Alia Luria

So, I still haven’t had time to do a proper update. I promise to try to work on one. I haven’t even gotten all my photos from kyoto tagged properly, but at least they are all up. I’m also getting sick, which stinks. I’ve had a sore throat all day, and now I’m feeling dizzy and my eyes are feeling puffy, so fun fun. I should probably try to get to sleep early tonight, but we’ll see what happens with Amey.

Also, I made a stop at Kiddy Land today and loaded up on random bunny stuff! Woo hoo, bunny stuff! :)

So, I made it back to Tokyo safe and sound. And my apartment hasn’t been leveled by a fire or earthquake, so all is good. I have a lot of photos and videos to share about my adventures in Kyoto. It was an amazing place, and I’m super looking forward to going back there with David in May. :) I took almost 1000 photos while I was in Western Honshu this week, and the vast majority of them are up on Flickr already, although they mostly need tags and descriptions. I will, as usual, post some of the highlights here, as well as links to videos.

As far as video, this video of me feeding a baby deer should tide you over until I get my links added and described! :)

Okay, so that was kind of cheesy. Spring break has officially started here at TUJ, and Amey made it safely to Tokyo today. I picked her up from the airport, and everything went smoothly until we got home and found that Sakura House had not brought by the futon they were supposed to provide (they collected my 32,000 yen guest fee but never scheduled someone to bring by the futon). So, I gave her my mattress pad and an extra comforter I had, and she luckily had a travel pillow. They promised to bring the bedding tomorrow and to refund me 2000 yen (one night’s fee). So, at least there is that…

We are leaving for Kyoto Sunday early, so tomorrow we have to pack, organize all our train info and hotel info and reserve our Moonlight Nagara train back to Tokyo on Sunday night. I’m pretty excited for Kyoto. It should be beautiful, although probably still a bit cold. Not looking forward to the massively long train rides, but hopefully we can just chill through the first part of it anyway.

Anyway, that’s my short update for now. Ja mata!

This guy was really cute. He had two pet cats on leashes that he was walking around the temple complex. After attempting to walk his white cat for a while, he gave up and picked it up and bounced it around for our entertainment. I think the leash was more to keep the cat from leaving than to actually walk it, although I did see him walking it later in the day! The brown cat just seemed to want to sit on his back the whole time though. It was pretty funny!

Cat photo – kawaii desu!

Tug tug on the leash

Cat video – it bounces!

So, after much prodding by my friend Olivia, I finally decided to try traditional Japanese bathing. Olivia is very fond of visiting our local sento (bathhouse), but she had not yet convinced me to come with her. This evening, however, she upped the ante by inviting me to the Odaiba Oedo Onsen (an onsen is a hot spring). I finally caved, since I’m doing onsen this weekend in Hakone, and I figured it would probably be a good idea to do a trial run.

I’m just going to do a quick description here, because I should be sleeping, as I have to be up in 5 hours to go to go Hakone. The Oedo onsen is supposedly an actual onsen, but it seems very fabricated, as it is quite a recreational facility. Bathing there was a particularly complex procedure.

When you arrive, you remove your shoes and place them in a locker (one of many). From there, you proceed through the decorated lobby (of which I have a photo and will eventually post) to the check-in area. There, you pay the basic onsen fee (roughly 2000 yen, or $20) and receive a key attached to a cord that goes around your wrist. On the key is a barcode. The key is to a locker in the respective changing area.

Once obtaining a key, you proceed over to the yukata area and select a yukata from the designs available. Then you enter the changing area for your gender, designated by a large cloth hanging over the doorway. In the changing area, you find your locker, stowe your belongings, and change into your yukata. This was a relief, since I had my school bag with me and my computer, and I was worried about what I would do with all this stuff. So, I stowed the first locker key and all my belongings and clothes into the locker and locked it with the second locker key.

From here, you are free to wander a little inside “shopping area,” which has food, snacks, palm readers, and shopping. When you are ready (which was for us, immediately, since we wanted to be out by last train and it was already almost 10 PM), you can enter the bath area and follow the signs for your gender towards the baths.

