Japanese Kit Kats!

While we wait for the plane, I thought I'd show you the different flavored Kit Kats we found! They weren't as wide-spread as we had been led to believe, but we got strawberry, blueberry cheesecake, and green tea Kit Kats to share with all of you.

Pictures

Maura has done a great job summarizing our trip to Japan in the last few blog posts.  She wrote most of it on her tablet on the 2.5 hour train ride from Kyoto to Tokyo.  I was essentially passed out that whole trip, which is why there were no pictures.  Actually, there wouldn't have been any anyways, because I need my laptop to upload the pictures from my camera.  Sorry about the pictureless posts.  I'll probably do a few mega-photo albums on here for the whole Japan trip sometime in the next few days.

Narita Airport

Tom and I are in Tokyo's Narita Airport getting ready to board our flight home. Flight #8 of 8 this summer. We are leaving Japan Wednesday 11:20 am Japan time, flying for 14 (!) hours direct to Boston and landing Wednesday at 11:05 am Boston time. Time travel is real! Not only will we get to live this day twice, but our flight was overbooked, so Japan Air moved us up to Business class free of charge. For a 14 hour flight at the end of this summer of flying, I REALLY appreciate the upgrade! See you all soon!

Kyoto in a day

First of all, let's say that our plan to do Kyoto in a single day was ambitious. Really, really ambitious. Probably stupidly ambitious, but we figured that we probably won't be back to this side of the world and it has been Tom's life long dream to visit Kyoto, the former capital of Japan, so we were going to make this work as best we could.

Tricky part #1: Kyoto is not near Tokyo. In fact, it is an eight hour drive west. But the world famous bullet train can make the trip in 2.5 hours, so we woke up at 4:30 a.m. and were on the train by 6:30. The bullet trains are really nice, though insanely expensive. The MBTA could learn a thing of two with regards to well run, reliable service, but if it it included such a dramatic increase in fare prices, I'd have to think a bit about that. Anyway, we arrived at Kyoto Station at 9:00, which let to tricky part #2.

Tricky part #2: Kyoto has a TERRIBLE public transit system. It is the third largest city in Japan and it pretty much just has some busses. Not even a lot of busses, just some busses. (Ok, yes there are technically a few subway lines, but they are privately owned and you have to buy separate tickets for them, so most people don't even bother.) Plus it is apparently school vacation week in Japan right now, so everyone and their elementary schooler was trying to use said busses to explore Kyoto. We stood in line for an hour before the bus we wanted even showed up and then it took another hour to actually go the tree miles to our first stop. Suffice it to say, I (Maura) was not thrilled with our first experiences of Kyoto.

Thankfully, it got a lot better from there. Our fist stop was the Golden Pavilion which is a Buddhist temple on a pond. The second and third stories are completely covered in golf leaf. It's pretty amazing to see.

Then we took another bus to the Silver Pavilion on the other side of the city. It was supposed to be covered in silver back in the day, but somehow that never happened. They still call it the Silver Pavilion, though. While it wasn't awesomely silver, it was very pretty and had some beautiful grounds we toured.

Then we followed the Philosopher's Path to the next big temple, Eikan-do. This active monastery was so peaceful. We walked through the buildings and grounds and saw several old, beautiful paintings on the walls and temples within the monastery. The architecture itself was beautiful and the grounds included a two story pagoda with an amazing view of the city.

After that, we took a cab to our final temple for the day, Kiyomizu. Our cab driver said something about congestion and taking us around and them proceeded to drop us off at an empty little road on a mountain and told us to walk 5 minutes down the path. I'm not going to lie, it seemed pretty sketchy and we weren't sure he had even brought us to the right place, but we went with it and it turns out he was a very clever guy. We entered at the top of the shrine and while everyone else had to walk up 10 flights of stairs in the blistering heat to get to where we were, we only had to walk down them. Kiyomizu had several amazing views of the surrounding mountains and the city below. It was also full of people in Kimonos. The Kusanagis had told us the day before that most people in Tokyo don't really wear them, and if they do, it must be a very special occasion. In fact, when we saw some people in kimonos, it turned out they were just tourists! Kyoto seems to be a different story, though. There were so many people, male and female, all ages, even entire families, wearing them. Kyoto seems to really value the old ways and Tom heard that certain places actually give discounts to people in kimonos as a way to encourage the tradition.     

