Thursday, October 29, 2009
6 August 1945, 8:15 am
Went to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum today. A bunch of other things happened, but that pretty much eclipsed everything else. It is undescribable.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Hiroshima
The first thing I did upon leaving Tokyo was to board the wrong bullet train. Hilarity ensued. Got to Hiroshima in the end, though, and it is surprisingly charming. The cute little streetcars help, and bicycles, bicycles, bicycles thronging the pathways and zooming over the numerous bridges that connect the islets of this river-delta city.
Dinner was at Okonomi-mura, a five-storey building containing 27 okonomi-yaki counters. The Hiroshima version is layered, and made with buckwheat noodles (soba), and was delicious. I forked out the extra cash to have oysters in it, for which Hiroshima is also famous, in Japan at least.
Walking back in the warmish-to-cool evening, I took a detour past the A-bomb dome, impressive enough on its own but dramatically set off with up-lighting against the night sky, and of crickets singing like delicate songbirds. A night-fishing crane gave a single indignant squawk from the river behind me before flying off in a theatrical arc. This backdrop seemed all perfectly suited to that inexplicable beautiful sadness of ruins.
Tomorrow it's off to the A-Bomb museum and memorial.
Dinner was at Okonomi-mura, a five-storey building containing 27 okonomi-yaki counters. The Hiroshima version is layered, and made with buckwheat noodles (soba), and was delicious. I forked out the extra cash to have oysters in it, for which Hiroshima is also famous, in Japan at least.
Walking back in the warmish-to-cool evening, I took a detour past the A-bomb dome, impressive enough on its own but dramatically set off with up-lighting against the night sky, and of crickets singing like delicate songbirds. A night-fishing crane gave a single indignant squawk from the river behind me before flying off in a theatrical arc. This backdrop seemed all perfectly suited to that inexplicable beautiful sadness of ruins.
Tomorrow it's off to the A-Bomb museum and memorial.
Quintessential Japanese Moment #1
Leaning over to look out the opposite window of my bullet train in order to glimpse the snow-covered cone of Mount Fuji pushing up out of the blanket of clouds covering the surrounding plains.
Friday, October 23, 2009
日本へ行きます！
Well, the cats are at Greg & Brian's, I have my passport (whew!), I have yen, I'm packed. I'm ready to go back to Japan. In focus this trip: maple leaves, castles, hot springs, practicing my Japanese, and eating, eating, eating. Don't miss out on the reports from the field, check back here often! But first, I have this ten hour flight to take...
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Narita, nostalgia
I am at the free Yahoo internet station in Narita terminal 2, for my 3 hour stopover. Japan, I love you!
My last day in Manila was every aspect of my trip rolled into one: bureaucratic hell to the point of comedy (e.g. 3 hours to mail a parcel to myself), friendly chatty people, a relaxed dinner of mediocre greasy food while stretched out on a restaurant's rattan couch on the seawall overlooking Manila Bay while Independence Day fireworks explode overhead in the finally just-hot air. Some chats with friendly people, endless hawkers. Some live bands strung along the baywalk, mostly cover bands but also some baklas (lady-boys) who are watched appreciatively by many families with children. And up to get to the airport for 6 am.
Not enough time to get anywhere, so I'm mostly milling about Narita airport trying to see how much Japanese I can remember from my crash course. I'm doing okay, asking people a bunch of unnecessary questions just to try it out.
Vancouver-Tokyo-Manila-Naga, Naga-Manila-Tokyo-Vancouver. I have a sense of going in reverse on this trip, like I should be walking backwards, just more quickly than when I walked forwards. And when I get home, I'll have undone all my steps, and be right back where I started. Maybe like I never left, except I'll see all I have done on my trip as if it were still ahead of me, but on a route that I can't take, like in a painting. I'm not sure where this feeling of disconnection from experience comes from. Or whatever. Whatever.
My last day in Manila was every aspect of my trip rolled into one: bureaucratic hell to the point of comedy (e.g. 3 hours to mail a parcel to myself), friendly chatty people, a relaxed dinner of mediocre greasy food while stretched out on a restaurant's rattan couch on the seawall overlooking Manila Bay while Independence Day fireworks explode overhead in the finally just-hot air. Some chats with friendly people, endless hawkers. Some live bands strung along the baywalk, mostly cover bands but also some baklas (lady-boys) who are watched appreciatively by many families with children. And up to get to the airport for 6 am.
Not enough time to get anywhere, so I'm mostly milling about Narita airport trying to see how much Japanese I can remember from my crash course. I'm doing okay, asking people a bunch of unnecessary questions just to try it out.