The nice thing about this onsen is that they provide pretty much everything you need to bathe, including soap, shampoo, moisturizers, hair products, hair dryers and even a brush and toothbrush. So, we went to our THIRD lockers and disrobed from the yukata. We were also given two towels. One was for drying off, and the other was for taking with us into the onsen. Stowing everything in the third locker, except my glasses which I forgot to remove and the small towel, we proceeded to the bathing area.

Traditional Japanese bathing requires that you scrub yourself off in a stall before entering the springs or bath to soak. So, Olivia and I sat down on some stools and scrubbed off. The bathing area itself was nice, with granite or marble, ambient lighting and steaming baths all over. There were probably five or six different baths inside and a few outside as well.

After we had scrubbed off, we proceeded to explore the baths. We pretty much just flitted from one to another, trying not to overheat. The jacuzzi was really relaxing, and the milky mineral bath was also nice. Outside was nice too, although the water was quite hot compared to the air, which made it refreshing but easy to overheat. The steam room was also surprisingly pleasant. It wasn’t too wet, and it wasn’t too dry. I did almost pass out a couple times.

When we decided to head back inside, I was grateful there was a vending machine there, because the world was spinning and things were starting to go black. That’ll teach me not to eat a substantial meal before onsen! Next time, I’ll know. And I’ll bring bottled water with me to the bathing area.

The experience itself was very relaxing. The water just soaks into you and gets to every muscle. I probably could have stayed out there longer if I hadn’t gotten dizzy. The bracelets functioned as an accounting system as well. A barcode reader on the vending machine read the code and dispensed drinks. All of the little shops functioned the same way as well.

After we had some beverages and dried our hair, we redressed in yukata and wandered through the shop area looking for ice cream. We found a group of people from school, got ice cream, and chatted with them for a bit. Before long, however, it was 11:30, and we had to hustle if we wanted to make last train. The others planned on staying there all night, but I didn’t want to be a zombie for hakone tomorrow, so we headed home.

It was a little pricey for the amount of time we spent there, which was only an hour or two max, but, overall, it was well worth it! After we changed back into our clothes, we dropped off our locker keys and the check out personnel charged us for whatever we’d purchased using the wrist bands. Mine was only 620 yen – ice cream, a tea and a sandwich pack for the road.

We hopped the train and headed back across the bay to Shimbashi station and headed home from there. I also highly recommend taking the train across the bay. It’s very cheap, only 370 yen, and it was a gorgeous ride. I tried to snap a couple photos, but I only had my cell phone camera, so they turned out pretty blurry and bad.

There were a lot of services that we didn’t even take advantage of in the onsen, including the foot bath (only co-ed bath), the massage chairs, the foot massage machines, the full-body massages, the lounge, etc. Also, if you decide to stay past 2 AM, they will charge you an extra 1500 yen, but you can stay there all night until 9 AM and sleep in the lounge.

Anyway, that’s all the info I have about the Oedo Onsen Monogatori for the moment. It’s definitely worth checking out if you are in Tokyo and can’t get out of the city to visit a “real” onsen.

Ja mata!

This title is a bit of a misnomer, since I made the executive decision not to go on the prison tour. I woke up with a sore, thick-feeling throat this morning. So, I decided to stay in and rest up. Sorry babe for having you bring my pantsuit six thousand miles!! :(

However, the main attraction of this week is that I’m going on a school-sponsored trip to Hakone this weekend, which is the site of a large national park near Mt. Fuji.

Our group leaves early Saturday morning and spends the night at a Japanese hotel, and comes back Sunday evening. I’m pretty stoked to be going. Activities planned include: the Hakone Open-Air Museum – which has a bunch of sculptures and a large Picasso exhibit, Owakudani – great viewing of Mt. Fuji, Odawara Castle, and Mt. Daiyu-zan Temple, not to mention a stay at Hakone Yumoto Hotel, which has an onsen.

So, it should be a fun trip with lots of culture. Maybe I will even try one of the sulfurous eggs available to eat at Owakudani. They are said by some to be touristy, but it still sounds like a potentially interesting experience. :)

Well, as most people might know, I didn’t end up getting to go snowboarding on Sunday. Instead, I decided to travel to Nikko with a couple of friends. Nikko is considered a World Heritage Site because of some of the temples and shrines there, so some of the train lines offer special passes for foreigners to go visit. The pass pays for a trip there and back, transit on one of the buses, and admission to three of the major sites.

