Hanami: Flower Viewing

Posted on April 20, 2013 by

For our next trick we will assail you with roughly a million pictures of flowers!

In Tokyo the plum blossom season started before we left for China, and we took a couple trips to local parks and temples to see the blooms. We saw Korakuen park quite early in the season and it was still very cold, but at Umegaoka park and Yushima Tenjin temple the blossoms were out in force (as well as the o-hanami-ing spectators.) Normally the following cherry blossom season doesn’t happen until nearly a month later, but because of a warm spell, Jen and I actually flew back into Tokyo in the peak of the cherry blossom bloom. The weather this spring has been a bit strange — summer-like one day, and then frigid again the next. At any rate, exhausted, but determined, we struck out the next day to see the Cherry blossoms around town. The most impressive was at Naka-Meguro, where the canal is lined in Cherry trees, and in the evening lanterns are lit under the branches. We walked from one end of the canal to the other in beautiful weather (despite rather dire weather reports of rain and wind — not good for cherry blossoms) taking lots of photos (as you’ll see), and having a little bench-picnic (not the full-japanese-style hanami all-day picnic and drinking extravaganza, but a nice little snack.) Seeing the lanterns through the cherry blossoms is one of those visions of Japan that I’ll never forget.

We did see a handful of other cherry blossoms around the city after that, but peak-bloom is a big deal for a reason — there’s nothing quite like those clouds of blossoms against the black twisted branches. At any rate, get on with your own hanami below — it’ll take a while to get through them all! ;)

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The Forbidden City and Great Wall

Posted on April 19, 2013 by

To finish off our China posts, our last few days in Beijing we spent going to the Forbidden City and the Great Wall.

We took the Beijing subway to the front gate of the forbidden city and saw Tiannamen square on the way. The first impression of both of these things, of course, is of size. Even so, thinking about spending your whole life inside the walls of the forbidden city (as a member of the imperial household) makes me feel claustrophobic — it’s all so squared off and unnatural-looking. So make my official residence the summer palace — trees, water, curving maze-like walkways… infinitely preferable.

Some of the most impressive parts of the forbidden city are the little details — the carvings and paintings. They do have exhibits in some of the buildings you can peer into, but the glass is usually scratched and yellowed, even you can even push your way through the crowds to see inside, and everything in there is covered in years of dust. There were beautiful dragon designs all over the place though, carved, cast, painted, tiled, and so on. One of the dragon displays was a tiled wall, where all the pieces had to be made in advance, and one piece was dropped and shattered during construction, but the workers were so worried that they would be put to death for the error that they kept the mistake a secret and painted a fake wooden tile to replace the lost piece. Apparently the tile was not noticed at the time, although after hundreds of years the paint on that piece has faded and it is now quite evident. And toward the back there was a lovely garden area, with some trees and pagodas and statues and so forth where the ladies would write poetry and chill. It was a very small, competitive world they inhabited, where there were a lot of formalized events (some only on the 9th day of the 9th month of the 9th year…) and behaviors that always had to be observed, with its own little quirks, like moving from one building to another in honor of an ancestor or a change in rank.

The next day we took the train out of Beijing to go to the great wall. The train was the first adventure of the day — you buy tickets and get into a big line (in which, if you don’t pack closely enough to the people in front of you, others will just elbow into the 3 inches of available space) and then you shuffle forward where you show the guy your ticket…. and then you SPRINT. With all of your baggage, children, elderly relatives, and girls in ridiculous shoes in tow — you run down the very long platform, into the train, and claim a seat with your butt. After we caught our breath, the trip was quite pleasant, particularly as the train wound up into the mountains and pieces of the wall could be seen climbing the peaks.

The wall itself was amazing — just hard to imagine building it up and down the mountains back in the day when you don’t have tractors or ropeways. You could see it go up and down the mountains in the most roundabout way, making sure to hit key high points with towers, and heading up very steep rises in others where it looks almost vertical. It’s also very steep in places along the rebuilt area where we could hike and there were a lot of tourists, although since it was a weekday it could have been much worse. We took the less peopled direction and walked all the way to the end, where there were very few people. Given the snow a few days prior, the air was lovely and clear and we got some apparently unheard of blue-sky shots of the wall. On the way back there were more train hijinx (including our train being canceled and me getting headbutted in the solarplexis by a little old lady during the train-sprint.) We had a ton of good food back in Beijing too, from dumplings to sauteed mushrooms to mango ice and on the last night some amazing food along with board games at a friend of Calley’s.

