Kanazawa Green Walk

The Kanazawa Green Walk is an annual event the purpose of which we have not yet determined but whose substance we recently tested. It is, as might be suspected, a walking event, with three courses of various lengths that purport to direct the participants to different Kanazawa landmarks and attractions worth seeing. A number of foreign teachers in the area were spreading the word and putting together a group of English-speakers to go walk as a group, and since it was a random middle-of-the-week national holiday day anyway, we signed up. Of the three courses, the short course is very short, the medium course is only a few miles, but the long course is 14 miles long and that is the one all the foreigners signed up for.

When we got up the weather was pretty miserable, with light but steady rain, but the weather reports said that things should clear up by the time the event actually got going, so we packed umbrellas and ponchos and took an early bus downtown to meet up at Kanazawa Castle (starting and ending point for the event) at about 7:45AM. People trickled in and we managed to register and collect the green cards that would be stamped at each checkpoint we passed. There were some speeches in Japanese, while we stood in the rain in the muddy field waiting for things to get going, but within ten seconds of the event actually starting, with inspiring music playing to motivate the walkers, the sun came out, the sky cleared, and it was suddenly about 25F warmer. This verged on ideal and was worth carrying the rain gear the rest of the day.
The 14 miles took us from about 9AM to 3:30PM, and we walked large quantities of Kanazawa terrain, but we also stopped a few times along the way for local attractions.

This is not real close to where we started

The first stop was at a village shop selling soy sauce ice cream. The village has a soy sauce refinery, and another teacher told us that all of the children she teaches from this area have been insisting that their soy sauce ice cream is both famous and delicious, and that we should all sample it forthwith. I was skeptical, but it turned out to be delicious. They only added a faint hint of soy sauce, using it in place of the salt normally in ice cream, and it added a faint nutty, savory flavor to the ice cream that was quite pleasant. I would purchase it in place of vanilla at least sometimes if they sold it in our supermarkets.

Outside the soy sauce ice cream place

The second "local attraction" was a ramen restaurant where we got lunch. It was a local restaurant for some teachers that live rather far from our place and they attested to the superiority of the cuisine. Apparently, this place also won some awards for best ramen in the prefecture or something too. We were eating a late lunch after walking about 3/4 of the course and were hungry, and found their offerings to be generous in size and very tasty too. The broth of the ramen was very thick, and the thin-sliced pork placed on top of the liquid melted into pieces and flavored the whole bowl. It wasn't greasy, just rich. I found that nori (seaweed paper) was delicious when soaked with the broth. It's a pity the place is probably an hour's bike ride away - too far to be a regular destination.

Not a bad ramen shop if you're in the area

Most of the long walk itself went through fairly undesirable and not-scenic routes. Starting in the downtown area they sent us all the way down to the industrial part of the waterfront and then back down a very commercial and very not-scenic road. The checkpoints for the course were all in parks that were nice enough but nothing special. The real pleasure of the event was just hanging out with people and talking. The walking aspect was secondary, though 14 miles was a fair bit of walking.

It's safe to say this was the nicest place we walked through.

One of the historical districts - some of the people we were with mentioned all kinds of things worth seeing in this one that we hadn't known about and didn't have time to see while walking

At the end they gave us some goodies that are pretty standard prize-package material here: towels and tissues, with a few magnets and various papers thrown in. We're not sure what was "green" about the walk - did it raise money for the environment, tour the green areas of Kanazawa, involved walking around instead of driving, or what? In any case, we had a good time, though next year we might just have a cookout with friends and skip the walking around the city part. We have enough mini towels already.

The welcome end of the walk, aside from the field still being really muddy

Hooray for towels and magnets, I suppose.

We Needed More Power

Some background - we're two people in a large apartment intended for four to six people, at least a family with kids, possibly grandparents in tow. There is a spot marked off for a washing machine. There are places to install four large electric heating / cooling units (known here as "aircon" units) but only three are installed. There is no other installed source of heating or cooling. Therefore, you would think that running two of the heating units plus the washing machine and, say, a Japanese electric oven (the only kind you can get), would not trip the circuit breakers of the apartment and plunge everything into darkness, wouldn't you?

The item previously known as the Box of Inadequacy

Well, no, apparently not. We had a 50 amp main breaker, which was semi-regularly not sufficient for our electric needs. I think there is a good chance that if you actually turned on four heating/cooling units at the same time, as the apartment should have been designed for, that it might trip the breaker right there. Also, Japanese people tend to have fewer and less powerful computers than us, but it seems obvious that the peak available power of the apartment could be easily exceeded by a family of six who all happened to be home and doing something at the same time. I bought a backup power unit to shield my computers from this unreliability and also to condition the power to them, but it was getting pretty annoying to lose power (halfway through a movie while eating dinner the lights and heat go out, the oven shuts off and loses the timer for baking cookies, all the computers die, and the washing machine forgets where in the cycle it was, etc) so we decided to find out if we could choke up to a power connection that might actually, you know, supply us with power.

