In case you hadn’t picked up on the dwindling frequency of our blog updates, we completely forgot to mention our recent trip down to Kyoto, Osaka & Tokyo AS WELL AS our recent Vietnam trip!!
Kevin’s parents, Barb & Harry came to visit us in Takikawa for a few days. We showed them around some of the major attractions of the area, and introduced them to our students, our guarantors and our friends. After Takikawa, we all headed down to Kyoto & Osaka for a few days, exploring the mid-section of Japan- the old culture and tradition of Kyoto and the lights and sounds of Osaka. We took the shinkansen to Tokyo and spent a day there before we all jumped on a plane to Ho Chih Minh City, Vietnam.
We spent a week in Vietnam, exploring Ho Chih Minh, Hue and Hoi an and battling the heat and the sun.
In total, we were travelling for 2 weeks: a week in Japan and a week in Vietnam. A much needed end-of-April break.
After waking up in a strange McDonalds in Ueno and finding it much busier than when we had decided to nap quietly in the corner, we headed to Asakusa to drop our bags off at the hotel. Cathy had found us a series of great hotels over the next 5 nights in all the best spots in the City. It was a decision, in part, due to the fact that most hotels were almost fully booked, and we could only find one availability here and there, but it also meant we got to see many different parts of the city and stay in a handful of funky 2-foot by 3-foot hotel rooms. Waking up and dropping off our bags at the next hotel before check-in was a common occurance across our stay in Tokyo.
Over the course of our 5 days in Tokyo, we stayed for one night in Asakusa, two nights in Nishi-Azabu, one night in Shinjuku and one night in Nihonbashi. We pushed & shoved through Harajuku and Shibuya, rode Japan’s biggest ferris wheel in Odaiba, ate and drank in Roppongi and strolled through Ueno & Yoyogi parks. All without a flake of snow!
By great coincidence ( & by relentless encouragement) many of our friends from around Takikawa ended up in Tokyo over new years as well. We each had our various places to go and friends to see, but on a few occaisions we all got together at an Izakaya for food, drinks and and some “Hey, we’re in Tokyo!”
On new years eve, after a big dinner gathering in Shinjuku, we found ourselves at Zojoji temple, at the foot of the Tokyo Tower. We were accompanied by our new photographer-friend Michael, who we had met for the first time earlier that day. We were introduced to Michael, a former Takikawa resident turned tokyoite, over flickr and the three of us had a great time in Tokyo walking around and taking pictures (even though he’s a Nikon guy…)
We were joined by thousands of people in the temple’s immense courtyard- and at the stroke of midnight, 3,000 “eco-friendly” balloons were launched into the air & the temple’s joya-no kane (new years bell) rang out as the Tokyo Tower lit up with its spectacular new blue colour for 2008. Attached to each balloon was a special new years wish, or prayer. It was a spectacular sight to behold, and in one single event justified our epic 48 hour, 16 transfer train ride down to Tokyo. Following that, we took the subway back to Shinjuku and drank in the new year until the wee hours of the morning.
The first of January, accompanied again by Michael, we visited Kanda Myojin, a modest shrine near Akihabara. Far from the tourists and foreigners, we got a very fascinating, real glimpse into the very old Shinto tradition of visiting the shrine on the first day of the new year, called Saitansai. We ate new years aman, and drank sweet sake, before heading into the heart of Akihabara, the electronics center of Tokyo to play with camera equipment like little kids on Christmas.
That night, we had a farewell Tokyo dinner with our foreigner-friends and woke up the next morning to catch our 9:00am Shinkansen back home. We laughed at our 2 day trip down to Tokyo, as we sped at 284km/h back towards Hokkaido. Within 11 hours, we were back at home to confirm that yes- our fish were still alive and yes… it’s still snowing in Takikawa, just as we remembered.
Tokyo was our first big trip within Japan, and a huge success by any account. It was nice to escape the snow for a week, though Tokyo wasn’t exactly t-shirt weather. We made good friends, took over 3,000 pictures beetween the two of us and ate some delicious monja. Our next trip will be to Taiwan, for Chinese New Year, and then to Kyoto for cherry blossoms in March.
In the mean time, we’ll enjoy the Hokkaido winter from our humble home in Takikawa.
Cathy and I had been tossing around the idea of where to go for Christmas / New Years for a few weeks. We had considered going down to the tropical southern part of Japan, Okinawa, or maybe driving around Hokkaido, soaking in the wintery goodness. We ended up deciding on something very much in the middle (both on the map and the thermometer), Tokyo! Seeing how we live in Japan, it’s almost necessary to visit Tokyo.
Looking into our travel options, we found a hidden jewel of the Japanese rail company: the Seishun Juhachi Kippu, or youth 18 ticket. (in Japanese, 青春18) The Seishun Juhachi Kippu allows for 5 days of unlimited rail travel in Japan with a slight (maybe major) catch - only local trains. Each day runs from 00:00 to 23:59, and costs ¥2,300 - or just under $20 CAN. As an added bonus, we can both share the same ticket by stamping twice per day.
We spent a few days simultaneously laptop’ing. Cathy was booking hotels in all the best spots in Tokyo (not an easy task as they were nearly all fully booked, and most Japanese online booking systems don’t offer an immediate response on whether or not you’ve managed to book the room.) Kevin was furiously plugging-in individual train schedules into an online trip calculator to find out how on earth we would snake our way down Japan using only local trains. (After all, Hokkaido is a separate island up north.) After a few days of grunting and complaining, we succeded on both fronts and decided on a change of pace for Christmas eve, put our computers away and went outside.
We stayed home for Christmas and had a nice relaxing morning eating breakfast, drinking coffee, listening to christmas carols and opening presents. We had video chats with both our families thanks to iChat / Skype and then we ventured outside to start preparing for our trip to Tokyo. We were to leave the following morning on the first train out of Takikawa, the 6:35 local train to Sapporo.
The next morning, we enjoyed a sobering -15°C walk to the train station at 5:50 in the morning, got our first 2 ticket stamps and boarded the 6:35 local train to Sapporo through Iwamizawa, all before the sun came up.Our (ridiculous) schedule looked like this:
In reality we had a few hiccups (actually, one big one) on our connection from Goryokaku to Kikonai and blew our schedule. We made it to Kikonai that night and decided to find a hotel. (Our original plan was to hack it in the train station in Kanita, but our missed connection made us strung out and cold.) We somehow communicated to the station manager that we needed a hotel that night. He took it upon himself to call around and he found us a cheap hotel above a small soba shop and convinced the owner to drive to the station in his pyjamas and come pick us up!
The next day, we finally made it off of Hokkaido and with a bit of trickery managed to get ourselves back on schedule. The following night we slept on a train called the Moonlight Echigo that runs overnight from 11:35 to 04:28 that provided us a crappy, uncomfortable sleep.
We pulled in to tokyo on Friday morning on the 5:50 to Ueno station and found ourselves crammed inside a stuffy train in the middle of the busiest rush hour we’d ever seen.We looked at each other and said: “Hey- We’re in Tokyo… cool.”, found a McDonalds, curled up in the corner booth and napped.
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