Next up: More cherry blossoms in Tokyo!

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Guilin Mountains

Posted on March 30, 2013 by

In Southern China, near Guilin, is an area that has the most unearthly, steep, green mountains you can imagine. You’ve probably seen pictures of them before — they’re amazing, and getting to see them is one of those things I never thought I’d actually get to do. I think I probably spent the first several days not saying much, since I was so focused on staring agog at the mountains.

We stayed near a smaller town called Yangshuo, in an adorable little hotel with a restaurant on the roof and a view of “Moon Hill,” a mountain with a natural arch on the top of it. Since there is another rise behind the arch, only a small crescent of sky is visible, which looks a little like the moon, and the thing to do in the little tourist hot-spot below our hotel is get your picture taken “holding the moon in your hand,” usually while also dressed in some rather bizarre and completely neon “traditional dresses.”

The first day in town, after checking out our hotel and grabbing some quick lunch upstairs (bizarrely enough they specialize in Italian food and Chinese food — one of the founders of the hotel had lived in Italy) we headed off for a boat tour of one of the most famous stretches of the Li river, winding through the mountains. The air in Guilin is much cleaner, generally speaking, than Beijing, but it was warm and muggy and there was a lot of fog, so as we went up the river the mountains drifted in and out of view.

After the boat tour we wandered around the nearby town for a while, perusing the shops, but also wandering down a residential street. We didn’t take photos — not wanting to be more intrusive than necessary — but it was a really interesting time of day to meander through. There were kids and dogs everywhere, running around and playing, often with family members sitting on the stoops of their homes, all the doors open and the very bare houses visible inside. Usually you could hear a TV on inside, and sometimes see a large framed Mao portrait hung on the wall. Many of the stoops were littered with pomelo (a large grapefruit-like fruit or sunflower seed husks. The nice thing about China is that they do a fair bit of staring themselves, so I feel perfectly comfortable staring back and checking them out. It’s a very poor part of China, and you can see it in their clothes and their houses.  But the neighborhood we walked through had a strong feeling of community too.

At any rate, we returned to our hotel for dinner (we had, at that point, already become addicted to the very sweet ginger tea they offered there.) The next day we decided to climb moon hill, a very steep ascent that was essentially a staircase going straight up the mountain (Jen counted steps on the way down and got 1073.) By the time we got to the top we were all winded and sweaty, but the view was definitely worth it, and we kicked back up there for a little while, sampling a pomelo and taking pictures. (The pomelo, for the record, was not my favorite thing in the world — tasted like a really bland, dry grapefruit, but wasn’t really sour. Jen also nearly busted something trying to get into the silly thing. Jen also says that this was “not a good example of a pomelo” so perhaps I am unfairly judging pomelos. Interestingly, we suspect they also burn the pomelo rind — outside many of the houses they seemed to be drying large quantities of the stuff.)

After descending, we rented bikes from our hotel and took off across town. We got lunch at the sister-hotel, sitting out looking over the river and sipping fresh fruit juice, and then continued on with the bike-trip. It was a lovely ride, winding through the flat areas between the mountains, very peaceful and pretty (with the occasional interruption of a really foul-smelling pile of trash.) The fields of yellow rapeseed were in bloom, and the Chinese tourists were all wandering among the flowers and taking photos. The area appears to be rapidly developing to accommodate the increase in tourists, so a lot of new buildings were going up, and many others appeared to be only occupied on the first floor, their upstairs just a concrete shell without windows or anything (except sometimes lines with hanging laundry) waiting until the owner has the funds to finish the upper floors. New hotels appear to be going in, and everywhere there were enterprising Chinese folks who wanted to sell you something, guide you somewhere, or let you take a photo with some contrived prop which they’ll then charge you for. We thought we were moderately safe on the bikes (you can just outpace them!) until one enterprising woman decided to pace Jen from her moped, offering various services.

