Change In Plans

This short post is about our pre-dawn trip to the Tsukiji Market, which is more popularly known as the Tokyo Fish Market.  It is definitely one of the best places that we have seen on our trip to date.

On our second morning in Japan, we all slept a little later.  Still, everyone was awake by 5am, so we decided to go to the Tokyo Fish Market, which is one of the great tourist attractions in a city which frankly doesn’t have many.  It is the largest fish and seafood market in the world, and has been around in some form since the 1600s.

The taxi dropped us off on a busy road, near a row of small fish and produce shops which were just opening.  We wandered around this small retail market for about 30 minutes, seeing a lot of fresh, frozen, and dried fish for sale.  Strangely, several shops were also selling big non-fish animals which had been stuffed.  We saw polar bears (hello Churchill!), a panda bear, an alligator, and sea turtles.

We realized that the main wholesale fish market, and the famous tuna auction, had to be somewhere else, so we asked directions.  As it got light, we walked down toward an open-walled warehouse structure about 200 meters away.

The wholesale market is truly enormous, measuring about 400 meters by 250 meters.  This translates into about 20 acres of covered area.  The ceiling is about 30 feet up, and the floor is made of concrete, wet with water (and a little fish blood). 

The activity level inside the hall was staggering.  All in, there appeared to be at least 5,000 people working.  Everyone except the tourists was wearing knee-level rubber boots. 

About half of the people were working in large stalls, cutting up fish with knives and band saws, and laying out displays of fish for sale.  Most of the other half were transporting fish on all sorts of motorized and handheld carts, on forklifts, and by hand with gaffing hooks.  The motorized carts were just able to fit through the narrow aisles between the stalls without knocking over fish displays. 

Finally, there were about 300 men in the auction area, examining and bidding on flash-frozen tuna carcasses.  The tuna were huge -each one was larger  than our eight-year-old son- and there were hundreds, maybe thousands, being displayed, sold, sawn up, and carted around. 

They no longer allow tourists into the auction area itself, so we entered the “visitor viewing area,” which was only about 5 feet away. 

We watched a few auctions.  Men looked thoughtfully at a lot of 15-20 frozen tuna halves laid out on pallets.  Then an auctioneer stepped on a box and rang a hand bell for  a few moments before starting the bidding.  Each auction was over in less than 10 minutes.  Fish-transport men would cart the sold tuna off to the appropriate stalls, and the process would start over again with a new lot.

After watching the auctions, we walked through the maze of stalls for about 30 minutes, dodging fish carts and generally trying to stay out of the way.  Zola and I watched a man killing live fish which were about the size of a woman’s pocketbook.  He held the flopping fish with one hand, inserted a sharp knife behind the gills, severed the backbone and spinal cord, and then cut off the tail.  After he had done ten or so, he took a long stiff wire (like a bicycle spoke), and reamed out their spinal cords from the opening where their tails had been a few minutes earlier.  Lucky Zola got an impromptu anatomy lesson from Dad added to the home schooling curriculum.

We saw every conceivable type of seafood for sale (octopus, shellfish, eels, squid included), and in every conceivable presentation (fresh, frozen, dried, whole, cut up, sashimied, breaded, curried).  It reminded me of the “ways to prepare shrimp” scene in Forrest Gump.

By about 7am, we had seen enough, and we zigzagged our way out of the market.  To give a sense of the activity level, as we crossed the internal passage by the exit, I counted 27 vehicles (motorized carts, hand carts, bicycles, fork lifts) passing us in miultiple directions in a 15-second period.  Highly orchestrated chaos.

The Tokyo Fish Market was amazing.

This short post is about our first full day in Tokyo.

After watching videos in the business center from 4:30 to 5:30 am, Zola, Tallulah and I went out for a pre-dawn walk. 

Shinjuku-chuo Park is directly across the street from our hotel, and we found two great playgrounds right away.  There were no kids playing so early, but there were about a dozen sweat-suit-clad elders doing exercises and stretching on the playground equipment.  Tallulah systematically tried out every swing, slide, seesaw, and monkey bar in both areas.  All three of us enjoyed a smooth-concrete slide which looked like a sine wave about 12 feet high.  The back side of the wave had ladder steps built into it, and the front side slid steeply down into a sand pit. 

