A Series of International Incidents: The Disney Debacle*

For the fourth and fifth days of my mother's visit we went to Tokyo Disney, both Land and Sea. I love Disney more than may be healthy, so this leg of the trip worked well for me.

Luckily, my mom also likes Disney, so we had a great time! It's pretty much the same Disney as the first time Lee and I went, except this time I got to go on the Monsters Inc ride without any drama or waiting in the rain for hours in vain. Cute, but it certainly wouldn't have been worth hours of waiting! My mother was as impressed by Disney Sea as we were.  Other highlights of this trip included the Aladdin carousel:

Fancy macarons for dessert with lovely fresh raspberries, something you can't really find in Kanazawa:

Japanese pizza with surprise corn and ham, in the shape of Mickey:

The electric parade:

Which had some really, really cool effects, like Genie changing colors:

There was also a fairly creepy collection of Duffy bears:

We took a ride on the gondolas around the lagoon of Disney Sea to wrap up our Disney visit, a nice little boat ride in the dark with the park lit up; it was really nice:

There are more pictures up at Flickr, and I recommend looking through at least the Electric Light Parade ones. They're shiny. After Disney, it was time to head off to Kanazawa with a side trip to Mito, which will be shown next time.

*Disney not particularly a debacle - the titles of this series of posts references A Series of Unfortunate Events because the international incidents part is semi-accurate and coming up with alliterative names for the rest of it is amusing.

A Series Of International Incidents: The Terrifying Tourism*

On the third day of my mother's visit we went to the Imperial Gardens, which was the second time for me, and it was a bit gray and rainy. Still a very nice place, but it seems as though many water features in Tokyo, including the waterfall here, were either off or set to very low, probably for the purposes of electric conservation.

After seeing the garden, we had a haunted tour of Tokyo lined up. It turned out to just be the two of us and an American employed in Korea who was on vacation in Japan taking it. While the haunted tour was not very spooky, there was a lot of interesting information about Japanese history and the Japanese mythology of things like goblins, and we also walked through some previously unseen areas of Tokyo. We saw some creepy old pre-WWII houses, very small, very wooden, and surprisingly still standing and housing tenants:

We learned about the kitsune, or white fox spirits, who grow an extra tail every 100 years and extra powers to go with those tails. They can be good or bad, and can shapeshift like many Japanese spirits. Many temples have kitsune statues to protect them from malevolent spirits:

We stopped by a Zen Buddhist temple...

...saw the grave of that guy who did all the famous Japanese paintings like the great wave and all the goblins, Hokusai Katsushika...

 

...visited a temple known for its affiliation with toads, who in Japanese lore heal skin afflictions - you can buy a toad statue from the temple, take it home, and when it's cured your skin condition, return it to the temple with thanks...

...and finished up the tour in the Kappa area of Tokyo. Supposedly, this area was swampland with horrible drainage. One resident, fed up with the lack of drainage, made a deal with the local kappa, turtle-ish water demons, to dig a sewer system, and the area never had water problems again.

The kappa in the Harry Potter books really is not true to Japanese lore. True Japanese kappa do not have long spindly fingers but rather webbed fingers, and to defeat one, you simply bow to him and the water in his head dish will fall out, leaving him at your mercy. If you can refill it with water, he will be forever grateful. They, like most Japanese spirits, can change form into people. 

Upon learning that my favorite vegetables are the same as the kappa (cucumbers, zucchini, and yellow squash), the tour guide hinted that I may in fact be a kappa. I suppose we will never truly know.

We finished up the tour at one of Tokyo's most famous shrines (Britney Spears visited!), Sensō-ji. We purified ourselves in the incense out front, so that no goblins followed us home, and thus ended the tour.

For more pictures, check out Flickr, and tune in next time for the Tokyo Disney portion of the adventure!

*Tourism not particularly terrifying - the titles of this series of posts references A Series of Unfortunate Events because the international incidents part is semi-accurate and coming up with alliterative names for the rest of it is amusing.

A Series Of International Incidents: The Anguished Arrival*

After living here for nearly three years, my mom came to visit! I met her at the train station in Tokyo (she took the train from the airport), with all her luggage in tow:

Most of the luggage was actually exotic food like long-grain rice, various varieties of Twizzlers, and Kosher dill pickles from the US.  There was also a single and inexplicable can of tunafish. We managed to man(woman?)handle it all over to the apartment before trying to find an apparently now-defunct Thai restaurant I'd selected on the internet as a dinner destination.  That not being in existence, we hit the foreign foods market, where Lee and I generally buy several hundred ounces of peanut butter in enormous tubs because it is literally five times less expensive there than in our local stores. They no longer sell the big peanut butter jugs. I bought granola bars, oatmeal, and otherwise unobtainable snacks like Cheetos anyway. At least our long-time favorite Mexican restaurant nearby was open, and I for one got a nice raspberry margarita to cap off the day.

The next day we did some sightseeing. We headed off to Meiji Shrine first off. On our way to the shrine, we passed some giant gates:

And came upon a garden. This garden has a very old well.

