Impressions

 Kon nichi wa!

In the last few days we visited Kyoto on foot, visiting temples and shrines.

 

We also walked through the Imperial Palace Garden. There are so many things that are different from what we know.

The bus is, like most cars here, very low and narrow. The driver first opens the front door for the passengers to pay and get out. Then he opens the back door for people to get in. The bus station has electronic information to let you know when your bus is coming.


The big streets have sidewalks, the little ones only have a markup. The crossings have sonar signals, initially very annoying, but then we got used to it and came to rely on it. We saw a couple of diagonal crossings.

Most of the times people won't cross the street on red, even when the street is empty. To get out of the parking building they have a light and sound signal and one or two people with little flags to stop the pedestrian traffic. The paid parking has a system of blocking the back wheel, like a raised plate.

In front of the different buildings you can see some plates in the side-walk. You can un-screw and raise them to delimit a space or block the traffic.

There are many bicycles. On the sidewalk there is a special line for them, but they are allowed to go on the pedestrian side too! On the bicycles you can see baskets, seats for children or infants(some have both, with rain covers and all)

Parking for bicycles is on two levels, like for the cars. They have a system of blocking the back wheel like a ring, that is controled with a key. When we rented the bicycles in Himeji I found out that they have an escalator just for them, so you don't have to push them up-hill.

There are people of all ages at all the times on streets. I've seen a crowd only at at the one-day, sell-everything market and at the temples. They wear west style clothes or kimonos. The young ones look like they climbed out of a manga page.

The houses have their typical aspect even when they are modernized. Every space and nook is used with efficiency, a little garden in 5 square inches. Every house has on the sidewalk one or two red buckets with water in case of fire. In between houses there are restaurants  and little stores.

The food: we tasted different things that were offered: pickled vegetables, sweets. We tried ramen, udon(very thick spagetti, different consistency) soba (like angel hair spaghetti that you dunk in the sauce) donuts with meat. From the travel guides I understood that there are some places where they have a line outside, the food is that good, but we didn't come across them, or maybe it was the wrong hour. We haven't tried sushi and sashimi yet.

The restrooms are either very simple or very beautiful. At one of the temples we saw a toillet with a seat with sounds and washing, but I liked best the sink with water, soap and dryer in the same bowl.

To be continued in a future post.

Best Day Ever

I wake up at 4 am and for a while I lie in bed imagining that I write about all that I hate about Japan. I cannot really find much, we've been here for a few days, still trying to adjust to the jet lag.

We arrived well, the 14 hours plane ride wasn't bad at all. The plane was to continue it's flight to Taipei, we were just a handful of people to disembark in Osaka. Siberia was awesome, I remember flying over Greenland in '96, it looked so gorgeous. Then flying over it a dozen more times, nothing but clouds. Seeing the ground, the immense expanse of snow and ice, magnificent. Very likely we'll never see it like that again. At immigration they were waiting for us, each one with it's own agent. The airport is fantastic, but we really didn't have time to explore it. The first challenge, finding an ATM that works with American cards. Then getting the train pass, finding the train, finding our host. The Kansai rail pass is a one time only choice for visitors to Japan, we chose to get it for two days in order to save one hundred dollars, and this means that on our second day, jet lag or not, we take a day trip to Himeji Castle.  It was a great introduction, the best and greatest castle in Japan, a nice garden that we visited right after that, free bikes in the city of Himeji, first experience trying to get food, first restaurant - just for the five of us and the cook.

Himeji Castle

Koko-en Garden with Himeji Castle

On the second day we start by trying to lay down a plan. It turns out that nobody knows much about Kyoto, the children have no idea why we are here and we have no plans for the next few days. Usually Mom takes care of this, sometimes I prepare something about our destination. I did prepare almost everything about our round the world trip, but not much about the individual destinations. Putting the house on hold - and taking care of about a million other things before we left - didn't leave much time for learning about Kyoto. Part of the reason for choosing Kyoto first has to do with choosing Japan first, the most expensive destination, very limited time, moving fast from one thing to another. Every day counts, we can rest in places were we can live with $50 per day, not with $400. So it's our first day in Kyoto, second day of Japan, and no idea of what to do. The books we got actually made things more complicated. There are 17 World Heritage sites in this city alone. There are two in Romania. There are several thousands shrines and temples and many other things to do. Without plan and with the impression that we actually have some extra time to spend and we deserve a free day, we start walking down the street, changing our destination every few minutes. We ended up in the garden of the imperial palace, after a couple of hours of wandering. We had a picnic on a bench, we visited some exhibition, a section with a little lake, we eventually get to the palace to find out that the next tour is tomorrow at 10 am. Two tours per day, we were there, but we missed it. After a somewhat disappointing day, it becomes clear that my family would rather have me do the planning, learning about what we have to see and organizing it by days, maybe even hours.