The kids and I bought breakfast -possibly the most wack breakfast of their lives- at an am pm convenience store across from the park.  Overwhelmed by unfamiliarity and choice, Tallulah and I bought pudding, two giant carrots, Cheetos, two yogurts, muffin-looking steam cakes, salted nuts, and a hot dog on a stick.  Zola was too busy scanning the racks of comics for Pokemon to help with the shopping.  I asked for hot coffee, and was directed to a warm display case full of canned espresso (not as bad as it sounds).  We ate sitting on a giant concrete whale in the playground.

India went for a run, and then I went for a run, then we got dressed, then we did schoolwork for a while, then we had another breakfast.  Suddenly it was 11am, and we needed a plan.

We decided to go to Odaiba, and ride the largest ferris wheel in the world.  What ensured was a minor Dingle (ie, our word for a confusing waste of time due to bad planning or communication).

We took the jampacked JR Yamanote train from Shinjuku Station toward Shimbashi, about 30 minutes away.  One stop before we had planned to get off, I made the (bad) executive decision to disembark and switch to the monorail, which I had read was a fun alternative .  Because we couldn’t quite figure out the monorail, Lu was already deeply asleep in the stroller, and Zola was staggering tired, India made the (good) executive decision for us to declare vistory and retreat.  We got on another train and rode back to Shinjuku.  All in, about 90 minutes of unproductive wandering in the Tokyo public-transport system.

We walked back from Shinjuku Station to our hotel, stopping for an awesome lunch at a noodle shop on the way.  After a short rest, we left to join our friend Kathleen and her daughters, Meredith, age 11 and Isa, age 7) for dinner.  They have been living happily in Tokyo for the last two years. 

We went to a ninja-themed restaurant called Ninja-Akasaka (www.ninjaakasaka.com).

 The interior is dark, and the tables are all little private rooms connected by twisting passages and low bridges.  All of the staff members are dressed like ninjas, and jump around and act dramatic.  Kids are only allowed in from 5-7pm, so I think it is geared mostly toward Japanese adults.

Everyone managed to stay awake through dinner.  In a fit of epicurean daring, Zola even ate some tempura.  All four kids really liked the young magician ninja who came in to do tricks just before dessert.  Lu said: “That is ninja magic!”.  They threw us out promptly at 7pm, and the kids played tag on the broad sidewalk for 30 minutes while the adults talked.

By the time we got back to our hotel at 8:30, all four of us were feeling very tired.  Lu, in particular, kept saying “I just want to go to bed now. I just want to go to bed.”

Getting from the street to our room requires a change of elevators on the 41st floor.  When the doors opened into the sky lobby (where the busy bar and restaurant are), Lu burst into tears because she thought we were going out for another dinner, and that she would never get to her bed.  Soon enough, though, we navigated the elevators, got to our room, closed the blackout drapes, and collapsed.

Even though we didn’t really accomplish much, it felt like a busy day.  Tokyo is cool.  Let’s hope we start a little later tomorrow morning.

This short post is about our first night in Japan.  Both kids and I are sitting in the Business Center of the Park Hyatt in Tokyo at 5am.  We have been here for an hour already.

Narita Airport in Tokyo is awesomely efficient.  Short walk from the plane to passport control, bags on the carousel when we arrived, breeze through customs.  We landed at 2h30 pm, and were ready to go before 3h00 (time difference is 13 hours from EST).  Unfortunately, the taxi ride from the airport into the city is very long, and brutally expensive (almost $300 to the Shinjuku District).  Part of the Japanese experience, I think.  The triple-level highways and general Bladerunner feel of Tokyo are still cool to look at on  the drive in.

India and I tried hard to keep everyone awake until at least 7 or 8pm local time.  We took baths, the kids played with the super high-tech Japanese toilet (Zola: ‘I used Spray, then Softwash, the Dry, then Bidet, then Dry some more, then the seat got too hot to sit on), we unpacked.  Eventually we went down to the bar to have dinner, but both kids fell asleep as soon as we ordered.  That was almost 8pm, so we were pretty pleased.

