More Japan!

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Alright, so to continue where I left off...

Saturday: My parents had arrived in Tokyo the night before, so we (Brandon, Pete and I) were going to meet them at Tokyo station and then head down to Nagoya. Tokyo station is ridiculously huge, so Pete, Brandon and I went there the day before and took pictures of the signs of where to go and where we wanted to meet them. And it worked 😊 So we met up with my parents and then were off to Nagoya. Since it was New Years eve (the busiest week of the year), we had to wait a little while before we got seats on the train. We took a bullet train, so it only took about 2.25 hours to go about 300 miles (way better than Philippines where it takes 7 hours to go 150 miles). That evening we went up in some tall building so that we could see the view of the city. Nagoya is a lot bigger than I thought it was. I think it has around 5 million people in the metro area. That night, we went to some Japanese place for dinner. The menu (including the prices) were all in Japanese, so Pete had his work cut out translating. So we just had him order. It turned out alright, but the portions were incredibly small and pretty expensive. After, since we were all still hungry, we went to a Japanese fast food place. Not my favorite. It's pretty much rice (like I don't get enough of that here!) and really fatty meet. It's only about $3-$4 a bowl, so very cheap for Japan (although that's the same price as pretty decent meal here... Including a beer) and they don't serve beverages. Just water.

Sunday: This was our only full day in Nagoya, so we got subway passes and tried to see as much of the city as possible. We started out at Nagoya University and saw where Pete's going to school and his dorm room. Since it was Christmas break, there were hardly any students there, so we really didn't get a feel for what it was really like there. After that, we went to a temple. There were a lot of people there because it was New Years. They all line up to ring the bell and pray outside the temple. There are also places that you can buy fortunes and if you don't like it, then you can tie it on a tree and it will be negated. This was our first real temple (the other ones we saw were right in shopping districts in Tokyo). There were a bunch of different buildings there, so we just walked around for a while. We thought this one was pretty crazy busy, but boy were we wrong. The next one we went to we didn't even get to see because of the mass of people that were lined up (ok, maybe not lined up. Flooding in is better.) to pray for a good new year. We thought about waiting because we had no idea how long it would take or how far away it was, but we didn't want to get stuck in the mad rush and then have to fight our way out in the other direction. I'm really glad we didn't wait because we saw enough temples that week. After that, we went to see Nagoya castle (not really a castle. Just another big temple.) It was closed, but we were at least able to see it from the outside. That evening we went to a really cool modern outside complex. It's hard to explain. Look at the pictures. We could climb up and there was water on the roof and a cool tower off to the side. Again, look at the pictures. Way better description.

Monday: We left Nagoya in the morning and headed for Kyoto. Since we rode another bullet train, it only took about half an hour. Our hotel was super close to the main train station, which was great. That day we went on a walking tour of Kyoto and tried to find some of the main temples. We needed to eat lunch along our walk, so we figured that there would be many choice along the way. Wrong. Everything was closed because it was still the New Years holidays. It was either a squid place or 7eleven. Surprisingly, 7eleven has good sandwiches. The main temple that was saw that day was called Kiyomizu-dera. There were so many people there! Again, there were a lot of different temples there, so we just walked around. However, we pretty much had to go in the order that everyone did because there were so many people and couldn't disrupt the flow. The views from there were pretty great. After that, we explored Old Kyoto. That area of town would have been amazing if it weren't so busy. But since it was crazy, we again had to keep the pace or we would get lost. There were a ton of cool little shops and cafes, but it was too busy to really attempt any shopping. That night was a little frustrating. The subway isn't the best in Kyoto, but the busses are. But we didn't really know anything about the schedule, how to pay, etc. for the bus. So we thought we would try the subway. However, our map that we had was not to scale. We finally found one subway station, but it didn't connect to the line that we wanted (not quite sure why in a city like that all the subway stations aren't with the same line). Anyways, on the map it looked like it was only a couple more blocks to the next one. Not quite. Through all of this, we are walking streets that are insanely busy (I mean like Target on Black Friday busy) and it's really cold. Needless to say, I was not in a good mood that night. We finally found a station that brought us back. The main Kyoto train station had a big mall in it with a bunch of nice restaurants on the top floors, so we went to one of those for dinner. The whole menu was different meats that were fried in the same crispy crust. Pretty good, just very interesting that that's all they had to offer.

