Lisa Learns

Alright!

I've finally figured out that I can't use the bloggerbot feature of Picasa Hello with blogger in beta, but I can still use Picasa to load photos to my blog.

And there was great rejoicing. "Hooray".

I have also tried out adding labels to my posts. Aren't you excited for me? (rhetorical question).

I do appologize for how long it's taken me to post my travel journal. Life keeps interfering, you see. But I promise I will not rest until I have told you the whole story.

I plan to eventually creat an album of our 600 or so best Japan photos to share with you as well.

Stay cool.

Or warm, depending on your geographical location.

I love technology

I am having trouble up loading photos to my blog since I switched over to the new blogger beta version. It seems I'm not the only one having this difficulty.

You'll just have to make due with boring text for now. I promise that photos will come soon.

Hitting the pavement without our trusty guide

October 23

We tried to book a room in Beppu (a balmy resort town of unique hot springs, pachinko parlors and sex museums).

The telephone makes the already daunting task of communicating with a japanese speaker completely impossible. Without the back-up of hand signals I was quickly discouraged. I could use the phrase book to ask questions, but then couldn't understand the answers given.

The woman on the other end hung up on me.

Breakfast with Champions

The manager of our hotel took us out to breakfast at a local cafe. He only knew a handful of english words, but was determined to communicate with us. We were able4to gather that he's 60 years old, and that when he was 17 he competed in Judo for the Tokyo Olympics. He said "World Champion" a lot and laughed. He showed us his cauliflowered ears proudly. Years of grappling made them unrecognizable. He told us that his son is a boxer in Las Vegas (later, his wife proudly showed us a magazine picture of him, she's so cute when she beams like that!).

As we hit more language barriers he enlisted the help of two cram school students sitting a few tables away. They helped him to ask Matt about his job and schooling. They discussed science and technology. The boys giggled and smoked constantly.

I let them talk and concentrated on the breakfast that has been brought to me: pizza toast, weiners, a salad of iceburg lettuce and wakame (seaweed) with mayonaise dressing. It's not my usual morning fare, but it's tasty. Familiar and foreign all at once.

  Museums and the like are normally closed on Mondays, so we just went to the castle park and an electronics store with Dave. A fun, mellow day, but still too much walking. I felt like if I looked down at my feet I'd see that they had worn away to stubs.

Dave had to work in the evening, so we were on our own for supper. We were totally intimidated by the idea of walking into a new restaurant by ourselves so we chickened out and went back to the sushi chain restaurant from the night before. Sushi is so much better here than back home!

We tried some new things, most of which we could not identify (but we did not try the things that looked like aliens). I managed to order a pair of beers. The waitress giggled. How can my accent make the word beeru sound funny?

I used a hand signal I had found in a book to order the check. More giggles. I found out later that it actually means "no, stop it!".

Culture shock was starting to settle in.

Damn it!

I had naively thought that being ready for it this time would prevent it. Not so.

The sound of japanese words started to grate on me. I couldn't stand to have the TV on in our room that night. It felt like such a burden to even be there, surrounded by people I couldn't talk to. I started to panic.

this is not your grandmother's pinball parlour

(I'm tired of writing everything in the present tense. It's time for plain old past tense)

Oct. 22 cont.

At night we went to some game centres. Holy sensory overload.

We found a game we could all play together: the object was to throw plastic balls at moving targets on a screen. I don't know how it could keep track of who threw what. It was very manic and did a good job of getting our heart rates up.

We watched people play violent first-person shooters, an ultra-mega version of dance-dance-revolution, and a super-intricate network strategy game with some kind of trading cards. Dave and James duelled on Japanese drums to match a rhythm, and we watched a guy who was the Ingwe Malmsteen of Guitar Hero. There were a lot more adults in here than in 'arcades' back home.

It was comforting that bowling was exactly the same in Japan.

Well, almost the same.















We plugged some change into a high-tech photo booth for a little crazy fun. After the shots were taken, we got to use a touch screen to add backgrounds, graffiti and cartoon piles of poo on each other's photos. Good times.

I found Pachinko unsettling. It was everywhere in Japan. Around every corner I saw huge pachinko parlors, clusters of machines in office lobbies, posters plastered in windows. The noise and flashing lights of the regular game centres was nothing compared to what leaked out the door of the pachinko parlors. It's also still ok to smoke in many public places in Japan. I saw row after row of young japanese men and women sitting glassy eyed and slack jawed with cigarettes dangling from their lips, feeding tokens or metal bb's into the machines in a steady blur. How much cash did they blow in a night? Why weren't they having seizures? It seemed like this was considered a normal way to spend an evening out.

We used up our handful of tokens and called it a night. In contrast, the cool night air and muted rush of traffic seemed tranquil.

Daylight

October 22

My first bath in a japanese tub.

The bathroom is closet-sized. The whole thing is one big molded plastic piece with a drain in the centre of the floor. You're supposed to stand in the middle to scrub down and hose off before you get into the cute little square tub to soak. It's very efficient.

