Rainy day in Hakuba March 24, 2008
Posted by Kristen in Travel.2 comments
Today I’m writing from the lobby of our hotel in Hakuba, Japan–a town in the “Japanese Alps” near Nagano. We planned to have a week of spring skiing here instead of taking a long trip further away in Asia. It seemed like a very good idea when we planned the trip, but now things don’t look so good. After a rather cold winter, things have warmed up significantly over the past couple of weeks. Our first day of skiing was Saturday and I think it was the warmest day I have ever skied. We kept having to stop and take off more layers, and I began to feel sweat drip down my back when riding up on the chair lift. Still, the snow was surprisingly good and the sky was a beautiful, completely clear, deep blue. Alas, I forgot to bring my camera that day. Yesterday it was cloudy but still very warm. Today it’s raining. And so we’re spending the day at the hotel and hoping that tomorrow there will still be some snow left on the mountains. It is Monday. We have paid for hotel rooms through Friday night, and have 4 more days of lift passes.
So now we’ve had two days of skiing in Japan. What is it like to ski in Japan, you ask? Of course, in many ways it’s the same as skiing everywhere. Except that everyone else is Japanese and you can’t read the signs. I was surprised to find in the area we were skiing this weekend that there was no place to sit outdoors. On a gorgeous sunny day like Saturday, I expected to see lots of people outside. If this had been Italy, we’d probably have seen half of the people sitting outside suntanning in T-shirts. Not here. Is it too much like loafing, I wonder? Is skiing okay, as long as you’re working?
Though it didn’t really seem like it at the time, I guess we got in some good exercise yesterday. Some of the trails were pretty challenging with the warming conditions and my thighs did some real work snowplowing behind Isabella on some of the narrow switchback roads. I discovered the real consequences of this at dinner last night.
We had a wonderful sushi dinner in a local restaurant, seated at a low table in a tatami room. Juliet was free to pop up from the table and run around, sneaking behind the screen to the next room (which remained unoccupied). The fish was excellent and the proprietor very friendly. They had a full English menu and he spoke some English, but seemed delighted to find that Isabella could speak Japanese very well (and Mark and I could stumble through a clumsy dinner order). He wanted to know where we were from. When we said America, he wanted to know which part. I told him New York, and he made a face. He came back a few seconds later and asked in Japanese if we were Mets fans or Yankees fans. Mark replied “Yankees” with no hesitation, which produced a big smile and much goodwill. The Japanese are very proud of their countryman, pitcher Matsumoto.
I was feeling very pleased with myself for managing to stay seated on my knees for much of the dinner. Wow, I thought, look how Japanese I’m becoming! Just at the end of the meal, Juliet had to go to the bathroom. So I unfolded myself and tried to step down to put on my shoes. I couldn’t stand up! A full day’s skiing followed by an hour on my knees proved to be too much for my middle-aged American leg muscles. The proprietor got a good laugh out of my stumbling walk. Though his laughter was friendly and good-natured, I imagine it will make a good story for him to tell his Japanese customers.
Soon I’m off with Isabella to the friendly neighborhood conbini (convenience store) and/or 100 yen shop, in search of some amusements for an unplanned day indoors. Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny and we’ll give it one more shot on the mountain. And then we shall see. A visit to a nearby castle en route back to Tokyo, perhaps? Ah well, these are the perils of spring skiing.
Mark in Shanghai March 12, 2008
Posted by Kristen in Uncategorized.add a comment
Here’s what Mark wrote to me from Shanghai this week:
Having breakfast in hotel atrium which, what with the palm trees and blue neon glass staircases looks a bit like a Miami cruise ship. Listening to the pianist and clarinetist (yes, clarinetist) play “Home on the Range”, “Swanee River”, and now “My Way.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
Exotic dinner at home, familiar food in an exotic place March 5, 2008
Posted by Kristen in Asia, Food, Travel.add a comment
Another pair of adventures: an exotic dinner at home, and familiar food in an exotic place.
For my birthday dinner a few weeks ago we decided to make Shabu-shabu, which is a sort of Japanese fondue. I bought a special tabletop portable gas burner just for this purpose. Having an open flame on the dining room table is, like many other things in Japan, it is a little alarming in its lack of American-style safety mechanisms. Yet you can get a good rolling boil in the pot that lasts a long time. Into the pot goes water and a piece of kelp, which is removed just before the water boils. Then you dip in paper-thin slices of meat (often beef, but we used pork) and a bunch of other things: Chinese cabbage, leeks, tofu, chrysanthemum leaves, shiitake mushrooms. The meat you can just swish around a bit, but many of the other things are dunked in and left to simmer. When they seem done you fish them out with chopsticks, dip them in a sauce, and eat. We had one sesame sauce and another made with rice vinegar, soy sauce and mirin (sweet rice wine). For such simple ingredients, it was really outstanding!
