Random miscellaneous

Being repetitive. My forte. :-)

I saw a fire-red dragonfly today. First time I'd ever seen one of those and it was the coolest thing ever...at least at that particular post-JHS club volleyball practice, pre-"what the heck am I going to do with the rest of my afternoon" time, as I was walking to the conbini (convenience store) for lunch (7-11 baby!).

Yesterday (Sunday) I went to a "classical vocal and piano" concert in my town. One of the two performers is the School Counselor at one of my junior high schools. She's a petite, adorable mother/counselor-looking lady with short hair and glasses, and man does she have a voice! Seriously, she could on the opera stage anywhere in the world. Got me to thinking about the choices people make regarding what to do with their lives, which of their talents/interests to follow through on AND all the hidden talents in our communities we're oblivious to.

And, for those of you who are interested but unawares, the World Track and Field Championships are going on right now right here in good old Japan, down in Osaka. I'm sure one of the 10 billion stations (in the States at least) are broadcasting them. Tonight they had the Hammer Throw finals. I couldn't understand what the announcer was saying, but boy did he make the Hammer Throw sound like the most interesting sporting event EVER! New sports history fact for me - the 1994 Olympic gold medalist in the Hammer Throw was Japanese....and he got 3rd place in the competition tonight. Maybe he was the reason behind all the hype for the event? Ya think?! :-)

July 13-16: Backpacking in the Japanese Alps: Part 1

You might recall the giant typhoon that covered pretty much the entire country of Japan back in July? The large earthquake that hit Niigata Prefecture the same weekend? Yes, well, that was the weekend I happened to be backpacking in the Japanese Alps with 3 friends. Impeccable timing. Actually, we had booked the bus through a travel agent, and because of the typhoon warning for the weekend, were given the option to cancel and get our money back. But we’re idiots, so we stuck to our plan. Although you can’t blame us too much, because for our previous hiking trip, everyone told us it was going to pour rain the entire day, but the weather ended up being perfect with a clear, blue sky all day. Typhoon? We’ll believe it when we see it. Actually, our primary motivation for undertaking the hike in a typhoon was because it was Bill’s last chance to do the hike before leaving Japan for good, so we were willing to bite the bullet for his last hurrah.

So, on Friday, July 13th (good omen, yeah?), me, Bill, and 2 Japanese friends, Piro and Mie, boarded a night bus from the Tokyo area bound for Kamikochi, the town from which we were to start our hike. I had mentally prepared myself for the worst, because here’s what our plan was: Leave the Tokyo area at 11pm. Ride the less-comfortable-option night bus for 7 hours (there are at least 2 kinds of night busses in Japan – one has 3 seats across per row, the other has 4, and is obviously much less comfortable), arrive at our start point around 6am to start hiking, most likely in very rainy, possibly very windy, typhoon-induced weather after getting no sleep on the nasty-type of night bus, hike for at least 8 hours up to just underneath the peak we intended to summit the next day and camp for the night. I think in all we were undertaking more than 1,500 meters in elevation, which is about 4900 feet (?!? – someone check my math on that one – I think it’s the first time in my life I’ve tried to convert meters into feet and I probably used the conversion rate for pounds into grams or something). If that conversion is accurate, that’s like hiking out of the Grand Canyon from the very bottom! It’s about as steep too. Hiking up hills and mountains in Japan does not (often) include gentle slopes and undulating paths. If you’re familiar with the mountains in Hawaii, that’s pretty much what you get in Japan – pretty much straight up, volatile, volcanic formations. I added volatile for dramatic effect. I don’t know how else to convey how steep Japanese mountains look. When we arrived in Kamikochi, the parts of the mountains we could see that weren’t completely shrouded by clouds made me think initially, “Okay, so we decided to go rock climbing instead? Who brought the rope and carabineers?!”

