Birthday Blog or Something
I’ve been meaning to blog several times in the past couple of weeks. I just haven’t had it in me. It’s one of those things, you know, where you sometimes can’t seem to DO anything.
I had a lovely, small and intimate release party for my new single on the 30th of April. Everyone who showed up was absolutely amazing and we had a wonderful time. I even held a little mini-gig, accompanied by Sebastian and Ingrid, during which the following was recorded:
On May Day I went marching with the punks in the Labour Day parade. We had pizza in the park behind the jail after.
This is something I meant to blog about at length. Why the labour movement is still important and so on and so forth. But it’s a little late now, so it might have to wait until next year.
I’ve got a new job. Money’s tight at the moment, so when I was offered this gig I took it without hesitation, even though it doesn’t pay very well. I’m now a nanny, for a kid who doesn’t have a space in a nursery yet, but whose parents ran out of maternity/paternity leave. He’s adorable, but a handful. It’s completely different from working in a nursery, where you have many kids. I have just the one, but it’s so challenging, because I have to devote all my attention to him all the fucking time. He’s too little to really play on his own, and since there are no other kids to distract him, the task falls to me, and he doesn’t talk at all yet, so understanding what he wants is hard. I’m growing to love him, though, bit by bit, and I’m getting into the routines okay. I’m only doing this job until the end of June, but it’s a bit of cash in the coffers at least.
Amanda Palmer revealed a kickstarter for her upcoming album on the day I released my single, which incidentally was her birthday. There are a lot of excellent stuff you can get if you pledge, so if you’re a fan, you totally should. For just a dollar you’ll get a download of the album, and starting at $25 there are a whole bunch of awesome physical packages. Among them is a house party. As in, AFP comes to your house and you can invite your friends and party with her. You have to pledge $5000 to get it. So, I got together with a bunch of other people in Oslo that I found on the Shadowbox forums, and we’ve pledged for a house party and are raising the money. I’m so excited! It won’t happen for at least a year or so, but it’s going to be awesome! It’s about the only thing I’ve managed to be excited about since I put out the single.
This evening, I went with my friend Chris to see Tim Burton’s new movie, Dark Shadows. It was a press viewing, invite only, at Rockefeller in Oslo, the day before the real opening. It was great! It was like a good old Tim Burton movie. Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd were all excellent films, but somehow they didn’t feel like classic Burton. After all, I fell in love with Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Sleeply Hollow, and I’ve been wanting more of that. With Dark Shadows, I feel like I finally got it.
And now it’s just gone midnight, and it’s my birthday. I’m 24. Fuck me, that’s weird to think… Mostly because I haven’t had time to really realise that it’s my birthday yet, because I’ve been so busy. I’ve invited some people to a birthday party on Saturday, and I’ve arranged to have dinner at my parents’ place, but between the house party funding, being broke, getting a cold and working full time, it honestly hasn’t had time to sink in. I want to be happy that it’s my birthday. But I really just feel exhausted and empty.
I think, in the end, it all boils down to my single. I guess I’d hoped to have sold a little more of it, after nearly two weeks. But I’ve hardly sold any copies at all. 54 people were set to “attending” my single release event on Facebook. That’s 54 people I figured might buy it, minus the ten or so who came to my release party and were given a free CD each. (If you’re waiting for a free copy for yourself, you’ll be disappointed; only the people at my party got free CDs, and I’ve given away a couple of download codes to special cases. If you’d like to help promote me by writing a review on your blog or something, then I’ll send you a code too.) In reality, I’ve sold 6 downloads, and 4 CDs. I’ve made 10 sales, of a single I spent weeks on. And that just feels shitty, cause it’s not for lack of trying. It just feels like PEOPLE WON’T HELP ME.
I’ve heard people say, before, that you can’t rely on your friends to be your fans. What that means, I guess, is that you can’t rely on your friends alone to buy your records and come to your gigs. And, of course you can’t, not in the long run. But to all my friends who might be reading this, I want to tell you something important. At the point I’m at right now, you are all I have, and I need you. I don’t have a label. I don’t have funds for advertising and promoting this thing. All I have is you guys, Twitter and Facebook. I have 163 followers on Twitter, 110 likes on Facebook and 500 or so Facebook friends. If all of these people shared my single, I would reach thousands of people. Unfortunately, most of them haven’t, even though I have asked and begged and pretty much offered my soul in exchange.