Following our homey Japanese weekend, we set out on another adventure abroad. Mark had an extended business trip to Hong Kong which straddled a long weekend for Isabella’s school, so we decided to join him for a few days. I’ve now travelled alone with the girls several times internationally and I think I’m getting a handle on it. There’s no getting around the fact that it takes a very long time to get anywhere from here. We took the subway to the train to the airport, leaving the house about 4-1/2 hours before our flight. It turns out that the train is a good way to travel with children because there are interesting things to look at, they can get up and move around, you can buy snacks from the cart, and (I learned later how very important this part is) you don’t get carsick. Check-in and security are wonderfully civilized here in comparison to U.S. airports. Sometimes (and this was one of those times) I’m even taken out of the regular line and escorted to the front because I’m travelling alone with children. The flight is 5-1/2 hours. Amazingly enough, that no longer seems to be such a long time. And so we arrived at the hotel about 11 hours after leaving home. The room at the Landmark Mandarin Oriental, where Mark stays for business, had a huge round tub. The girls were delighted to frolic in there together at the end of the long day.
Hong Kong is an interesting place. This was our second visit, and I still don’t quite know what to do with the kids there. There don’t seem to me to be any obvious tourist things to do. After living in Tokyo, the city doesn’t seem so exotic to me. A great many people speak English, and it seems you can use English in any of the shops and restaurants in the Central part of the city. Many signs are in English, and products are labelled in English as well. Going to a drugstore here makes me feel a bit like a kid in a candy store: I can finally read the packages, so I want to buy everything! This time we took a ride on the Star Ferry to Kowloon again. At about 40 cents for adults, it’s one of the best tourist bargains anywhere. While there, we also visited one museum and spent some time in a children’s English language bookstore. The city is always changing, making it continually new and hence less foreign. I was astonished to see how dramatic these changes can be: Mark has told me that they keep adding landfill to extend the waterfront, and the shoreline has moved quite some distance out since he first began visiting in 1989. Here’s an example of the expansion in action, as we watched from the walkway to the ferry. Next time, this walkway will go over solid highway.
Here are the girls posing in front of giant inflatable models of the mascots for the Beijing 2008 Olympics
We also visited Stanley Market on the South side of the island. En route there in the taxi, I was reminded why train travel is so much better (see above). And I was reminded of the conflict between travelling light (I was wearing my only pair of jeans) and being prepared! After cleaning up and calming down a bit, we enjoyed a nice walk around the market and beachfront. It was much prettier than I expected. I think it wasn’t the case even 10 years ago, but now in addition to the market filled with very inexpensive shops, the waterfront is lined with several attractive restaurants. Mark and the girls climbed on the rocks for awhile and we enjoyed some very welcome sun and warmth.
Mark and I had dinner one night with a couple of his former colleagues from New York, who moved to Hong Kong in January as expats. It was a lot of fun to have a regular dinner out with familiar people from home. We ate at an Italian restaurant which felt as if it could have been in New York. The menus were all in English, the waiters spoke perfect English, the portions were large, and they insisted on continually assaulting us with enormous pepper mills! How strange it felt to travel further into another strange and exotic country and yet feel closer to home.
Thoughts on Language February 14, 2008
Posted by Kristen in Kids, Language.add a comment
Of course language is on my mind a great deal these days. When we made the decision to move to Tokyo, I fantasized about spending all my spare time studying Japanese and adding another and much more exotic foreign language to my repertoire. How cool it would be to talk to real Japanese people in their own language! I might even learn how to read, I thought.
In the beginning, it was easy to work hard. It was very exciting to learn something new and thrilling to be able to put words together in new and strange ways, and to be understood. It was a major breakthrough to be able to direct a cab driver to my building, and a crucial one too—since there are no real street addresses in Tokyo and you always have to give directions. I have also mastered the crucial and tricky counters and so I can count two when describing pizzas (nimai), pencils (nihon), kittens (nihiki), people (futari) or any general thing (futatsu). I can order in a restaurant and say “for here” or “to go”. I can ask “what is this?” on a menu and sometimes I might even understand a wee bit of the answer. This was useful in a sushi restaurant recently when we were served something which apparently came from the abdominal region of some kind of fish. And I can read a few kanji, even sometimes useful ones like “restroom”.
Yet as time went by, I got tired. The novelty wore off. And there were fewer and fewer circumstances in which I had to be able to speak Japanese in order to get what I needed. But mostly, I was tired. Each time I dropped Juliet off at school and rushed home to meet my tutor, newly confused and ill-prepared, I felt tense and anxious. Finally I decided it was time to take a break. And so for the last two months, I have not had a single lesson and haven’t learned any new words. I feel bad about this. It makes me feel weak and unmotivated. It makes me feel like a bad guest in my host country.