Afterwards, we went to dinner in Gion, an older section of the city. Tom had a restaurant picked out but it wasn't exactly where we thought it would be, so we eventually went into a McDonalds to ask directions. Remember a few posts ago, when we talked about how helpful the people were in Tokyo? Well, no sooner had we asked for directions, then we had most of the staff trying to help us find it on a map and looking it up on their smart phones. After a few minutes, they handed the map back to us and said to go back out to the sidewalk. We thought they just weren't able to help us, but three of them led the way and them fanned out searching for it! The found it just around the corner. Tom thought we should call this post "McDonalds helped us have a wonderful dinner in Kyoto."

We had dinner at a really nice sushi place called Chojiro where you placed your order on an ipad. They we walked through Pontocho, a very old street with lots of shops and saw a real Maiko, a Geisha's apprentice! Maiko means "dance child" and they are paid half the wages of a full Geisha. They are pretty rare now and we were very lucky to see one! 

Overall, Kyoto had the feel of an old world city. We hopped on the bullet train back to Tokyo and we in our hotel before midnight. It was an exciting last day in Japan.

Tokyo day 2: Exploring with the Kusanagis

On Monday, Tom woke up early and went to a famous fish market in Tokyo. There, people can watch restaurant owners bid on the fish that the fishing boats brought in fresh that morning; sometimes the sea creatures are even still breathing! Unfortunately, Tom wasn't there at 4:30 when that happens so he milled around the area and saw the last few hours of the fish market business.

Then we met up with the Kusanagi family. For those of you that don't know, I taught two of the Kusanagi children, Yutaka and Yurika, when I worked at BU. Their parents, Aki and Maki, lived in the Boston area for 9 years while Aki was at MIT, and returned to Japan three years ago. It was so nice to see them and Kyoka, who was born when I was teaching Yutaka. Yutaka is 10 now, Yurika (which is Japanese for Lily, not what Archimedes shouted in a bath tub) is 8, and Kyoka is 6. They looked so big, but still very much like the Kusanagi children I remember. We reminisced about Yutaka's favorite game when he was three - Kompai! - and how Yurika took almost a whole year before she was comfortable using English, and then suddenly started speaking it in complete sentences. They even remembered some of the songs we used to sing in preschool! When they returned to Japan, the Kusanagis had lived outside of Kyoto until a few months ago, when they moved to the Tokyo area. The children hadn't been to too many places in Tokyo yet, so we were all tourists this day! Aki set up an itinerary for us to visit Asakusa, take a river cruise, and go to the Hamarikyu Gardens.

We all got on the train and went to Asakusa. It is an older section of Tokyo with the Sensoji Shrine, a beautiful Shinto temple said to have been built around 600 a.d. Shinto is the Japanese national religion and it's a little hard to understand or explain. It was originally a form of ancestor worship, but as Aki said, it has incorporated a lot of Bhuddist traditions into it. Basically it had no god, no covenant the people follow, and no universally accepted practices. At the shrine, the children each received a fortune ( like with a fortune cookie, but no cookie), and we all did some souvenir shopping in the stalls around the shrine. Next, we had an authentic Japanese lunch of udon and soba noodles, which we slurped as loud as we could, as is the Japanese custom.

Then we hopped on the river cruise and and found out that Tokyo's river has some unusual bridges. Every single one was a different style, and we passed under at least thirteen! The river cruise ended at the Hamarikyu Garden, which was really lovely. It had originally been built for Ieyasu Tokugawa (I think) as a place to go duck hunting with horses and trained hawks (you don't want the ducks to have an unfair advantage, you know). There were several nice ponds in the garden and even a big field of flowers. I'm not sure what kind they were. Mom, maybe you can identify them?