It has to start somewhere. If you guys support me now, buy my single so I can spend the money I earn on equipment and instruments so I can make my music better, so I can take the time to write more songs, if you share my single with the world and go that extra mile by adding the words, “this is my friend’s new single, you should really listen to it, it’s about ME!!!” or something else enticing to your post, I promise, vow and GUARANTEE it will be worth the five minutes it took out of your busy life. If you order a CD, editions out of 100, signed and numbered, that thing will become fucking valuable one day, because I WILL do this. I WILL make it, I’ll find a way with or without you. But if I have you with me, you will be able to say, one day, “I helped make that happen.”
It’s a brave new world, my friends. A world of Internet, creative commons, independence. A world where musicians can earn their livings themselves, without having to rely on record labels that steal 90% of their profits and sue poor students for torrenting their albums. We are making history. We can BE the media, if we try.
So try.
New single, out today, available exclusively through Bandcamp. Listen! Buy! Share!
What’s cool about Bandcamp is that whatever you choose to pay goes straight to me! Bandcamp only takes a small 10% as a distribution fee, and there’s no label taking any of my moneys. So, you’ll be supporting the artist directly!
And, did you know you can even order a CD? Editions out of 100, signed and numbered!
Also, there’s a t-shirt!
Source: maiamadness.bandcamp.com
It is Here!
Amazingly, incredibly, it is here, at last! After all the secrets, the anticipation and the general suspence, my single is being released RIGHT NOW! Available exclusively through Bandcamp, you can now experience the happy ukulele feeling, the strangeness and the proper fucked-upedness of “My Friends Are More Fucked Up than Me”!
You can stream and listen to it as much as you like from your browser, or you can download one track at a time for free, or you can name your price and buy the whole single, in which case you get a thank you video from me as well! If you’re up for it, you can even order a special edition CD from me, which I shall lovingly burn, decorate and sign, and then saunter off to the post office with to ship off to anywhere in the world.
If you’re the giving kind and you’d like to write a review on your own blog to help promote me, I’ll give YOU a code to download the single for free. And if you share the link on Twitter and Facebook and the like, you’ll have my heartfelt gratitude. I need your help to sell this thing!
And look! I made a t-shirt, too! Because everyoneknows their friends are more fucked up thanthey are, so why not show it off?
I think you should buy this shirt. It comes it lots of different colours and it would look awesome on you.
Now, all that remains is to thank everyone who’s been helpful, all the people who have supported me, and especially my boyfriend, who stands by me even though I’m pretty fucked up, and all my fucked up friends, without whom this song would not have been written.
Thank you all!
Happy Birthday, Dad.
My father was a very talented musician and a remarkable person. He has inspired me in so many ways, and has been an important factor in my decision to become a musician myself. He would have been fixty-four today.
My dad and I performing together at Särö in November of ‘97:
Last year, when I was at university, I had a module called Untold Stories. It was a popular music history module. Our assessment in this module consisted of researching and writing about something or someone that had not been written about extensively before. It could be a band or an artist or a musical style or period, preferably something that we had experienced for ourselves or had a close connection to.
I chose to write about my dad. In the occasion of his birthday, I now choose to share with you this narrative.
Tore Haraldsen – A Legacy in Song
I loved my dad. I still do. I don’t know much about what I really believe about much of anything, but I know this: I miss you, and I hope and believe that from somewhere, somehow you’re looking out for me. Happy birthday.
Mysterious Surprise Single Release
Plans are afoot! Evil ones! Or perhaps not so evil, but certainly strange and intriguing. I plan to release a single! Two songs have been recorded quite secretly in my living room. Which songs, you will find out on the 30th of April, which is the release date I’ve set. I’ve made a Facebook event that you can go join in case you’d like to be reminded, though it’s possible that I’ll also be tweeting quite a bit about what’s going on while I fine-tune the recordings and to the best of my limited ability do the whole mixing-thing. I am, once again, doing it all myself, since I have no moneys to hire professionals to do it for me.
I share with you, once again, this piece of perplexing artwork:
Perhaps some exceptionally intelligent person will be able to gather from it what sort of songs I’ll be releasing, but seeing as only 30 people have heard the single’s title track in the first place, I doubt if anyone but the five people who already know will have a clue.