And yet, I ask myself, what was I gaining by learning Japanese?
And this leads me to a related question, which is: why do we learn language in the first place, and why would we want to learn more than one?
Juliet is now 2-1/2 and is talking up a storm in English. She seems to do very well in Japanese as well, though I’m not the best judge. She took her first big leaps in language over last summer when we were in the States. When we retuned to Japan, I noticed that she was speaking mostly in English to Noriko. She seemed to understand just fine when Noriko spoke to her in Japanese, but she would respond in English. Gradually she stopped, and now I hear her speaking only Japanese. I find this very interesting because Noriko speaks English very well, and Juliet hears me speak to her in English all the time. Yet she seems to accept that Japanese is the language Noriko uses to communicate with her. After the initial transition, it doesn’t seem to be any more difficult for her speak Japanese than English.
A few weeks ago I took Juliet to a birthday party for one of her English-speaking friends. Almost all of the guests were English or American, but there was one Japanese mother there. Her husband was English and their baby understood both languages, though I think she was not yet talking. I was chatting with her in English when Juliet came over to us. She picked up a toy that was on the floor and asked the Japanese woman, “kore nani?” (what is this?). To the best of my knowledge, she had not yet heard the woman speak Japanese.
So I’d love to be able to say that my daughter is completely bilingual and so brilliant that she can determine which language to speak based solely on facial features and/or accent. But of course it’s not that simple, and the pattern is not consistent. Another day we had a Japanese friend of hers from school over for a playdate. Her friend understands very little English and I’m sure they only communicate in Japanese at school. The mother spoke to Juliet in Japanese and Juliet answered appropriately, yet she persisted in speaking English to her friend. I found this very strange, since it seemed clear to me that the little girl had no idea what Juliet was talking about. But on the other hand, she spoke very little. I wonder what would have happened if her friend had answered in Japanese?
And then there are the funny and slightly humiliating instances in which she refuses to listen to me speak Japanese. If I try to say a word in Japanese (for example, pointing to a strawberry and saying “ichigo”), she will correct me (“no, Mommy, that’s a strawberry.”) I wonder what she’s objecting to. Is it because I just don’t say it right? Or is it because the word doesn’t match the person? I tend to think it’s the latter, because if I ask her what Sensei (Teacher) would call it, she will say “ichigo”.
She never gets mixed up, but I have heard her use a Japanese word when she doesn’t yet know the English one. They were learning the names of animals in school, and one of the animals was a camel. I didn’t know this, and the word “camel” had never really come up in conversation before. Then one day we were looking at her Sesame Street word book together and labeling the things on the “C” page. She pointed to the camel and said “racuda” I thought she was saying “it’s a duck”, and so I corrected her and said “no, that’s a camel.” The next week was a special observation day at school and the teacher took out the animal cards they’d been practicing with. Up popped the camel and the children chimed in “racuda” along with the teacher. I felt silly about having corrected her, and yet I realized that it was part of the process of separating the two languages. She didn’t say “camel” to the teacher, but now she knew that “camel” was the word to use with me.
Obviously, we use language to communicate. It is also obvious that young children learn language very quickly and can even learn two at the same time. I know that a large part of the reason I find it difficult to learn Japanese is that I’m no longer a child. But it’s also true that I don’t need to use it in order to communicate. I can get what I need, make friends, talk to my family, eat, sleep, shop, everything—all by speaking my native language or by using my few words of Japanese. I think that a huge part of our drive to learn language is the need to connect with other people. Children are making new connections all the time, creating friendships, trying to figure out their place in the world. As adults, we have already made our most important connections—especially if we are married and have families of our own. And we have the flexibility to seek out other people who speak our own language and make friends with them.
We know that children who move to a new country are able to pick up the new language and speak almost as well as a native, yet adults do not fare so well. But children are also immersed in schools and have a great need to make friends. Adults who move to new countries often go with their families or can form communities of others who speak the same language. What would it be like, I wonder, to go alone as an adult? What if you had to make friends and go to work and do everything in a new language? How long would it take to learn, and how well would you learn it?
New name, new location, new format! February 7, 2008
Posted by Kristen in Info.1 comment so far
After looking at lots of other blogs and reading about fun tools that are available, I decided to make the jump from Blogger and move my blog over to WordPress. I still know very little about what I can do here, but I can see that there’s lots of stuff to try out. So here I am, and now I get to start playing!
Stay tuned, and look for new features coming soon.