Calley had to head back a day before us, so on her last day there we decided to go Kayaking down one of the Li tributaries. It was a beautiful and peaceful trip, although it was a fair bit of work — the river was wide with no current at all so we had to paddle pretty hard the whole way. After Calley departed, Jen and I headed out to see one of the many caves in the area (we chose this one because it did not seem to require rolling around in the mud — an activity we had not anticipated needing an extra pair of pants for) which was lovely, if perhaps a bit gaudy. They lighted all of the stalactites/stalagmites in a rainbow of colors, which occasionally was pretty, but mostly was just a bit strange.

Unfortunately Jen and I ate something bad that night at dinner, and spent the rest of the night being dramatically ill. All I’m really going to say about that is that two cases of food poisoning and one toilet takes a fair deal of spousal cooperation and teamwork. We had to delay our flight (originally scheduled for the following morning) and spent that day laying in bed feverishly trying not to think about anything related to eggplant. We did finally get on an airplane (still feverish and miserable) and got back safely to Beijing, where surprise, surprise, it had snowed!  We rolled into Calley’s house around 4 am and collapsed gratefully into her spare room.

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Spring Travel

Posted on March 29, 2013 by

So we’re almost 6 weeks behind in our blog, but by a fortunate quirk that Red Queen fans will appreciate, jumping ahead leaves us right where we left off— adventuring with Calley!

This time we took the show on the road and went to visit China.

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The Summer Palace

Visiting Beijing in March meant stepping back in time a little (more than just the one hour).   Tokyo is starting to warm up and bloom, but Beijing snowed on us.  Fortunately, we got just enough snow to clean out the air and give us relatively clear views and artistically outlined roof tiles without the mess of slush.  (We actually started our escapades in southern Guilin which was warmer, but since that destination was a particular request of a certain shutterbug, I’ll leave those photos to the expert!)

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The Summer Palace is a must-see in Beijing– a former imperial compound that hugs a man-made lake whose dirt built the hillside that the buildings sprawl up.  The audio guide kept drawing our attention to the wonderful artistry of the “Hall of Benevolence and Longevity” etc, but I kept getting distracted by the warren of little buildings and courtyards packed with pine trees and rock collections.

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I can’t help wondering how long would it take, trapped in this relatively tiny world with dozens of scheming rivals and a dizzying web of protocol to drive any normal person round the bend? Perhaps a slightly grim turn of thought, but luckily there were plenty of captivating little details nestled about the place to distract from the ghosts of palace intrigue.

There are paintings are lurking in every nook of woodwork that would hold still.  Apparently, unpainted wood was particularly susceptible to mold, so they began a tradition of painting that eventually blossomed into an all-out war on blank walls.  The Long Corridor is the epitome of this– an 18th century equivalent of a digital photo frame.  It’s a huge walkway covered in thousands of paintings of the emperor’s favorite landscapes from his travels, scholars debating over tea, scenes from poems, flowers, birds, veggies, and even insects.

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Clambering up the hill from the Corridor– we came face to face with an army of roof tile guardians. These little fellows are partly holding down the corner tiles, but naturally there is more to them than that. The really fancy ones– and at a palace there is little else to be found– march along in small parades of fantastical animals, led by what Tara called “men riding chickens”.  The more men, the higher the rank of the building– up to 11 I think.

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Tile rider army

All in all it was a gorgeous day– beautiful clear weather. I’d been up to the top of the hill several times when I lived in Beijing before, but this was the first time I’d seen this much of the city.  Go snow!

Chinese cherry blossoms
Chinese cherry blossoms

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Retreat to the Mountains

Posted on March 10, 2013 by

A few weeks ago Jen, Calley, and I took off for a long weekend in Matsumoto and the surrounding mountains. (Actually, first, we saw a sumo tournament, and we took off from there.) We started with the castle of course — it’s one of the best in Japan — and then had lunch in a fabulous little noodle shop. We spent the afternoon wandering through the historic part of town, and then were picked up to head up into the mountains. We heard about this place through Sumi, whose uncle takes photos for them sometimes, and so she helped us get a good reservation — we can’t thank her enough, we’d never have known about it without her.

The van that picked us up stopped to put chains on, and then we began an epic trip up the mountain. The road was steep and a series of endless switchbacks until we got up to the ridge, where the hoarfrost began. While there was no accumulation in the valley, up on the mountain there were several feet, with more slowly drifting down as evening settled in. Aside from being slightly fearful for our lives (despite assurances from the driver — which Jen translated — that the van was supposed to be skidding and sliding like that) and carsick, it was a pretty amazing accent. We stopped part way up to take some pictures, and then continued on to the hotel.