Other than that, I now look like this:
On the 1st of May I intend to take it all off. Hey, I’m only young once, right? Better do all this before people start to seriously expect me to be… respectable. I hope such a day never comes.
Finally, Japan already feels like it happened years ago. Anyone else get that thing when you travel to some place utterly different from your home, that it feels like a whole different world, and when you get back it just sort of fades into the background? That’s happening to me right now. It’s really very strange. It’s like Japan isn’t a part of the real world at all.
Take care, everyone in the world! Make life awesome!
Japan Extravaganza: Appendix
Japan is a weird country, and the Japanese are weird people. In case this wasn’t clear enough from my Japan blog posts, here’s a collection of funny signs and just funny things we saw.
Aside from how disturbing I find it to have food smiling at me, this guy looks like he wants to eat ME:
A clean tombstone is a happy tombstone:
I saw two of these. No idea what they do inside:
Do not ride this toilet backwards, and do not stand on the seat:
Do not play baseball in the escalator:
A curiously blank road sign:
Do not drive inside the restaurant! (Actually, this sign reads “don’t drink and drive”, if you know how to read Japanese, but I don’t…):
And, finally, don’t drop your baby on its head, love Narita Airport <3 :
So, that’s it, no more Japan! I’ll be blogging about music again soon. Till then, take care!
Japan Extravaganza Part 3: Tokyo Fun and Nosebleeds
Part 2: Inari, Hakone, Harajuku
KayKay got up very early indeed on Saturday morning, as she had an introduction ceremony start of term thing at her uni. Morten and I had breakfast at the ryokan. They gave us way too much food, as they are prone to do at ryokan, but it was all lovely.
After a slow morning involving a long, comfortable bath in the ryokan’s onsen, we made our way to Ueno Park, where we went to the zoo.
Given that the last two zoos I went to were the Helsinki Zoo, where the animals have loads of space and are really happy, and the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, where the animals live in as close to their natural habitats as possible, Ueno Park Zoo was a little depressing. Some of the animals looked awfully cramped, but it was fun all the same, and I don’t think any of them were directly unhappy.
Okapi:
Funny, snouty turtle:
Weird crocodile cousin:
Pygmy hippos:
Pallas’s kitteh!!!!
Man, penguins are bastards…
Don’t try to cuddle the fluffy lemur-cousin:
Aaaaand Firefoxes!!!!
The queues for the polar bears and the giant panda were ridiculous, so we skipped those and left the zoo to go meet KayKay. We had meant to have a look around Ueno Park, but due to the sakura the place was packed.
So we took a fancy train with no driver out to an artificial island in Tokyo Bay.
There, we visited Miraikan, which is a sort of museum of science and technology. We were absolutely gutted to find that we had missed the ASIMO demonstration, but there were a lot of other awesome things to see there, too.
I was too excited about all the cool science stuff to remember to take photos at first, but I managed to get a few towards the end of our visit.
A model of the ISS:
Space onigiri:
This is what it looks like where astronauts hang out:
Paro, the theraputic baby seal robot:
Morten petting Paro (a little Japanese kid got in my shot, so I blurred out his face; not sure his parents would want his face in my blog):
A dress made of salt:
I made a glass vibrate using my voice and went inside a weird room that I think was registering neutrinos or something, and learned stuff about earthquakes and it was awesome.
Outside was a pretty park thing:
Miraikan closed at 5 pm, so we decided to just chill that evening and went back to Kasuga. We had drinks and dinner at the pub place from the previous evening. They had loads of tasty foods, and we had pizza, and when we felt like we’d had enough we stopped by a convenience store and bought some alcohol and went back to the ryokan where we had a bath together in the onsen. It was a lovely evening.
A small damper was put on it, however, when we learned that one of mine and KayKay’s closest friends had just lost her little sister who had been in hospital. It was dreadfully sad to hear, and I think we all went to bed pondering our own mortality a little bit.
Sunday was our last day in Tokyo. We decided to go to Asakusa to look for souvenirs and have a gander at the temple there. It turned out to be absolutely packed full of people.
We did find some presents for some of our friends, though, and we got Morten a yukata! Yay! I have one from my previous visit to Japan (it may or may not have been bought in the same shop in Asakusa, actually), so now we can wear them together! If I can ever convince him to wear the thing, of course.