The Dullness of Everyday Life February 2, 2008
Posted by Kristen in Gripes, Healthcare, Japanese Culture.add a comment
Sometimes days, even weeks go by in which I have trouble finding anything to write about. Every day brings something new and notable about living in Japan, but what do I choose? What do I write about? And what about those periods in which everything seems just boring and dull, just ordinary everyday life? What do I write then?
The past few weeks have been busy and tiring, filled with ordinary struggles of everyday life. Illness and taxes.
First, the illness. Mark’s.
On a business trip to Hong Kong at the beginning of January, he came down with a bad cold which quickly turned into laryngitis. A few days before he returned to Japan, his lower right leg started to swell up. By the time he got home, he had lost his voice completely and his leg was red and puffy. He went to work anyway, but by the next day his leg was hurting and he decided to go see a doctor. The doctor at our nearby clinic thought he should go to the hospital, so we ended up in the emergency room on a Friday evening.
I was struck by several differences between this hospital and the ones we’ve visited in New York. First of all, the main entrance to the hospital was closed at 5:00 pm. By the time I joined Mark at 6:30, it seemed totally dead. The hallways were dark and I had to enter through the single small emergency door. And then there was no drama at all. No bleeding injuries, no ambulance arrivals, no drug addicts. Just a few tired-looking people sitting in nice, clean rows of padded straight-backed chairs.
The first several visits to the hospital were frustrating and discouraging. There was a lot of back and forth between doctors, more visits to the clinic and to the hospital, and prescriptions for antibiotics and pain relievers. The clinic doctor thought it might be deep vein thrombosis or an infection, the doctor at the hospital thought it might be gout but gave him antibiotics anyway. Still, the redness began to spread above his knee and he was getting increasingly worried.
Finally, a week later and again on a Friday, I joined him at the hospital after yet another unsatisfying visit with the doctor on call. This one had told him to take more of the same antibiotics and go home and rest, with instructions to come back and see a specialist 6 days later. With the infection spreading northward, we didn’t much like those instructions. So I decided to be a pushy American and I called the clinic to enlist their help. They were initially hesitant because the doctor who had seen Mark the day before wasn’t there that day, but soon agreed to have another doctor call and speak to the one who had just examined Mark. It turned out she was able to speak directly to the infectious disease specialist at the hospital who agreed to see Mark that same afternoon.
What followed was one of those astonishing only-in-Japan episodes. We walked back over to the walk-in clinic, where we had been told to go and make an appointment. The nurse met us in the hallway and asked, “Green-san?” (pretty obvious who the non-Japanese people are!) It was 11:30 am and she told us that the doctor could see Mark after 1:00 pm, so we should have lunch and come back then. We assumed we’d have to wait an hour or two after our return to see the doctor. Mark saw her at 1:05.
Here’s what she said, and what seems most likely:
The infection is most likely caused by streptococcus bacteria, probably from the sore throat. The initial dosage of antibiotics they gave him was the Japanese dose, and since he is so tall (!) and weighs more than 60 kilos (132 pounds) (!), they should have given him DOUBLE that dosage. She recommended treating it with intravenous antibiotics for several days.
Mark returned to the hospital every day for 8 days to get his IV. The doctor popped in to see him on several visits. He was impressed with how thoughtful, patient and attentive she was. And we were both humbled by her continued apologies for her poor English—which was, of course excellent—since we are both incapable of even basic communication in the language of our host country!
Many people I spoke to about this drama gave me dire warnings about the poor state of medical care in Japan. They offered up their favorite specialists or suggested we consider going abroad. In the end, though, I think that Mark got better care here than he would have in the U.S. After the initial confusion, he certainly got more attention. And the cost of the visits to the hospital were shockingly low: one day he saw two separate doctors and had the IV administered, and the total bill was about $60. That’s the total bill, without Japanese health insurance. That’s the amount we’ll submit to our insurance company for payment. Clearly, we’ve got something really wrong with our system.
And the taxes?
Well, that’s what I got to tend to as soon as Mark was back on his feet. Round One of the big, ugly task of filing taxes for two separate countries. Yes, we do have an accountant to help us. But that never seems to be much of a help for me, as you still have to track down all the relevant data and put it in order. The first part involved figuring out the sum total of all the money that we transferred into Japan from foreign sources. Sounds simple enough, until you realize that this includes items paid for in Japan from a credit card that was paid for out of a non-Japanese bank account. And this is how we pay for a large portion of our expenses here. Fortunately, I had remembered this part from last year. And so I had been pretty vigilant about separating our Yen and U.S. Dollar charges on separate credit cards. And I have all of that data conveniently stored in Quicken. But then I read on to the part where it asked for the total in yen. And all my data was in dollars. And the exchange rate dropped rather dramatically during the year. Good grief.
Thank goodness for Excel and for all my years of experience with historical rate tables and lookup functions!
