One Fish Two Fish

The next day, Friday, we got up early to go to the Tsukiji fish market. The Tsukiji fish market is Tokyo’s most famous open air fish market, and even if you haven’t heard the name before you have probably heard of the market before. It usually gets running in full swing around five in the morning, and starts winding down around eight, so we got up a little before six. Fortunately, our hotel was located about a ten minute taxi ride from the market, so we were able to get there pretty easily. The market itself is located near the water in a series of open-air warehouses, and to get to it you have to maneuver through a maze of stacked Styrofoam boxes, fast moving transport vehicles, and fish parts. Once you get there the atmosphere is so crowded and hectic that it can be a bit hard to get your bearings. The market goes on for what seems like miles, and it is easy to get lost among all the fish purveyors and buyers. The upside is that you can even if you do get lost you are never at a loss for things to look at. Any fish you can think of can be bought by the dozen, and many fish I had never even seen before were on display. Octopi, Monk Fish, Whale, Shark, and of Tuna, can all be found, carved up and ready for sale. Given the amazing amount of fish in the market, you would think that it would reek of fish, but surprisingly, it hardly smells at all. Maybe it’s the freshness of the fish, but it doesn’t smell at all.
The market may be a popular tourist attraction, but it’s important to remember that it’s a place of business first and foremost. This means that people are not going to tolerate you getting in their way, and are likely to run you down if you do. I almost got run over by forklifts at least a dozen times, and Grandma was bumped a couple times. It’s interesting, but the first thought I had when I got there was that the market felt a lot like Bangkok. Crowded, cramped, dirty, and full of food, it made me feel a little nostalgic. Another interesting thing about the market was the tuna. Tuna is perhaps the most popular fish in the world, and that holds true in Japan as well. Since most of the tuna that you can by in the states comes in those tiny cans, it’s easy to forget how large of a fish a tuna actually is. I saw tuna there that were bigger than I am, and must have weighed five times more. The only thing bigger than the fish were the tools that were used to cut them up. I saw a man wielding a knife with a serrated edge that must have been at least six feet long. There were knives as long as I am tall, and as thin as the blade of a band-saw. Other knives were big and used more butchering. Some of the larger knives looked like they weighed 15 pounds, and the people using them had arms as big around as my neck. After a couple of hours wandering around the fish market, we decided to head back to the hotel. On our way back, we ran across an alley next to the market that was exclusively sushi restaurants. Grandma isn’t much of a fan of sushi, so Mom and I stopped at one of them to grab a sushi breakfast. We each got a rice bowl with sashimi (sushi without rice), and it was absolutely amazing. It was probably the best sushi I have ever had. After breakfast we started walking back to the hotel while trying to catch a cab. It was on this walk that I learned never to take Mom’s advise when trying to catch a taxi, because every time she had us cross the street to where she thought we could catch one, they would start passing by where we had just been. We did eventually catch one though, and made it back to the hotel.
I decided to take a nap and Mom and Grandma decided to seek out some coffee. I got up around one in the afternoon, and we headed out in search of a toy store that Mom wanted to go to. We were able to walk there without too much trouble, and it was really a pretty interesting store. It was five stories tall, and each floor specialized in a different category of toy. One floor had novelty toys, another had baby toys, the next stuffed toys, then hobby toys, and finally models. We spent about an hour looking around there, Mom got some souvenirs for the kids, and I was able to find a magnetic Go board that Grandma was nice enough to buy for me. After that, we caught a taxi to the Imperial Palace grounds. It was a pretty impressive area, though unfortunately I can’t say much about it since it is closed to the public all year round save for two days near the beginning of the year. We didn’t find this out until we got there, so we just wandered around the gardens and took some pictures of the palace from across the moat. Once we finished looking around there, we headed over to Tokyo Tower, so I could show Mom and Grandma where I spent New Year’s Eve. We wandered around the temple grounds where I celebrated New Year’s, took some pictures and observed a little bit of a Buddhist ceremony, before we headed out to have dinner. We found a nice yakisoba place (soba are a type of Japanese noodles that are made of Buckwheat, and yaki means grilled or fried, so yakisoba is soba that has been cooked on a grill) and had dinner. After dinner, we went back to Tokyo Tower and rode up to the main observation deck. I had been there before, but even having seen it before the view was really breathtaking. I think Mom and Grandma were impressed with the view, but I think Mom was more impressed with the fact that she left her purse on the railing in the observation deck and it was still there 20 minutes later when we went back for it. After awhile we decided to head back down and make our way back to the hotel.