After a cup of green tea and some Japanese TV, we scamper off to church with Dave. The song lyrics are good practice for reading hiragana. These very warm and friendly people fed us a lunch of beef donburi, with persimmons and oranges for dessert. This ends up being the only home cooked meal we get in Japan. I'd really like see more of what people eat at home compared to restaurants.

  After lunch Dave takes us to a fishing village on the outskirts of Fukuyama called Toma No Ura. There's a ferry that goes out to a little island where you can camp or stay at a hotel. It's very pretty, and populated by Tanuki (raccoon-dogs).
  
In Japanese folklore, these little creatures are powerful shapeshifters and tricksters. All over Japan we see ceramic tanuki at the entrances of shops, like the beckoning cats, but a main feature of tanuki statues is an enormous scrotum reaching to the ground. Apparently, it signifies good luck. Studio Ghibli produced an anime about tanuki called "Pom Poko", which I haven't seen yet, but now I understand why the cartoon characters can use their scrotums to parachute.

Back on the mainland we see fisherwomen with wind-burnt cheeks cooking something that smells delicious. I hesitate to ask for a photo and the opportunity is lost. At the local store you can buy bags of dried sea slime for 500 yen. I tell Matt no. James gets a salt-flavoured ice cream cone. It just tastes like vanilla to me.

This is not about Japan

On Wednesday I attented a seminar on Aboriginal Awareness. I found it really worthwhile. I often feel aprehension and discomfort when interacting with aboriginal people because

a) I'm afraid they hate me because I'm white and will respond with hostility, and

b) I am shamefully ignorant about their modern culture.

This seminar gave me a quick, easy to understand tour of the political history of Canada's aboriginal people and changes that are taking place today. It also did a really good job of putting into words why our aboriginal people are facing so many struggles today and explained all the terms and categories for them that most of us have been totally misusing. The best part was a nice, thick binder to take away so that if I forget this stuff, or have trouble explaining it to someone else, I can go back to the book. I now feel a bit better equipped to relate to my aboriginal clients and neighbours.

Robert Laboucane, president of Ripple Effects Ltd., was the speaker for the seminar. He was passionate, frank and funny. I don't know if everything he said about the government was accurate, but now I feel I have a good starting point to look things up for myself and verify what he told us. One message he really tries to drive home is that knowledge is power, and he is working hard to bring people in this country together with that power.

I was impressed. I encourage my friends who run rescue missions to bring him in to speak to the staff.

I wanna rock and roll all night...

October 21 cont.

After Dave rescues us, he takes us to meet his friends James and Naoko. James is a missionary from South Africa. They both go to the same church as Dave. They take us to experience authentic karaoke for the first time. We enter a tall, skinny building with a sign that says "Joy" on the front. At the desk we are given a box with some kind of controller, 2 microphones and some song lists. We go up a couple of floors and down the hall to a small rooms with bench seats, a table and a TV monitor. There's also a telephone on the wall, which Naoko uses to order beer. Let the fun begin!

It's so much easier to belt out your lungs into a microphone in a room full of friends than in front of a bar full of hostile strangers! This is great! Matt gives a spot-on rendition of "I believe in a thing called love" by The Darkness. I'm not even tired anymore. The hour we paid for is over so quickly. Sigh.

What time is it? What day is it?

October 21

Kansai Airport is spacious and orderly, but I am tired and disoriented. It takes longer than I'd hoped to get out. Staff here don't speak as much English as I had been led to believe. I feel very anxious about not having a room booked for the night yet.

Looking out the train window, everything is so neat and new and wonderful - even the broken-down buildings.

We reach Fukuyama just after supper time. There is no English at the tourist office. We panic and call our friend Dave. It will be a couple of hours until he gets off work and can rescue us.

There is a young guy sitting on the pavement outside the station playing classic American rock on his guitar. Boys and girls are strutting around on the street like peacocks in their carefully contrived designer outfits and huge hair. I feel so tired and helpless by the time Dave appears.
(to be continued)

All day on a plane

Alrighty,

Since I had neither the time nor energy, and rarely the internet access necessary to post while I was on vacation, I intend to give you daily snippets from my travel journal, starting now:

Friday, Oct. 20

Eavesdropping.

Joyce is an older Japanese lady who was born and raised in Calgary. She is loud and chatty with the woman sitting in front of me. She said that she didn't start learning to speak Japanese until later in life. She is so cute and spunky, with very short cropped hair - an interesting mix of two cultures.

The first in-flight movie was Nacho Libre. The thing I like most about Jack Black is how comfortable he is with his own jiggly body.

They gave us cute fishy-shaped soy sauce packets with our meals. This is the start of a theme.

Not a big fan of this jet lag

Today I'm seeing things in a rather gray and dingy light.

I wish there was a pill you could take to cure dissatisfaction. It's a nasty virus. Symptoms include: always wishing you were somewhere else, secret desires to be a rock star, restlessness, conviction that you were made for more important things, the incorrect assumption that changing something about your life will make you feel better.

Insidious.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow I will have had more sleep. I will feel like myself. I will upload my vacation pictures and start to regale you all with tales from my travels.

Until then, ta ta.