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
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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.