When I got up on Sunday, I checked the weather, and it was terrible. It was gusting wind, and Nikko was supposed to be in the low 20s. The icon also showed snow. I was a little dubious, but we’d agreed to meet at the station at 7:40 AM, so I basically just sucked it up and got on the train. One of the ladies I was traveling with, Erin, got onto my train, so we ended up riding there most of the way together, and we met Becky shortly after as we were exiting the station.

I told them what the weather was looking like, and we were all a little nervous. We almost scrapped it, but then decided to go on ahead with our plans. We managed to get spots on the 8:15 train with some cocoa (or coffee) in our hands and some sandwiches from a local coffee shop. The train was pretty slow and rickety, but it seemed fine. As we wound our way north, the ground began to have little patches of snow on it, and the wind gusted now and again, blowing around snow and blowing through the trees. At one point, the train came to stop, and it just kind of sat there for a while. We started to get nervous, because we couldn’t understand what the conductor was saying, and he was talking a lot. Finally, Becky leaned over and asked the lady next to us what they were saying. I could see that she had been translating for her boyfriend, who was a foreigner.

She explained that the wind had knocked another train that was before us off the track, and that it was delaying our train. We were all pretty freaked out to hear that and again doubted the intelligence of heading out to Nikko on this particular day. Eventually, another train pulled up next to ours, and they transferred us to that train, and we continued on, reaching Nikko with little other issues. In Nikko, it was bitterly cold and windy, so we decided to pop in for some ramen before getting on the bus to the temple sites.

I will pick up the story again later, with some photos and possibly some video at that time…

In the meantime, here’s an article about the terrible winds we were dealing with: Japan Times.

We weren’t on a bullet train, but we were on a train in Tochigi Prefecture: “All bullet trains on the line were suspended at around 7:55 a.m. when winds of more than 108 kph were recorded between Utsunomiya Station in Tochigi Prefecture and Shinshirakawa Station in Fukushima Prefecture, East Japan Railway Co. said. Services were resumed around noon.”

Anyway, I will post the rest later… ja, mata!

So, last week was a great week. David came to visit me in Tokyo, and we had a lot of fun. I had missed him a lot over the last month, and I miss him again because he has gone back to Orlando. So, this entry will probably be pretty long, because I want to post some notes and photos about what we did during the week.

Needless to say, we didn’t do anywhere near all the things I would have liked to have done, but we did accomplish some goals for the trip. :)

Goal 1: Okonomiyaki

So, the first goal was to try some okonomiyaki, which is a Japanese food that is basically a cabbage pancake with meat in it. Sounds weird, but it’s pretty tasty. Our experience was on the experimental side, because none of us had actually made okonomiyaki before. We had some trouble locating the place in Shinjuku that we ended up at, called Monja. It seemed to have either switched floors or moved, or whatnot, but we eventually found it. I went with David and my friends Justin and Becky. Through Becky’s querying of the locals, we finally made it there and got seated. Then there was a mix up with the service. It was fairly tense for a bit there, but we managed to get through it and all get some okinomiyaki. I really liked it, but I ended up seasoning mine liberally with sauce, salt and pepper. I think next time I go, I will have a much better understanding of how the process works. :)

Sadly, I have no photos of okonomiyaki…

Goal 2: Ghibli Museum

So, one of our goals for the trip was to visit Ghibli Museum (Wikipedia site). If you are ever interested in doing this while you are in Tokyo, it’s a quick train ride to Mitaka, and the museum and surrounding area are very pretty. Here is a site that gives you information on obtaining a ticket: Getting tickets! Apparently, they can also be obtained at Lawson’s, which I didn’t know, but it was fine that we got them in the U.S. (except for the crazy shipping fee).

The museum, apart from having exhibits of various kinds (including a really cool stroboscope) and a mock up of Miyazaki’s studio with storyboards, etc., also allows you to view one of a number of films only shown at the museum. The one we saw was called The Whale Hunt, and it was very cute. :) They rotate the films every month.

Anyway, here are a couple photos from the museum. We weren’t allowed to take photos inside the museum, but I have more of the grounds up on Flickr.

