Kanae had planned to take us to Hachimangu – a very famous shrine – but traffic proved to be rather intense for reasons we later discovered (a very important holiday for kids turning 3, 5 and 7 is coming up and families are heading to shrines in droves). So we bypassed Hachimangu for the moment and headed to a temple (whose name I for-the-life-of-me can’t remember) that is known for it’s wonderfully thick bamboo forest. I think it’s colloquially called the Bamboo Temple. And my what a thick forest of bamboo it was. Just beauitful – with a thick carpet of lush moss only broken by the occasional stepping stone. We enjoyed a bit of thick, foamy green tea (what we realized would be our last matcha) as we took in the scenery of the bamboo forest and a playful little waterfall.

For our next Kamakura location-not-be-missed, Kanae lead the way to a Zen temple nestled in a forest and carved into the stone of a mountain side. It proved a beautiful if not a bit spooky place whose scraggly, leafless trees drove home the message that fall was coming despite today’s extraordinarily warm weather.

We walked back to Kanae’s car and started the trip back to Hachimangu with hopes that the crowds had subsided or at least a parking spot would be free. No such luck. As we drove in circles, slowly, looking for a parking spot, we realized that time was getting short and Kanae, Riko and Rio would soon have to head back to Kanae’s parents home in order to get their ride to the airport. Ah, how quickly time flies. We finally found a spot and Kanae hurried us to a Thai restaurant she had mentioned earlier. Aware of the time, we all quickly ate up our respective tasty Thai dishes and rushed back through the now bustling crowds of children in kimono and parents and formal wear.

We made it back in time to Kanae’s parents, and sadly waved Kanae, Riko and Rio goodbye with hopes, no, assurances that we will see them in the States soon. It was then back to packing. Our bikes were still unwrapped and unready so we got to work; the bubble wrap, tape, bikes and bike bags all lay in wait. Kanae’s father, Meghan and I all spent the next hour with greasy hands trying to protect every protrusion and side of the bike from rough baggage handlers – all while trying to keep the bikes as small as possible. It’s quite unlikely that we’ll get away with the bike bags as regular checked luggage but if we do, it means we’ll save about 400USD in over-sized baggage charges. Please, please, please let us not incur those charges.

Bike packed, we popped them in the car, washed our hands and headed into house for our final, and always delicious, dinner prepared by Mrs.Hitomi . Tonight was chicken with broccoli and pasta followed by the again always delicious fresh sliced apple. Our final dinner in Japan and homecooked. What a treat! After dinner, we had much needed showers, ensured that our bags were, mostly, in order, grabbed Inu-chan from his new favorite napping place on the piano, and headed to bed.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that tomorrow night I will be back home in Washington DC. It’s not a vacation. We’re going home for good. And not only does that mean readjusting to a culture and country that I feel like I should know (but I don’t), but also means leaving Japan, a place I have grown to love and be very comfortable in during these last three years. But maybe that’s why it’s time to go. I’m not ready to get so comfortable yet – it’s important to mix things up every now and them.

So, I guess this is our last post from Japan. If you are in the US, we will no doubt see you very soon. If you are in Japan, we’ll be in touch and no doubt see you all fairly soon as well.

After breakfast back at the house, we headed to Haneda airport to pick up our cat from Krystal and Yuya, who flew down from Hokkaido with him this morning. Happily, Kanae offered to drive us to the airport on her way to the hairdresser in Tokyo. It was a quick exchange in the airport, and with a cat in a bag we headed into Tokyo. Inu-chan (our cat’s name) was dead silent, probably on account of pure shock from his airplane experience. We had been debating between taking the train back from Tokyo – about and hour and a half ride with two train changes – or waiting for their hair appointment to end and getting a ride home with Kanae. In the end we decided the crowded subway would be worse then a couple hours alone in the car, so we wandered around the Omotesando area while Kanae and the girls got their hair done.

Christophe actually stayed in Tokyo after the rest of us headed back with the cat. He went to a concert with a buddy who we had hoped to meet up with earlier in the week but who had had the flu. I took the cat back and introduced him to Kanae’s parents home. Kanae and I set about making pizzas for dinner, and by the time the dough had finished rising Inu-chan had come out from behind the couch and was happily inspecting the room. I was amazed by how quickly he adjusted to the new space. I guess he did remember me after all, since it took him no time at all to start nuzzling me and following me around meowing (you have to take the good with the bad when it comes to cats).

