middle. And there was the conveyor belt, like a miniature version of the things they use as luggage carousels in airports. You sat down at a stool, filled up on green tea (or ordered a beer… guess what I did…), poured a bit of soy sauce into a small dish and grabbed the first tasty looking plate that went by. Every once in a while the chefs would stick another few plates into the mix and cause the whole business to back up alarmingly, but they never let it go long enough that there was a total derailment. These guys were pros.

The view from behind the belt

It was great. Every plate was the same price - ¥137 – so it was cheap enough that you could be adventurous and try a few weird things. I had one with raw quail egg, and I had uni, and something pink and stringy and… well, I had a lot. You could even request something special from the chefs and they’d make if up for you on the spot for the same price. On my second visit I got up the gumption to ask for another round of shrimp with avocado, mayo and sliced raw onion and it was YUM. And even though I stuffed myself and had two beers the bill was only about $20, and the fun factor was through the roof. On my first visit I was seated next to a friendly Australian guy who I chatted with the whole evening. We ended up walking around the area for a while after we finished gorging on sushi, and had a great conversation. (Nice to meet you Adam!). That conveyor belt joint really had it all – cheap sushi, a great gimmick, beer, and engaging dinnertime conversation, all in one easy to navigate package just a few blocks from my hotel.

And that was Kyoto. It’s a city you could easily spend weeks in, especially if you’re a fan of Buddhist temples. Even I, templed-out as I was, felt sad to leave it. But time is ticking away on my big year-long adventure, and I have more of Japan to see. I can’t believe that, as I write this, I’ve only got a week left before I fly back to North America. I think I’m in for a big big shock.

Random Japan fact: Those half-curtains that hang in doorways of shops and restaurants? They mean the place is open for business! No curtain means the shop is closed.

All templed out in Kyoto

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Wed, 19 May 2010 10:00:00 +0000

It’s broken record time: Japan is GREAT! I love it here! It’s easy and safe and beautiful. And I feel like it’s really starting to get under my skin. For instance when I give money to a cashier I now do so holding it in both hands and with a slight nod/bow. It is received with two hands, and my change is offered in a similar way. I’ve also tried to stop eating and drinking on the street – it’s kind of not done in Japan. Yesterday when I went to a vending machine to get a drink I stood in front of the machine and consumed the whole thing before I moved on. Admittedly this was partly because the contents of the bottle were quite surprising so I was sort of frozen to the spot in contemplation. I thought I was going to get a nice cold orange drink, but it turned out to be a bottle of watery, lumpy orange jello. If McDonald’s orange drink could curdle, that's the texture it would have. Like a lot of things in Japan it was not unpleasant, just unexpected.

A row of vending machines. They are, I swear, EVERYWHERE. You can be walking down the quietest back street and think to yourself, “Hmmmm, I could really go for a bottle of curdled McDonald’s orange right now.” and as if by magic a vending machine will appear around the next corner. And yes, there is a drink called “Pocari Sweat” – apparently it’s a Gatorade-like sports drink. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m told it’s nice. And I’ve really only seen machines for drinks and cigarettes so far, nothing really weird like bicycles or live goldfish. I’m told the real vending machine paradise is Tokyo.

I saw a lot of temples in Kyoto, though it was only the tiniest fraction of the 1600 Buddhist temples and 400 Shinto Shrines in the city. It didn’t take me long at all before I was completely “templed out”. Actually, it took half a day – the length of the Lonely Planet walking tour of the southern Higashiyama district, though in fairness my tolerance for religious structures of any faith has been extremely low for a long long time now. I quickly instituted a One Temple Per Day policy in Kyoto, and this made things much better. Therefore, I’m only going to tell you about the real highlights as I saw them. First was a small temple called Yasaka-jinji, located in a park that was the halfway point of my walking tour. The temple itself was nothing special, but I happened to arrive right at the start of a wedding ceremony, and I got to see the bride and groom and all the wedding guests arrive and seat themselves. I love it when you happen upon some unexpected real life event like this.

