Our Moldy Summer

Late summer got a little interesting for us because we had to have most of our upstairs re-wallpapered within a three-week window.  Why?  Well, I believe I've been clear about our issues with heating and cooling our house.  In the summertime it gets really hot and humid here so we run our air conditioners a lot.  This summer we ran the one in Cora's bedroom basically all the time.  It's where she sleeps and naps, you know?  And personally I believe that it wastes less energy to just leave it on all the time than it does to turn it on and off frequently.

So, anyway, there we are, running her air con constantly during really humid weather and uh....not really airing out her room much.

And then one day I was moving things around in her room and saw this.....

Now, Chad had already noticed that the wallpaper was bubbling so we weren't that surprised to find it (although I did shriek and pull my hair a little....wouldn't you?).  We had even already notified the maintenance people.  But after I found this we called them back and told them to step on it.

So Cora spent a few nights in the guest room and a dude came and re-wallpapered her room.  Everyone always asks me how he got rid of the mold.  After some lengthy and confused conversations with maintenance men, I finally learned that he sanded it off.

While he was working in her room we found a little mold in our room and ended up having it redone too.  And then we did the guest room because by that point we figured it was only a matter of time.  (For the record the guest room had no mold because we don't run the air con in it all the time.)

So, for anyone thinking about moving to Japan, or moving to a house with air conditioning difficulties, let the following be a public service announcement to you.   Don't be like us! 

1. Invest in dehumidifiers for the summertime!  They help a lot.

2. Air out your rooms regularly!

3. Give the air cons a break occasionally!

Geocache 'Til You Drop

This past weekend we all went to Tokyo to get flu shots.  We spent a night in a hotel so we would have time to eat some good food and do some sight-seeing.  While we were there we did some geocaching.  If you don't know what geocaching is, stop right now and go read this.

Alright, so we headed for a cache located in the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden.  This garden used to be the home of a feudal lord in the 1600's- 1800's.  It eventually became Imperial Gardens for the royal family of Japan and then after that became a national garden open to the public for a small fee.  It's about 140 acres, very wooded and well-landscaped.

taken on my iPhone, hence the quality

we will refer back to this picture later

So we went to the cache location and it turned out to be one of the best kind of geocaches in that it was located exactly where you thought it would be.  It was in the edge of the woods near some old concrete rubble.  It was big enough to hold items and we dropped off a trackable travelbug that we had picked up in a cache near the Tokyo SkyTree.  We picked up a new travelbug to take to the US over the holidays.

And now....for the rest of the story.  You didn't think this was just a nice, boring tale about a garden and a geocache, did you?

As I walked out of the woods after replacing the cache, I banged my knee hard on a piece of the concrete sticking up out of the ground. I hit it riiiight on the bone but it was a small gash with minimal bleeding.  I came out onto the path and told Chad what I'd done.  And then I tried really, really hard to walk it off.  I'm a big fan of  "walking it off"......in theory.  I thought I was fine and over it.

And then.... I had this really good dream that I can't remember.  I was very confused when  I woke up on the ground with Chad holding me and yelling at me frantically.  I was cold and wait....oh, yeah...I'm in this park. Fortunately Chad had caught me before I hit the pavement in a dead faint.

Now those of you who know me very well said "Uh-oh." two paragraphs ago.  For the rest of you, well....I pass out easily.  Blood, needles, childbirth, intense sharp pain of the funny-bone type or any combination thereof and I will keel over in a second.  It's very annoying and seems to be getting worse as I get older.  At this point I've had enough "episodes" that I know I'm supposed to lie down.  But the park was chilly and there was no place to lie down (refer to the photo above) so I was just going to walk it off.

As Chad was trying to get me to wake up a nice man came by and tried to help.  There was a language barrier but he was trying.  I told him I was fine (in Japanese, no less!) and sent him on his way.  Because clearly I was fine, right?  I was just walking it off.

Chad left me kneeling on the ground and went to see to poor Cora who by this time was crying in her stroller.  I was drinking some water and then....I had another great dream that I can't remember. This time when Chad woke me up I was much less confused and Chad was much more frantic.  Let's stop here and appreciate his dilemma.  He didn't want to leave me lying on the ground and go for help yet he couldn't move me and handle the stroller.  And I'd sent away the only person who had offered to help.

At that point I managed to get it together and get up and walk out of the park.  We took a taxi the half mile back to where we'd left the car and just went home.  I'd like to say it ended there but apparently my digestive system had been compromised and I polished off the morning with some carsickness on the drive out of the city.  And now Chad I both have bum knees because he wrenched his catching me as I fell.

But now we're home, safe and mostly sound with another geocache found and a (hopefully) entertaining story to tell.

The end! :D

Meiji Jingu Shrine

A month or so ago (when we had a visitor from home) we took a trip into Tokyo and explored the area around Yoyogi Park more thoroughly.  We went there once before but we didn't actually go see the main feature of Yoyogi Park which is the Meiji Jingu shrine.

Meiji Jingu is a massive Shinto shrine dedicated to the spirits of the Meiji Emperor (he ruled 1867 to 1912) and his wife.  It's in the middle of Yoyogi Park which is 175 acres of huge trees smack in the middle of Tokyo.  The trees were donated from all over Japan and the world and installed when the shrine and park were constructed in 1920.

Two interesting things about Meiji Jingu:

First, it was completely destroyed in the Tokyo air raids during WWII.  Public funds were raised to reconstruct it in the late 50's.