It was a relaxed evening of making and eating pizzas. Kanae’s brother’s family lives on the second floor of the house so they all joined us for dinner. After dinner we all took baths one by one, and just hung around until we got tired (actually until the adults got tired, Kanae’s girls and their cousins seemed to have an endless quantity of energy!). I went to bed before Christophe got back and don’t even remember his return – I guess the day had been more tiring then I realized.

sadly the internet is being very weird (big surprise) and we cant seem to upload pictures (but we can write and upload posts…). Hopefully we will figure it out soon, but in the meantime please enjoy these very delayed, no picture posts – yikes, things are going downhill fast at the end here!

3 days until we are on a plane for America!

I’d like to go into it, but well, it’s a fish market. It has fish and lots of it. We walked around, took some pictures, and headed toward to food stand and restaurant area that we had walked through earlier in the morning to dig on some delicious fresh (VERY fresh) sea food rice bowls. I had a tuna/salmon/salmon roe bowl and Meghan had a tuna/salmon. Delighted, we thanked the restaurant owner and chef and walked around a bit more to find a sushi place that would fill our desire to get a slice of each kind of cut of tuna for comparison. We found one and treated ourselves to one piece of akami, one piece of chu-toro, and one piece of o-toro each. Very satisfied, we headed away from Tsukiji to meet the Tokyo morning in Ginza.

We milled about Ginza for a while when we realized that it was only about 9 and nothing was open. Starbucks. Macha Latte and Coffee accompanied by people watching. Once the stores began opening, we headed out and were first met by the Sony building. Strongly considering the purchase of a Sony television after getting settled in back in the States, I thought we could peruse the offerings of the Sony building. Nice, unashamed consumerism. We walked the many floors of the Sony building, played with the many toys, and feasted our eyes on massive HD televisions we could, mostly, never afford.

A bit tired, we headed from Ginza to Tokyo and grabbed the next train to Kamakura – the latest place of residence with the wonderful Hitomi Family, parents to a wonderful friend of Meghan and mine from Muroran, Kanae, who would be arriving with her two girls that evening. Arriving in Kamakura, we decided to walk back to their home (which resides down a network of twisting roads and on a hill). It took us quite a while, and we did get a bit lost, but we eventually found our way. Tired and fairly stinky after both sleeping in an internet cafe and walking all about Tokyo, we grabbed naps and showers before Kanae, Riko (7) and Rio (3) showed up.

Around 7pm a small child burst into the room – the girls had arrived. Christophe and Kanae prepared the tons of fresh sashimi that Kanae had brought down from Hokkaido, while I partook in tickle wars with the girls. Dinner was another amazing meal of fresh fresh fish and two beautiful Hokkaido Kegani (hairy crabs). It was a good day of eating.

We got to Tokyo around one, grabbed some lunch then wandered around Akihabara (christophe’s favorite part of the city). After a while we worked our way up to Ueno, where we spent some time in the park and the shopping areas surrounding it. Around 7pm Mika, one of my close girlfriends from Hokkaido who moved down to Tokyo last year, met up with us and we went for dinner. We enjoyed a night of yakitori and beer, oden and beer, and finally darts and beer. It was a wonderful evening of catching up and at the end of the night it was a difficult goodbye.

Since we were planning to go to Tsukiji super early in the morning and it was already past midnight we decided to hole up in a manga-kisaten for the night (basically an internet cafe where you get a small cubical with computer, TV and sometimes video games. It’s about 4am now and we are just turning off everything (watched Da Vinci Code, played some games, ya know) so it will be a short night. We will be up at 6:45am tomorrow to get out of here by 7!

We got to the platform (three stories up) and got on the train. The shinkansen was an enjoyable 2 hour ride, very fast indeed. We spent the following 2 hours navigating between local trains and transfers to get to Kamakura station. Our shoulders ached, our feet ached, everything hurt. We got to the station and happily met Kanae’s father (Kanae being a very good friend from Muroran whose parents have so graciously offered to house us, our cat and our luggage as we prepare to leave Japan).

We even more happily loaded all the bags and bikes into the car. In a state of pure joy we enjoyed a large dinner of chicken wings, baked potatoes and carrots, pasta and rice – followed by persimmons and apples for dessert. Happy doesnt even begin to describe the feeling brought on by an offer of baths, soaking our aching bodies. Completely satisfied and exhausted we collapsed into warm futons and went to bed.

