Change In Plans

This short post summarizes how we have spent the last 48 hours in Tokyo. 

Tokyo is largely graceless, in terms of aesthetic beauty.  This comes from having been pretty much destroyed twice in the last century: in the earthquake of 1923 and again in the firebombings at the end of World War II.  The city makes up for its architectural blandness by being awesomely efficient (the best public transport system I have seen anywhere) and possessing tremendous vibrancy.  The lights are bright, and all hours of the day and night the streets are thronged with activity.

We have had only a few short days in Tokyo, so we have tried to do as much as we can.  Since we left the Tokyo Fish Market on Friday morning, we have been going full tilt.  Here is what we have been up to:

On Friday afternoon, Halloween day, we had to get Zola a constume, so we wandered around the Shibuya District, found a great store called Don Quijote (similar to a Ricky’s in New York).  Zola ended up combining a “Scream” mask and robe (inspired by Edvard Munch) with a “Friday the 13th” bloody sword.  Tallulah was a ladybug.  We ate a uniquely French-Japanese bistro lunch. 

Before meeting our friends for trick-or-treating we had a family karaoke session in Shibuya.  The karaoke place was 8 stories tall, with 10-12 small soundproofed rooms on each floor.  This supports a lot of karaoke.  Once I figured out the controls, we were able to sing along to Green Day and Guns ‘n Roses (Zola’s choices) and the Beatles and Michael Jackson (India’s choices).  Lu shook the maracas and the tambourines, and we all made a tremedous racket.  Fun for all, and a deal at $2.60 for half an hour.

Trick-or-treating is highly organized in Japan (a cultural specialty).  A couple of neighborhoods had been designated as October 31st trick-or-treat areas, with many other neighborhoods having been designated for last weekend.  Individual families signed up to receive visitors, and the map of houses was available on the Internet.  Our kids were tired, and a little shy about being with a mob of expat kids they didn’t know.  On the other hand, free candy is free candy.

On Saturday morning we checked out of the hotel and moved to our friends’, Keith and Kathleen’s apartment.  After dropping our bags, we ran out the door to see the sights.  We walked through the big Yoyogi Park, dodging multiple squads of runners training for some marathon.  Monday is Culture Day in Japan, and there was a big thousand-year-old ceremony at the Meiji shrine in the center of the park.  The highlight for me was watching Meredith and Isa (our friends’ daughters) teach our kids the hand-washing ritual outside of the shrine.

Leaving the park, we walked through a crowd of “Harajuku Girls”.  This is a difficult cultural phenomenon to describe, but the Harajuku Girls dress in fetishistic costumes (eg, Goth, dominatrix, sexy Little Bo Peep) to shock and tantalize the staid citizens.  Apparently many of the Girls do this in secret, leaving their homes in normal clothes, and changing into costume away from their parents.  It is a uniquely Japanese expression of group non-conformity, maybe now done more for reaction than anything else.

We walked to a tiny, smoke-filled dumpling restaurant in Omote-sando for lunch, followed by a second lunch at a sushi-go-round up the street.  Zola loves a miniclip video game called “Sushi Go Round,” so he was determined to see it for real.  We also went to Kiddyland, the noisy epicenter of Japanese electronic toys.  I actually stayed out on the sidewalk with the stroller (I spent two hours in Kiddyland a few years ago, and my eardrums am still scarred from the experience), and watched all four of the kids stagger out after about 30 minutes, happy but shell-shocked.

Keith and Isa walked back to their house with Zola and me, which took about 45 minutes.  Zola talked non-stop to Keith about every conceivable topic, while Isa looked on in silent wonder that someone could talk without breathing for that long.

Last night we left the kids with their nanny, and the adults went out.  We went first to a party hosted by mutual friends from New Jersey.  Fun, wonderful to see them, beautiful view of Tokyo from their roof deck.  We walked to dinner at Morimoto, which is the original Iron Chef restaurant.  Classic Japanese dining experience, ending in the second-floor lounge in big comfortable chairs.  India and I could have easily slept the night there at Morimoto.

Instead, we walked for about an hour (slightly lost) to a Halloween party hosted by expats in Tokyo.  This party was a lot more raucous than the first.  It was at a bar on the sixth floor of a building in Roppongi.  We navigated through hordes of large Nigerian men touting for strip clubs and massage parlors, and finally found the place.  The elevator doors opened into the middle of a dance floor, with disco hits of the early 80s blaring, and dozens of costumed Westerners rocking out.  Fun party, we stayed until about 1:30.

We are on our way to Tokyo station to take a bullet train to Kyoto.  Thanks to Keith and Kathleen for taking good care of us, and giving us two weeks of Tokyo fun in 48 hours.

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.