The hotel is situated on the top of a mountain with very few other mountains immediately around it, but a ring of white-topped peaks at a distance 360 degrees around. We suspect that it’s possible through a partnership with the radio tower maintainers, as there are a garden of towers up there as well which require electricity and clear roads for maintenance. Otherwise maintaining a hotel at the top of a remote mountain like that would be prohibitively expensive. Most of the rooms in the hotel, including ours, having amazing views — we could see fuji from ours — and the onsens are walled entirely in glass so you can relax in the hot water while appreciating the mountains peaking up beyond the cloud-cover in the valley below.

Not wanting to waste any daylight, we quickly headed back out into the frigid wind and snow to take a walk around the top of the mountain. The view is just incredible, and the harsh climate makes for really beautiful landscapes. We promptly all got hoarfrost in our hair, on our hats, and in our eyelashes. I took a metric ton of photographs, while Calley romped happily in the snow and Jen did her best not to turn into a popsicle. We came back to the hotel and gratefully sank into the onsen to thaw, then headed to dinner.

Dinner turned out to be an adventure that almost needs its own post… one course after another, all kinds of Japanese treats, and more food than we could possibly eat. They ended up delivering dessert to our room later while we were playing board games under the heated table. We did, however, discover the hard way that trying to communicate total vegetarianism requires not only telling them you don’t eat fish or meat, but you have to specify shellfish as well. They kept bringing poor Calley all kinds of delicacies like scallops and stuffed lobster and so forth. We tried to be surreptitious because they got quite worried if we didn’t eat something, but we did eventually get caught passing things across the table. We tried to assure the waitress that it was simply so delicious we had to share, but I’m not sure she believed us. At any rate, despite the shellfish misunderstanding, we all still got a ton of really amazing food.

The next day continued in much the same vein with exploring, photographing, gallivanting, eating, snowshoeing, soaking, sitting in a massage chair looking out at the snow, and just generally having an amazing time. The air the second day was clearer, so we got an even better view of the surrounding mountains, and got to try out the various onsen pools they have with views in different directions. We were very sad to leave so soon that afternoon, but due to our schedules it had to be a quick trip. The staff (who had been very concerned about having foreigner guests — I think mostly Japanese people stay there — and were very attentive, trying to make sure we understood) waved us off, and we headed back down the mountain and caught our train home!

(I apologize that these are all out of order — the new gallery editor is a little frustrating.)

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Sapporo Snow Festival

Posted on March 9, 2013 by

The plum blossoms are beginning to emerge in Tokyo, so it’s hard to remember that just a month ago we were at the snow festival up in Sapporo. While we spent several days skiing (including at the famous Niseko, although the weather that day was not so good) and doing other tourism around Hokkaido, one of the highlights of any trip to Sapporo in winter has to be the yukimatsuri — snow festival, in which all kinds of snow carvings go up in the central Sapporo park. These statues range from small human-sized carvings to huge building-sized panoramas. The festival starts properly on February fourth, and we were there on the third, so we got to see everyone putting the final touches on their statues, which was fun. It also meant we avoided the majority of the crowds, and since some of the pathways and footing was treacherous, we appreciated having some space. It was also quite unseasonably warm (relatively speaking — Jen was still really glad to dive into a hot bowl of ramen for lunch) so some of the statues which had been done before had been damaged by the heat and rain and were being touched up.

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Public Service Announcements

Posted on March 2, 2013 by

Yet another crazy week gone by and it seems to have taken February with it.  Rather than recount the gritty details, I’m opting for escapism and humor. So here, unsuspecting readers, assembled for your amusement is a collection of Japan’s finest metro public service announcements.  The prevailing themes of courtesy, silence, and above all taking up as little space as possible are repeated over and over in a never-ending, but generally amusing series of posters.  By now we’ve been through about four cycles of poster themes.  Collecting the funny ones has become one of my odder hobbies and I have no compunctions about diving crosswise through oncoming commuters to get a shot of a new poster proclaiming the most virtuous way to sit or denouncing drunken discourtesy.  Coming soon: posters warning batty foreigners to stay in line and stop finding the posters so amusing. :)

 

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