The local trains, we learned, would have 8 transfers, take 9 hours and cost 8000 yen (about $80) each. The shinkansen route would mean getting on at a station about 10km away, take two hours to Shin Yokohama, then there would be several transfers to get down to Kamakura and cost 13,000 yen ($130) each. The rent-a-car agency we went to told us we could rent a car and drive it to tokyo, then leave it there- but pre gas and toll roads, the car would cost about 40,000 yen ($400)- since we were not bringing it back to Osaka.

Starving, we had been walking all over the city but hadnt eaten lunch and it was about 2pm, we headed into a big department store in search of food. On the top floor they were having a “Hokkaido Food Fair” so we amused ourselves walking around looking at the brands that were so familiar to us. There was even a Muroran stand serving yakitori! I wanted to ask the lady manning the stand if she was from Muroran, but the line for yakitori was pretty long.

We went to an Okonomiyaki place for lunch – it is an osaka specialty and we hadnt had it yet. Over lunch we decided the shinkansen would be the best option, but we would need to catch a mid-day train at least, since we didnt want to arrive in kamakura in the middle of the night. Plus we would need time to properly pack up the bikes, with a few transfers at the end of the trip we wanted the bags to be as easy as possible to carry. So we made a new plan -tomorrow we would get up, rebuild the bikes, pack everything onto them, bike the 10km to shin- osaka station, there take apart the bikes completely getting them down to the smallest size possible and securing them with bubble wrap and tape, then buy a ticket and board the next train, and head to Kamakura.

Liam was back when we got home, so we hung out with him for a bit, telling him of our plan. For dinner that night we did yakiniku (grilled meat) with Liam, Hiromi, Brad and Brad’s girlfriend (whose name I somehow totally missed). A lowkey final eve in Osaka (we hope).

On October 26th, Meghan and I spent a good bit of the day lazing about and preparing our bags for the upcoming trip to Tokyo. Since Hiromi had the day off of work, we watched another one of the movies we bought in Korea and then continued to make sure our things were in order. Then we bought our but tickets – two on the overnight bus from Osaka to Tokyo with the Willer Bus Company.

Once Liam got back from work, we all decided to share the last couple beers from the fridge and head out to dinner. We marched out onto busy Route 30 and headed to a little restaurant right next to the drunken pig themed bar we had been to the first night. This restaurant, an izakaya or Japanese style pub, had a different theme however: baby strippers. As in, babies who strip. Not regular live babies – don’t work. The stripper babies were modeled after the 3D Dancing Babies of a while back. Now that I write this, I believe I mentioned it a couple days ago. Well, here are some pictures. And his dance moves are awesome.

After eating some delicious fried things on sticks, we headed to the bike garage, checked out our bikes and began ferrying all of our bags from Liam and Hiromi’s 5th floor apartment down to the ground floor. With bikes and bags together again, we hurried down to the main road to meet the bus.

When we finally arrived at the bus stop, we were met by a tall, lean representative of the Willer Bus Company wearing a too-small suit, tiny red apron and a hell of an attitude. Right away, he let us know that we were not allowed to take our bikes on the bus. We knew this. You can’t ever take bikes on buses and train – unless they are wrapped up in a special bag as we always do. We told him not to worry. That the bikes would become quite small. He persisted: no matter what size the bikes became, the bus would not accept the bicycles. We ignored him, wrapped up our bikes and placed them in the underside storage of the bus as he checked in other people riding the bus.

After a bit, he returned to us and told us he would not allow the bus to leave unless the bikes and bags were removed. We continued to tell him that it wasn’t a problem – that the bikes were the same size as moderately large air-travel luggage. (We even asked the bus driver and luggage handler what they thought and they seemed to agree with us that not only were the bags ok to travel but that there was plenty of room under the bus – SINCE IT WAS EMPTY.) No go. We told him we would buy another ticket for the larger luggage. No go. Then I asked for the phone number for his manager, called him up, and was essentially told that as long as we didn’t hold the company responsible for damages to our bikes, they could ride. He asked to talk to his manager on my phone, hung it up, handed it back to me, and said, “This bus willl not leave with those bikes. You’re making the rest of the bus riders angry.” The bus’ departure time came and went. Finally, 10 minutes after the bus was supposed to leave, I quickly removed all the luggage and Meghan, in an English rage fueled by the guy’s awful attitude, the rain and possibly a couple beers, exploded at him. The bus left, Meghan’s rage subsided, I casually tore into him a bit in Japanese and he left.