Then we all headed to Tokyo station where we said goodbye. It was so nice to see the Kusanagis again and see the children getting so big! Then Tom and I headed for a place called Shabuya (Go ahead, say it out loud and with emphasis! It's pretty fun). Shabuya Crossing is a famous intersection in Tokyo where several major roads come together and it's fun to people watch as the cars stop and tons of people pour into the crosswalks. When we went it was pouring, so we got to see it from the second floor of a Starbucks, and it looked really pretty with all of the umbrellas. Then we went to Shinjuku, where the Tokyo Municipal Government building has an observation deck on the 45th floor. It was still raining a little so the pictures didn't come out well, but it was really nice to see Tokyo lit up at night. Then we headed off to bed, so we could get up at 4:30 a.m. for our day trip to Kyoto! (The exclamation point is for Kyoto, not 4:30 a.m., but Tom has to get back to his regular school year sleep schedule somehow, so oh well.)

Konichiwa! Japan Day 1 (Pictures to come)

Our first day in Tokyo had a jam-packed itinerary. First, we headed over to the Edo-Tokyo Museum. This was a very cool museum all about the history of Tokyo shown through life size replicas of houses, art from different periods, and artifacts. It had some interested wording about how World War II began and several interesting artifacts and videos on how people from Tokyo experienced the war.

Then we went to the Nezu museum. It is a small art museum that had a special exhibit on Buddhist mandalas which were beautiful, but the highlight of the museum is it's garden. It has a big Japanese garden full of wandering paths, Buddhist statues, tea houses, and koi ponds.

As we left the Nezu museum, it was starting to rain a bit, which was too bad because out next two stops were gardens. So, we bought an umbrella in a convenience store (they are just as big here as 7-11 is in Taiwan, but they have several different companies).  We took the metro to the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden. The metro system here is really great. It's a little overwhelming at first, because there are so many lines and they are run by several different companies, but the trains are fast, clean, timely, reliable, and easy to follow once you get used to the map.

The Shinjuku Gyoen garden was really beautiful. It rained for the first 30 minutes that we were there, but we still loved it. It was divided into three large sections: a traditional Japanese garden (with a mother and child forest and beautiful ponds with Japanese bridges), an English Landscape garden (basically a big huge open grassy area), and a French garden (complete with a rose garden and two avenues of sycamore trees which felt just like Paris.)

Then we headed over to the Meiji Shrine and Yoyogi Park. The Meiji shrine is dedicated to the Emperor and Empress who died in 1912 and 1914. They were so beloved by the people of Japan, that the Japanese decided to construct a forest and shrine to their honor. Over 100,000 trees were donated from across Japan and people volunteered to plant them and create a man-made huge forest in the middle of the city. This isn't like an ordinary city park with some large grassy areas and clearly visible skyscrapers around it; all you can see any way you look is trees 100 ft tall.

Then we went to Yoyogi Park where some interesting characters can be found (we saw a group of Japanese people in leather jackets and pompadours rocking out to some Elvis). Then we got back on the train and went to Roppongi for dinner of ramen, pan-fried dumplings and rice before heading back to the hotel. Also, Tom got us a really nice hotel, so good job Tom! 

Unexpectedly interesting lesson from our trip: The Japanese people are super nice and helpful! We often stopped to look at our map and on two separate occasions, people came up to us and asked in very good English if we needed any help. Even though we weren't really lost, they showed us where we needed to go on the map or walked with us to make sure we got there.

Also, we are currently on the hunt for the many different flavored Kit Kats that are rumored to be popular in Japan, but so far ave only found green tea flavored ones. The search continues.

A Quick One While She's Away

One more post before bed.  The very last picture that we took in Taiwan is worth sharing.  Early on in our trip; we were told that you know you've mastered chopsticks when you can eat rice one grain at a time.  Please feel free to congratulate Master Maura in the comments section.

