works of wanderlust

Tag: japan

  • japan-oramas, one

    November has ended, and on the last weekend of the month I time travelled across sixteen timezones, arriving back home before I left Tokyo. Weird, huh? Our flight left Narita airport at 18:30 on Saturday evening and we arrived in Edmonton at 16:20 the same day.

    International travel can mess with your mind… and your circadian rhythms. It took me most of Sunday to glom back onto Mountain Standard, and then just when I thought I was doing fine I tossed and turned until 3am. Ah, jet lag, you nasty witch.

    All that is to say, our near-three week vacation in Japan is done.

    I have many thoughts, and (a) there is no possible way, still slightly jet lagged, to get them all into even a couple blog posts, and (b) I do want to break the surface tension of that reluctance and my lack of posting here for that duration and write something.

    We landed in Tokyo nearly three weeks ago. Phew! Has it been that long already? I was equally jet lagged as I am now, but going in the opposite direction. Sixteen timezones is no joke. But, we got out on foot (and train) and explored the city for five whole days.

    And you can see a lot of even a massive city like Tokyo in five days. I mean, you can’t even see enough of it or even a significant portion of it, but you can see a lot. And a city like Tokyo throw a lot at you.

    We stayed about six blocks from Shibuya Station, which if you know nothing else about Tokyo you might know it for that crazy scramble crosswalk where millions of tourists flock to simply cross a major intersection in a bustle of people.

    We did the stereotypical thing and filmed ourselves crossing it. And I think the locals hate that in their beautiful bustling and glowing city what people get kinked about is crossing an intersection whilst making a selfie. I did not selfie.

    The thing I noted most strongly about Tokyo is that it seems a lot like a lot of cities that have been mashed together into one super city. We would catch the the train, ride fifteen minutes through three or four or eight stops and then get off, only to emerge from the chaos of the rail system into a brand new place. You’d pop up by the Imperial Palace one day and stroll by some lovely gardens surrounded by a serious business district. Then we’d take the train a few stops and suddenly I’m in Akihabara and I feel like I just popped into a video game level, or another stop and boom: temple, or yes another stop and wham: fish market.

    We ascended two towers whilst we were in Tokyo: the Metropolitan Government Observatory (pictured) and walked around inside there for about an hour just looking at the endless city, and then later The Tokyo Sky Observatory, at night, and seeing endless lights stretching to the horizon made us realize that we were in a sea of millions of people and millions of stories, and there was no way we could ever see even a fraction of part of it all.

    Of course it is really the culture shock of Tokyo that caught me off guard. I feel like I try to be open minded enough that nothing truly shocks me. I am a trained scientist after all, observing the world with a rational mind of curious interest. And maybe it is only that as foreign as you expect a place to feel, it usually turns out to be foreign in ways you didn’t expect. That is to say, a lot of things feel mundanely familiar if only because we live in a great big interconnected global village and a lot of the world has been homogenized into a grey paste of sameness. But then the other bits that you didn’t expect rise up above the sameness of bank machines and traffic lights and potato chips and homelessness and starbucks and those differences are so stark against that grey backdrop that they are all the more surprising because of it.

    We went to temples and museums and markets and seven-elevens and ramen shops and kabuki theatre shows that brought us new experiences in Tokyo that will stick in my head for decades.

    And yet, here we are back home again.

    It had snowed a day before we arrived back in Edmonton. It was cold and grey, but grey in a freshly arrived winter sort of way. And lots of people were happy to see us back, asking about our adventures and to regale them with stories of what we’d seen.

    So much, I’d tell them. Where to start?

    I think it will need to dribble out as I remember it, little bits of it will poke up into future reflections or recollections as I write and remember in the coming months. And that is a good kind of travel experience, I think, the kind that worms into your brain and fills it with so much that you can’t possibly explain to anyone in any coherent way what it all meant.

  • head over feets, thirteen

    Lucky.

    All good things begin with the number thirteen, right?

