Japan: family, craft, etc

It is past 10 o'clock, in the few hours we have to get up at 3am to fly to Odessa and I still haven’t finished writing about Japan, so here are some quick bullet points:

• The Japanese side of the family were very hospitable, took us on the car trip to the Kairaku-en park (one of three biggest parks in Japan), gave us presents, enjoyed playing with The Little Girl, worried about us being too cold, etc. But again the language was major barrier. I wish I could communicate my gratitude for all their generosity and kindness, so I want to send them a small present – I just need to figure out what type of English things someone from Japan may enjoy.
• It was very interesting to meet few more members of Clive’s family as until now I only met his dad, who came to visit us last year. Cheryl, the mother of the bride, used to be a computer programmer when punch-cards were in use, but now she makes beautiful miniature porcelain dolls. Luckily for me she made one for a Japanese friends and I got to see it – the level of detail and workmanship are impressive. You can see for yourself at her Miniature Porcelain dolls from Africa website.
  
• I’m glad we stayed in the small town with fewer tourist attractions, as we didn’t feel the need to rush around trying to get to see everything. Instead we could take time to pause in the small temples and enjoy sunshine in the Hachimanyama Park.
• At the same time we had an option of catching the train to other towns, while we choose not to go to Tokyo we did make it to Nikko to marvel at the beautiful architecture.
  
• Totally accidentally I managed to visit a craft store: in the shopping complex, planning to go down, we got into the lift with an old woman; she pressed the button for one of the upper floors; and once there, at least according to my husband, it took me only a second to realize what I was seeing and forget about everything else in the world. After tiny London craft shops this one looked heavenly huge, but sadly I couldn't buy everything I liked or needed.
• The wedding was held at the beautiful park and both bride and groom looked fantastic. I enjoyed both the wedding and the reception and here is a photo of me in the park before the wedding.

As always more photos can be seen on Flickr.

Japan: kuwaee

Before we went to Japan my friend gave me a short list of few useful Japanese words. One of them was kuwaee – cute. I paid more attention to the other ones, but she was right – kuwaee was the word we heard most often in Japan. Outside of our hotel room we were met with lots of smiles and adoration of Cat’s cuteness. Women of all ages were the most open and loud in their praise for the cute kid – the younger ones would often dissolve into giggles and excited hand waving, while the older ones would try to strike a conversation with The Little Girl and myself. I wish I could speak Japanese. After the reserved attitude of most London inhabitants it was fantastic to have some friendly attention and I loved to see how much love is shown towards children in Japan in general. I liked the fact that we didn’t see many prams around; most small children were carried or walked next to their parents/careers. So I did the same (as I do anyway in London when we aren’t going too far) trying to encourage The Little Girl to walk more.

The Japanese streets are free of rubbish, in over a week there I only saw one abandoned can, and so I found our walks less stressful. Here in London I constantly have to stop The Little Girl from picking up beer cans, bits of broken glass, food wrappers and cigarette buts, which often results in frustration for both of us. Anyway back to the topic of this post, in Stratford-upon-Avon we kept on running into Japanese tourist groups and it was fun to understand one word – kuwaee. Are there any words from foreign languages that you learned during your trips and still remember?

Japan: food

While in Japan The Little Girl didn’t eat much and I’m still not sure if it was due to teething, change of schedule or unfamiliarity of food. Not knowing any Japanese Clive and I were few times surprised by our food being totally different from what we imagined it to be: sweets turned out to be salty crackers; plain bread rolls full of custard filling; etc. Nearly every morning we couldn’t resist getting some pastries from Denmark Bakery and while I love Asian interpretation of European pastries sometimes we couldn’t figure out the ingredients at all, which slightly freaked Clive out, as he prefers to know what he is eating. One of my best pastry finds came at the end of our trip in the airport – green tea and white chocolate chip bagels – not surprisingly as my favourite flavour of ice-cream is green tea and trying out different types of green tea flavoured food was high on my agenda.

I also got to introduce Clive to gyoza and ate lots of sushi myself. Most of my sushi came from the supermarket as both the little girl and I were too tired by the end of the day to try to struggle through the late dinner with the rest of the family – thankfully Japanese supermarkets have great selection of sushi. On the other hand Clive got to experience a wider range of restaurants including Italian one, Italian cuisine seem to be very popular in Japan, and a proper Japanese banquet of about 12 mostly seafood courses organized by Aki’s parents in honour of the bride and groom.


Our breakfast at the hotel consisted of miso soup, rice and picked vegetables. Cat decided to use chopsticks like everyone else, despite being given a spoon by friendly staff, and she loved mixing the soup, attempting to pick up rice and generally waving them around, while the rest of us tried very hard to protect our eyes from her enthusiastic wielding of chopsticks.

Japan: traveling with a toddler

The airplane ride with a toddler wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but it was still exhausting for all of us. The little girl got very little sleep on the plane, but nevertheless behaved really well with only few protesting screams against tiredness and over-stimulation. And for me the time went by faster as I was busy trying to entertain her; get her to sleep, to drink, to eat; trying to figure out a comfortable position for myself without waking her up; to eat without her overturning the food on both of us. I wish we had a separate seat for her. I’m grateful for other babies on the plane (she loved watching them) and on-demand entertainment with good cartoons (like 2 episodes of In The Night Garden).

On board the Shinkansen bullet train

On our arrival to Utsunomiya after 12 hours on the plane and another 3 on trains we were exhausted and collapsed into bed as soon as we could at about 5:30pm - we would’ve been happy to sleep even earlier, but the hotel wouldn’t check us in before 4pm. Exhausted we slept until 7am the next morning thus beating the jetlag.

Every following day the little girl would eventually pass out in her stroller or on my shoulder for a pithily brief nap. She slept well at night next to us, occasionally kicking us in her sleep and often taking up most of the bed space by rolling about and sleeping at every possible position except parallel one to us. However the daily lack of sleep kept on accumulating eventually resulting in the session of protesting screaming on the last day when she desperately wanted to sleep while we had to pack.

Our return flight was a day one and I’m starting to agree with Clive that they are easier than night ones as we could be louder, sillier and more active. Since everyone always complains about their inability to sleep on the plane, I was surprised to notice a lot of people sleeping for long periods of time. But we didn’t get much sleep. Poor Cat asleep on the way home from airport. Our attempt to wake her up on the arrival home was met with horrible loud screeching; and so we let her sleep. She woke at 3 am for the next two mornings, but I think she is finally back to more normal schedule after staying awake from 8:40 to 19:30 yesterday. Annoyingly I still woke up at 3am today – looks like I’m struggling to flight my own jetlag while having to deal with hers.

Japan: the introduction

On Monday afternoon we returned from our trip to Japan for Tracey's (she is my husband's cousin) and Aki's wedding. I wonder how much you want to read about our trip, probably less than I am going to write. While in Japan, at times I felt that my trip consisted of being stuck in a tiny hotel room, walking around LalaSquare shopping centre and Utsunomiya train station complex. However on our arrival back my slightly altered perception of everyday things and the feeling of being away for weeks stunned me. Hence I guess it was an interesting trip full of discoveries and lessons; while traveling in Europe it is easy to forget how different other cultures can be and yet how similar people everywhere are. I was planning to write all my thoughts down, and then organize them into coherent posts. However after two days of being at home and struggling to get anything done due to jet lag, I decided to just start writing in a hope to document at least some of my experiences and thoughts while they are still fresh. So be prepared for a long, rambling and not always coherent series of posts.