Tuesday: This was one of my favorites days. We went to Nara, which was about an hour away (by regular train) from Kyoto. It’s a “small” town (like 400,000 people) and near all the temples, there are deer just wandering around. They’re completely tame and will just walk up to you. You can also buy food to feed them and they will bow to you so that you will feed them. It was super cute. Brandon absolutely loved this. He had one deer that he fed that would not leave him alone. It kept nuzzling him and bowing so that he would get more food. It was pretty funny. We pretty much just saw temples with deer walking around. We did see the second largest wood building in the world, though. It was a temple in Nara that housed the largest (I think) bronze Buddha in the world. It was huge! There was also a backdrop behind Buddha that was made out of gold. 278 pounds of gold. So that was pretty neat to see.

Wednesday: We spent another day in Kyoto and went to the Temple of the Golden Pavilion and some zen rock garden thing. The golden temple was pretty good. It was cloudy (and it actually snowed while we were there), so the temple wasn’t nearly as stunning as it would have been if it would have been sunny. But it was still very pretty. After that, we walked to a famous zen rock garden. The grounds that housed this “garden” were gorgeous. There was a pond/lake there and very pretty foliage around. However, the rock garden wasn’t that great. It was pretty much just rocks in sand. Apparently you’re supposed to contemplate what they mean and why they were placed that way, but honestly, they just looked like rocks to me. Maybe I’m just not creative enough to look past the logistics. That night, we also ate at the Kyoto train station. It was a really nice restaurant on one of the top floors, so we got a nice view of Kyoto. They also had an English menu! So it was a pretty great dinner. Pete left us that night and took off for Korea, so after that dinner, we were on our own for translating and communicating.

Thursday: We took the bullet train down to Hiroshima and spent the day there. The city itself is really nice. Not too crazy big like Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kyoto. And it was so much less crowded than the other cities. Once we got off the train, we followed the main road to get to the area that was dedicated to the atomic bomb memorial. The first thing that we saw was the A-Bomb dome. It is a building that has been untouched (restoration wise) since the bomb in 1945. It’s incredible to see what the bomb did to the brick building. While we were there, a nice Japanese lady who was a volunteer tour guide, gave us a really good explanation of things relating to the bomb. Everything from the reasoning to why the US dropped the bomb to who created it to the after affects. It was very interesting and she did a pretty good job. After that, we went to see the various memorials around the park and then to the museum. It was a pretty depressing day, but also very educational. I’m very glad we got to experience it. That night, we decided to eat in Hiroshima before taking the train back to Kyoto. We found a place that looked good near the train station, but they didn’t have an English menu and none of them spoke any English. But we tried anyways. Pete had written down some basic menu characters (chicken, fish, beef, etc.) but we couldn’t get them to match anything on the menu. I just pointed to the chicken character and hoped for the best. Brandon pointed to some pizza and just requested “no fish” (by pointing to the fish character and shaking his head). Dad pointed to some pictures of skewers of meat. Mom pointed to a random thing on the menu that she thought had noodles. Luckily, it all turned out pretty well. I got some breaded, fried chicken that was pretty good. Brandon got some sort of white sauce pizza. Mom’s noodles were pretty good. Dad ended up with a variety of skewers of meat. Including chicken liver. Luckily, he’s not too picky. We then took the bullet train back to our hotel in Kyoto for the night.