As we've probably said before, there are two speeds in Japan. Something either happens instantly or else takes at least a couple of months. To our pleasure and surprise, getting more power is one of the things that happens instantly. We had our helper from the school call the realty agency, and the next afternoon they came over to have a look at our circuit breaker to make sure we weren't just using it wrong or something. They don't believe anything we say until they see it for themselves - the default position seems to be that the foreigners are both crazy and incompetent, see for example when we told them there were mice in the ceiling and they seemed genuinely surprised to in fact find mice in the ceiling. Anyhow, after verifying the box was not defective or being improperly used, they called the power company who came the next afternoon and installed the biggest main breaker that they can give a private residence: a whopping 60 amps. Ye-haw.

Now upgraded to Box of Extreme Power (that's Medium Power in non-Metric units)

So far, the upgrade has been sufficient to stop the blackouts. I guess we were right on the edge and the extra 20% covers our needs, but I'm pretty sure they run 100+ amps to even small houses in the States, and we have most all the equipment of a house in here, plus electric heat. So far their "big-u size" breaker has been good enough, though, and for the extra $2 a month they're putting on the electric bill for a while to pay for it, it was a worthwhile upgrade.

Questionable Beverage Consuption For Science

Packaging picture

Ana bought a carbonated Japanese chocolate beverage believing it to be possibly drinkable or maybe even tasty. We found the packaging and concept to be more and more suspect the longer we examined it, so we took video when she bravely attempted to consume some of it, in the name of science. We will remember her sacrifice in the years to come.

Baking Dirt

We've mentioned our plants on here before (and they're doing fine, thanks) but one aspect of preparing to plant them was a bit funny looking and Ana took pictures which we might as well share.

My parents gave me a large and extremely comprehensive book about growing chili pepper plants. In it, it suggests using only potting soil or similar for potting seedlings, and if you must use actual dirt from outside to bake it first to sterilize it. I used potting soil for the peppers because I'm trying to get as much out of them as possible, but the herbs did fine last year in regular dirt so I decided to keep using that for them. First, however, I needed to sterilize it to kill the weeds and things that were growing in it last year.


So, dirt goes in Pyrex bowl, Pyrex bowl goes in oven, smell of 400F dirt goes into the apartment. Worked great as far as I can tell - no weeds and the seedlings as going strong even after their two weeks in the makeshift greenhouse while we were traveling.

Hanami Matsuri at Daishoji

Hanami (cherry blossom viewing) season was quite recently, and for something as big as cherry blossoms in Japan, you really ought to head out one or more of the numerous places to go see blossoms, frequently with some kind of festival attached. This year we went to the town of Daishoji, about an hour's train ride outside of Kanazawa, to see their cherry trees and partake of their local cherry blossom festival (Hanami Matsuri).

It turned out that several dozen foreign teachers in the Kanazawa area had decided to go to this festival and we ran into a goodly handful on the train. We had a good time talking and just generally being not-Japanese together, and after we made it outside the city there were some startlingly good views of the mountains. Kanazawa is close to a range of pretty serious mountains but the view is frequently blocked by the foothills.

When we arrived some navigation was required to get from the station to the area of the town where the party was, but some other teachers knew what they were doing and we followed them. When we got there, we did find a whole bunch of really old, nice cherry trees hanging over a canal, and a small festival, along with a pretty interesting park area.

Old cherry trees over the canal

Riverside area with very slow boat rides available (we passed)

Park

The park had several water features of questionable aesthetic virtue, but they couldn't be called uninteresting

And that stuff is all great, but here's a Japanese kid with "APPLE BUTTER PANIC" written on his shirt

First we poked around a little bit to get our bearings, but we needed to eat, and went and got fried chicken and quasi-okonomiyaki fritters (sort of egg and veggie things) that were a little different than ones we've had before but still good. We ate under a bridge down by the canal to get out of the sun, get a little more peace and quiet (the Japanese children were feeling very rambunctious) and watch the blossoms float by on the stream.

After that, we looked around some more and found a nice shrine, an intermittent parade, and many further nice cherry blossoms.

Nice Shrine

Intermittent parade

More cherry blossoms

We then when back to the festival area for dessert - chocolate covered bananas and pineapples and more candied strawberries.