Live From Tokyo

Hi everyone,

This is just a quick check-in to say that we have left Taiwan for good.  We landed safely in Tokyo, where we will be for the next four nights, and one of the three full days will be spent in Kyoto.  This is the vacation part of our summer, since we were working for nearly the whole time we were in Taiwan, as awesome of an experience as it was, of course.  Also, the exhaustion that comes with corralling kindergarteners (Maura wouldn't like that job description, but I adore alliteration) left us completely incapable of sending all of the Taiwan posts that we wanted to write, so expect more Taiwan posts for the next few days (who am I kidding...weeks or months is more accurate) mixed in with the Japan ones.  That's all for now since we are going to jam-pack the next three days full of as much stuff as possible (don't worry all you smell-the-roses people out there - most of the places we're jam-packing in are temples and gardens where we will take our time to enjoy everything).

Sayonara,
Tom

Potty Talk

So we've been blogging for a couple of months now, and some of you have been very kind and have been reading our ramblings from across the world.  I imagine, however, that one thought has been running rampant through your minds for weeks now: what are the bathrooms like?  Calm down for a minute, and I'll tell you all about them.  First of all, our bathroom here is very much like a bathroom you'd find in an apartment at home; shower with a tub, sink with a mirror, toilet you can sit on, and not much more.  Many of the public bathrooms, however, have only one of those things, and it's not the toilet (or the shower, but you already knew that).  At least, not like Western toilets.  You see, these toilets are built into the ground, the idea being that you squat over it and do your business without ever actually touching the bowl.  As weird and gross as it sounds, I've actually read about health benefits to that style of toilet, but we don't need to talk about the efficacy of different methods of waste disposal, do we?  Good.  Here's a picture of a typical bathroom.

Okay, I lied.  This is actually a toilet in one of the nicer restaurants we've been in, so it's probably nicer than might be typical.

Now, you're probably thinking, "Well, that's all well and good, but what do you do with the toilet paper?"  I'm glad that you asked, because that is the most unfortunate thing about using the toilet in Taiwan.  Their plumbing is typically not of the highest quality, and most toilets (really all of the ones we've seen outside of the airport) can't flush toilet paper.  That waste basket that is suspiciously close to the toilet is actually where you put the used toilet paper.  Like I said, it's quite unfortunate.  It's one of the very few things that I never quite got used to doing.  Okay, that's another lie; I totally got used to it, but I kind of wish I hadn't.  I have to remember to completely remove the waste basket from our bathrooms at home to avoid any relapses.

Finally, I'll address the burning question that our male readers have been dying to ask for the totally excessive amount of time that it's taken to read this disgusting post: "Do they have any helpful reminders posted behind the urinals so that I don't embarrass myself, and are they translated to English so that I can benefit from them?"  I'm happy to report that the answer is a resounding, "YES!"  I'll leave you with three of the most helpful urinals that I've encountered in Taiwan.

We have not had betel nuts on this trip, but we've seen many betel nut stands on the sides of roads.  They are often marked by seizure-inducing, multicolored lights and life size pictures of attractive women, and the similarly attractive women that sell them always can be seen sitting in the big window in front of each hut.  From the various descriptions people have given us of what they do, I would guess that they are somewhere between coffee and cocaine.

I found this particularly helpful, as I have a tendency to get complacent with repetitive activities.

If you can't read this one, it says, "Would you stand closer.  Please."
Very direct, although it does force the user to ultimately disobey its simple order, lest they wind up inside the urinal, at which point they have probably caused the very problem the warning was meant to avoid.  Still, I appreciated the politeness.

Sun Moon Lake Continued

So by the end of our late-night tea-and-cards foray, the Sun Moon Lake trip had grown to include everyone that was at tea, plus Jenny, one of Eric's friends, and his 4 year old son.  Eric and his friend drove us to Sun Moon Lake, which took a little under two hours.  We got some great initial views of the lake from the road, but then we had a lot of trouble finding a parking spot before being stopped by a woman that was following us through the parking lot on her moped.  She told us that we could park in a nearby lot if we bought tickets to tour the lake on her company's boats.  Mind you, this was all in Chinese, but we got the gist of it between context and Fran's translating.  The boat tickets were sort of a hop-on-hop-off deal with three stops, one being the start and end of the trip.  The lake itself was beautiful.  It was pretty clear at first, and we could just make out distant mountains past the ones that immediately surround the lake.  As the day went on, those mountains disappeared into the clouds, eventually followed by even the nearby mountains before we left.  The water was greenish-blue, and there were lots of boats, mostly medium sized ferries, moving in every direction on it.  See for yourself:

Those characters represent Sun Moon Lake.  The Chinese characters, not the people characters.  Those are Maura and Tom.