Of course, both kids were completely awake again at about 3am (better than 1am).  We tried for a while to get them back to sleep, but it was hopeless.  Eventually, I agreed to take them somewhere, and let India sleep.  The hotel staff was kind enough to open the business center for us: probably not the first time that a gaijin family has stumbled into the lobby at 4am with wide-awake kids.  Zola  is watching Pokemon videos on my computer.  Lu and I found Dora the Explorer videos on YouTube, and watched a few short clips on another machine.

I discovered a great mashup of the song “Crank Dat Soulja Boy” overlaid on 3 minutes of Dora footage.  Then I found the same song overlaid on Sponge Bob Squarepants, and on Barney the Dinosaur, and on several other kids programs.  These were all done by different people. It is a weird little cottage industry of Web 2.0.  It was fun to watch Dora and Boots dancing to Soulja Boy, though.

Kids are getting restless now.  The fun meter appears to have run out on Pokemon videos in the Business Center.  I think we will go out for a walk in the streets, and check out the park across from the hotel.  I sure hope that India is ready to take over in another hour or so.

This short post is about the flight from New York to Tokyo.  There is, of course, nothing short about the flight itself.

Our time at JFK was nowhere near as leisurely as we had hoped.  India managed to buy some gifts and celebrity magazines for our friends in Tokyo.  We also got some Frosted Flakes and pizza (breakfast of champions!) for the kids.  The slight time pressure, combined with our general edginess as we embark on the next leg of the trip, meant that none of us were really on our best behavior in the airport.

In the many years that India and I have been together, if there is ratty behavior in a travel situation, I am always the one who has gotten frustrated, and been curt (occasionally perhaps even rude) to an airline employee.  India is invariably the diplomatic and levelheaded one, and bails me out of these totally counterproductive encounters.

India did not lose her cool today, but she was definitely assertive in getting us through the boarding process (in part because our assigned seats were scattered all over the cabin, and we needed to get on early and start bargaining to sit together).  The gate attendants were disorganized, and there were multiple lines against boarding-pass scanners that were not working.  The female gate-attendant manager asked everyone to “please be patient, please be patient” as they moved the lines around. 

To my great amusement, as India led the passenger charge to reform the lines and get us on the plane, the manager mumbled (into her microphone): “Jesus Christ, lady.  Hold on.”  What amused me even more was that India wasn’t even aware, because she had gotten our boarding passes scanned and was already charging down the runway.  To complete the role reversal, I smiled and shrugged my shoulders at the manager, and said “Sorry.”

We splurged on business-class seats for our OnePass “round-the-world” tickets.  They are only marginally more expensive, and for flights this long, with kids, it feels like a good deal. We persuaded our fellow passengers to swap seats and let us all sit together (great quote from a tall businessman in his 50s: “I would be delighted for you to sit next to the eight-year-old boy instead of me).  Once we got settled, both kids were thrilled to have reclining seats and TVs and little vanity kits to play with.  Zola still thinks that business class is wildly glamorous.

Despite the boarding drama, we took off late from JFK (naturally), and climbed through the clouds into the perpetual daylight of the trip to Asia.  It is a ridiculously long flight (13 hours with favorable winds), but we seem to be amusing ourselves.  It has been fun for me to listen to Zola as he laughs uproariously while watching the 2-hour cartoon special.  It has also been fun to see him, the pickiest eater I have ever known, react to his first Japanese food.  He may lose a few pounds in the coming weeks.  We were a little surprised when we flew almost directly over Churchill, Manitoba, where we were watching polar bears only a few days ago.

Both kids are pretty good travelers, which is an enormous blessing.  We seated Zola behind Tallulah, so when he kicks the seat in front of him, it is all in the family.  He spilled a glass of water, of course, but we managed to catch his glass of milk.  Tallulah actually slept for a couple of hours, but the rest of us have been gorging on movies (Hancock, Little Miss Sunshine, Get Smart, Batman) playing Battleship, doing crossword puzzles, and reading magazines.

I think we will pay in jet lag for all of this non-productive fun we are having on the airplane.  We have scheduled two very low-key days in Tokyo when we land, so we hope that will get us through the worst of it.  If not, we can always go hang out with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansen in the hotel bar.

This short post is about leaving New York and departing for Tokyo.

Our almost three weeks in North America flew by. Seeing the polar bears in Manitoba was a cool side trip. It was also very helpful to be able to repack, sort out some admin, and do some work. The baby’s dental surgery was an unexpected bonus.