The chocolate covered pineapple was better than my expression might indicate

Following that, we went to the big lawn where most of the foreigners were hanging out on blankets having a hanami party, which is when a company takes all their employees to go hang out by cherry blossoms and drink beer. There were some good snacks going around (Homemade donuts? Yes, please!) and we spoke a lot of rapid-fire English and met a few foreigners we didn't know. The weather was close to perfect for most of the day but when it started getting cold we grabbed a train back to town rather than get caught outside with not enough clothing. All in all a very pleasant day. There are a few more pretty pictures of the blossoms over at Flickr.

Part of the foreign colony in the park

Spring Break 2010: Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo (Day 10 - Last Day)

There's technically one more day after this in the trip, but all that happens in it is that we take the train back to Kanazawa and find everything pretty much how we left it, so this is the final entry in the Spring Break 2010 series of posts. We do a few different things in Tokyo, some of which are probably interesting enough to be worth mentioning.

First, we slept in until just almost lunchtime. That's probably not that interesting. Moving on, we got ready to head out into the city and made a plan for the different things we were going to do, then started moving in the direction of doing them.

First up, after grabbing a snack, was a trip out to a chocolate shop that Ana had heard of and wanted to go see. It was a little trippy. It's called the 100% Chocolate Cafe, and their gimmick is they have 56 main flavors of chocolate, including chocolate made from beans from all over the world, so they have a Brazilian chocolate and a Peruvian chocolate and so forth for fifteen other cocoa bean producing countries. After that they have several pretty conventional mixes - milk and dark and super dark and chocolate with honey and nuts, before getting into stranger areas with tea chocolate and herb chocolate and things I can't even remember. They also do a monthly selection with a unique chocolate every day, and these ones tend to be really off the wall. They gave us a free sample of white chocolate with honey and thyme mixed in with our order, and it was edible but I'm glad it was free. Ana got a really high end hot chocolate (orange chocolate with cracked black pepper, yum!) and we both bought a couple of conventional chocolates for later and headed out. I don't need to go back.

They had enormous pieces of their main flavors in a glass case across the back of the cafe.

Edible...but not much more

Next up was the cat cafe. Before we get going, a cat cafe is a place where you can basically go to hang out with cats and eat. There's demand for this kind of thing in Tokyo because most families just don't have space for any pets at all, and might not be allowed to have them by their apartment complex's rules anyway. After reading about these places on the internet we wanted to go and just sort of marvel at the Japanese-ness of it, and also Ana is deeply fond of pretty much all things cute and fuzzy and wanted to play with the kitties, we we'd resolved to do this the next time we were in Tokyo.

We technically weren't going to a real cat cafe because we'd chosen one that focused on the cat aspect and excluded the food aspect, as the combination is more expensive and weirds us out, but it still falls into the general category of cat cafe for lack of a better term. Anyway, the place is called Nekobukuro (which is supposed to be a clever combination of the word for cat, neko, and the name of the neighborhood it is in, Ikebukuro) and it is on the top of a department store, probably as a way to drive foot traffic.

When you walk up the stairs that lead to Nekobukuro, a version of "Up On The Housetop" rendered into Japanese by synthetic cat voices plays. The words are probably different but the tune is unmistakable. That was pretty strange.

Nekobukuro entrance

We paid our entry fee (discounts for couples - it appeared to be mostly kids and teenagers on dates) and ventured in. I'll let the pictures do most of the talking, but most of the cats really didn't want anything to do with the people there, and the ones that would actually let you touch them seemed closer to being sedated or totally non-responsive, except when the staff handed out cat treats and then it was blood in the water in front of sharks. I don't think they try to select cats that like people, which is strange. I guess I'm glad we went to see it but the whole thing was kind of sad. It looked like the animals were being treated well and the whole place was clean but the people were there to play with cats and the cats didn't want to play...

There were cat walkways along the walls and across the ceiling. The "Cat Train" in the back is a rest zone where they store cats where they can be seen but not harassed.

I think everyone would correctly identify this as from Japan without further context.

After leaving the cats to the attentions of the Japanese children we went down to a used English bookstore. It was a nice store, with a wide and interesting selection, but prices were too high to really pig out on reading materials. We both got a few things that interested us at prices we were willing to pay, but I'd have had half the store if it were cheap enough. I'm trying to stretch them out instead of finishing them all at once - new, interesting English books are a real treat and especially ones using advanced or elegant English are wonderful as a morale boost compared to the slow and broken English and Japanese mishmash we use to be understood with non-fluent coworkers and the public.

Minds fed, we went for less metaphorical food, first at National Azabu supermarket. We bought two 64oz peanut butters as a friend had requested one and we were low too, and a few other treats that can't be had in Kanazawa. After Azabu we needed dinner, and met up with my relative again and headed over to Helmsdale, the whiskey pub in Hiroo that we've mentioned before, where the fish and chips and burgers remained as good as we'd remembered and there were still ~297 whiskeys yet to be tried.