I also found a piano patterned obi. It was so awesome I just had to buy it, even if it was a little expensive. I figure I can wear it with other kinds of clothes than a kimono, mix some east and west, it’ll look awesome!
The temple was also packed.
We gave up on really seeing it and went off to the side where they were selling food and bought okonomiyaki, which they were selling as simply “Osaka-yaki”. I’d never tried it before. It was a little weird. I didn’t finish mine.
Next stop was Akihabara, Electric City. We had lunch at the train station there before heading for the flea market-ish thing.
They had so many things!!! Anime posters and figurines, clothes and accessories, original artwork and home crafted jewellery, laptop bags, phone charms, t-shirts, all kinds of geek.
We stopped at a row of what looked like gumball machines, except there were little toys and phone charms inside instead, and KayKay put in a coin and got the one she wanted. She was extatic.
Then we went out into the main part of Electric City, where they had closed off a six lane street!
Me sitting down in the middle of an intersection, because I can:
(Turns out I couldn’t, actually… I sort of started a trend – though I saw another person do it first – and soon people were sitting down all over the place to get their pictures taken and a police officer came over and asked us to do him the honour of not sitting down in the middle of the street if we’d be so kind.)
In this building they had a video game arcade:
And in the basement they had girly photobooths. Basically, boys park their girlfriends down there while they play video games. KayKay and I went into one and took pictures. It was a bizarre experience. Everything was so pink and loud and weird, bit we got cute stickers out of it.
With Akihabara over and done with, we returned to Homeikan to drop off the things we’d bought and then headed out to the Tokyo Dome, where they have an amusement park. We got a ride from a guy who was very curious as to why westerners would come to Japan and stay in ryokan rather than fancy big hotels. Japanese people who can afford it stay in fancy western style hotels, he said. KayKay explained that it’s not all that fancy to us, and we’d rather experience something specifically Japanese.
The Tokyo Dome amusement park place was pretty packed. We only did one ride, the Big-O, which is sort of like a London Eye type ferris wheel where you can look out at the city. Tokyo is really quite huge.
Also, they had a Moomin café, with a shop.
I was really pleasantly surprised by the café. I had expected everything to have pictures from the Japanese cartoons, but instead I found that they had the official Finnish Moomin mugs, and in addition to that they had their own Moomin mugs, and note books, and wallets, and phone charms, and cookie cutters and all kinds of stuff, and they all had Tove Janson’s original illustrations and comics on them. It was fantastic!
We had intended to have dinner at a restaurant the people at Homeikan had suggested to us on the first night, but we couldn’t find it, so we returned to the ryokan and asked again. This time, they sent us back to LaQua, the mall at the Tokyo Dome. The place they had suggested to us turned out to be a bit pricy, so instead we went to a Chinese restaurant on the second floor. Best choice we ever made! We had pan fried dumplings, and crispy rice, and tasty meat and mushroom sauce, and pork and eggplant rice and gravy, and it was amazing! What a fantastic last Japanese (Chinese) dinner!
We had a bath that evening too, and went to bed something like early, after packing all our stuff.
The next morning we had breakfast early and then got the staff to call us a cab after check out. We said goodbye to KayKay outside Homeikan. I’m going to miss her so much and I won’t see her again until August! But at least we had an amazing week with her.
We got to the airport, returned and paid for our mobiles, checked in, went through security, had a little food and got on our flight.
We flew Austrian home. They have the most garish colours in their cabins! The seats are a teal-ish green colour, and the headrest mats are red, orange, yellow or white, seemingly randomly. The blankets in economy were lime green, and the pillows were red. The plane wasn’t as comfortable as the one we had arrived on, and took longer, as we were going all the way to Vienna. I watched a couple of movies, and things were going okay when I suddenly and without warning broke into a violent nose bleed.
Morten was in the loo at the time, and I was strapped in and wearing headphones and didn’t have any tissues. I tried to get my headphones off while holding one hand under my nose so I wouldn’t bleed on anything, and got stuck, and panicked, and couldn’t get out, and the kindly Japanese gentleman next to me had the good idea of giving me the plastic that had been around my blanket to catch the blood in and helped me get out of my seat. Unfortunately, the plastic meant I couldn’t breathe, and the toilets were occupied. So, sobbing and out of breath I found a flight attendant and asked her, between gasps, if she had any tissues.
