We’ve been to Japan! An early 50th birthday present to myself. And the girls had a parallel adventure with family and friends in three cities and Anglesea, all in the space of a week.
New Zealand was our last overseas travel, but I haven’t been to a non-English-speaking country for more than 13 years, also the last time Steve and I travelled apart from the girls. We missed them every day on this holiday, and I think they missed us. But we all had an excellent adventure as well.
I enjoyed immersing myself in a different culture and language: the food markets packed with different types of fish, a tucked-away pottery shop, and fruit and vegetable stalls with tasty strawberries. Just outside the former main Tsukuki market I bought a packet of dried persimmons that kept us in snacks for most of the week (it’s similar to dried figs but not as sweet).
The cherry blossom trees were delightful. Most were not at their peak but we found some late-blooming varieties in some of the parks we visited. It would be amazing to walk down a whole avenue of them along a canal or park, but we caught the tail end of the season, and I was happy enough with that.
We stayed in mostly medium-sized hotels, whose rooms featured blond Japanese veneer wood and Japanese art, and always heated toilet seats with an inbuilt-bidet, which I summoned the courage to try on the last day (verdict: pleasant). I also visited the honsen (Japanese public baths) in our first hotel. They are segregated, with the first room containing lockers, benches to change at and hairdryers. The second room had six or seven showering areas with hand-held shower heads around the walls, and in the middle of the room was a pool, perhaps ten metres by three. There were two Japanese women in the first room but the second was deserted. I had a quick shower and a dip in the warm pool, then got dressed and tried to open the door to get back to the first room. I pushed and pulled without success. One of the women motioned to slide the door, so I managed to get out.
We chose and practiced four words or phrases every day as a mark of respect and to help us get our basic needs met, starting with Konnichi wa (hello); Ego ga hana shi mash ta? (Do you speak English?); Sumimasen (Excuse me); Do zo (after you); and graduating up to asking for the bill, right/left, saying that I didn’t understand, and asking to reserve a table for two. Some of these were a bit shaky, but we tried to practice them during our walks. I was pleased with myself that I attempted a phonecall in Japanese to ask if tickets were still available at the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra’s Saturday concert. I was able to ask if the person spoke English, but couldn’t understand the reply. We struggled through enough for him to tell me in English to please come to the theatre, and indeed we did go on our second-last night, and enjoyed the music and the 2,000-seat auditorium, its interior looking a little like the Opera House in Sydney.
We walked a lot: around the Imperial Palace park, to see a rooftop garden and have afternoon tea at a building made mostly of glass, which had a boat-like feeling standing on the deck and looking up to the ceiling. We drank Japanese tea at a couple of cafés attached to gardens, and took buses and trams to canals to search for cherry blossoms. We admired the Tokyo cityscape from a restaurant high up a building in the Ginza district that served delicious Greek food on one night, and another night ate very good Italian pizza and drank Italian wine, a stone’s throw from our Mitsui Garden hotel. I only ate sushi once, bought from a kiosk at a train station when rushing to make a connection. Other than that, we ate noodles, tempura and trays of small dishes. One night we ate at a very stylish restaurant with such dishes, and we were elevated in a long bench divided into booths. Another night, this time in Kyoto, we ate at a busy, hot kitchen, where simple eggplant, fish, and tempura was brought out one by one and I drank apple sake without tasting any alcohol in it.
Kyoto was our favourite, because it had the old district; and the zen temples and their gardens were so beautiful and at a human scale. We were blown away by the Golden Pavilion temple by the lake and by the Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine whose dark orange arches wound their way every step up the mountain. We hired bikes to ride to the Botanic Gardens in search of cherry blossoms (without success) and I hired a bike from our ryokan (hostel, where we had our own curtained-off single beds in a dorm), while Steve rested and did the washing. This was an adventure: I had my guidebook with basic map but was relying on the GPS in my phone, whose battery was rapidly being depleted, down to 1% by the time of my arrival back. It had lasted long enough for me to find the Philosopher’s Path and ride along it, imagining what it would be like when the blossoms along the creek were in bloom.
We strolled around the Geisha district and caught glimpses of no fewer than four geishas during the course of our stay in Kyoto, dressed up and with their white makeup painting their faces. It rained quite heavily overnight one night, so we walked with an umbrella and raincoat, but it was clear in the morning, with the temperature a perfect 22 to 25 degrees that day and every day.
Yes, we did get on the wrong bullet train back to Tokyo because we jumped on a few minutes before the scheduled departure time and found ourselves on an all-stops instead of express train back. But even then, I found it a meditative time, totally focused on planning and then immersing ourselves in the experience. I even learnt a little about Japanese history and culture at the impressive Tokyo museum, including about the 700-year Samurai culture.
Meanwhile the girls were having their own adventures, with their holiday comprising time with cousins, aunts, uncles and their grandmother, an Easter-egg hunt and swimming in Anglesea; then a full day devoted to Duncan, Becky and doting on one-year-old Felix; time at home with Maggie, Peter and Oli then a drive to Sydney for a glamorous hotel stay followed by a full day at Luna Park; then two days with my friend and her family back home, where they played board games and ran around, including with water guns. They were unable to choose which of the four experiences was their favourite.
We all had five days together at home after that, relaxing and doing some nice things. And on Friday of my first week back at work I attended the funeral of the father whose four children I used to babysit when I was in my last couple of years of school and they were aged from one to twelve. They lived down the road from us and at the end of the evening, he would walk home with me and ask about school and what I was thinking of doing next.
It was a sudden death at the age of sixty nine and a blow to everyone. The funeral was beautiful and a perfect tribute to his positivity, zest for life and commitment to work, his family, and since his retirement two years earlier, to his many hobbies. We used his law firm to do the conveyancing for our move last year and I was sorry to have missed him due to his retirement. All four of his children spoke, one reminding us to ‘take the holiday, spend the money, don’t put it off’; and another to be curious, be generous and kind, and you will be spreading his legacy in the world.
As we all process the premature loss, this is a good message to remember.
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