Do Shoes Make the Woman? January 11, 2008
Posted by Kristen in Fun Stuff.3 comments
Last night I finished watching the movie Kinky Boots. It was just the right kind of story to fit my mood this week, and I thought it was a lot of fun. The final scene with Drag Queens in thigh-high stiletto boots on the catwalk in Milan was definitely worth the wait!
At one point in the movie, the lead Queen Lola says that you can tell everything about a person by their shoes.
So this begs the question, what do my shoes say about me?
I decided to go through my closet and examine the very sorry state of my footwear. My friends, it is not a pretty picture.
Here are my basic everyday shoes for the winter:
Black suede Merrells. Several years old and fading. Very practical. Comfortable to walk in, some protection from rain and snow. Slip-on, which is very useful in Japan.
For everyday use, here’s my other alternative:
New Balance Cross-trainers. Great for my feet, especially if I were planning to run a marathon. Could be considered clever if I were commuting to work on Wall Street in a suit, or anti-Beauty Establishment if I were a college student.
Today I decided to go with something a wee bit more stylish when I took Juliet for a walk. Here’s what I found in my closet:
Rubber-soled loafers from Aerosoles. Nice and comfortable, actually.
Now let’s move on to the summer shoes stashed away in the closet. Here the story isn’t much better, I’m afraid. I bought these shoes for our first visit to Tokyo, for easy slip-on when apartment hunting.
What was I thinking?
Here’s what I wear almost every day in the summer:
I love these Clarks sandals. They are incredibly comfortable. They’re also reasonably attractive if you’re wearing khaki capris or a long denim skirt. But they seriously restrict my summer wardrobe.
Then there are these:
They have potential, but I’ve never been able to walk in them very well. And isn’t the point of a really great pair of shoes that they make you look good when you walk?
Of course I have these too:
They seemed like a good idea in theory, since I like my winter Merrells so much. But I’ve never figured out how to make these work with any halfway decent clothes.
Now here are my dress shoes.
These are nice black suede pumps. Practical and decent. Big heel and square toes. Also extra pads and arch supports to make them fit my feet. These are not sexy shoes.
And finally,
The blue pumps with a top strap. The shoe salesman at the special store for people with problem feet (me and a bunch of octogenarians in orthopedic shoes) had some point about the strap, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. These shoes are weird.
These shoes are only for outing that require very little walking. If I’m going to take the subway or even walk several blocks to take a taxi, even if I’m going to the opera, I always opt for these:
So there it is, folks. The sum total of my shoe collection. And so I ask myself, what do my shoes say about me?
They say I need to buy new shoes.
(Now, if only they sold women’s shoes in my size in Japan. I wonder where the Japanese Drag Queens shop?)
Fun Movies for the New Year January 8, 2008
Posted by Kristen in Fun Stuff.4 comments
The start of a new year seems a good time to simplify things, so I’m going to try something new for awhile. I’ve been enjoying some fun movies lately and I thought it would be fun to share them. Here are some of my recent titles:
Pride and Prejudice, the 6-hour BBC miniseries from the early 90′s.
The actress who plays Eliza Bennett has an easy smile and seems usually amused by the silliness that surrounds her. Colin Firth is the quintessential Darcy. At our playgroup yesterday of mostly younger moms, my friend Emma put it to the test. The question was: Colin Firth, yes or no? The results were one undecided, one no, and all the remaining (5 or 6) yes.
Arthur, from the early 80′s, starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minelli.
This movie was funny when I first saw it and has always remained funny. This time when I saw it, I was especially touched by the aging father-figure Hobson. It was a gesture of true generosity when he went to visit Linda and her father.
Kinky Boots, a British film from a few years ago.
The owner of a shoe factory in the Midlands in his sunset years wants to pass the torch to his son, but the son escapes to London for a better life. Exit father, re-enter son, factory turns out to be in serious financial trouble. Enter an outrageous drag queen and some very large, very sexy red boots. A very good story.
Calendar Girls, starring Helen Mirrin and Julie Walters.
I love the scenes in the beginning when the two leads are giggling in the back row of the Women’s Society meetings.
What good movies have you seen lately?
Weekend in Hanoi September 25, 2007
Posted by Kristen in Asia, Travel, Vietnam.1 comment so far
Last year we didn’t manage to do nearly as much travel in Asia as we would have liked. So we decided to start this school year off with a trip as soon as possible. The third weekend in September was a long weekend, and we decided to go to Hanoi, Vietnam.
The decision was very deeply thought out and scientific. It went something like this:
Mark: “Let’s go somewhere interesting in Asia for the long weekend.”
Kristen: “Okay, where can we get to in 3 days?”
M: “South Korea, China, Hong Kong and Vietnam.”