Most of all, of course, it was great to reconnect with family and friends before we set off again.

This time it feels as though we are leaving for a long time, and going into truly unfamiliar territory. Of the 10 countries we have travelled to on our trip to date, Tunisia is the only one that I had never been to before. Now, in quick succession we will habe Japan, India, Nepal, and the Maldives. We will soon be way out of my comfort zone.

India and I were both too excited to sleep, so we were up before 6am. We left our hotel at 8, which was actually 30 minutes ahead of our original schedule.

The early departure was helpful, because the torrential rain and a series of comedic errors on my part didn’t give us much buffer time at the airport.

Finally, we are seated on the 777, ready to depart for Tokyo. The journey resumes.

This very short post is an experiment, to see how our new web site works.  So far so good.  This should make it easier for readers to find us, and for us to publish text, videos, pictures, music.  As we get ready to leave for Japan, this should be helpful.

Thanks for your support.

This post is about the mood of our family, and the mood of those around us, as we get ready to leave for the longest leg of our trip.

On Saturday it rained buckets up in the Catskills. Trapped inside our tiny cabin,filled chaotically with all of our half-packed bags, tempers were short.

As usual, I was probably the grouchiest and the most unsettled. That said, India and Zola were also greatly on edge, and we all got in each other’s way and on each other’s nerves. Tallulah, bless her heart, was as joyful and even-keeled as I was sour and ratty.

In the week before we departed in August, India developed chest pains which made her very concerned. Literally, on the day we flew to Spain the chest pains resolved and were no longer a problem. On Saturday the chest pains came back. There is no doubt that these are real (India is a physically very tough person), but I think we agree that they are stress related.

When it became apparent to Zola that he would not have a sleepover with his friend Matthew, he became very upset and angry. He said things like: “Why can’t I just have a normal childhood?” and “Why are you taking me away from my friends for so long?” Ouch.

When we were down at the general store near our house, Zola was upset, and played a joke on Tallulah and me by hiding her dolls’ stroller next to the truck. I don’t think he meant anything bad to happen, but when I pulled out I ran over the stroller and mangled it beyond recpgnition. More drama, although Lu, again, was very forgiving and light-hearted.

Traveling as a family, we are definitely recofnizing the pattern that transitions are associated with stress and short tempers. In the Mediterranean leg of the trip, we started to anticipate and recognize “travel day” stress. Just by acknowledging and expecting it, we dealt with those days much better. At least we could put a label on Dad’s bad moods. Gearing up for a big transition, we are all feeling some transient self doubt, anticipation of what we will see and do, and the stress of rhythmless living.

The ongoing collapse of the financial markets is creating stress from a completely different source. Many of our friends and family are uncharacteristically anxious. At dinner on Saturday night, and again last night at a small farewell gathering in the city, much of the talk was of recession vs.depression, and falling house prices, and layoffs, and general insecurity. It was wonderful to see our friends on both occasions (thank you), and, of course, not everything was doom and gloom. There is just more anxiety and uncertainty than I have ever seen. My brother-in-law,the compassionate stockbroker, went to the emergency room in Nashville last night with an uncontrollably racing heart. The doctors said it was likely triggered by fatigue (he’s not sleeping) and a reaction to a swing in blood sugar, but this all seems to link back to market anxiety. He is fine now, by the way. Looking at Asian and European stocks on my Blackberry, it looks as though today may be another tough one.

It is quite different from the months immediately after September 11th, but there is a similar collective feeling of being in the middle of a bad moment in history, and not knowing when and how it will get better.

I feel aware of the macro-anxiety, but also strangely outside of it. We won’t get (and don’t expect) any sympathy for our family pre-trip jitters. I think we will have a tremendous experience, and we all now just want to get on with it.

Both kids seemed happy after multiple play dates in the city yesterday. This morning, though, even Tallulah, our little emotional stalwart,cried inconsolably for 20 minutes after India left our hotel to meet a friend for a run.

As a family we are ready to go, and to replace these feelings with action. Ironically, this may be something that an 18-hour flight will cure. Unfortunately we can’t do something similar about the markets.

Onward to (the suddenly much more expensive) Japan!

This short post is about our trip back to the Catskills, where we are gearing up for the next leg of our trip.