That was our last day in Tokyo, and we managed to make it a pretty full day. I think it was a pretty good introduction to Japan for Mom and Grandma. The day after, which was Saturday, we headed to Kyoto, but I’ll talk about that soon.

Labyrinth

Travelling with family is fun, if a little exasperating at times. Being around Mom and Grandma all day everyday was fun, even if we sometimes grate on each other’s nerves. Grandma was particularly amusing, always exploring every new hotel room until she knew where everything was. I think one of the things that made the trip both frustrating and amusing was that none of us were used to interacting with each other, and we sort of treated each other the way we would have treated the people that we are used to being around. Mom sometimes treated us like children, while I spoke to her and Grandma like I do to my friends here (lots of asshole sarcasm and joking), and Grandma treated me and Mom like she sometimes interacts with Grandpa. It was all a bit amusing, if a little confusing.
I forgot to take notes on what happened when during the time we spent in Toyo, so I’ll just try to hit some key events. On our first full day in Tokyo we headed to Tokyo’s most famous Kabuki theater, to see a performance. Kabuki performances usually takes place over more than six hours, and are in four or more acts. Fortunately, we were able to purchase a ticket for a single act, so we were only there for 90 minutes. I had never seen a Kabuki performance live before, though I had seen them on video as a part of my Japanese literature class. Overall the experience was not unlike watching a performance of a Shakespearian play, if the actors had more reverence for the material and the performance itself was ritualized. There is a care of movement and speech in a Kabuki play that is unmatched in anything that I have ever seen in the States. The actors train themselves to speak in a very particular way, putting emphasis in certain places and the way they move is very deliberate. I’m sure this is also the case in many western performances, but the level to which it is done in Kabuki is something else entirely.
We didn’t get done with the play until mid-afternoon and afterwards we went and did a little more looking around before heading to Shibuya to visit a department store famous for its knickknacks and for having just about anything that you could need. Up to that point we had been moving around in fairly quiet parts of town, and I don’t think that either Mom or Grandma had an idea of just how busy and crowded Tokyo could be. Shibuya is one of Tokyo’s busiest neighborhoods, and the roads are winding and confusing. We had a little bit of trouble trying to find the place, but after about half an hour of wandering around we found it. For some reason, my normally abysmal sense of direction was right on the money most of the time during the trip. Maybe I have just been living in the wrong hemisphere for my entire life. Once we were at the store we looked around for an hour, spending most of our time on the floor that sold novelty goods. The store wasn’t really remarkable, except that it was built like a maze. Each floor was divided into three floors of its own, and the stairs in one part would skip a floor while the other stairs led to another floor. The result was a very confusing and challenging to navigate store, but at least it was interesting. We found our way back to the station easily enough and headed back to the neighborhood in which we were staying to have dinner. We found a little ramen shop under the train tracks, and I had fun explain to Mom and Grandma how to use a ticket machine at a restaurant. Some restaurants don’t take orders, they have their menu in a vending machine at the front, where you buy a ticket and give it to a server. It was the first time that Grandma had had real ramen before, and I think she was a little surprised by the amount of food that was provided. She made it through about half of it, and I was able to finish the rest before we headed back to the hotel to turn in for the night.

Been on spring break for about three weeks now, and I’m really enjoying it, although I’ve been far too lax in my blog writing duties. I spent the last two weeks travelling with Mom and Grandma, and I had a lot of fun doing that, and it was great to see them. I’m working on a multi-part installment of what I did with them, which will hopefully allow me to go into more detail than I would be able to in one enormous post, and might help get me into the habit of writing more often. Well then, let’s get started.
