Hot Springs, Nara
Golden Pavillion, Kyoto
Golden Pavillion, Kyoto
Washio Kids: Gaku and Aoi
Homestay Families: Danika, Estes, Lacey, and Me w/ the Washios
Day 90: Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
We are in the middle of the Pacific Ocean right now. Yesterday, we celebrated our crossing of the international dateline with our second November 22nd. I’m not sure I’ll ever get to relive an entire day ever again. It was nice, we had a barbecue, no classes, and I played music. There was a live auction for charity and I sold myself. I was pleased to have been purchased for a significant amount. A lucky lady, and her friends if milady wishes, will have the unique opportunity for a “private serenade” at a time and place of her choosing. It was quite an experience being at this shipboard charity auction…let’s just say a lot of kids have unrestricted, unsupervised access to their parents’ credit cards.
I’ve finished a couple songs now, so it’s been an average semester of creative musical productivity for me. That seems to be my normal rate when I’m taking classes.
Here's what I did in Japan:
Day 1: Arrive in Kobe, Japan. After a bit of uncertainty, I have secured a spot on a homestay. It takes forever and a day to get through customs, but our homestay families are waiting in the terminal. I look around for my name on a card, and I find my new mom (Mika). Of course, I happen to have the most adorable family ever. She has two little kids with her, a five year old boy named Gaku (Gah-kuh) and a three year old girl named Aoi (Owie!). There are about 20 families in the terminal, and one of the Japanese ladies leads us in a series of icebreakers, including a Japanese hokey-pokey-style circular song and dance. Before we leave the terminal, Gaku and I are already playing monsters.
We go with a few other families and their SAS kids (my friends Lacey, Danika, and Estes) to lunch. It’s a self-service deep frying restaurant, so each table has a mini deep fryer and you choose your raw foods on a kebab from refrigerated displays. It’s quite good, except we always leave the sticks in for too long. We hang out on the patio for a while and then head to the Washio household. They live in a community built by Toyota. Yet they have two American cars, a burgundy PT Cruiser convertible and a silver Dodge Nitro. Interesting. We hang out for a little bit, and Gaku proposes that we go to the park. The two of us ride bikes to the local park, where all the kids are playing baseball. It’s a great park, and we play soccer for a while before tackling the obstacles around the perimeter. There are plenty of things to climb on, which makes me happy.
That night we have a pot luck dinner with three other families…Danika’s, Lacey’s, and Estes’. There are at least 10 little kids there, and we’re all having a blast running around. We do a few more kids’ song and dance games. The girls get dressed up in Kimono’s. The food is great. All cold. The Washio father (who tells me to call him “Toto”, like Gaku does) is finally off from work and joins us. He is an acupuncture therapist. He’s young and very hip for a dad, and comes bearing 3 boxes of cream puffs. How he got them here on his motorbike I don’t know, but the Washio magic is in full force. My family rocks.
When we get back to the house, he pulls out his Japanese snake-skin guitar and we jam for a little bit. We talk for a while until its time to sleep.
Day 2
We have a simple breakfast and Mika helps me find a hotel in Kyoto for tonight. Then we join Estes’ family in a park and head around to a couple sake breweries, kids in tow. Estes and I try out a bunch, and I discover what “savory” really means. I just read an article in the NYtimes a couple weeks ago about how western medicine was beginning to recognize umami, or “savory”, as one of the basic tastes that the tongue can detect, along with sweet, sour, salty, spicy. Whoa, they all start with “S”. Never noticed that.
We have lunch, then all pile into a photo booth in the mall, and head to a hot spring to dip our feet in. They take me to the train station and we say goodbye. The adventure begins.
Nobody speaks English. I’m pointing at maps trying to get to Kyoto. After I find my hotel, I eat dinner at a conveyer belt place, where the sushi is riding around the room on little dishes. If you order a dish, it zips out on a bullet train right to your table. At the end of the meal, they count the number of plates (each one is 100 yen, or about a dollar) and write you a check. The sushi is awesome.