Okay, so back to prior to catching the night bus. After work, while we were all in our respective homes frantically packing for the weekend, the travel agent called Bill to let him know we could back out of our night bus plans, which of course instigated a brief flurry of cell phone calls and emails (Japanese cell phones don’t text, they email) to verify our insanity, and as everyone agreed we were all indeed crazy, we let the travel agent know we would be following through with our plan. She said we would be the only ones on the bus….later we realized that was a misinterpretation, that she probably said we MIGHT be the only ones on the bus, but how funny to be setting out for a trip for which, to the best of our knowledge at the time, the rest of the country had cancelled their plans for. We trained it to Shinjuku (part of the greater Tokyo Metro area), lugging our backpacks and looking seriously out of place in the big city at night on a Friday, located our bus, boarded it and were simultaneously pleasantly and irritatingly surprised to find that we were not the only ones on the bus. However, the bus was not packed to the brim and actually had double the leg room my last night bus experience had afforded me, so we were able to spread out comfortably. But of course I couldn’t sleep. MAYBE 2 hours. It was going to be a LONG first day of hiking.

About 2 hours away from our destination it started to rain – not pouring gales of rain, but enough to make one a bit wary of what might be in store once the shelter of the bus was ancient history. When we arrived at Kamikochi, we were greeted by only a light rain, but as I mentioned before, the mountains were almost completely shrouded in clouds, so it was impossible to see what we were in for. And of course I had no idea how to mentally convert 1500 meters and hadn’t bothered to do the math prior to the trip. 1500 meters? Let’s see, did 1500 feet relatively often in Arizona, so no biggie……ha ha. With only 2 hours of sleep under my belt, it was probably better I couldn’t look the beast in the face anyway!

After a relatively lackadaisical breakfast and confirming that the first half of the hike had almost no elevation climb at all, we unanimously decided to do the first stretch, see how the weather was treating us (it was still only lightly raining at this time), and play it by ear from there. I do have to say that deciding to do this hike in a typhoon warning was good from the standpoint that there was pretty much no one else on the trails. I think we would have been more lemmings than hikers had we done the hike in good weather. The trail ran parallel almost the entire route next to a river that was absolutely stunning. I had never seen such clear water in a river before. It carried a turquoise tint that is usually reserved for postcard photos of tropical beaches. This was exactly the way mountain rivers should look – clean and pure as if every drop just melted from the whitest, most pristine snow in existence. The best single word I can use to describe the water in this river is ‘glacial.’ I couldn’t get over it the entire weekend.

There were plenty of rest houses relatively evenly spaced along the flatter part of the trail, so as we leisurely meandered the first section of the path, we’d stop for a spell to check them out, have a cup of coffee here, some snacks there. After about the 3rd of 4th rest house, we finally hit a section of trail that would lead us off and up into the mountains. The rain was coming down a little more steady, but at least for me it was a bit more of a welcome relief to counteract the increased body heat. The rain did make for an interesting trail. I don’t think I’ve ever really hiked a trail that had been turned into a stream. There was something reassuringly humorous about having the trail trickle underneath your feet in the opposite direction your feet were heading.

To be continued........

Sweating to the Cicadas

If Richard Simmons even steals that title, I’m demanding royalties. :-) Yes, it’s August again in Japan, which means sweating like a horse on a daily basis (since I found out pigs don’t sweat, I’ve been trying to come up with a decent alternative exclamation….I like ‘horse’ because they do sweat like mad, but they are still regale….works for me anyway!). August is by far the hottest, most humid month in Japan. Being on hand to witness the blooming of summer flowers, which come in an amazing variety of shapes and stunning colors, coupled with the crazy summer heat, made me realize how tropical Japan’s climate is, at least part of the year, which kind of blows me away, not because it doesn’t make sense, but because I don’t think many people (including myself, up until recently) ever make that association.

I believe the average summer temperature, at least in my area, is between 32-36*C (90-97*F). And of course it’s humid as all get-out. Last week we hit 38*C (100*F) and two days later, 40.9*C (106*F), which apparently was a record high, although I haven’t been able to verify whether it’s the highest temperature ever recorded in Japan (which is what everyone is telling me), on only the island of Honshu or just in the greater Kanto region. Whatever it was it was damn hot. I woke up at 6:45am already sweating. Someone told me it was 35*C (96*F) by 9:00am that day. That’s Phoenix/desert weather! What the heck?! I had vacation that day, so was planning on staying home and the second I woke up I gave up my previously seemingly obtainable quest of not using my air conditioning this summer. It wasn’t until the next day I found out I was completely justified in caving on the hottest day EVER IN THE HISTORY OF JAPAN (as one person told me :-) - dramatic effect, thank you very much).