The bride and groom, with an attendant carrying a red umbrella to shade them

By far my favourite temple was Ginkakuji, literally the “Silver Pavillion”. It was originally part of a genteel retreat built in 1482 by the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. It’s a small and exquisitely designed site – a few buildings, a beautiful pond and garden, and the two-level pavillion. It’s compact enough that the whole area can be viewed in detail without too much trekking, and I rented the audioguide, which was excellent. It gave a lot of information about Yoshimasa, who was instrumental in forming what’s known as Higashiyama culture, widely credited with being Japan’s first nationally-shared artistic aesthetic. Higashiyama culture includes things like sado – the tea ceremony, ikebana – flower arranging, Noh theatre, and sumi-e ink painting – many of those things that we tend to think of as typically Japanese.

Come on, how fantastic is this?

Ginkakuji is also an example of the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which I really like, if I understand it at all, which I probably don’t. It’s a slippery idea for non-Japanese. I think Wikipedia has made a good stab at a definition:

Wabi … connotes rustic simplicity, freshness or quietness, and can be applied to both natural and human-made objects, or understated elegance. It can also refer to quirks and anomalies arising from the process of construction, which add uniqueness and elegance to the object. Sabi is beauty or serenity that comes with age, when the life of the object and its impermanence are evidenced in its patina and wear, or in any visible repairs.

Remember my paper wallet from way back in Barcelona? Well it’s still going, having been taped back together countless times. I think in its current state it’s a decent example of wabi sabi. People comment on it all the time. I don’t mean people say, “Wow, is that wallet ever totally wabi sabi!”, I just mean that when I pull it out people often notice and say it’s interesting, and the Japanese people who’ve commented have agreed that it’s pretty wabi sabi.

I found the whole vibe at Ginkakuji just excellent, and really wished I could banish the zillion other tourists at the sight, hop over the barriers, and wander along the garden paths and across the stone bridges. Instead I tried to tune out the crowds and enjoy the scenery. And of course I stopped to answer the questions of a junior high school boy who waylaid me on the path to the exit. He was on a weekend field trip from a town outside Tokyo, and had the now-familiar questionnaire, which I filled out happily. He even gave me a 5 yen coin in an envelope as a thank you, and we both got photos of us together.

That thing with the fingers… that’s soooooo Japanese. I see people posing with one hand up like that all the time. Sometimes palm out, sometimes the other way, and often with different combinations of fingers held up. I have no idea what it’s about.

Other than viewing some of the compulsory temple and historical sights, I also took some time in Kyoto to explore a part of modern Japanese culture: manga. Manga is the Japanese word for comics or graphic novels, but you really can’t compare the stature and popularity of Japanese manga with their poor Western cousins. Manga is HUGE in Japan – as the LP puts it: “manga stand shoulder to shoulder with traditional text-based books.” On my first night in Kyoto I found a bookstore that had a small section of manga that had been translated into English, so I bought one and dived in.

Part of the shelf of translated manga

The first weird thing is that they read back-to-front, because Japanese is written and read from right to left. (They also drive on the left here, but frankly I’ve switched back and forth so many times in the last month and a half that I hardly notice anymore.) This means that the pages are read, in a Western sense, starting with the last page and moving towards the front of the book. It also means that each panel of the comic is read in a different order on the page: top right, top left, middle right, middle left, bottom right, bottom left. Because the artwork and dialogue balloons were originally created in Japanese, it would be impossible to switch it all around, so you read the individual English words in each text bubble from left to right, but the panels are ordered right to left and you turn the pages from back to front. It’s odd, but you get used to it pretty quickly.

The manga I bought was “Hellsing: Vol. 1”, and it was fun – lots of vampires and blood and gore. Most manga are serialized stories, often appearing in short chunks in periodicals and then being bound together into volumes for later sale. And the sheer amount of manga produced, covering every possible subject, is staggering. I learned this when I visited the Kyoto International Manga Museum! This was a four-storey temple of manga. (Note: this site was exempted from the One Temple Per Day Rule). I went on a Sunday afternoon, when the place was full of people sitting inside and out, taking advantage of the enormous manga library. There was a short but informative display on the history of manga (with English translation! Yay!), and a gallery of manga artwork, but mostly it was just shelf after shelf of manga. Oh, and lots of people dressed up like their favourite manga characters. Called cosplay-zoku (costume play gangs), this is a popular activity for some Japanese youth, and because it was Sunday afternoon they were out in force.