Those distant mountains looked really big, and then they were gone for the rest of the day.

Having never been to Hawaii, I've decided that this was pretty much the same exact experience.  The only way to convince me otherwise is to buy us plane tickets.  I dare you.

From left: Fran, Joy, Maura, and Jenny.

This town was our next stop.

The mountains really were pretty majestic.  You can see the town in the bottom right corner.

At the second stop, we wandered through a few shops and ate dinner at a nice little restaurant.  We had noodles or rice, which were good, and a few shared side dishes.  One of those was a wild boar dish, and it was definitely one of my favorite foods that I've tried in Taiwan.  Really delicious.  Here's a few pictures from town:

Don't let your eyes deceive you: I'm reasonably sure that this woman was not the devil.  She actually seemed quite nice, no matter what those crispy birds said.

I almost forgot to take a picture of the boar.  This was all that was left when I remembered, mainly because I had eaten most of it.

This was a shop specializing in nougat, which is a pretty big product over here.  They all seemed to have nuts in them, so I sat this one out, but Maura tried some.  She said it was fine, but not something that she would eat too often.

Our last stop had several hiking paths, some of which led to a temple.  Stereotype alert: Taiwanese people generally don't seem to like walking long distances in the heat.  They tend to find it fairly shocking that Maura and I have occasionally walked to places over a mile away instead of taking a cab or stealing a car (maybe not stealing).  They didn't want to hike, but we still climbed up the steps to a smaller temple with some great views.  Also, the crowds were ridiculous, mainly with tourist groups from mainland China.  Here are those pictures:

The entrance to the area from the pier.

One of the better living statues that we've seen.

Sun Moon Lake behind us.

There was a long line of people waiting to take their picture next to that rock behind us.  Tour groups are the worst.

That's Joy and Eric's son playing in a ... thing that was there.

Like I said, there were BIG crowds at this particular place.

From there, we took the boat back to the starting pier, hung out for a bit, and then headed back to Taichung.  Here's one last picture of Sun Moon Lake:

Compare this to the first photos and you can see how much the clouds had crept in while we were there.

I slept off and on for the whole ride home, because I am completely incapable of staying awake here if I'm not moving or talking to someone.  That's all for our last weekend in Taichung.  Thanks for reading!

Science, Parks, & Sun Moon Lake

So we had a very, very busy last weekend in Taiwan.  The last weekend had been left open from the start (the only weekend for which we didn't have plans arranged by the school), so we decided to use it to enjoy a few things that we hadn't gotten to do yet.  After tossing around a few places that I'm sure would have been amazing but also would have been very hard to get to and cost a small fortune, the answer was practically decided for us.  The family that was going to take us to Sun Moon Lake, a very mountain lake and resort area, had to cancel last weekend, so we decided to go there for a day.  When we told Jenny, another teacher, about our plan, she decided to come, too.  Then, some other conversations happened that we didn't exactly know about.  Anyways, long story short, we ended up taking two cars, eight adults, and one 4 year old.  I'm getting ahead of myself, though.  The trip to Sun Moon Lake was on Sunday.  Since that had become more of a group trip, Maura and I decided to spend Saturday alone in Taichung.  We went to the National Science Museum several weeks ago, and were a bit underwhelmed with what we saw.  It was more for kids, and there was very little English.  We also didn't leave ourselves enough time for the exhibit halls, however, which was a separate admission.  We decided to go to those exhibit halls on Friday, followed by a bus ride to Taichung Park in the evening.  The exhibit halls were pretty great, especially the large section of dinosaur fossils/animatronic dinosaur robots.  Don't take my word for it; here are some pictures:

This was in the entrance to the museum.