 

After walking through the nice open paths through the woods, we found the shrine itself. This shrine was made in the early 1900s, rebuilt after WWII, and is popular for weddings now. It's well-known because people like Hillary Clinton have visited in more recent times. Part of the shrine itself:

We managed to exit the shrine at probably the furthest possible location from any subway stations, and had to do some walking before getting underway towards our dinner reservation, a Brazilian steakhouse, which in Japan are always good for all-you-can-drink in addition to all-you-can-eat.  Afterwards we checked out Akihabara at night to see the area, though quite a few businesses were keeping their signs off in order to conserve electricity. It was still fun!

There are more pictures up at Flickr, though we took a lot fewer pictures than I'd thought. Next up, we went to the Imperial Garden and took a cheesy haunted tour of Tokyo.

*Arrival not particularly anguished - the titles of this series of posts references A Series of Unfortunate Events because the international incidents part is semi-accurate and coming up with alliterative names for the rest of it is amusing.

Japanese Sweets (Wagashi) Making

I can't exactly call these candy, but I went to a workshop on how to make Japanese sweets from bean paste. Yup, bean paste. The flavor takes a bit of getting used to, but now I kind-of-sort-of like the creamy sweetness once or twice a year, as long as there's some really bitter matcha, Japanese powdered green tea, to go with it. It is a very fall thing for me now, and one of the things I think I'll miss from Japan. I'll probably be able to find the sweets and tea powder in the US, or make some bean paste from scratch if I really wanted some, which is good. (Lee's comment: Bean paste is better than starvation but not better than food.  I recommend it for people who like things that aren't very good.)

Anyway, on to the sweets! No pictures of the actual process, because this stuff is like sticky Play-Doh, and bean-paste-covered hands just don't mix with cameras in electronically compatible ways. Basically, you take the more savory center bit, typically one large chunk of red bean paste, roll it into a ball, and then take the sweeter colored pastes, cover the center with them, and make any designs you want. We made three different sweets, and it really was just a chance to play with edible Play-Doh for grown-ups. I will have to keep this in mind as a good Girl-Scout-type future activity, with cultural, edible, and creative components. My finished sweets:

For this one, when we had finished covering the inner bit with the green and white outer stuff, we wrapped it up in a clean cloth to create the wrinkled outer shell.

This one is a peach. Or at least, it's supposed to be. I'm not sure if the leaf is bean paste too or not, but it was edible!

 

The third one has an outer shell similar to the leaf from the peach, a more solid jelly-like thing. You break up the large square into small strips using a strainer, and then just pile it around the red bean paste ball.

Of course, they look nothing like professional sweets, and if you want to see a gorgeous sampling of them, search for "Wagashi", or go here.

Hamlet's Castle: Not in Sweden, I Checked

For our last day, we (my friend and fellow conference-goer from Chile and I) decided to head over to see Hamlet's Castle, supposedly the castle that inspired Hamlet / Hamlet would have occurred at. It definitely aims to get the tourist dollars by hyping the Hamlet connection, but the castle was really cool anyway. I've seen quite a few Japanese style castles at this point, but not so many European ones.

We set off after the conference lunch. We had to get to Helsingor, the terminal stop on the train line, which lets off in the town that houses the castle. Upon getting to the station and finding a train about to depart to Helsing... we grabbed seats and enjoyed the train ride. We passed through countryside and then started crossing over some water.

The water kept going...and going...and we looked at each other, thinking that perhaps this was rather more water than we should have had to cross to reach our intended destination.

Our fears proved well founded. Unbeknownst to us, the other end of the train line terminated at Helsinborg, which, incidentally, is in Sweden. That's right, I managed to visit a whole 'nother country by accident. We got off at the first stop in Sweden, which seemed to just be a sports arena of some sort, took some pictures, and hopped the next train out of there going the right way.

When we finally made it to Helsingor, we discovered that it's really a cute little town, with a nice plaza and a delicious Thai restaurant. Of course, with the 2-hour detour, we made it there just after the castle closed for the day. We were still able to walk around the grounds, but could not go into the castle or check out the artists who have shops in the old stables and other buildings on the castle grounds. The foundations of this castle date back to before 1420.

Whether or not it is in fact the castle that inspired Shakespeare's Hamlet, a troupe of actors comes to perform the play on the castle grounds in the summer. I would enjoy going back to this castle to take a look at the artists' wares and to see the actors performing. Also to go inside the castle.

Of course, what the helpful people on the train didn't tell us was that it would have been faster to continue on in Sweden to Helsingborg and then take the ferry across to Helsingor. We found this out when we were at the castle, looking across at Sweden, where we almost ended up:

It certainly was a good time, and the castle was pretty cool. I really enjoyed going there, since I probably would have just hung out at the Ben & Jerry's stand all day otherwise! That about wraps up my adventuring around Denmark. Check out the Flickr set for more pictures of the castle!

Sightseeing in Copenhagen

In addition to the conference, the trip as officially planned by not-me had about a day and a half of free time in Copenhagen in it, which I took advantage of.

