works of wanderlust

Tag: travel

  • 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.

  • hiragana two

    Our plans to leap over the Pacific are become more real with each passing day, and my progress in dabbling in acquiring at least some Japanese language prior to that trip is progressing with promise.

    Sorta.

    Fluency? Heck no.

    But I am hopeful that I won’t be completely overwhelmed by even simple basics in a radically foreign country (for us, anyhow) by the time we step off that plane.

    For an English-speaking middle-aged guy who was never very good at spoken languages, Japanese has been something of a new yet familiar challenge. I have been using a multi-pronged approach that includes flash cards, Duolingo, online resources and eating large amounts of sushi. The last one probably isn’t helping much, if I’m honest… but I only half contest that because our local sushi place does use hiragana on their menu and it really does lightly boost my confidence as I start to recognize the characters better with each passing visit.

    I also forced myself into a tougher difficulty setting on Duolingo when I just recently realized I could shut off the Romanised hints in the lessons and force myself to start thinking in the hiragana characters and not just the English-like phenomes.

    None of this is an endorsement for Duolingo. I just happened to have an account and I just happened to get it for a student discount because I was registered in University.

    My take on the whole do-it-yourself, language-in-a-can approach is of course, and has always really been, one of cautious skepticism. I’ve generally been poor at languages because ranked in order I would often put my personal verbal communications skills near the bottom of my list, even in English. I won’t say I’m bad at it, but I am much better at writing and visual communication methods. I’m also a bit of an introvert, and as much as I would hesitate to ever use that as an excuse for any kind of failure to participate, I do admit that I am less inclined to strike up conversations in general… and significantly less inclined to strike up conversations in a second language. It’s just a personal quirk that I should probably get over and work on, to be honest. But to that whole point, sitting on the couch and talking to my phone, and getting frustrated because my pronunciation is either wildly off or the speech recognition is weak or maybe I’m just not learning how to talk with Japanese words is something that I do put squarely on my methodology and thus on the effectiveness of these little language lesson services. They are better than nothing, I admit, but by how much I’m yet to be sure.

    That is to say, I could probably learn much better passable Japanese by signing up for a course and being forced to talk to strangers in a classroom a few nights per week than I can ever hope to learn by unlocking little digital badges and gaming the game that I downloaded on my phone.

    And ALL of that is to tell you that what I am actually really feeling good about learning through this app is the written portion of the exam: the hiragana. I probably can’t speak well enough to be understood, and my brain locks up when I try to listen to a spoken phrase and damned if I can remember more than a few dozen words of vocabulary BUT I have started to get my mind around the character set.

    The Wife is in the narrowing of date options phase of trip planning. It may sound slightly insane but our trip window now hinges on the ride maintenance schedule at Tokyo Disneyland. Really. But it seems like we’ll be seeking a pair of seats to Tokyo before the year is out, and that is super-exciting.

    And if nothing else, at least I’ll be able to order us some tea when we arrive.

  • hiragana

    We have loosely settled on a trip across the Pacific.

    Unable to confidently travel southbound across the border for our semi-annual pilgrimage to the house of the mouse in California, my wife has set her sights on the sister park near Tokyo for sometime, hopefully, next year. And of course a couple weeks checking out more than just Disney, too.

    I love the idea of visiting Japan. The art and culture and food and architecture and everything that I feel would be familiar from the exports of media and such in which I partake locally.

    And as is my oft-usual approach to these things, I’ve started to prepare for this still-hypothetical trip by taking language lessons. In other words, I’ve been studying Japanese…for about a month now.

    And while the actual need to speak the language as a European-toned North American tourist has been repeatedly called into question by many friends, many Asian-descended themselves, I can’t help but feel having a basic grasp of how to (at the very, very least) read some of it might come in all too handy.

    I mean, let’s just forget for a moment the academically-rewarding aspect of learning any language, and take that as a given: Learning new languages is simply, well, human.

    But instead picture Brad stumbling through the Tokyo subway system or down a bustling alley and having some basic ability to read the signs for a shop or a washroom or even an exit. In that aforementioned Euro-centric approach I’ve taken to travel, the languages are almost always close enough and use the familiar latin-descended alphabet system. I get by. But arriving in Tokyo I would assume that recognition and some general familiarity with hiragana and katakana script will give me some advantage. And increase my enjoyment and comfort on such a trip, too.

    Thus, I have been learning. Learn slowly, of course, using apps and flashcards and online resources. But learning.

    And that hypothetical concept of a maybe trip to Asia next year seems a little bit more real in the process.