We had a farewell dinner with India’s family last night in Nashville. They are all very loving and supportive, but I think they are saddened that we will be away for Christmas, and generally a little confused by our trip. My guess is that they have been pretty confused in the past as well, for example, when we:

• moved (unmarried) to South Africa the first time in 1991, and lived in sin
• both changed our last names when we got married in New York
• drove from Cape Town to Nairobi in 1995
• moved back to South Africa from New York in 1996
• gave birth to our first child in Cape Town, rather than in Nashville
• chose to live in New York (then New Jersey) when we finally did move back to the U.S.

They seem to shower us with love and hope for the best.

This morning we left for the airport in a driving rainstorm at 5:15 (too many early morning flights). We checked in our absurd amount of luggage, boarded the plane, and were airborne by 6:45am. We landed in clear and sunny Newark, and drove up to our Catskills house.

By the time we arrived in the Beaverkill Valley, the skies had clouded over, and the temperature was in the high 40’s. In the two weeks we have been away, all of the leaves have fallen, it has snowed (and melted), and everyone has shifted into winter mode.

Zola, Tallulah, and I went for a bicycle ride before sunset, maybe the last one of the year. We saw a family of bald eagles near the fish hatchery, which made us feel very patriotic. Zola complained about the cold, and Tallulah shouted “Cowboy up, cupcake!” at the top of her lungs several times. Because she was in the seat on the back of my bike, when her hands got cold a few minutes later, she just slipped them under my sweater without Zola noticing and retorting.

We have a lot of packing and organizing to do in the next two days, before we head down to New York City and then off to Japan (and India and Nepal and the Maldives and …)

Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that Zola will see his friend Matthew before we go, which will be a little traumatic. When we landed from Italy, Zola and Matthew talked on the phone. Zola launched into a Pokemon monologue (or “Pokemonologue”), which was interrrupted by Matthew saying something like: “I am not so much into Pokemon anymore. I am much more into Avatar now.” When they hung up, Zola said that “a little fire went out inside of him” when Matthew told him he wasn’t into Pokemon anymore.

This may be somewhat of a metaphor for all of our external relationships in this year of travel. Fires may not go out, but they may dim and need rekindling when we get back.

On the other hand, Zola did tell my mother-in-law that his favorite part of the trip was spending so much time with his Dad, so there are benefits as well, I guess.

This short post is about my day volunteering for the Obama campaign in Nashville.

We took Tallulah home at 4pm yesterday, after about 5 hours in the surgi-center and more than two hours of actual oral surgery. She was fine, and good spirited, if a little puffy-cheeked, throughout the entire ordeal. Kids are amazing.

After we arrived home, late yesterday afternoon, I called the Obama campaign headquarters in Nashville, and asked what I needed to do in order to volunteer. The answer was simple: show up, and we will put you to work. They didn’t even take my name.

This morning, I hitched a ride into the center of Nashville (Rosa Parks Boulevard) with my father-in-law, L.C. I was a little early for the campaign world, I guess, arriving at about 8:45. The cavernous Nashville HQ was pretty much empty. Not an auspicious start.

Before 9am, however, a team of volunteer co-ordinators had arrived, registered me, and gotten me working the phones. There were no land lines, only a huge table full of cell phones on chargers. Today’s big get-out-the-vote task in the phone bank was to contact elderly Democratic voters (80-95 years old!), encourage them to vote, and find out whether they wanted an absentee ballot. This was (at least) the second pass through these phone lists, because my pages were already heavily annotated, and I was instructed to just call the ones coded “No Answer” and “Busy”.

Calling the old people was more fun than I would have imagined: “Since you are recovering from the triple-bypass surgery, Ma’am, can we help you get an absentee ballot and vote from the comfort of your home?” At about 11am, though, I was flattered to be selected for door-to-door canvassing.

With a very smooth young African-American guy as my partner (he on the left side of the street, I on the right), we knocked on doors in a Nashville neighborhood called The Bordeaux. It had been described to me as “demographically friendly.” This turned out to mean “mostly African American.” The purpose of the canvassing was to get voters to go to the polls early - today if possible.