K: “Vietnam sounds cool. Let’s try Vietnam.”
M: “Should we go to Hanoi or Saigon?”
K: “I don’t know, which one do you think we should go to?”
M: “Hanoi is in the North and so it may be a little less hot; it’s also smaller and less spoiled.”
K: “Okay, let’s go to Hanoi.”
One of the reasons we didn’t travel very much last year was that every time Isabella had a day or two off from school, Mark had to go on a business trip. And lo and behold, it happened again. Mark had to be in Hong Kong for 10 days spanning the weekend we wanted to travel. It was time to take the leap and try out traveling separately. On Friday night, Mark flew from Hong Kong and we flew from Tokyo, arriving a few hours later. On Monday night, Mark left us to return to Hong Kong and we headed home by ourselves. It was a tiring flight of nearly 5 hours each way, and the return flight was a very short overnight. But it worked, and nothing went awry, and now we know that we can manage a family trip to an
exotic destination even if we can’t travel together.
It helped a great deal that traveling within Japan is easy and comfortable. On Friday afternoon Juliet and I picked up Isabella at school and went to Ikebukuro Station to catch the express train to the airport. Isabella and I go through this station every week on the day I pick her up from school, so (though it’s big and can be confusing) we know it well. The train was exactly on time, comfortable, and a nice lady came by selling snacks. Juliet was happy to be able to get up and move around. We had no suitcases with us because I had sent ours ahead by takkyubin, a wonderful delivery service in Japan that allows you to send pretty much anything, anywhere. When we got to the terminal, we just went to the appropriate counter and gave them the receipt, and they handed us our suitcase. We then had to roll it only a short distance to the check-in counter. And here in Japan, they still treat mothers traveling with small children nicely: we were even allowed to check in at the Business Class desk.
We arrived in Hanoi at around 11:00 pm local time, which was 1:00 am Tokyo time. This was when we hit our only real snag of the trip: the hotel did not have adjoining rooms as we had requested. So Mark bunked with Isabella and Juliet and I shared a room. Not ideal, but it worked. Our hotel was the beautiful and historic (Hotel Sofitel Metropole), built in 1901. Our rooms were in the old part of the hotel and still had many beautiful original details. The lobby was decorated with items such as an old Louis Vuitton steamer trunk, and the house phone was a working antique. After about five minutes of ooing and ahhing at the elegant furnishings, we all collapsed into bed.
We spent the next two and a half days exploring the city and gazing in awe at all the new and surprising sights. Here are some of the things we found most interesting:
Most everyone rides motor scooters. My very non-scientific survey put the ratio of scooters to cars at about 30:1. It was very common to see two or more people on a scooter, and parents often rode with small children standing up. This boy is standing on the running board, but we saw many toddlers standing on the seat between their parents.
Much activity takes place right on the street. Here is a typical local restaurant: the kitchen is the table on left, and the diners sit on small plastic stools on the sidewalk. There is an indoor part as well, but no one uses it; they prefer to be outside.
And here is a restaurant in transit: the twin baskets hold both food and stove, ready to be prepared wherever she chooses to set it down.
Stores as well were often little more than a display case at the edge of the sidewalk. I guessed that this was a convenience store.
The city is lush and green. This large lake is right in the center of town, surrounded by trees.
It was funny to see shops selling Communist paraphernalia, especially for those of us who grew up during the Cold War.
We went to see a traditional Vietnamese water puppet show at the Thang Long Water Puppet Theater, which was really interesting and entertaining. Set to traditional Vietnamese music, the show is done entirely in the water with puppeteers standing behind a screen and maneuvering brightly painted wooden puppets on long sticks. We got the impression that they perform the same set of 10 or 12 scenes each time. There was a boat race, there were snakes, a pair of dancing phoenixes, sparklers, dancing fairies, and a monkey that climbed a tree. This website gives a complete explanation, along with pictures. (You may even be able to view a Quicktime video of the show, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work.) Unfortunately, Juliet found the very first puppet to be scary and so she hid–first against my shoulder and later folded up completely in my lap–for the entire rest of the show. I was very sorry she was afraid, especially since I was sure she would have enjoyed much of the rest of the show. Here’s one of the pictures I managed to take while holding her (I love my digital camera, but I still find it a big challenge in difficult lighting situations!).
We visited the excellent Vietnam Museum of Ethnology on our second full day. We were surprised to find that in addition to the very interesting exhibits on the culture of some of the many different ethnic groups within Vietnam, there was also an area devoted to tremendous difficulties in the lives of ordinary people under the Communist regime. One area displayed a recreation of the apartment of a mid-level government official and his family, consisting of 4 children and mother-in-law. The apartment was about 300 square feet. The placard (written in English and French as well as Vietnamese) explained that the family raised pigs in the bathroom in order to make extra money, a common practice at the time not only in the country but in city apartments as well. Although we’re all raised to believe that our country is the most free and open in the world, do we have museums that are this explicitly critical of the government from the recent past? Visiting a place like this certainly gives one perspective.