“Oh, my God, what’s happened?” she asked, and soon three flight attendants were getting me into a bathroom, trying to find out if I spoke German or English, getting me cold towels, tissues, wet wipes and all sorts of useful things.
I stoppered my nose with a tissue, washed my hands and returned to my seat. I fear, however, that my jumper might be ruined:
One of the flight attendants explained to me that the dry air and the altitude can sometimes cause nosebleeds and that it was nothing to worry about. I used to get nosebleeds really easy when I was younger, so I wasn’t really worried, but the reassurance was nice.
We had four hours in Vienna. By now, I was crabby and whiny and complained about everything, and Morten was sleepy and hated me a little bit for not shutting up. We had a, for me at least, somewhat unsatisfactory dinner at a café, looked around the shops a bit and then sat down at our gate.
On the flight to Oslo I started bleeding again. This time I had some tissues left over from last time and didn’t panic, but asked for a wet wipe and they brought me more cold towels and made sure I was okay.
We landed just after 11 pm, and weren’t home until one in the morning. We went straight to bed.
Today, we’re tired and I think I’m coming down with a cold. We have a lot of unpacking to do, and gifts to give to people. As usual, I return to find, to my enormous surprise, that the world has kept on turning while I’ve been away. I have a million e-mails and lot of stuff to catch up on, but it’s good to be home.
Japan Extravaganza Part 2: Inari, Hakone, Harajuku
Day four, we decided to head out to a Arashiyama to have a look at the bamboo grove there. While the grove itself proved to be somewhat underwhelming, the trip there took on all kinds of unexpected qualities. When we got to Saga Arashiyama, it turned out that we had to buy separate tickets for a “Romantic Train”, the Sagano Scenic Railway, to get to Torokko Arashiyama, which was where the grove was. We tried to say we were just going to Torokko Arashiyama, but the lady explained to us that there was no point in taking the train just for that, and that we’d be much better served taking the train to the end station and then hopping off at Torokko Arashiyama on the return. We had nothing better to do, so we did just that. We had half an hour to kill before the train, however, so we went into a building next to the station where there was stuff.
Stuff turned out to be a really cool train set, and there was a man selling tickets for something in another room. There was a discount for people with tickets for the Romantic Train, so we got tickets and went in.
It turned out to be an even bigger train set. It was modelled, in part, after Kyoto, and it had temples, streets, houses, gardens and most importantly, trains. Morten was like a kid at Christmas. And then, after a while, the room went dark, and all the street lights and lanterns were lit, and the stars came out on the domed ceiling. It was amazingly well done.
The scenic railway is probably more scenic in summer and autumn. As it was, many of the trees had yet to sprout leaves, and the most scenic thing we saw was probably the family of Tanuki at one of the stations. But it was fun none the less. A man in a demon mask came through our car at one time. He told apparently funny stories in Japanese and stopped to ask where we were from in stilted English.
The bamboo grove was very pretty, but turned out to be much smaller than we had anticipated. At the end of it, however, we came across a temple called, if I remember correctly, Tenryu-ji. We paid admission and took a stroll through its garden, and found another exit, through which we left and found ourselves in a town. We walked through the town, and I found the most adorable tote bag with a cat on it that says, “I love your shoes. The right one is my bed, the left one is my toy.”
After some more walking, we found ourselves back at Saga Arashiyama station, and got a train back to Kyoto.
After lunching on udon at Kyoto station, we got on another train to go to Fushimi Inari Taisha. This is a place with basically thousands of orange Torii gates that you can walk through along a path up the mountain, occasionally giving way to lots and lots of Shinto shrines protected by foxes called inari. It can be a challenging trek if you’re not in very good shape, and I’m not, but in spite of that we did make it all the way up to the top. It took us a good couple of hours, though it was totally worth it for the view, which was amazing.
Afterwards, we were exhausted and our feet were aching, so rather than find somewhere interesting in town to eat dinner, we went to another restaurant at the station. We ended up choosing an Italian restaurant, and the food there was really, really good. I ate a pasta dish with mushrooms and meat in a tomato ragu. The pasta was perfectly al dente and the sauce was excellent. The half bottle of Chianti we ordered, however, was ice cold, as per usual in Japan.