I run into my boss, Nathan, on the corner outside of the restaurant. We had been meaning to meet up at our capsule hotel in Tokyo, but this happy coincidence leads to an epic karaoke session with the two of us, Brittany the photographer, and John the psychology professor. A night to remember, for sure. I head back to the hotel and make a couple calls before going to sleep.
Day 3
I eat a small European breakfast and head towards the Golden Temple on the bus system. When I get there I run into Brandon, Estefania, Mariana, and Marian. Out of the vast assortment of temples I have visited on my travels, this is by far the most beautiful. The temple is shimmering with gold leaf walls, it is in the middle of a perfectly reflecting lake, and the trees in the various stages of turning orange, crimson, and falling as we walk by. After this we go to a rock garden, which might have been better to go to first, but is striking still. It is part of a temple, where a rectangular yard is covered with neatly raked gray pebbles and features about 5 rock arrangements of different sizes. It is a minimalist meditation on beauty in nature’s simplicity. We go to another conveyer belt place for lunch. I split off and head for Tokyo on the bullet train. I wander around in the darkness around the station in Akihabara, a district on the east side of Tokyo, I think. I happen to run into a few SASers, who point me in the direction of my capsule hotel. It’s a funky place, the capsules are very retro, and you can hear everything that is going on in the room. It’s surprisingly spacious, enough room to roll around a bit, with a TV and old radio too. I run into Nate again.
Day 4
The four of us karaoke buddies head out at around 6 am to the Tokyo fish market in Tsujiki. They’re not throwing around the fish anymore, but the market is bustling. It’s crowded, little cargo lifts are zipping around, and there are hundreds and hundreds of fish merchants inside this huge warehouse. We go to eat sushi nearby, and it’s the best sushi I’ve ever had.
I go to Hibiya park, near the imperial palace, but apparently I didn’t see the right part of it, because it is supposed to be amazing but I thought it was bland and left. I went to Shibuya, a trendy youthful district of Tokyo. I ran into Benson and Lily, walked around with them a bit, had dinner with Benson after Lily left. We then went to Shinjuku, which was the most crowded, densely metropolitan area I’ve seen on the trip. Every avenue off of the main drag was another bustling artery of shops, neon signs, and waves of foot traffic. The red light district was interesting, with a lot of benign looking clubs advertising “live talent”, hosted by what I assume to be yakuza (Japanese mafia) members on each doorstep. We wandered into a seasonal festival/carnival, an impossibly crowded affair with loads of food/game/merchant booths and some kind of temple with thousands of paper lanterns.
I head back to Yokohama to find the ship, which sailed from Kobe without the independent travelers.
Day 5
I head back to Shibuya in the morning and live a leisurely day as if I lived in Tokyo. Coffee and the morning paper, brunch, walking around town and taking in the sights. I make it back to the ship just in time for departure.
All in all, I was extremely grateful to have a generous, kind, family with amazing kids. That was the certainly the highlight of my trip. The Japanese are very modern and trendy, yet they adhere to salient traditions pertaining to respect and order. They are the 3rd largest economy in the world, and my wallet certainly noticed that we were back in a first world country. Japan is a wonderful place. They know how to rock (there were guitar stores everywhere in Shibuya!), they know how to dress (trendiest place I’ve ever been, even more so than L.A.), they know how to eat (sushi!), and they are quite friendly. I just need to learn Japanese.
November 24th, 2008 Day 92
23º 04’ 10’’ N 167º 35’ 01’’ W
Open mic last night, played my new song, “I Will Step Aside”, went well. Duet w/ Allison. Classes are going well. Started reading a book called Catfish and the Mandala, about a Vietnamese-American who takes a bike trip from California to Vietnam. Hm. It’s really well written.
Did I mention that I finally finished Chesapeake? By James Michener. Glad I read it, if you’re from the bay, read it!
I’ll be playing a concert at Coffee East on December 20th. Mark your calendars.
Comments