We had a bit of confusion in the days leading up to their arrival. We weren’t quite sure what day they were actually going to get here, as it was going to be different than the day that they left. Figuring out time zones is tricky, and not one of my strong suits. In the end though we figured it out, and I took the Shinkansen (bullet train) down to Tokyo to meet them. We ended up meeting at the hotel, as it had a shuttle service that they were able to take there straight from the airport, and it was a lot easier and cheaper for me to just go to the hotel from the train station. After the initial greetings we settled down and it started to feel as though we had just seen each other. It was weird, it was as if I hadn’t been gone for seven months and had just seen them the day before. They got in at a little after six in the afternoon, and after about an hour of lounging and catching up, we headed out to try to get a bite to eat. We didn’t go very far, just to a sushi place that we found a couple blocks from our hotel (not the first one we passed though, Japan in general and Tokyo in particular has a ridiculous number of restaurants, most of them packed into alleys). It was one of those restaurants where you have to take your shoes off and sit on the floor which gave Grandma a little bit of trouble, but I think she was mostly just complaining, a common trait in our family. The sushi was good, though not the best I’ve had since I’ve been here, and afterwards we wandered around a little before heading back. They were feeling pretty tired, and I had been travelling all day so we turned in early. More tomorrow, I feel sick at the moment.

Bump in the Night

Been keeping pretty busy, winter semester is rough, but almost done now, just a couple more days of class and then the final test. Been doing a lot lately, so I’m going to try to cover some of what I’ve been up to, as well as take care of some old business.
A couple weeks ago, at the beginning of the month, Sapporo held its annual snow festival. The festival takes place over the course of a week, from the fifth to the eleventh, and draws a huge crowd from all over the world. There are all sorts of different events and attractions put on for the festival, not to mention the things that Sapporo has to offer year round. The main attractions though, and the things the festival is most famous for, are the snow and ice sculptures, some of which are over 50 feet tall.
When I knew for sure that I was going to be coming to Japan, going to the Sapporo snow festival was very near the top of my list of things to do while here. With this in mind, I kept a close eye on the dates set for the festival, and tried to figure out a way to get to Sapporo. Since Sapporo is in Hokkaido, the large northern Japanese island, getting there is not exactly easy, as it involves either a ferry ride or a plane. I went with a couple of friends and we opted to go with a plane which, though expensive, would give us a full day and a half more to spend in Sapporo (though this was little comfort at the time I forked over the cash for my plane ticket). Very little interesting happened on the trip there (other than reaffirming my belief that the architect responsible for the Akita airport is the same person that designed the Missoula airport), so I’ll skip to the snow festival itself, which was really something.
Travelling with new people is always a nerve wracking experience, or at least the lead up to it is. It’s not that I went into it thinking the people I was with were going to be bad travelling companions, far from it, it’s just that who a person is when you are hanging out with them and who they are when you are travelling can be two very different people. Fortunately the two people I travelled with, a guy from England and a girl from Washington, were a couple, which might suggest that I would be made to feel more uncomfortable but really meant that if things went bad they were more likely to start yelling at each other than me. Not great from their perspective but it worked out well for me.
We left on Friday the fifth, and since we were travelling by plane it only took about an hour to get there, as opposed to the 15 or so it would have taken had we gone any other way. We got there in the early evening, and the first thing we did after getting our bearings (by which I mean taking a 45 minute train ride from the airport to Sapporo station), was to check in to our respective hotels. I had put off finding a hotel a little too long, so not only was I not staying in the same hotel as my travelling companions, I only had one night booked, which meant that I would have to try to find a place to stay the next night, a fact I tried not to think about. Hokkaido, being farther North than Akita, is quite a bit colder, a fact that was not lost on me, especially considering the shoes I was wearing were not exactly made for winter wear. I got them from Target a couple weeks before I left, and since then the soles have been worn to the point where the sides have disconnected from the sole in some places. This means that if I step in anything wet; a patch of snow, a puddle, you know, the sorts of things that may or may not be found in abundance in a city celebrating a snow festival, it goes straight into my shoe and soaks my foot. This is knowledge I would have liked to have had prior to going on this trip but sadly this was not the case. My frozen feet aside, we spent that first evening at Odori park, which runs through the center of Sapporo city. The park was host to the main attractions of the snow festival, several extremely large snow sculptures. I won’t put too much effort into describing them here, but they were really something. One was a sculpture funded by the Sapporo zoo, and featured a host of animals rendered in remarkable detail; penguins, wolves, a monkey, and a leopard were among them. Farther down was a beautifully rendered Sculpture of a Shinto shrine, life-size. I wish I could have focused more on the sculptures, but I hadn’t really dressed for being out in the cold, so I had a hard time focusing on anything more than how cold I was.