We even stayed for dessert, but even though everything was lovely, something I ate must not have agreed with me because later that evening I started feeling really sick. I got up again after going to bed and spent some time reading and writing up the day’s events. Around midnight I was finally able to get some sleep as I’d stopped feeling queasy.
We caught a bit of the musical fountain show at Kyoto station on our way home. They were playing Mozart:
Our fifth day in Japan was mostly spent travelling. We got up reasonably early and shipped off our suitcases to the hotel we were going to stay at in Tokyo. This was done, of all places, at the local liquor store. The lady there chattered animatedly at us in Japanese and got our address tags mixed up, but both suitcases were going to the same place, so that was okay. After that, we handed in our key to our chatty landlady and got on our way to the train station.
We bought bento boxes to have for breakfast, and got on the Kodama Shinkansen train toward Tokyo. We had some scenic views of Fuji-sama on the way, but other than that it was a fairly boring train ride.
We got off the train in Odawara, where we met up with KayKay (who passed her placement test and her interview with flying colours and is now in class 1, yay! *confetti and cake*). From there, we caught a train to Hakone-Yumoto, and then a bus to Lake Ashi. There we caught the so-called pirate ship (which really looks more like a very garishly painted 18th century galleon) across the lake and changed to the ropeway. We stopped and got out at Owakudani, an active volcano where they have a sulphur mine and are famous for their disgusting “black eggs” that are meant to add 7 years to your life. However, since those are the drooling, bed-ridden years, we determined that life is too short to waste ten minutes of it eating a rotten egg, and so we passed on that particular pleasure.
Hakone is still riddled with references to Neon Genesis Evangelion:
We got the ropeway down the mountain on the other side, and changed to a stair-shaped cable car that took us to Gora, where it turned out that we had missed our last bus. This led to yet another train adventure, where we had to go back down and change to a different bus at a station the name of which I am currently failing to remember.
We did make it to our hotel, though, or hostel if you will, the Sengokuhara Youth Hostel, also known as the Fuji-Hakone Guest House. We stayed in the ninja room and had a nice hot bath in their indoor onsen (with water from Owakudani, which meant it smelled slightly sulphurous, but was probably immensely good for something or other) before bedtime. Before that, though, we went out and found a tiny local restaurant where we were served excellent food, beer, sake and yuzu and plum wine.
The following morning, we got up and had breakfast, and went off to climb Mt. Kintoki. The mountain is named after a little boy who lived with a witch and who grew into a very big kid who had a nasty habit of throwing boulders off the mountain.
It’s a fairly tough hike. We probably got about halfway before my body failed me and I had to admit defeat. My knees were shaky, my head was hot, my body was cold and I felt like I might lose my breakfast if we kept climbing. I really wanted to make it to the top, but alas willpower wasn’t enough to defeat my lack of condition.
I did get some lovely photos along the way, though.
View of the mountain:
Rosetta stone?
A big broken boulder that Kintaro threw off the mountain:
KayKay in a tree:
Victors victorious:
A shrine on top of a boulder, with Kintaro’s axe:
Morten on the same boulder:
Upon our descent, we caught a bus to Hakone-Yumoto and a train from there to Odawara, where we changed trains to get to Tokyo.
We started in Harajuku, where KayKay and I meant to locate a piercing studio that was recommended to her by Pinpoint Piercing in Oslo. After a couple of trips up and down the street, however, we gave up. Our visit to Harajuku wasn’t a complete loss, though. We had a fantastic lunch at a burger joint, of all things, and had a look around a shopping centre where I was convinced by the staff of a very fashionable shop indeed to try on two dresses, none of which really suited me, though I loved the look of the fabrics, the stitching and the patchwork feel of them. They were, I learned, designed by a polish painter who had never designed clothes before.
I didn’t buy anything, but I’m filled with ideas on clothes that I could make for myself out of used materials and with fabric dyes. I shall experiment when I get home.
After Harajuku, we went to find our ryokan. It is located close to Ueno and is called Homeikan Daimachi Bekkan. It’s lovely here.