I have no idea who these girls were supposed to be, but they took it pretty seriously. When I asked to take their picture the one in the middle wouldn’t let me do it until she’d put her glasses on.

As has become my habit, I inadvertently arrived in Kyoto on the eve of a big festival. Aioi Matsuri (the Hollyhock Festival) “dates back to the 6th century and commemorates the successful prayers of the people for the gods to stop calamitous weather. Today the procession involves imperial messengers in ox carts and a retinue of 600 people dressed in traditional costume.” (LP) I planned to take in the procession after my morning walking tour and set out from my hotel in what I thought would be plenty of time to catch the parade at one of its more northerly points. I was going to take the metro and then walk to the parade route, but the hotel desk clerk said I didn’t have enough time for that and I should head straight to the Kami-gamo Jinja, the end point of the procession. I was dubious but went ahead and caught the bus he suggested, which turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. It was packed full of people going to the temple, and was very slow and a bit warm and standing room only. As we crawled through the streets I could just tell that there was no way we were going to get where we were going in time to see the procession pass.

And I was right. Just as we crossed the bridge near the temple, we could see the tail end of the procession disappearing ahead of us. I was pretty annoyed and all for packing it in and staying on the bus for the return journey downtown. Instead, I got off and followed the huge crowd to the temple grounds. There I discovered a sort of fair ground atmosphere with lots of people hanging around and vendors set up selling all manner of weird Japanese fair food. I decided to stick around and see what was going to happen. And of course I had to try some of the food. Most of it was unrecognizable, though I did identify an okonomiyaki stand, and there were people selling shaved ice with flavouring (no way of identifying what flavours, mind you…). The first thing I tried was a perennial favourite – stuff on a stick!

Squid-on-a-stick! I think it’s a sign of how far I’ve come that I didn’t really consider this as a possible Weird Food.

I sampled few other less-weird things and struck up a conversation with a French woman who was also hanging around. There really weren’t a lot of Westerners there, so it was nice to have someone to talk to even if it was in a combination of my vocabulary-challenged French and her much better English. We chatted together and waited some more – she had it on good authority that there would be some horses going past a some point, so it seemed worth waiting for. I’ve found a lot of travel is like that. The strictly rational, 9-5, work-a-day part of my brain thinks, “You have no idea what’s going on here. There might be some horses going by at some indeterminate point this evening. Big deal. It might not even happen. And if you hang around too long there will just be another crowded, exhausting bus ride back. Bail out now!” Then then casual, long-term traveler part of my brain kicks in and says, “Relax! What else have you got to do anyways? Stick around, and maybe something cool will happen.”

So I stuck, and there were indeed horses. First they were led out of the temple along a wide approach that was lined with reserved seating. Then, one by one, they were raced back towards the temple at a full gallop only to veer off left just in front of the temple gate and right past where I was standing. Ok, it wasn’t high altitude fireworks and aerial ballet or anything, but it was still cool.

And then to avoid the crush on the bus I took a pleasant stroll along the Kamo river. Kyoto’s riverbanks have beautiful, wide walking paths on both banks, and they were full of people out enjoying the warm evening, walking dogs, practicing different sports, and playing musical instruments, it was lovely. There were even spots along the way where large steeping stones allowed pedestrians to cross the river without bothering with bridges. I walked for about half an hour until I reached a convenient subway stop, and then got a quick train back to the hotel.

What a great system. Mind you, the water was very tame and only about eight inches deep, but still.

It turned out to be a nice evening after all, and that was just one of three I had in Kyoto. There’s still lots more to tell – I participated in a tea ceremony, did origami, learned all about Kyoto’s geisha culture, saw half a show, and ate sushi off a conveyor belt (twice)! But my train has almost arrived in Takayama so that’s enough for this installment. All I can say, once again, is stay tuned.

Small, interesting Japan observation that doesn’t really fit anywhere but bears telling: The buses in Kyoto turned off their engines at red lights, rather than idling.

Pick of Pics: Miyajima

noreply@blogger.com (Pam) — Tue, 18 May 2010 12:00:00 +0000

This is one of my favourite of the Rakan staues at Daisho-Inn Temple