David and I in front of the mock ticket booth. Totoro was there to welcome us! There were Totoro characters all over the place, but that one was my favorite, except for the immense stuffed catbus, which we weren’t allowed to photograph.

This shot is from the roof or cafe… can’t remember which. You can see a bit of snow still on the ground. It had snowed on Saturday, and it was still all over the ground on Monday. Really, though, it was still on the ground in parts of Tokyo as late as the following Saturday, because we saw some at the Meiji Jingu shrine as well.

The side of the museum, and some kids playing in the snow. :)

The robot from Laputa:Castle in the Sky on the roof of the museum.

So, those are a few of the photos from the museum.

Goal 3: Imperial Palace

This was kind of a failure… we were supposed to take a tour of the imperial palace, but I managed not to know exactly where to meet the tour, and we ended up there early, and it was very cold and blustery out, so we just wandered around the east garden for a bit, which is the grounds of the original Edo Imperial Palace.

Here are some photos…

This was a guardhouse

A shot of the foundation walls, which were currently being restored. You can see the modern buildings in the background.

This was my favorite structure on the grounds. It was a music hall dedicated to one of the Empresses. It was really ornate and the mosaics were really gorgeous. David though it looked like some kitschy 60’s building. I liked it though. :P

David on the top of the highest platform of the foundation. The sky and trees were really gorgeous that day. Too bad it was super cold!

Valentine’s Day

So, we didn’t really have any plans for Valentine’s Day. David doesn’t observe it… sniff sniff Although, I did present him with a bag of goodies Japanese-style. I even tried to bake him cookies, but that failed miserably… My grandmother would never be able to survive here. My apartment doesn’t even have a proper oven! So, given that we didn’t have any particular plans, I thought I’d look around for somewhere nice to eat.

Using Gourmet Navigator, I looked for a shabu shabu place, because I thought that shabu shabu would be an interesting kind of Japanese dish for David to try. It’s not really something that’s readily available in the U.S. Through the site, I lucked onto the restaurant used in the movie Lost in Translation. The restaurant is called ShabuZen, and it is located in Shibuya. It was fairly painless to find, since David and I decided to take a cab from the Shibuya station. ShabuZen is located in the Creston Hotel, which is a really small hotel near the NHK building. The menu contained many price ranges for beef shabu shabu. The cheapest started at 3500 yen per person and went up to something like 15,000 yen per person… Needless to say, we opted for the inexpensive imported Australian beef. It tasted just fine. Also, you have the option of getting all-you-can-eat shabu shabu at ShabuZen, but we decided against it, as neither of us needed that much food. The people sitting next to us must have gone through five plates of beef in the time it took us to eat one. It was pretty impressive. The other option was to have a kaiseki meal (or course meal) along with the shabu shabu. Since I thought it might be fun to try kaiseki, and it was something I was thinking of us doing at a ryokan anyway, we decided to go for it.

Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation of what shabu shabu is for those interested. It ALSO has an explanation of kaiseki. Wikipedia is my hero! It means I never have to go into the detail needed to explain all this stuff to everyone. :) Also, here is a link to the restaurant, if anyone is interested in going there.

So, the shabu shabu kaiseki ended up costing about 5,000 yen per person, which wasn’t too bad, given that we got a bunch of courses. Of course, the waiter accidentally bought us out the wrong appetizers from a more expensive meal, so we got some free, weird fish. I took photos of each of the courses, because they were really beautifully presented and the food was definitely weird. So, here’s my photos of food from ShabuZen… (also, these photos were taken with my casio exilim cell phone camera, so I apologize for their quality… I didn’t think to bring a real camera for some reason).

1st Course – fish jello

Some kind of fish skin suspended in meat-flavored gelatin, served cold, with scallions on top. It actually wasn’t too bad, but I could only get through one of the two little bricks they served. You’ll notice the beautiful plates. Everything served to us came out in gorgeous plates.

2nd Course – raw fish mistake!

This appetizer was actually served to us by mistake. It consisted of two tiny, raw squid, two clumps of fish eggs wrapped around something that tasted like ham, and some pickled veggies. The fish eggs and squid were actually pretty good. David was okay with the squid, but I think the fish eggs creeped him out. :)

3rd Course – Soup

I found this course to be one of the more aesthetically pleasing ones. It was a mild soup with pink noodles in it that had a flowery taste. Under the large veggie flower was a bread soaked in the soup that had what tasted like octopus meat in it. It was pretty good as well! And very lovely!