Vancouver-Tokyo-Manila-Naga, Naga-Manila-Tokyo-Vancouver. I have a sense of going in reverse on this trip, like I should be walking backwards, just more quickly than when I walked forwards. And when I get home, I'll have undone all my steps, and be right back where I started. Maybe like I never left, except I'll see all I have done on my trip as if it were still ahead of me, but on a route that I can't take, like in a painting. I'm not sure where this feeling of disconnection from experience comes from. Or whatever. Whatever.
and the evening and the morning were the third day
A slice of life in peaceful, beachful Aninuan: A late-afternoon stroll a couple of kilometres down the road. The first half cement, the remainder rocky dirt. At this point, a boy walks with me just long enough to ask if I am a missionary (why does this keep happening?). A ways further, I stop to search out what was shaking way high in a mango tree, when mangoes started dropping down. Monkeys? No, small children, surprisingly high up. A man standing by and watching with me picked up one of the green missiles and offers it to me. "Very sweet." This surprises me, as I thought the green ones were sour. But it is the most delicious mango I've ever eaten. Indian mangoes, he said they were.
I stroll further, a little nervously past some aggressive-looking horned but tethered goats, their ropes stretching well into the road. A water buffalo is tethered a safe distance away. Finally I am at the next beach down from mine, over some rocky promontories, which is even less populated than Aninuan where I am staying. I have heard about the one restaurant here; it is Italian and supposed to be good. I find it, and also at it the large English family who spent the whole day hogging the best beach chairs back in Aninuan. They appear to have chartered their own outrigger canoe and pilot -- no dirty rocky road for them -- and thankfully are about to leave. Unsurprisingly they had the best table, which I claim victoriously. The spaghetti puttanesca is genuinely Italian, like The Man Of No Words at the restaurant; the service, like the two waitresses, is genuinely Filipino. I practically have to beg to be given a menu, despite that there are only two tables occupied. But I get to sit beachside and watch the twilight turn to night, eating my first non-Filipinized non-Filipino food in weeks, and it is Good.
My company at the restaurant arean intermittently loud Filipino family who mostly keep to themselves, and a table of drunkish, late-middle-aged, haggard-looking mixed bag of European men accompanied by a couple of silent, younger but nonetheless uxorial-looking Filipinas. One man, Sebastian, says nearly nothing but eventually gets up and staggers off in that deliberate, zombie-state way of someone who is not new to heavy drinking. Later, he reappears and sits down at my table; almost immediately his wife (?) locates him and looks into my eyes while apologizing repeatedly with deep and urgent desperation, gradually herding him away to Somewhere Else.
320 pesos later it is 7 pm and dark when I hit the road for the trip home, surrounded by the hushy night sound of crickets and the occasional firefly making its dotted-line way across the tree-canopy black holes in the starry sky. Sometimes a bat puts an end to this dotted line, which makes me melancholy.
Back at Tamaraw (= "water buffalo"), where I am staying, I quickly change into my bathing trunks, wander down the strand as far away from beach lighting as I can get, remove my trunks again and slip into the womb-temperature ocean for a weightless escape under the night sky, which continues to be starry; over all, the sound of slowly crashing waves. Eventually I return, re-clothed, to the little table and chair outside the door to my room, my gaze hovering dreamily just above no point in particular over the night beach, and am soaked with the sense of a day well lived.
I stroll further, a little nervously past some aggressive-looking horned but tethered goats, their ropes stretching well into the road. A water buffalo is tethered a safe distance away. Finally I am at the next beach down from mine, over some rocky promontories, which is even less populated than Aninuan where I am staying. I have heard about the one restaurant here; it is Italian and supposed to be good. I find it, and also at it the large English family who spent the whole day hogging the best beach chairs back in Aninuan. They appear to have chartered their own outrigger canoe and pilot -- no dirty rocky road for them -- and thankfully are about to leave. Unsurprisingly they had the best table, which I claim victoriously. The spaghetti puttanesca is genuinely Italian, like The Man Of No Words at the restaurant; the service, like the two waitresses, is genuinely Filipino. I practically have to beg to be given a menu, despite that there are only two tables occupied. But I get to sit beachside and watch the twilight turn to night, eating my first non-Filipinized non-Filipino food in weeks, and it is Good.
My company at the restaurant arean intermittently loud Filipino family who mostly keep to themselves, and a table of drunkish, late-middle-aged, haggard-looking mixed bag of European men accompanied by a couple of silent, younger but nonetheless uxorial-looking Filipinas. One man, Sebastian, says nearly nothing but eventually gets up and staggers off in that deliberate, zombie-state way of someone who is not new to heavy drinking. Later, he reappears and sits down at my table; almost immediately his wife (?) locates him and looks into my eyes while apologizing repeatedly with deep and urgent desperation, gradually herding him away to Somewhere Else.
320 pesos later it is 7 pm and dark when I hit the road for the trip home, surrounded by the hushy night sound of crickets and the occasional firefly making its dotted-line way across the tree-canopy black holes in the starry sky. Sometimes a bat puts an end to this dotted line, which makes me melancholy.
Back at Tamaraw (= "water buffalo"), where I am staying, I quickly change into my bathing trunks, wander down the strand as far away from beach lighting as I can get, remove my trunks again and slip into the womb-temperature ocean for a weightless escape under the night sky, which continues to be starry; over all, the sound of slowly crashing waves. Eventually I return, re-clothed, to the little table and chair outside the door to my room, my gaze hovering dreamily just above no point in particular over the night beach, and am soaked with the sense of a day well lived.
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