Travelling with a two-year-old gave us the excuse to head back to the hotel after lunch and chill out by the pool. It was a nice mix of exploring and relaxing, especially for the girls.
We enjoyed several good meals. Although I would have liked very much to try out one of the places such as the one pictured above, I wasn’t willing to risk anyone getting sick (and it would be impossible for me to take care of the children and travel alone if I picked up a nasty bug). So we restricted ourselves to “tourist” restaurants, which were still absurdly cheap. One of our dinners came to about $14 for all of us, including two beers apiece for the adults! We ate lots of spring rolls and fried noodles and Mark enjoyed some of the local specialty pho, which is a soup with chicken and rice noodles. I was surprised to find that the rice was quite different from Japanese rice: the grains are much smaller, and it is considerably less sticky. Oh, and the coffee! I loved the coffee. It is very strong, and is served with sweetened condensed milk. On the last day we had lunch in a restaurant where you get to sit in chairs made from rickshaws.
There are still not a lot of tourists in Vietnam, and we saw very few other Westerners. The Vietnamese people were friendly and open and many stopped to look at Juliet, often touching her or even pinching her cheek. They would ask us where we were from and seem generally interested in talking to us. It was an interesting contrast to Japan where we are also very different from everyone else, but where people rarely talk to us and often don’t seem to notice.
On Monday afternoon we bade Mark farewell from the poolside and he headed off to the airport for his flight to Hong Kong. We were able to keep one of our rooms until late in the evening (that is, by paying for an extra night), which enabled me to manage the midnight flight back to Tokyo. The girls and I splurged on a hotel dinner and then they watched TV in the room while I packed. We left for the airport at around 9:00 pm and encountered our only rain of the weekend in the form of a dramatic thunderstorm en route. It was then that I realized the main disadvantage of travelling by motor scooter, as I watched our fellow travellers on the highway huddled under ponchos! The cab driver made a token effort to overcharge me for the trip, but didn’t persist when I challenged him. At $10 for a 45-minute drive, though, it would hardly have been a crime. Dressed in jeans for a long airplane trip, we perspired as we browsed the few airport shops in the barely air-conditioned small airport. Finally we found ourselves on board our very comfortable JAL 747 where Isabella soon busied herself with her individual video screen and Juliet, after half an hour of cartoons, fell fast asleep.
Just Another Day May 31, 2007
Posted by Kristen in Tokyo Adventures.1 comment so far
My advisor at Wellesley had a favorite saying: “Everything is either trivial or impossible. If you know how to do it, it’s trivial; if you don’t know how to do it, it’s impossible.” Of course, Prof. Hirschhorn was talking about incredibly difficult theoretical mathematical proofs. But the saying comes back to me so frequently that I believe it really applies to just about everything new we encounter.
And so it is with life in Japan. Everything starts out impossible. But if you can deal with that, you just might find that it gradually becomes trivial.
Today I had an adventure full of impossibles.
I met Mark for lunch and planned to do some shopping afterwards. I thought I would go by bicycle to give myself more flexibility and explore the city a little. I knew I could get to his office in 10-15 minutes, and then from there to Shibuya in 10-15 more. Going to Shibuya is one of my regular reminders of how small New York is in comparison with Tokyo. Like Times Square on steroids, Shibuya is one of the many big, crowded commerical areas dotted around the city. It is centered around a commuter rail station, crammed with departments stores and shops, dotted with neon and an enormous video screen. The streets come out in a star from the station and it is easy for someone like me (with little sense of direction) to get lost. It’s also very crowded. I have been there several times by train but never by bicycle. I’m not sure why I thought this would be a good idea, but it seemed worth a try.
Here’s what Shibuya Crossing looks like at night; it’s just about this crowded during the day.
I knew it might be a challenge to park my bicycle. Lots of people travel by bicycle in Tokyo, but it seems to be illegal to park your bike almost anywhere on the sidewalk. Everyone does it anyway. The police do routinely ticket illegally parked bikes and even cart them away, so there is some risk. I still can’t figure out where it’s okay to park. When I got to Shibuya today, however, I found an actual bicycle parking area. So I put my bike into one of the slots and locked it up. Then I saw that there was a machine to pay for the parking. Okay, kind of a drag to have to pay, but no big deal, I thought. Except for this: the machine was labelled only in Japanese. I had no idea how to use it. So I decided to go back and remove my bicycle. But when I tried to take it out of the slot, I found it was locked. Then I realized that you would have to pay in order to remove your bicycle. But of course I couldn’t pay because I couldn’t read the machine. Hmmm. I stood around for a bit, hoping someone else would come and park their bicycle so I could see what to do. Then I stood around a bit more, trying to look vaguely confused and helpless, hoping someone would offer to help (this often works). No luck. Then I called Noriko to ask if she knew how to use this kind of machine (maybe it was very common, I thought, and everyone would know how to use it). Unfortunately, she had never used one before. And then, of course, I couldn’t read the instructions to her for me to translate because, and this is the thing that I just can’t get over . . .