4th Course – Sashimi

The next course was a sashimi course, with some tuna and an unidentified white fish. The tuna was excellent. It just melted in your mouth, the way good tuna steak does. Mmmm. The white fish was okay too.

5th Course – Cooked fish and goo

This was the final course before the shabu shabu. It was a firm white fish, cooked, with a gelatinous goo and some wasabi on top. The fish was pretty tasty, although the good was a little odd for my taste.

6th Course -Shabu Shabu

Finally it was time for the shabu shabu course… even the bowl was extremely elaborate.

Meat and veggies boiling away. David and I ate pretty slowly, just adding a couple slices of beef a time. You can see the raw meat in the back of the shot. It was a very pleasant meal. You basically just cook the beef and veggies in the pot and pull them out when they are done, dip them into a bowl of sauce, and eat them with your chopsticks.

7th Course – Noodle Course

We were stuffed at this point, but we still had more to go… after the shabu shabu, the servers will take the “broth” that you’ve basically been simmering and make a cup of japanese noodles for you out of it. I didn’t think to photograph it until it was almost gone, but it was noodles that were wide and flat with some kind of thing that looked like a lump of mochi in it. The broth was quite tasty!

8th Course – Desert

This was our course desert (we ended up with yuzu sherbert and caramel ice cream also, because we’re insane), which was a stack of candied apricot jellies. I had had my fill of gelatinous things by that point in the evening, so I didn’t eat much of mine.

Us

And one of us – it’s on the blurry side, but you can kind of see the restaurant’s decor. You’ll probably recognize it if you’ve seen Lost in Translation.

Miscellany…

So, other stuff we did included visiting the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno, shopping around for a coat for David, visiting the Meiji Jingu shrine, visiting the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, karaoke with friends on Friday, and taking the most ridiculous photobooth photos ever!

I have photos of most of these things up on flickr, although you can only see the photobooth photos if you are listed as a friend or family member. They are too goofy to be released for public consumption.

Some samurai armor from the Tokyo National Museum.

A noh mask from the Tokyo National Museum.

A cute, but blurry photo of us from karaoke.

Entrance gate to the Meiji-jingu shrine.

Meiji-jingu main shrine.

Anyway… that is about all I can think of for last week. It flew by, and it feels like it didn’t last nearly long enough, but I guess we did a lot more than I thought we did. :) Anyway, hopefully, this weekend, I will get to try snowboarding for the very first time. If so, I will have some photos of Nagano to show everyone. If not, there is always the Hakone trip next weekend (which is sponsored by the school).

Well, I miss everyone at home, but I am making the best of my time here. So, for now… ja mata!

Sorry for the lack of any blogs this week. As many of you know, David is in town visiting me this week. We’ve been having a great time around Tokyo. I will blog in detail about it, probably after he leaves and I’m mopey because he’s gone. Either way, I have posted some photos of our dinner this evening on Flickr, as well as photos from the Imperial Palace East Garden, some photobooth photos (very goofy) for friends and family to see, and some photos from Museum Ghibli.

I hope everyone enjoys them, and I’ll blog more explicitly about my week probably next week.

Check out Flickr!

Someone stole my umbrella today from the second floor umbrella stand… and I had to walk home in the rain. Aren’t we adults now? It’s sad that I can trust a complete Japanese stranger not to steal my umbrella while I’m in the 7-11 (and they don’t even have to come inside to steal it), but I can’t leave one in a confined area like the law school. I guess gaijin are gaijin for a reason. Pretty pathetic though.

I could have chosen to buy another umbrella on the way home for another 500 yen, but it seems as if I will have to buy a compact one that I can put in my bag and keep with me or I’ll be spending 500 yen ever other week, so I just waited. Either way, I’m just a tiny bit disappointed in whoever did that.

Well, that’s about all I have to add for today. I had a lot of work to do, so I didn’t get to go out. My classes are going along. I have to get out in the next day or two to pay rent and visit the travel agent though. Either way, that’s all for now!

Ja, mata!