As I was saying, I am lying in bed at 4 am, I had too much sleep to have any chance of falling back to sleep, earlier Ileana was on the stairs, waiting to get to the bathroom because she was “a little sick.” I had to work so much to get here, they could have prepared something about Kyoto. I cannot use a computer, because my family is on them all the time, my wife suddenly rediscovered her love for photography and she wants to learn Aperture, a special program on handling the files and processing photos digitally. I cannot take pictures, I cannot use the computer.  There is too little time to answer all the messages that we got from our friends, keep the Facebook page updated, finish the financial aspects of our previous existence, cleaning up the backup hard drive and moving all our computer life on the road. I hate that I have to write, I don't know how to write, I cannot take this imaginary reader off my mind, what would she think of what I say. I carry out a conversation with her in my head, but this doesn't help. It doesn't help. Maybe I should just blog like everybody else. Travel is great and all these places are fantastic and food is awesome and people are amazing. On top of this, we are in Japan, they use different words for numbers depending on the type of object they are counting, they use three different alphabets, we have no idea of what we eat, everything is upside down, everything is horrible. Even at 4 am trying to identify all the negatives, there is too much excitement and I run out of subjects to complain about. Last night, I started to learn about Kyoto, I actually knew enough that I only need to put things in order and find some organization. I will throw out the stupid book about walks in Kyoto (cannot really, it's on the Kindle, just delete), when I have time I will write a one star review on Amazon. Back to Lonely Planet and Insight Guides, back to the App store, buy an application about Kyoto that I install on the children's iTouches, a piece of paper to divide the six days we have left here. At 7 am everybody is up and ready to start the new day. We leave at 8.30 am, a little late, but it's OK. We have a plan. Ten hours later, after visiting a quarter of Kyoto, I truly think this was the best day ever. Ever.

We start with the Higashi Hongan-Ji, followed by Nishi Hongan-Ji, two magnificent temples of competing branches of buddhism. At Nishi, we have a special introduction from one of the priests. This is a special year for them, 750 years since the death of their founder. He explained and we understood a bit. Then, as we are getting hungry we make it to the Kōbō-San Market, once a month on the 21st. We love the market, we eat a lot of different things.

Takoyaki

I find out that the first thing that I had in Japan was takoyaki, no wonder that I didn't like it. Now that I see what is made of (some fried dough shell with a piece of raw octopus and some sort of coleslaw), I decide that I have no excuse not to like it. We keep trying various other things, working our way between the stands, a line of monks passes by going to the service, we follow them and end up in the cemetery, people are praying to statues of turtles, amazing. In the back there is a five stories pagoda, the tallest in Japan. We pay the entrance fee but the pagoda is closed - we can visit the next two buildings, all part of the Tō-ji temple. It is now 2 pm, maybe we should go home, the kids are ready. Ileana inquires about visiting the Fushimi-Inari temple, she read about it and I couldn't fit it in the program that I made so far. We check the map, figure out a bus to take, bribe the children with some icecream. We end up on some back roads, another huge temple. “this is it?”, “no, it cannot be this one”. It turns out that we are in the yard of Tōfuku-ji temple.

Tōfuku-ji temple

We don't pay admission but we are able to wander for a bit on the premises, another set of magnificent constructions. We finally make it to Fushimi-Inari-Taisha. We are exhausted but this thing is unbelievable. We get a second wind, start going in the orange tunnels, up the mountain, it never ends. Interspersed here and there, little shrines, old graves, constructions, foxes, lions and other animals guarding one thousand year old graves up and up and up the mountain. Supposedly the whole circuit is four kilometers, we choose a shorter path but the maps are just sketches in Japanese, we go and go, soaking wet, the kids start running up the mountain, they jump and laugh and enjoy it, even if occasionally they complain about this father who could only find a path up not down the mountain.