Friday: Our last full day. We couldn’t decide what to do. We’d seen most of the major temples and didn’t really know of any other city to go to that other attractions besides temples. Brandon found something called Toei Kyoto Studio Park online that looked like a cheap, Japanese version of Universal Studios. I looked it up on tripadvisor and the reviews said that it was great for 10 year old boys. Perfect. That’s what we were doing. Mom and dad decided to see some more temples as we sent off for Ninjas and Samurais. We went to the train station and attempted to figure out which line we needed to be on to get to the station by the park. 90% of it was in Japanese and not even written in English letters. So we stood in front of the huge Kyoto train map and looked like idiots. Luckily, a nice women who spoke English helped up figure out which line we wanted. So, we took the train and the station we were supposed to get off at was super tiny. It was in a suburb and the only thing at the station was like a bathroom and vending machine. There were tons of maps, but all in Japanese. All we knew from the website was that it was a “13 minute walk from the station.” But we had no idea in what direction. We then found a map that had pictures of Ninjas and people dressed up and showed a building on the map that probably was the park. So we followed it the best we could. We made it. Everything was in Japanese at the park. The shows, the signs, everything. We went to a few ninja shows and walked around and saw where/how they filmed some of the Japanese ninja movies. It would have been way better if we could have understood anything. One attraction that we did there was called the Ninja House. We had no idea what it was, but it sounded cool. So we went. It was kinda like a tour through a ninja house. There were trap doors and hidden ways to get from room to room. We first started out as a group while a Ninja was explaining what to do (we obviously had no idea what was going on. However, there were rules in English, including “follow the Ninja’s instruction.) we then were on our own to try and get through a series of rooms that had hidden ways of getting out. It was actually pretty good and kinda difficult. There were a few that really stumped us. Brandon was also pretty excited because there was a lot of Power Ranger stuff there. After the studio park, we went back into Kyoto and me my parents for our last dinner together. We decided to go back to the place that had the English menu because the food was good and it had a good view. That night, we said good bye to my parents because we had to leave at 5:30am the next day to catch our flight back to Manila.

Saturday: What a long day. We woke up at 5 to take the train from Kyoto to Osaka airport. Then we had a flight from Osaka to Gangzhou, China. Because of the ridiculous customs and visa requirements for China, it took a while from landing to boarding our next plane. We only had an hour layover and barely made it. We got on the flight to Manila when the sign was blinking “last call.” So we made it to Manila. Our bags did not. So we headed off to the bus terminal and just hoped for the best for our luggage. The bus ride back was fine. We weren’t able to take a deluxe bus (better seats than 1^st class on a plane) because there wasn’t one leaving for another few hours. So we had to take a regular one. Pretty much just like a coach bus in the states. So not too bad. Except for the fact that it takes 7 hours to get from Manila to Baguio (about 150 miles. Ridiculous.). So we made it to Baguio about 2am. Our bags still weren’t there on Sunday and we hadn’t heard anything about them. Monday afternoon, we got a call saying that the bags were in Manila and they would be up to Baguio that night. Later, the delivery guy texted me (texting is the main way of communicating here) saying that he would be arriving Baguio around 3am. I said, ok, just leave them at the guardhouse and we’ll get them in the morning. But he said that we had to be there to sign the papers and declare and damage upon delivery, otherwise, they wouldn’t be responsible for the damage. So that really sucked because we had to wake up at 3am to go claim our bags. But they were just fine, so that’s good. Overall, it was a very successful trip and I’m so glad we got to go to Korea and Japan with people who could speak the language 😊

Now we’re back to our normal life here. Brent is in the middle of hiring new math and physics teachers because the other was quit/was fired. So I’ve been part of the interview process and am observing demo lessons by a couple different candidates to see what I think of them. It’s pretty great to be a part of this process and that Brent puts so much confidence in me. Hopefully, in the next couple days we will have filled the positions and then I’ll only have to focus on my classes. Marissa and I are going to the beach this weekend to enjoy the sun. Now that we’re out of typhoon season here, the beach is pretty much always nice. So I’m hoping to get down there every couple of weeks. (It’s about 20 miles away, but takes 1.5 hours on a bus.) I’m gonna try and upload some videos from this trip soon, but our internet has been pretty bad these last couple of days, so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to.

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Photos

Pete on his bike
He rode from just outside of Tokyo to Nagoya on the bike before his semester started.

Temple in Nagoya
The unwanted fortunes

At Asuta temple
The really busy one that we didn't even get to see