On the day, I was all set to blog about the incredible experience of surviving the summer heat and humidity in Japan when I stumbled upon on internet article about the intense heat that has been gripping the South-Central U.S., and suddenly my summer heat experience here in Japan didn’t seem so incredible. And I’m sure I’m proving complete ignorance of crazy weather those of you in other countries are probably experiencing this summer as well. But, of course we all like to think that our experiences are unique, so I’m blogging about it anyway. :-)-

Washing Machine Mystery

At the end of July, my washing machine was stolen. It sounds just plain weird for someone to say their washing machine was stolen period, but even more so if you don’t know that their washing machine sits outside on their front balcony. :-) Yep, so someone, in broad daylight, decided to help me celebrate my 1-year anniversary in Japan by stealing my washing machine, which also happens to be one of those half-sized things so conveniently for the thief, not as difficult to carry. It was there in the morning when I left my apartment, I’m fairly certain, but much to the chagrin of the police later on that day, it just happens to be one of those things I don’t consciously verify on a daily basis when I leave my apartment. Door locked? Check. Washing machine still there? Check.

I just happened to come home in the afternoon at the same time as my neighbors. As I was walking toward my apartment building, I saw my upstairs neighbor making very prolonged observations from his apartment doorway towards the general direction of my washing machine (the space for which I couldn’t see from my standpoint at street level), which I thought was royally odd, but whatever. As I started up the stairs to my apartment, my downstairs, kitty-corner neighbor emerged from her apartment and the upstairs neighbor started descending the stairs so I returned to street level to chat away with them for a bit, completely obliviously that I was about to have my first experience with theft (anything more than food from a shared refrigerator, that is :-) ). Now, my upstairs neighbor is a bit on the quiet side anyway, and very polite, so he wasn’t about to interrupt the conversation, even with something as important as the theft of a major household appliance, but when an appropriate break came, he very nicely said, “Mandy, do you know your washing machine is missing?” Well, I’ll be darned. So it was!

My neighbors were heading over to Town Hall anyway, so they offered to stop into the Board of Education Office to ask if the office had for some reason taken my machine for servicing purposes, which was very kind of them to do, because washing machine theft is not a conversation topic I’ve mastered yet in Japanese. I believe about 10 minutes later my supervisor appeared at my door to confirm that my washing machine had indeed disappeared. He went back to his office to call the police. :-) I knew that was coming. I think I did the fastest, most thorough apartment clean ever recorded in the history of man the second my supervisor drove away and it’s a good thing I did, because when the police officer arrived, he was followed by one of my Junior High School English teachers, one of the Junior High School Principals, my supervisor, and 10 minutes later, 2 more police officers. I was seriously trying not to laugh the entire time we were filling out the police report. The parking lot in front of my apartment building was full of cars parked at random, and I can only imagine what the neighbors thought about the scenario!

It was also funny because when my supervisor left, one of my first thoughts was about how quiet I would be able to keep the situation. Initially I thought, well, if it’s just the police and my supervisor, maybe no one at my schools will know. Yeah right. People I have random connections with at the Town Hall are STILL asking me about my washing machine situation and I don’t even bat an eye when they bring it up. My inside joke with myself was that the story would probably be run in the next town newsletter. Of course it wasn’t, but you never know….. So anyway, of course they never found my washing machine, although I’m sure the police did an extremely thorough search of the area within a 50-kilometer radius (ha ha). The junior high school across the street from my house (whose principal came over with the police on the day in question) lent me an extra washing machine they happened to have on hand, so I was only without a washing machine for 2 days. All in all, it ended up being more of a funny, memorable experience for me than anything, for which I am indeed grateful!