I AM ILLITERATE.
Yup, that’s me. Competent, intelligent, well-educated; yet I can’t read or write in my host country. A very strange and unsettling fact, which is unlikely to change anytime soon.
So anyway, back to my adventure. I did the only thing possible, which was to walk away and go on with my errands, hoping that when I returned I’d be able to find someone to help me. As I walked away I wondered: would I be able to find my way back here again? Could I possibly remember in this urban maze where I parked my bike? All I could do was check for a landmark or two and hope for the best.
Next, I went in search of Bic Camera again. This is the same store I was looking for when I got lost in Shibuya the first time back in December. This time I thought I’d look for the main store instead of the smaller, older branch I’d gone to before. I thought it would be bigger and easier to find. It still took me a long time to find it. When I finally noticed it, I realized it was the biggest store on the corner of the main street that I had looked at 10 times. This time I knew it would be labelled in Japanese, and I knew what the katakana letters looked like. It is just so very strange to read symbols and letters that are not Roman characters that I still often miss the obvious even when it’s right in front of my nose.
In the store, I was looking for a specific kind of cable to hook up the new TV in the bedroom. I couldn’t find it, so I asked a salesman for help. He didn’t know what I was looking for. Eventually, we each took out our cell phones to call for translation help. At one point, I was talking to his colleague in English and he was talking to Noriko in Japanese. Though we still didn’t manage to communicate much, it seemed clear that they didn’t have the cable. Strike 2.
Next stop, Citibank, to pay a bill. There are two ways to pay bills here in Japan: in person, in cash; or by bank transfer. No checks in the mail. To do a bank transfer, you have to go to the bank and either fill out a form with the teller or enter the information in the ATM. In general Citibank is pretty friendly to English-speaking customers and the ATM’s have menus in English for the basic transactions like withdrawals and balance inquiries. Not so for the bank transfer function, however. That is only in Japanese. So in order to pay a bill, I have to go the bank during regular banking hours and ask a bank employee to help me enter the information into the ATM. Today I got to the bank at 3:15, only to find that the branch closed at 3:00. So there I was again, with all the tools available to accomplish the task I needed, yet unable to use them. Because, of course, I can’t read. Strike 3.
At this point I just wanted to go shopping and buy something, anything at all. Last time I had an impossible day I came home with a waffle maker. This time, I very nearly came home with an ice cream maker (but it was a very silly bright red thing made by DeLonghi in cooperatin with Disney, and it cost about $100). I contented myself with a small canvas shoulder bag to hold all the extra stuff I seem to be always carting around. (I’m still longing for an ice cream maker, however, so I can have something other than vanilla, green tea, rum raisin or mediocre chocolate flavors!)
Finally, it was time to go back and face the bicycle challenge. I found my way back to the station and then, somewhat to my surprise, back around to the bicycle parking area. And as I had hoped, this time there was someone standing around whom I could ask for help. The machine turned out to be ridiculously simple: you enter the number of the slot where your bike is parked, then push a button. The display tells you to insert 100 yen; you put in your coin, and then you can pull your bicycle back out.
Just like Mr. Hirschhorn said: if you know how to do it, it’s trivial.
And then, I even found my way home without getting lost. (I did have one further scare, however, as the sky darkened and looked terribly threatening. Why didn’t I think to put in a raincoat? Luckily, I beat the storm home. Whew!)
Even after 8 months, it seems that I still regularly find myself in situations that are completely unfamiliar and appear impossible. I thought that I would gradually learn how things work and then I would be able to do whatever I need to without getting stuck. But now I think it will take a very long time to get to that point. In the meantime, however, I find that I am learning something even more valuable: being in a completely unfamiliar situation and not knowing what to do is actually okay. I can just ride the wave of anxiety, slow down, look at the situation, and do whatever I know how to do. I have a cell phone and know how to use the trains, so I can never be completely lost. And I am surprised to find that it’s kind of liberating to be able to face an impossible situation and, in a very normal and mundane way, without any brilliant flashes of insight, work your way out.
Of course, it sure helps to come home to mediocre chocolate ice cream and an episode of Grey’s Anatomy downloaded from iTunes!