Fushimi-Inari-Taisha

We decide at station three that we had enough, we are now almost on top of the mountain, Inari-san. The whole of Kyoto lies at our feet. Breathtaking. Coming down, we find an alternate path, we then realize that we followed all along the path that we chose in the first place, but a kilometer, especially up the mountain, is pretty long. All this trip among these old graves and shrines, a totally different world, grey and orange all over and on the last meters, a lot of cats on the graves or in the middle of the road. The last few steps we pass a little pond; people are feeding turtles and the huge carp jumps over to steal their food. After a couple of hours here, I realize that this is the best day ever.

We take the bus toward home, get booted off at the Kyoto station, we are too exhausted to walk the next mile home so we vote, four to one, to find some ramen here. We get to the tenth floor and find a place to eat, pick something based on prices and pictures and have a great dinner. The waiter told us what we had, we cannot really understand and we forget a minute later. But you know what, this food is great. Another couple of hours later I fall asleep while playing chess with my son.They had to make the bed under me, I couldn't really help, I was so asleep.

Next day, Saturday, long ago planned, they have two festivals, Jidai Matsuri in the morning and Kurama Fire Festival later at night. It rains, I wake up at 3.30 am. No way to get back to sleep. I clean up emails and financial documents, slowly finishing things up, it will be so good when I will be able to put all this to sleep for a year or so.

I learned to use Twitter today. I had this account for a couple of years, I even posted 56 tweets so far, but this morning I decided to search for “Jidai Matsuri” and found out in a moment that it was rescheduled for tomorrow. Wow, twitter can actually help!

Kiyomizu-dera

When Ileana woke up, we made an alternate plan, we visited Kiyomizu-dera, another unique, fantastic temple, another World Heritage site. We spend more time slowly walking on some streets in Southern Higashiyama. We eat at a restaurant that has English menus, we finally know what we have. We have dessert handed to us by tens of salesmen who invite us to check their products. We decide to return home. The weather is very hot and humid after the rain from this morning, but the sky is still very dark.

I want to go tonight to the fire festival - the trip might be two hours by bus and train, my daughter Ileana and my son want to come. It's optional, Mom would probably decide to come at the last moment. I am still working on convincing Maria. We are at home at 3 pm and shortly after the rain starts. This is no joke, we cannot be outside in this weather, we'll just stay home. The festival continues even in the rain, but it will have to be without us. We talk, we stay at home. We love our little house. Ileana and the children sleep upstairs, I sleep downstairs, there is not enough room for choices. It would probably fit in our kitchen, but it's great and Maria wants to have a house just like this when she grows up.

Higashiyama

At every step I marvel at something. Every person, every cloth, every house, car, road is so different. I love their temples, even if I don't understand much. Cabs have lace on their chairs! The traffic signals beep incessantly, but they stop when we get used to it and come to expect it. The public toilet beeps to say hello. I love the stupid fashion of these teenagers, they make it look so natural, if they find it beautiful then so do I. By my taste, women dress awfully, but after two days I start to like it. They would be fired or taken to the asylum in USA, but they actually seem to feel comfortable and pretty.

Of everything here, I cannot have enough, I would want to take a picture every second, but I don't have the camera and Ileana is much more selective. I don't want to ask for the camera, after all, I have two others in my pocket and last night I discovered that we have 15 cameras with us. But pictures wouldn't help. I just cannot have enough. I love everything about Japan, I already know it will not be enough. It cannot be enough. I love Japan.

Himeji Castle

Oyasumi nasai! Good morning!
I drink a cup of tea while admiring the interior garden.

 We take the train toward Himeji, where there is one of the oldest and best preserved medieval castle in Japan.

We pass the longest suspended bridge in the world.

Because we have to walk for a long distance, we rented bicycles. There is an escalator for them.