About two minutes after I started, a young guy yelled out the window of his car as he drove by: “This is the ‘hood, bro. Don’t get shot!” That was a little dramatic for what was an entirely pleasant experience. Of the 50 doors I knocked on, maybe 20 had people at home. 19 were planning to vote (or had already voted) for Obama/Biden. One woman told me she was undecided, but would enter the voting booth on election day, and would pray “until Jesus tells me who to choose.” Hmmmm. My big accomplishment was calling in an “immediate ride” request, and having a nice elderly woman taken for early voting within 15 minutes. Impact!

When I returned to the HQ, I was served lunch, got back on the phone (now alongside dozens of other volunteers), and started calling the elderly voters once again. Throughout the day, the place got more crowded and more lively.

Overall, this was a fun and worthwhile day. It is too limited an experience (in time and in geographic scope) to draw any conclusions about the race, about the campaign, or about much of anything. That said, I was surprised by a couple of things that I observed:

1- The campaign seemed extremely well organized. As new volunteers wandered in (or returned), they were made immediately productive. Detailed plans for the day, and for the next 12 days were printed and hanging on the walls. There was enormous capacity in phones and computers and literature and paraphernalia. There was good guidance and oversight, and clear task orientation, all in a completely fluid environment. Very impressive.

2- Even though Obama/Biden is trailing by 8 points in Tennessee, the turnout and energy of volunteers was amazing. It seems unlikely that a concerted get-out-the-vote effort amongst the 80-95 year-old demographic, or really anything else that a group of volunteers can do at this point, will close the 8-point gap. That said, the commitment and seriousness and passion of the volunteer effort is truly inspiring. This is the democratic process at its finest.

India and I view this period of me not working -this “year off”- as a precious gift. I had some fleeting remorse today that we are expending this gift time on our trip, rather than on a political campaign or on non-profit work. The trip still seems like the best thing for us as a family, and probably also the most fun. That said, I became more aware of the opportunity cost with my one-day visit to Campaignland.

This post recaps family consensus on the most spectacular sights we saw in Turkey. As India and I wait anxiously for Tallulah in the lobby of a surgi-center in Nashville (the baby is having dental surgery), we are catching up on posts from the second leg of the trip.

Overall, Turkey is pretty spectacular: the religious and secular history, the natural beauty, the grandeur of Istanbul. We had a difficult time reaching consensus, but here are the Top 5 picks:

Top 5 Most Spectacular Sights in Turkey

#1 - Cappadocia. My favorite was the view from the terrace of the Museum Hotel (where Zola and I got haircuts), looking down the valley at the rock formations. The view from the hot-air balloon was also breathtaking, but I was too busy worrying about Tallulah. The hikes and the outdoor museum were also amazing.

#2 - Old Istanbul and the Haghia Sophia. The stretch from Topkapi Palace past the Haghia Sophia to the Blue Mosque, around to the old cistern, up toward the grand bazaar, and down to the Bosphorous, is all amazing. We should have spent days just admiring the architecture and absorbing the history. The Haghia Sophia is particularly special because of its mosaics and its history as a grand cathedral, a mosque, and a (compromise) cultural center.

#3 - Turquoise Coast. Everywhere that we anchored during our week on the gulet boat was pretty spectacular. The picture at left was from a sunset hike up St. Nicholas Island, just as the sky was turning pink behind us. Rugged beauty all around us.

#4 - Istiklal Boulevard - Istanbul. Istiklal is the huge pedestrian boulevard that slopes gently for about a mile from Taksim Square down toward Bestiklal. Unlike Las Ramblas in Barcelona, which feels intense and very crowded, Istiklal is so broad (maybe 70 feet across) and has many fewer flow impediments (kiosks, shops cafes, street performers), so it feels spacious and unhurried. That said, up to a million people will walk on Istiklal in a given weekend. There is so much to see, and such beautiful views down to the Bosphorous off the sides, that it is a truly spectacular place. We only spent an afternoon on Istiklal, but if we lived in Istanbul, we would go all the time.

#5 - Dolmabahce Palace.

This is the $900 million residence that bankrupted what was left of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-19th century. Zola, in particular, loves to tell people about the palace: the opulence, the symmetry of the furnishings, that Ataturk died there at 9:05 am. I am sorry that I could not join India and the kids to see it, but will go the next time I am in Turkey.

Overall, again, Turkey is a pretty spectacular place.