Second, world leaders (I use that term loosely) like to visit it.  Hillary Clinton was there in 2009 right after she was made Secretary of State.  And, if you go to the Wikipedia page there's a photo of Nazis visiting it in 1938.*  So, yeah.

main building

panorama of the complex

exiting

this photo is from our previous visit.  if you look carefully at the bottom right of the torii you can see Chad and a
stroller with our abandoned child

*This is in no way meant to compare the two.

Poppin' Tags

So here's a post about what a thrift shop is like in Japan.  Before you get all excited let me tell ya that it's pretty much like one in America. The only one I know about in these parts is a chain called Off House.

Off House is part of a conglomerate that includes Hard Off which sells used electronics/hardware (and yeah, sorry, the name totally cracks me up), Book Off which sells used books, and the aforementioned Off House that sells housewares, clothes, toys etc.  There are a few other variations that I've never seen in person, but you can see them listed on the official website.

a local Off House

I recently went with an American friend and attempted to actually sell some things there.  I wasn't too successful in that I only made ¥400 (about $4) profit.  But the fact that we were able to manage the transaction was a success, albeit a touch-and-go one because of language difficulties.  We had to show ID and fill out a short contact form and sign that we weren't going to show up and want the stuff back.  The ladies working there pulled some poor dude out of the back and made him talk to me.   When this happens you can assume that the poor schmuck at some point let on to his co-workers that his English was better than average.  Or they grabbed him just because he was younger and had been in English classes more recently than they had.  I always feel really sorry for someone when this happens.  Anyway, they didn't want most of my clothing because it was off-season but I did sell a baby toy.  Granted, I ended up buying a baby toy while I was there but that's beside the point.

Other than the toy, I once got a maternity dress there and I've bought some cute Japanese-style appetizer dishes.  That's the kinds of things Off House is good for.

and guitars

clothing

the rather large collection of action figures is pretty "Japanese" I'd say

electronics

Roll It Up, Pat It Out...

I see a lot of "different" things here in Japan.  But after two and a half (!) years here I don't notice many of them anymore.  But there is one thing that still - after all this time - puzzles, fascinates and occasionally repulses me.

Japanese bakeries.

First, let me make clear that I am talking about bakeries and not sweet shops*.  I know in my mind they can sort of blend together sometimes but here they are very distinct.  Bakeries here are much more focused on non-sweet items than those in America.  In the average Japanese bakery (this does not include Starbucks or it's imitators) you will be hard-pressed to find cinnamon rolls, danishes, cookies, muffins or any of those other wonderful items you would expect to see. (Although, you may occasionally run across them and most bakeries will have a few dessert items available.)

Here are some of the things you can expect to see.  I've broken them down into categories that I feel best expresses the general composition of a Japanese bakery.

• Fake Hotdog Travesties

that is a really long, bad-tasting fake hotdog
in an equally disgusting "bun-like contrivance".
seriously, the bread is hard and the hotdog
is more like a sausage.

• Things With Corn

on the left is bread with a pile of creamed corn.
on the right is another hotdog monstrosity helpfully labeled "pastry frank".

• Bread With Vegetables (and Mayo)

on the left - broccoli, mushrooms and probably mayo
on the right - tomato and definitely mayo

• Things With an Egg

Japanese people will put a poached egg on anything.

• Green Bread

it's filled with a mashed soybean paste.  Yum!

Two more things of note:  One, it is virtually impossible to find empty hoagie/sub rolls in this country.  They are always filled with something.  Egg, cream, bean pastes, chocolate, peanut butter, cheese, you name it and I've probably seen it sold in a sub roll.  But if you want to buy a plain roll to take home and fill with steak or roast beef or meatballs as God intended then you're out of luck.  Two, if you see bread filled with what looks like chocolate, IT MAY NOT BE CHOCOLATE.  It may be red bean paste masquerading as chocolate.    Trust me, you do not want to bite into that thinking it's chocolate.  If you learn nothing else from this blog, learn that.


*Japanese sweet shops, on the other hand, are usually marvelous and full of wonderful shortcakes, creme brulees, tiramisus, fruit tarts, chocolate cakes, pies etc.  If not exactly what you would find in an American sweet shop (to me they have a bit of what I imagine is a French influence) they are close enough.

Tokyo Skytree

A few weeks ago, we had some family visiting so we took the train into the city for the day to visit the new-ish Tokyo Skytree.  The Skytree is a broadcasting and observation tower that when completed became the second tallest structure in the world--the tallest is some skyscraper in Dubai.  It is the tallest tower in the world, since there is a distinction between skyscrapers and towers.  If you're wondering why it's called the Skytree, it was chosen in a nationwide vote from a selection of names that were suggested by the public. The one I like that didn't get chosen is "Dream Lookout".  Catchy, huh?

The place has been open a year and a half and the lines on a weekday still looked like this:

We waited in line for forty minutes to buy tickets and get in (you can reserve tickets in advance and walk in but we weren't that smart) . Anyway, we can say we went and the views were spectacular.  First though, the tower itself:

tall, right?

I can't take credit for this cool pic, Chad took it

When we finally got our tickets we rode some pretty snazzy elevators up to the observation decks.

usually when you take these pics, you see the Skytree looming over everything because it's just that tall

wait, there it is!!

another Chad shot, him looking down through the floor windows

and it wouldn't be Japanese if it didn't have a pastry
made in it's likeness (this thing looked disgusting)

 So if you're in Tokyo check it out---there's lots of restaurants and shopping nearby and inside the tower.  And they constructed a brand new train station that dumps you right out at it so getting to it is easy!