Wonderful people that they are, Liam and Hiromi stood by us during the encounter and even helped us to haul our incredibly heavy bags and wrapped-up bikes back to their place where we grumbled about the guy in the red apron and found out that, indeed, there was no mention of a restriction on bikes on their website. Very grumpy, we went to sleep; not knowing how we would get to Tokyo.

We have encountered so much kindness during this trip. So many people have helped us out, slightly bent the rules for us, or let us slide in situations simply because we were kind to them and they were excited by our travels. Only a few times, very few times, did we encounter people like the guy from Willer Bus Company – people that just woke up on the wrong side of the bed and seemed to want to make things as difficult as is physically possible. Thankfully, and I’m certain it’s this way throughout most of the world, people like him are the exception as opposed to the rule.

Christophe and I have a bad habit of not going anywhere in the cities where we have friends to stay with – other then the places those friends take us. When we were in Matsue, Dustin had dragged us out of the house every afternoon, but we had only gone out once without him. So it was, that in Osaka Dustin was still getting me out of the house (and not to the local mall or bar).

Dustin is doing a 33 temple pilgrimage (slowly) to 33 temples in the Kansai area that have Kannon statues (a certain kind of Buddha statue). Today he hoped to get to a few of those that were in the Osaka area. The first one, Fuji dera, was only a 30 minute ride on the Kintestu line (a privet rail line) and so we met at the train.

The ride was nice, working our way out of the city into what I will call ‘densely populated farmland’. On the train we sat across from a crew of 5 elementary school boys. After watching them junken (rock paper scissors) to decide which one would speak to us (the boy who lost this game stared at his hand as if it had betrayed him to the devil) we struck up a conversation. The boys, it seemed, were heading out to pick mikans (clementines). I suppose living in the mostly treeless city of Osaka, fruit picking in the countryside is a popular event for young kids – these were not the only mikan gatherers we would meet on the trains. The group of students readily accessed their English lessons, each introducing themselves to us.

“I am Hiroki”, “I am Keisuke”, “I am Satoru”, they went down the line til the last… “I am Alex”.

Spoken flawlessly Dustin and I both cracked up – “Alex” was clearly the main character from whatever English text they use at school.

The ride continued in that vein, with “I am the terminator” coming over to join the group and offer a string of American pop culture words – “He is shrek, he is Bill Clinton, he is Obama, he is Mike Labowski, He is MacDonald’s…”. When we arrived at our stop we waved goodbye to the young Osaka boys, who hollered back at us “see you!” in true Japanese school child fashion.

The temple, Fuji dera, is so named because of the large number of fuji trees (wisteria I believe) that grow in its compound. Sadly, the flowers aren’t in bloom right now, but it was still a striking temple area with a few well placed pine trees, board stone walks, and several large statues scattered about the grounds. The Kannon statue was not open for view today, so we continued to the next temple.

It turned out the next temple was actually in Nara – up a rather windy mountain which happily had a very convenient bus running up and down it. This complex was huge, with a variety of giant stone sculptures of Buddha scattered about. The leaves were already beginning to change, adding beautiful reds to the scenery from our mountain peak. The main Kannon statue was an old wooden statue that is said to have once given a blind man his sight. The temple is most well known for its efforts in helping the blind (it has sponsored several schools and centers) and the fact that it was the first completely handicap accessible temple in Japan (a feat considering it is running up the top of a mountain. It was a really beautiful temple and we took our time wandering its grounds.

Meanwhile, I am told, Christophe woke up. He then proceeded to make bacon and eggs for our hosts- Liam and Hiromi. About the time that Dustin and I left the temple to begin our journey home, Christophe, Liam and Hiromi were setting out for Osaka Castle grounds where we were all meeting for a picnic. Amazingly Dustin and I didnt arrive too much after them, as they had to stop for supplies and such on the way.

The BBQ was not only our small group, but rather was a group of about 20 foreigners and Japanese English students who all live in Osaka. Many we had met the night before, some we were just meeting now. Always a fan of BBQs we happily joined, and before I knew it someone had placed a cup of Merlot in my hands – I was happy.

After a while Christophe and I went for a walk of the castle grounds, then met up with Dustin to walk him to his train. By the time we were seeing him off it had gotten dark and started raining, so we rolled back to the apartment, arriving just before Hiromi and Liam. We were all pretty tired from the night before. Liam went straight to bed at 9pm, Hiromi, Christophe and I watched the movie Iron Man before passing out.