    The race kinda wrapped our season, however you look at it, and as an autumn overseas vacation looms I’ve been contemplating things besides long distance training. That said, I’ve been trying to get in some physical activity amid dealing with a minor health issue this past couple weeks.

    On my docket were…

    Tuesday, after a full day and some of post-race recovery, I drove across town to the pool. Gah, I’m getting so tired of not having a pool close by… but I deal and in a couple weeks the local one will be through it’s refurb and I can get back into that groove over the winter. For now tho, laps in Mill Woods.

    I didn’t do much the week that followed the race, but on Sunday (in the wake of the daylight savings time change) we were back to our regular meetup and coffee club run, logging eight klicks in what suddenly felt a lot like impending winter weather. The leaves are all well-gone and there were icy patches on the trail because the temps were hanging out below zero when we started. Long pants weather for sure.

    Did I mention that I gave up caffeine? I don’t know that it is a permanent switch up quite yet, but I’m testing out a theory around this persistent cough I’ve been fighting and I feel like it might be less of a respiratory issue and more of a reflux issue. Too much info, I know, but them’s the reality of my so-called fitness life. So I’m off caffeine for a month or so… meaning I spent most of this week in full on withdrawal. Headaches, muscle aches, general tired and grumpiness. All that, along with a dose of snow late in the week meant I didn’t really get out much at all for a few days.

    I did make my way to the pool again on Friday morning and I swam a bunch of laps. The post-caffeine withdrawal phase felt pretty good and my lungs feel like they’ve opened up. I actually had a mighty good swim and then a nice long soak in the hot tub.  I doubt I’ll have a chance to get in another swim before vacation tho, and hopefully my home pool will be open again when we get back, so fingers crossed that’s my last drive across town for a swim for a long while. It is a really nice pool, but a thirty minute drive was a little much.

    Of course, Sunday despite the flipping cold weather, we met up at the rec centre as usual for an eight klick run. Just as much to remind me of my caffeine withdrawal as anything else, it was a slog. I ran out of gas around six klicks in and ended up doing some walking. I have been doing a whole nutritional reset as part of trying to get this reflux issue under control before our trip, so I’m sure I was just in a bit of calorie debt, too. Ugh! Getting old.

    On Monday I sat down and worked out a game plan for Japan: I’m bringing along one change of running gear, my watch (of course) and I bought some new running shoes to double as fresh travel, walking around shoes but which will more than serve in case I opt to go out running. My best bet is to hope I’m not too jet lagged that I can make a Park Run just a few days after we arrive, and if not that, there is another one much later in the trip. Otherwise, it looks like I might just scope out the streets and parks of Tokyo and try and find a nice homemade route. Travel running is always a glorious challenge.

  • urban sketch, four

    I’m nearly three-quarters of the way through my October sketching challenge as I write this and I have yet to miss a day.

    Two things have emerged from that effort:

    First, I think my drawing has legitimately improved. Doing anything daily is inevitably going to contribute to the effort of general practice and growth, but there is always the risk of hitting a plateau and not realizing any noticeable gains. Self-perception is hard. Self-evaluation is even more difficult. But drawing every day feels a bit like running every day: you build on the gains from the day before and the vibe is never really given to a recovery phase where things stagnate or decay back to the starting state. Whatever that metaphor means for the effort of learning an artistic skill, it feels like it is meaningful here as a comparison.

    Second, me concern for lacking meaningful subject matter in the aesthetic wasteland that is the suburban clutter that is the place I live has ebbed into a kind of seeking the beauty of nature fighting against the cookie-cutter-ness of this world. Sure, the houses and windows and rooflines all start to look the same, but the trees are poking out around them in different ways and framing scenes with a kind of pleasing quality that I am getting better each day at noticing. I think that is important. I mean, I wrote earlier about my struggles with getting out of the photographer’s mindset and of moving away from thinking of my sketches as photos with an ink pen instead of pixels. I think I am starting to feel that vibe a little more strongly as I plonk myself down in unlikely places and frame a scene with sharp inked lines to give a sense of something beyond what is just there.