We tested four whiskeys this time..293 to go. This one was laid down six years before I was born. My relative turned out to have some interest and experience in whiskey so we had a good time and Ana tolerated us while drinking good cider with her fish and chips.

So, thanks for reading my inordinately lengthy documentation of our trip. I think we have a couple of short entries coming up after these, covering a day trip in cherry blossom season and a few things done for science. The next big trip is actually coming up fast as Golden Week (Japan shuts down for a few days in early May) is nearly upon us and we're going to camp on an island off Hiroshima Bay (the campsite costs 50x less than hotels) and visit the city, the Atomic Bomb museum, some of the most famous shrines in Japan, and on the way back one of the three most famous gardens in Japan. Between the one in Okayama that we're visiting and Kenroku'en here there will only be one left of the big three. Should be a good time and at the least it will certainly be adventurous. Might be a while until those posts start going up though, don't get too excited too early lest ye be disappointed.

Spring Break 2010: Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo (Day 9)

Warning: No pictures in this entry. We were tired and didn't see a lot of things worth taking pictures of until dinner anyway, and were at that point more concerned with pigging out.

Our night on the town the day before notwithstanding, our flight from Singapore back to Japan was an early one. Really early. We set the alarms in the hotel room for 2:50AM to get a 3AM taxi (subway doesn't run all night) to reach the airport at 3:40, to give us about ninety minutes to clear security and so forth before they close the airplane doors half an hour before our scheduled departure time of 5:45AM. There was one flight with open seats later in the day...for a $400 per person premium. Not worth it, though when I asked Ana if she had anything to contribute to the notebook I was keeping to help remember small details her response was "tired".

Anyway, we were flying Delta for this leg of the trip, and this flight would later continue through Narita to land in Detroit, which meant it was an international flight terminating in the US. We hadn't noticed this before, but apparently that is a recipe for security being totally ridiculous, even for US citizens. A member of the "Auxiliary Police" questioned us about our travel plans and they broke the tiny little nail file off Ana's miniature nail clippers. For the record, airport security is nearly pointless*. They definitely crank up the pressure for flights ending in the US, though.

Despite the extra heat brought down for this flight, the overall process of getting to the plane was not problematic and I think both of us pretty much slept through most of the flight itself. The six plus hour flight felt like about 20 minutes, though I can't say that afterward we felt entirely lively and charged up. The train from Narita Airport to Tokyo proper takes about an hour, and then it takes a further 45 minutes to an hour to take the subway to KIT's condo, where we immediately pulled out the futons for a nap.

Two hours of real sleep later, we were feeling sort of alive again, and started thinking about dinner. A relative of mine gets sent to Tokyo to work by the company he's with for a couple of months a year and happened to be in town at the time. He's spent a lot more time eating in Tokyo than us so we tossed some ideas around and trusted to his knowledge of the dining scene to steer us right, and he got reservations for all of us at a churrascaria (Brazilian steakhouse) called Barbacoa so we could get a red-meat fix before heading back to the rice-eating wilderness of Kanazawa.

Barbacoa turned out to be entirely satisfying (it's off Omote-sando station, exit A2 and then make a right if people in Japan want to go) and actually very reasonably priced. It is all-you-can-eat as such places usually are and we gorged on superior animal products and generally had a good time. The $25 all-you-can-drink menu didn't hurt either as their caipirihinas were tasty though very strong.

I'd say that about wraps up day 9 of this trip. For day 10 we stay in Tokyo and do some shopping as well as have one of those only-in-Japan experiences when we visit a cat cafe on the top floor of a department store.

*unless they start disallowing electronic devices with batteries, since you can make batteries explode. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery, end of second paragraph. Also you could use raw heavy alkali metals in pseudo-batteries and just add water to produce a serious explosion. See this video that was originally shown by the BBC at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqeVEFFzz7E. They'd also need to start scanning people for internally carried non-metallic weapons or explosives to prevent say, the rectal or stomach carrying of high explosives that you could then detonate using electricity from a laptop battery. There must be a lot more ideas that someone with some actual knowledge of destructive devices could use to reliably beat currently employed screening practices. Barring a much higher level of security, how about we forgo the rest of this rigmarole? It costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year to implement and probably more than that in the effective cost of lost time. At least stop caring about edged weapons; they can't bring down a plane.
(Ana's edit - screen him, not me, I was uninvolved with this train of thought)
(Lee's addendum: Note for national security personnel - I am a young engineer and I want to live. Please don't send the black helicopters for me.)