 The Castle is nicknamed "White Heron" because it looks like a heron taking flight and is painted white following a traditional Japanese method. It was built by Tokugawa Ieyasu (the main character in "Shogun" by James Clavell) on the site of his mentor's castle (after he was the one who burned it and killed everybody in mentor's family). Like any medieval castle, it has plenty of fortifications.

The main gate has a lateral wall, used for throwing stones and shooting arrows.

The roads are narrow and zig-zagged.

The gate has a smaller gate in itself to controll the volume of enemies entering.

And everywhere, there are small windows for shooting arrows.


The only battle this castle had is the one with time. It is in renovation and we had the possibility to see up-close the walls and the roof.

Like any complicated thing, the castle is made of simple ones: rock, wood, string and earth (plus additives such as rice water, oil, etc.)

 It is to be commended that they are renovating it using traditional methods.

Interesting facts about the castle: it has an appearance of five levels, but has six (bummer for the enemy).

On every roof corner are fishes, to protect it from fire

The castle follows the natural curves of the land and so this granary is one of a kind in Japan with a curved form

Every shogun that had this castle added his seal, that can be seen at the tiles.

The building in which lived the women who took care of the princess was resembling a long hall with some lateral rooms. The difference between this and Versailles was in decorations. (in the picture you can see a little chair; in it sits Hayden, but he is invisible)

Every respectable castle has a moat.

From here we went to Koko-en, a botanical garden.

This man is pruning the tree needle by needle and trains the stems to grow gnarled

These women were going to a tea ceremony into the tea pavilion.

We can only presume the amount of work to have this kind of garden.

By this time we were really hungry. We found a ramen shop. The cook got out from behind the counter, taught us how to work the machine with many buttons and prices, printed our tickets, and then proceeded to boil the noodles and prepare our food. We still don't know what we ate, but I know that I had pork, with mushroom and sea-weeds and it was excellent.

We return to Kyoto and I am left to be the guardian, as they fall asleep almost as the train started to move.

It is 8:30 pm and I am very sleepy. Oyasumi nasai! Good night!

Day One

It's now 10 pm and we are settled in the motel room. We were here before, Ileana didn't like the beds. We looked for something different and still ended up here. We took our chances with room 39 this time.
So this was the first day. It was exhausting. I imagined a slow, boring day until 1-2 pm when we'd go pick up the rental car and then leisurely drive toward the airport. No such thing. It turns out that putting the house on hold for a year is a pretty big business, cleaning everything, emptying all the cupboards, covering all the furniture, washing everything. Ileana had us all open the luggages, take everything out and then put it back, many questions and explanations and a few more problems to solve. We ended up leaving at 4.41 pm. Thanks to our best friends it all got done. Driving in the dark rain, away from home wasn't that much fun. We made it, we left and it's real and I don't even know how it feels.

Counting Down the Days

20: Realizing that we leave in 20 days. Going to the library and elementary school to invite the teachers and the library women to the party.

19: The destruction and scanning of the psychology textbook. The planning of the novel continues.

18: Boredom. Unproductivity

17: 17 days aren't enough. We leave too soon. I won't finish anything. There's so little time!

16: I have a plan and there's enough time to do everything. (Later that night: WE'RE LEAVING, YIPPEE!)

15: A normal day but a productive one. I read.

14: Church. Watched the Phantom of the Opera. 

13-4: Scanning guidebooks while watching movies, and reading between scanning rounds.

3, 2, 1: There isn't a free moment. We work from sun-up to sun down.

0: We're off. I still don't feel that we've left.

If I do have any sentiments, it's that we're going on a vacation to Japan.

We're in the car that we rented from the airport. Dan McCauley drove us to Elmira: thanks! It's a huge car, especially for us. I can actually sit in the back and type without my shoulders coming up to my ears.

This morning I woke up later than usual: at 6:30 instead of 5:30.
I came downstairs and started reading about schizophrenia. This is because I have a character in my NaNoWriMo novel (a kind of contest where peolpe try to write 50,000 words in November) who has this sort of disorder. I wanted to see what sorts of things I could put into the novel and what I couldn't to make it as realistic as possible.

By the time I finished that, the others came downstairs and the work began: moving the files I don't need around the world, deleting the files I don't need, period. Writing to the people in my writing group. Buying the music which we didn't get to buy until now.