    My plan with this effort was to re-prime my sketching senses before we head off on a vacation where I think the world will be significantly more sketch-able than suburban prairie Canada. Japan is graced with interesting architecture and a kind of shinto-driven aesthetic that emboldens spaces with a kind of symmetry and beauty that one could spend a lifetime studying to attempt to understand. I have a couple weeks to sketch it, so I wanted to go in hot and ready as I have ever been to draw it—and draw from it.

  • japanese, part three

    I am approaching fifty, but attending an introductory language class kinda makes me feel like I’m in kindergarten again. We count in unison, ask each other our names and ages, play games identifying colours, and get stickers for good work. 

    I also have the least interesting origin story of the bunch, I’ve concluded. Everyone else seems to have a much better reason to be learning a challenging new language than my “I just decided to learn something new” one day reply. 

    One guy has family in Japan and he’s trying to learn how to talk to his grandmother. He already seems to know quite a lot and jumps to answer almost every question before my brain can even start to do the back and forth translation and get words to my mouth.

    Another guy is trying to immigrate there and wants some basic proficiency under his belt before he leaves. He spent the break yesterday getting help from the teaching assistant proofreading an email he needed to send about his immigration process or something—I only half listened from across the room.

    I was chatting with another dude after class and he had apparently grown up in Japan because his parents were working there when he was very young, and was fluent in Japanese at one point. There were recordings of himself speaking as a kid and he decided he wanted to be able to understand what his younger self was saying so… language classes.

    And me. Just interested. Lifelong learner, I reply. I dabble—I am just in a phase. Will I still be poking at this in a year? It would seem a bit of a waste, otherwise, right?

    In a month or so we’ll be in Japan. Immersed. 

    I’ve got a few basic phrases locked into my brain, but the daily drilling of new ones goes in fits and starts and I’m not as consistent as I need to be with the effort. Also, my brain is not as young and spongelike as it used to be. In one ear and out the other, is how the phrase goes.  I can say it twenty times in class and seem to have it just right, but then—out of context, perhaps—I can’t seem to latch back onto it again.

    Learning languages is not for everyone. It seems like some people just get it—or at least they are faking it way better than I am. I persevere, but am humbled by the effort.

  • japanese, part one-ish

    I have written here previously about a couple of my self-study efforts to start learning Japanese, in part for our upcoming trip to Tokyo, but also just as—well—something interesting to pursue. Skills, languages, all that stuff—it broadens the mind, right?

    I figured I would make my updates a bit more formal because as of last week I signed up for actual in-person lessons. Right-o. Things are getting a bit more serious all of a sudden. The local Japanese Society, a cultural organization made up of and supporting Japanese immigrants happens to have a series of courses to teach the language to anyone interested in learning.

    The first class of my introduction to Japanese is tomorrow evening.

    We have a homework, tests, and cultural things to do in between classes.

    I just passed something like day 175 in Duolingo, and my hiragana and katakana skills are starting to settle into a comfortable familiarity—by which I mean I have about fifty percent recognition of the characters and their sounds. This is probably more-so with the hiragana, for now, but I’m starting to be able to look at characters when I see them out in the wild and sound things out. I mean, I usually don’t have the vocabulary to know what the word means, but I can sound it out—which is a great start, I think.

    I also bought myself a dictionary. That’s it. Nothing special to add about it, other than like any time I bought a translation dictionary it is a fun time looking up words and just flipping around through the pages looking for curiosities. 

    And, less useful but maybe interesting as the project progresses, our next door neighbours are hosting an exchange student from Japan for the year and she has already poked her nose over the fence to say hi (mostly to meet the dog, of course) and maybe there will be some opportunities to speak to her in Japanese when I get some lessons (and verbal confidence) under my belt.

    But the core of it, really, I think is the lessons. Eight weeks of three hour focused instruction before we go, and then I can try the test for the second level course and keep going in the new year and when we’re back from our vacation. By next summer I suppose I could have some serious progress.