After getting settled, we went out to find some dinner. We were told by the staff at the ryokan that we should poke our head into restaurants and ask how much for a set meal. So we went off down the street towards Kasuga subway station, and soon passed a small restaurant with a hand written menu outside in all Japanese. We were about to move on when a lady poked her head out. She had a raspy voice and was very insistent that we come inside and have sashimi. So we did.
The lady seemed very amused to have foreigners in her restaurant, and was oblivious to the fact that KayKay is nearly fluent in Japanese. “They don’t speak Japanese,” she said to the two regulars who sat smoking at the counter. “They ordered pints of beer!”
The sashimi was lovely, though. Morten, who isn’t too fond of raw fish, had fried fish cheeks instead. With our food, we got rice, miso soup, a sort of stir-fried, hot pork salad-ish thing, pickled veg and it was all very tasty. We got tuna and octopus sashimi.
After we had finished, we went and had a drink at a small pub-ish place across the road, where they sold European ales and I got a glass of red wine that was almost not too cold.
We got back to the ryokan a bit after ten, I think, and went to sleep almost immediately.
We’ve done a bunch of stuff today; more on that later, probably not until I get home on Monday night. Until then, stay happy, and if you’re not happy, get happy! Sayonara!
Japan Extravaganza Part 1: Kyoto
We started our journey at 10 in the morning on the 31st of April. We reached Japan sixteen and a half hours later at 9:30 in the morning the following day. We’d made sure to sleep a short night in hopes of getting some sleep on the plane to avoid jet lag. It kind of worked.
The plane trip was uneventful, though we did get some of the best plane food I’ve ever had. I watched some movies and tried to sleep and got in three hours or so. We were seated in the middle of the plane and so couldn’t see out of the windows, but thanks to the wonders of technology we got a good view of the Japanese countryside on the inflight anyway.
Leaving the airport was a bit more eventful than perhaps strictly necessary. We discovered when we reached the arrivals hall that Morten had forgotten his wallet on the plane. Some panicking ensued as we tried to get hold of someone who could help. After soliciting the help of a nodding and smiling Japanese lady at the Star Alliance help desk, the wallet (and Morten’s earphones which he had also forgotten) was recovered and returned to us.
Happy Morten:
After that we spent an hour in line to get our Japan Rail Passes, and after a brief stop at a Starbucks we were on the Narita express on our way into Tokyo.
We got the Shinkansen from Shinigawa. We’d bought some bento (Japanese lunch boxes) at the station, but I decidedly got the wrong one. What I had seen when I bought it was rice and fish and pickled veg. What I hadn’t noticed was the whole fried tiny fishies next to the fillet of whatever it was, and the… I don’t know what it was. May have been fish entrails. Oh well. I ate the fillets, and even one of the small fried fishies and tried the weird thingies, and then I finished most of the rice.
Possible fish entrails:
Whole fish! It is staring at you:
I fell asleep on the train and was very grumpy when Morten woke me up when we reached Kyoto.
We met KayKay at the Kyoto train station and she took us to the Ryokan where we were staying.
A Ryokan is a traditional Japanese guest house. This generally means that you sleep on futons and take your shoes off in the hall. We were expecting a room at such a guest house. What we found when we got there was that we had actually rented a house. Complete with dining room, kitchenette, bathroom, living room and bedroom.
And even a tiny Japanese garden out back, complete with little Tanuki figurines. And this was not an expensive Ryokan.
We went out for Yakiniku, which is a Japaneseification of a Korean style of dining. The place we ended up at was very Korean, though, which means there was spicy food (!), which is something the Japanese don’t do. It was really tasty. Then we went to a temple where they were doing an illumination, which basically means you walk around at night and everything’s lit up artistically. It was magical.
The following day, which was Monday, we breakfasted on onigiri we had purchased on our way home the night before. We went out quite early to try and get tickets to the Miyako Odori, the famous Maiko dance in Gion, the Geisha district. This turned out to be no problem at all, and we got fancy tickets with tea ceremony included and everything. We stopped at a coffee shop for coffee and tea and, in my case hot cakes, as we had some time before it started. I love hot cakes! They’re the Japanese version of American pancakes. Basically, they’re smaller and not as greasy, and very very tasty (I tried American pancakes for breakfast in San Diego and could hardly finish one, and did not particularly enjoy them).
The Miyako Odori was amazing. The tea ceremony was the quick tourist kind and perhaps not entirely worth the extra 500yen, but at least I got a couple of pictures of the Maiko serving the tea.