I was a bit underwhelmed by Copenhagen. It's a nice enough city, but I found that neon signs on older architecture was more of a visual turnoff than a cool old-meets-new thing, and that style was everywhere.  When Lee and I visited Vienna, we felt like we had to go back and see the rest of it.  That's just not the case for Copenhagen.  I wouldn't say no to another free trip by any means, but I have no particular need to see it again.

One fun thing Copenhagen had going on while I was there was an Elephant Parade, composed of fiberglass elephants painted by artists to raise funds for an Asian Elephant conservation organization. Buffalo had a similar one once called Herd About Buffalo (no website I could find), and I've heard of other cities doing similar things with various different animals and causes. I got pictures of quite a few that were around so check out Flickr for the rest of the elephants.

There were a lot of street performers out and about - people painted and standing like statues, instrumentalists, and other assorted individuals trying to make some money with their art.  Most were pretty good at what they did and not too far out of what you'd expect to see in their genres.

This, however, was not universally the case...

...And a few seemed to be a long way from home.

I did a lot of my sightseeing with a fellow conference goer from Chile, and we went together to the cute little waterfront area questing for the famous Little Mermaid statue. The waterfront has expensive restaurants, probably really expensive apartments, and not-so-expensive boat rides which we passed on because the weather wasn't very good. It's a very colorful area:

The statue was a bit past the lively part of the waterfront area, so we kept going and found ourselves passing the Queen's residence, which was near near a nice little garden:

We eventually found the Little Mermaid statue, with some emphasis on "little".  She's roughly the size of a 13 - 15 year old girl, rather true to life, but the most common remark made by tourists at the conference was, "That's it?" It's also difficult to photograph because of the dark color of the aged copper.

After seeing the statue we opted for a bicycle taxi back to find dinner in the more populated areas. I snagged a few pictures along the way, but they turned out mostly blurry! Here's one view:

One item of mixed blessing was the daylight in Denmark during the conference.  There was light at 4AM and it stuck around until nearly 10PM. It was surprising to look at my watch and realize it was much later than I thought.  After this day of sightseeing, there was one more morning of conference events, after which we had an additional sightseeing adventure.  Emphasis on "adventure" this time! Stay tuned, and check out the Flickr set for additional pictures of Copenhagen.

Conference in Copenhagen

The school sent me to a conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Last June. Yes, long time, no post. However, I am posting now! Sadly, Lee wouldn't have been able to come with me without us paying for a lot of really expensive plane tickets, so he stayed home. First off, we (the school sent a sizable delegation) went to Tokyo the day before our flight to Denmark so as to be certain we were on it. This was an act of excessive caution considering that the morning flight from Kanazawa would have landed hours before the Denmark flight took off, but hey, they were paying and the room was really nice:

Of course, being in Japan, it can't just be a nice room - you know there must be something special about some aspect of it that could only be from Japan.  I was not disappointed this time.

On this package, it says

SHAPE UP GEL

 I can't join the party due to ugly body. I am now in shape-up mode. Some day I will do it with dress up. BODY SELEB is willing to help you achieve it. The success gives you self-confidence. Let's go to the party where a lot of celeb gather. You will see yourself changed drastically.

I still have no idea what the heck you are supposed to do with it. It's Red Heat Hot Pepper...flavored? Scented? Containing those extracts? I chose to leave it there rather than risk it.

After the night in Tokyo, we left for Copenhagen. I knit and watched movies on the flight. I had a much smaller room in Copenhagen, but a much more comfortable bed. Since the Japanese tend to sleep on thin mats on the floor, their beds tend to be harder to approximate that feeling. I am not a fan.

Sadly, the bed here was too comfortable, and although I love, love, loved it, I woke up stiff and with a sore back. Obviously I have been in Japan for far too long!

For the next few days, I was at the conference. I met people, heard interesting seminars, and played with Legos as an official part of official business:

The conference was really well put together. They bused you from a central location out to the campus and fed you at all the appropriate times, with delicious Danish pastries and things you can't easily get in Japan like lasagna and roast beef. The big conference dinner had a live band that played well and was a lot of fun, especially with the available wine:

There were also more hands-on sessions like the Lego session than I'd anticipated, which was a plus. Many times you'll sit around and be lectured about how hands-on education is the best way to learn, whereas here, they actually used hands-on education to illustrate its effectiveness. Of course, not all sessions were interactive, and many looked more like this:

(Yes, I was knitting, though it was usually under the desk and not a distraction to others, yes, I was taking notes and yes, I actually pay attention better when knitting; it stops my mind from wandering)

I was hoping for a bit more research and fewer "Here's what we did and we think it went well! Yay for not-actually-science!" papers, but given the size of most of the schools involved, real comparisons between heavily monitored control and experimental groups is understandably difficult. Complaining too much would also smack of hypocrisy due to the fact that my paper and presentation were awfully fluffy and definitely not a real addition to the science of engineering education - a trend I hope to reverse in the next few years.  My paper was mostly on things the school will be doing to implement educational reform in the future, so obviously no results could be given, though more scientific reasons for why we're doing what we'll be doing would have been nice.

Next up, sightseeing! Also check out the full Flickr set for more pictures.