And on top of all this, we had to pack up the entire house, too. We put sheets on all the surfaces. We unpacked and repacked the bags. We finished the food.

In short, by 4 something we said goodbye to the house and statrted towards the McCauley family. The girls were very happy that we had brought pistachios and two heavy-duty garbage bags full of clothes. The kids especially liked the car ("it's so CLEAN!"). Their parents took some pictures of us with the backpacks and in our Scottevests and then we set off with Dan towards Elmira.

When Dad said that we have too many bags (and we do: six backpacks and five winter coats), Dan laughed and said that he'd never in his life seen a family of five taking as few bags as us for a weekend, much less a fifteen months!!

See you

We're leaving. Mixed feelings.

Joy: we're going to live what we dreamt about
Sadness: our friends are not coming with us; they will follow our adventures but we will not be part of their  lives in the same way we have been.
Impatience: To get on the road, as a confirmation
Angst: How are we going to deal with the trials?
Protection: we are helping each other pass over the low points: it's just a form of dealing with the emotions
Giddiness: Look at what we're doing, hee hee!

 A stage in our lives is ending. Until now we followed the same steps as the majority of people: high-school, university, job, family, children. We have proof that it ends at every step: last day at work, packing the clothes and preparing the house (sheets all over the place like in "Great Expectations"), suspending services. The most difficult to finish is the food! I never believed Mihai when he told me that he could live comfortably for a month without buying food (while I was in vacation with the kids for two weeks). But as usual he was right: I gave away lots of bags, and even though the five of us eat three meals a day, the food is still there!

We said our good byes to the people we know. When we moved to the States (we have antecedents of straying from the majority's path) our friends visited us one by one (we all had little children) and our parents took us to the airport and encouraged us. Now, we had quite a few parties and we were the main subject. My heart is full of warm feelings, because I felt people's joy and care for us. We thank you all for your thoughts and wishes.

We're leaving... leaving every object, checking the house for the n-th time. We sit down for a while as Russians do, say a prayer, and lock up.
The road awaits us....

And as Grandfather Grigorie used to say: "We're crossing it in two!"

Good Bye Party

A lot of friends stopped over this evening to say good bye. Thank you so much. Taking time of their busy life they came over to see us, learn about our plans, see our little movie and wish us luck. Occasionally an emotional farewell, it was also great fun, ending with balloon fight and dancing. The children worked to put together a little exhibition, stuff we are taking with us, spread out on a table, books we read, and one of the bags ready to be tried on.

The Exhibition

Some of the paper books we used or will use during our trip

They also made it a "fun fund raising party" and we all thank our guests for their generous donations. A little disappointed that some of the people who confirmed their attendance didn't come, we'll get over it and move on with our last few days.

We have a few more things to take care of. A marathon of services at the church on Saturday and Sunday, a couple of lunches, fourteen hours of job time, a few phone calls to make, but besides this just passing the time and trying to relax. Maria spend the last week scanning a lot of the travel books. We sold Ileana's car and decided to keep mine. (A very old, run down Plymouth Voyager, now the doors won't open, the rust is falling by the side and it keeps raining in the car. But we love it and the engine still works.)

Amazon came up with the latest and smallest Kindle, Apple released their updated iTouch and iPhone models. It's funny how I planned this trip and picked the middle of October for departure, thinking that there will be new Kindles and iPhones in the fall. Unfortunately we cannot get the more fancy versions of Kindle touch or iPhone 4S, but happy with what just came out. The iPhone will arrive on October 14th, not much chance for error there, I hope Fedex will do its job. This will be Friday and as we leave on Sunday, there is no back up plan. We got the OneSim card and I'll report from the road on how it works. China Airlines changed the departure time on our flight, we will leave one hour earlier! When we'll arrive in Osaka that hour will matter a lot, it will take about two hours from the time we leave the airport till we get to the rented apartment.


So this is it. I started this blog 827 days ago, it was a crazy dream and now it's not. After spending thousands of hours researching this subject, I feel that we did the best we could, we learned a lot, we made hundreds of little or major decisions and now we are there. Seeing the children preparing for the party, taking it so seriously and being so proud of themselves and their parents it is priceless. They know how happy we are with them, but might not realize how special they are. Yet.