I was not allowed to photograph during the dance itself. It was truly a fantastic experience. They wore the most gorgeous kimonos, the music was fascinating and the stories they were telling, though I couldn’t understand the words the Geiko were singing, were captivating. The light shows were spectacular as well. We’re not talking lasers and pyrotechnics here. These are lighting techniques that have been used in kabuki theatre for hundreds of years, though with the added convenience of electric lights these days and not just lanterns and open flames.
Stage curtain at Miyako Odori:
After the Miyako Odori, we went for a long walk in the very fine weather along temples and shrines, looking for cherry blossoms, and somehow we found the BIGGEST FUCKING CEMETARY EVER!!! I joked that everyone in Kyoto must be buried here. That turned out to very much not be true when we, after walking for a while longer, found another one that was nearly as big. Holy shit!
Morten and KayKay:
Sakura tree:
I was a little allergic and had a tickle in my throat, so we got me a mask so I wouldn’t frighten any locals by coughing on them:
Biggest cemetery ever:
We had a table booked that evening for a themed restaurant. I usually find themed restaurants to be a little tacky, but this was a NINJA themed restaurant! It kills me that I didn’t get any photos… I never remember to take pictures of, well, normal things. I’m really good at getting hundreds of pictures of temples and gardens and pretty flowers and shrines and such, but terrible at documenting the food I eat or the restaurants I go to. And the ninja place was excellent, too. They served fantastic food. We got the cheapest of the set menus, and still we were rolling out of there at the end of the meal.
Day three saw fairly crap weather. In spite of the drizzle, we went to Ginkaku-ji temple after breakfast, and then strolled along the Path of Philosophy to Nanzen-ji where we found, of all things, an aqueduct. At this point, however, the rain was turning from a bit crap to absolute shit, and when we found that the temple was closed to visitors due to a festival, we went to get a bus back home.
Unhappy me, cause it’s wet:
Overhead view of Ginkaku-ji:
The building in the rain:
Aqueduct:
After changing out of any wet clothes, and packing KayKay’s stuff, we headed towards Kyoto station. On the way to the bus it actually seemed like the weather was letting up, but when we were on the bus it started hailing. Upon reaching the station, we fled into the basement shopping mall and had ramen for lunch.
KayKay left us to go to her university for a placement test, and Morten and I decided that rather than go to Fushimi Inari Taisha like we had planned, and get really wet, we would take the train to Osaka and go to the aquarium.
So, train happened; suddenly Osaka.
I wish it had been that simple.
Halfway to Osaka, the train stopped and we all had to get off. Then the train just stood there for nearly half an hour, after which it vanished to be replaces with a not-quite-so-express train that was supposed to take us to Osaka. That train, however, dropped us off at Shin-Osaka, where we had to wait for another one.
This screen was trying to show us useful information in Japanese. After a while, it just gave up:
I imagine that all these delays were caused by the storm. In the end, though, we did make it to the aquarium.
In it, we met otters, dolphins, sea lions, seals, penguins, loads of fishies, a whale shark and a HUGE manta ray called Alfred. He was an Alfred Manta Ray. It said on the thingy next to the tank. He had a freeloader on his back, some fish that had decided that this would be a nice place to take a nap or something. Alfred was carrying him around. Like a pony.
They had a small Egyptian exhibition which I didn’t quite understand. It had some fish in way too tiny tanks, a sleeping gerbil and a sleeping pygmy hedgehog, a barn owl that was either sleeping or dead, and a terrarium with poo and some scarabs that were definitely not moving. All in all, it was sort of depressing.
But the rest was good. They had a gigantic shark tank, which was where Alfred and the whale shark lived, along with dogfish, smaller manta rays and various other fish of the same family.
After we’d finished at the aquarium, we wanted to get some dinner before returning to Kyoto. We ended up at, of all things, an Australian restaurant. The food there was a bit disappointing, but it did the job.
The trip back to Kyoto was a little bit long as well, though nowhere near as bad as the trip there. We bought some onigiri and alcohol on the way home to munch before bed.
Now we’re having breakfast in a café. Today, we’re off to a bamboo grove, and we’re going to Fushimi Inari, and then tomorrow, we’re off to Hakone. Love to all of you! <3