The next day got started late, as I had to walk halfway across town to meet with my travelling companions, and I got lost several times. Eventually we met up and had lunch, which was some of the best ramen I’ve ever had. Near where my friends were staying was a place called “ramen ally,” which is just as awesome as it sounds, though not in appearance so much as content. It’s a cramped little passageway under a couple of buildings that has several ramen shops set up inside. We ended up going to the first one we passed, which was sort of unfortunate. The problem was that it was really cold outside, and the hostess kept opening the door to try to coax in customers, which meant that it was very cold inside. Ramen is good for warming up though, and I ordered the butter ramen, which was essentially a bowl of ramen with half a stick of butter stuck in it. It was amazing. When I leave Japan, I’m really going to miss being able to get good noodles just about anywhere. After lunch we headed back to the park to see the sculptures that we had missed the day before. On our way there, a blizzard picked up, so we headed underground. Sapporo has a really extensive series of tunnels in the form of an underground shopping mall, which is pretty cool. You can spend hours wandering around down there and pop up in a small corner of the city or directly under the TV tower (essentially a mini Tokyo Tower), which is what happened to us. We were able to keep an eye on the blizzard’s progress by watching the people coming in and checking how much snow they had on them. At around four in the afternoon, my friends got tired and headed back to their hotel to take a nap, leaving me to get lost while trying to find a place to stay. I wasn’t able to find anyplace, but I did manage to get lost in a new part of the city, which was fun. We met up again at around six and headed out to a different part of town. In this area, the street was lined with ice sculptures, all of which were very impressive. My personal favorites were the ones that had fish frozen in them. A little sad, but the awesome made up for it. There were sculptures of dragons, sea creatures, birds, people fishing, and all manner of other awesome things. My camera battery died about five minutes before we got to the sculptures, so I need to bug my friend for the pictures she took. After that we went to dinner. Hokkaido is famous for several things, one of which is crab, so we decided to spend a little money and get some crab. The fare was pretty standard, shabu shabu, which is essentially a make-your-own soup with the pot on your table. The crab was fantastic though, which is a shame because there’s never enough of it. After that we went back to Odori park to have a look around after it had closed down, which was fun, but at that point we were all cold and tired and ready to call it a day. We got lost on our way back again, which likely has something to do with them putting me in charge of finding our way back. It wasn’t all bad though. On the way back we ran across a capsule hotel, which is where I ended up spending the night.
Capsule hotels are really awesome. The night before I stayed in a reasonably fancy hotel, and I can honestly say that I was no more comfortable there than I was at the capsule hotel. The hotel is men only, which I assume is due to the fact that there’s not much in the way of keeping people separate. The space was a lot more comfortable than I had imagined it would be though, it was padded, had a pillow and blanket, and a mini-TV and radio attached to the ceiling. It was about three feet wide by three feet tall and almost exactly six feet deep. The hall my capsule was in stacked them two high and maybe ten or fifteen deep. There was a shade at the entrance to the capsule, but it was little more than a screen, you could still hear other people in their own capsules. Fortunately, everyone was fairly polite, and I had no trouble falling asleep. Overall, I’d say staying at the capsule inn was one of the more pleasant travel related experiences I’ve had, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
The next day was Sunday, and we only had half a day so we went to the Sapporo beer museum, which was about as interesting as it sounds. It wasn’t great, but some of the stuff was pretty interesting. They had a display of all the cans and bottles that they have used since the company started. It was pretty cool, but I got the impression that it was really just a place designed to get people to spend money on beer, snacks, and trinkets, which I did. Hokkaido is famous also for cantaloupe and chocolate covered potato chips, so I spent $30 on chips and melon flavored candies and called it a day.
The flight back was uneventful, I spent it doing homework, and after that the trip was pretty much over. So that was how I spent my trip to Hokkaido. I had a really good time, even if the weather was not as nice as it could have been. In addition to the awesome snow festival stuff, I learned something about myself. I’ve realized that despite whatever attractions the place I’m travelling to has the thing that is going to interest me most is the food. This isn’t a bad thing really, I think it just means that I make for a slightly obnoxious travel companion.