There were three sauropod (I think) skeletons in a circular courtyard in the middle of the museum.

See?

This is a giant squid.  Maura was not impressed.

This was from a section on Chinese innovation.  This device is actually an ancient seismograph.  The information was all in Chinese, but the best we could understand is that those dragons all have little marbles in their mouths, and movement in the Earth causes them to fall into the frogs below, indicating the direction of the movement.  We could be way off on that.

There was a section on Chinese medicine, including this outdoor herb garden.

I'm pretty sure that this T-Rex was sneezing on the velociraptor in front of it.

Woops.  I meant that the T-Rex was awesomely attacking the velociraptor...not sneezing.  Sorry, Mr. T-Rex.

This museum appears to have kept up with the times well.

This canoe is from an exhibit on the aboriginal people of Taiwan.

Maura fearlessly inserted herself into the middle of a fearsome fossil fight for a fantastic photo op.

One of the special exhibits at the museum contained a bunch of oversized duplicates of famous artworks and let you pose as part of them.  I don't know why it was in the museum of science, but we had some fun with it.

Maura invented sunglasses.

I'm hoping a talent agent sees this photo and realizes my comedic potential.

After the museum, we went to a restaurant called Ponderosa, and we ate at their buffet.  It's apparently an American chain steakhouse, but I had never heard of it before coming here.  The food was definitely not the highest quality, but they had fruits, vegetables and iced tea, so we filled up on those.  When we finished, we got on the bus headed to Taichung Park.  It was pretty dark by the time we got there, and my camera battery was just about dead.  The park was really nice, consisting of a small pond, several bridges, and the Lake Heart Pavilion, which Taichung has adopted as it's city logo (weird wording for that?).  There was also a hill in back with a few buildings on it, and a HUGE statue of three goats - owing to the total randomness and crazy size of said statue, along with the fact that my camera died as I tried to take a picture of it, I'm not ruling out that Maura and I shared a hallucination, possibly as a result of the "popcorn chicken" at Ponderosa.  Here are the pictures that I was able to take at the park:

There were other pictures of Maura on this bridge, but every darn one of them came out blurry.  This one is much darker than them, but at least you can see Maura in it.

This was taken from the Lake Heart Pavilion, which is built in the middle of the pond.

Also from the park.

We got on the bus and headed back to the school, finishing our very full day at 8:30.  We were getting up early for Sun Moon Lake in the morning, so we figured that going to bed early was a pretty good idea.  Just as we got back to the school, though, the phone that the school gave me for emergencies rang.  It was a teacher named Emmett, asking me if we wanted to play (play is a weirdly translated word; people also asked us what we played in Hong Kong).  We figured, "Why not?", and got ready to go out to who knows where.  I was ready for a basketball game or video games, but it turns out that the father of one of the kids at school was around and wanted to hang out, so we went and did that at a tea restaurant with him, Emmett, Joy, and another teacher named Fran.  We had tea, appetizers, and played some card games.  Maura even hurt her finger stabbing the father while playing a game that resembled Slap Jack.  We had fun, although we stayed out really late and didn't get to bed (we still hadn't showered from our day of walking a few miles in 95 degree humidity) until 2:00 am.  That's it for Saturday, and I'll continue Sunday and Sun Moon Lake in a second post.

Oops, I almost forgot...before the tea restaurant, we went to a nice, new park called the Maple Garden.  Here are a couple of pictures from the Maple Garden.

The park was this winding walkway around a man-made pond at the bottom of a dug-out valley in the middle of the city.

This is in a very nice part of the city, so the buildings surrounding the park are all new, colorful, and clean-looking.

There was really no wind to speak of, which was unfortunate with the heat, but made for some nice reflective pictures.

This came out blurry, but from left to right: Me, Maura, Joy, Fran, Eric (the father), and Emmett.