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
Things That Are Going On
I’m getting really tired of my job. Not the work itself, though it is tiring; I quite enjoy the work, I love kids. But the schedule, or lack thereof… I keep getting phone calls early in the morning on days when I’ve hardly slept the night before, and someone’s going, “You have to come in, it’s an emergency!” And while I’m fully at liberty to say no, I really need the money, and I’d feel really bad if I said no, too, because they usually call me as the last resort.
I just hope they don’t call me any more this week, cause I’m supposed to be off to Japan on Saturday and I seriously need to pack and make sure I have everything I need. This was my travel garb last time:
I have a sneaking suspicion I might need some new boots, cause the weather’s gonna be quite wet while we’re there and I need boots that are good to walk in. I don’t know where my old combat boots have gone, or if they’re even useable anymore. I guess I’ll find out.
I’m so looking forward to Japan, though! It’s been four and a half years since I was there last, and it was absolutely wonderful. I was there for two weeks with my best friend, and we just travelled around, took it one day at a time and saw the things we wanted to see most. We went to tiny villages and huge cities and it was magical.
This time we’re only going for ten days. The boyfriend and I are going there to visit my best friend, who is currently there on an exchange programme. Of course, she speaks the language now, which is going to make things a fair bit easier. We’re going to Kyoto, Hakone and Tokyo. We don’t really have any plans set in stone other than the hotels, and we’re going to the zoo in Tokyo. They have firefoxes!!! They look like this (random google image search; no copyright infringment intended):
I’ll shoot plenty of pics of my own at the zoo, don’t you worry!
The weather is getting nice and warm and sunny and springlike here, so I’m thinking I might start busking soon, see if I can make some extra cash that way. Might try a couple of afternoons this week if the weather’s good and I have the time. When summer comes, and tourist season, I have great plans of sitting down and playing in Vigelandsparken, a famous sculpture park that every tour bus in town stops at. I did quite decently busking a few years ago, and I was fairly crap back then. I should be able to gather some cash that way now.
I want to play another gig soon, but I don’t really know where to start to get one… I don’t know who to talk to or which venues would suit me… I think I need some help. The annoying part is that almost everyone who’s at liberty to grant me that help belongs to the big bad music industry, the organisations that pretend to protect artists’ rights and intellectual property but who, in reality, just make it really hard to be an artist if you’re not interested in doing things their way. And I’m not.
The big bad wolf in Norway is TONO. They handle copyright for songs. Every venue that plays music, be it live music, CDs, Spotify or radio, has to pay royalties for the songs they play to TONO, and if you, as a song writer, register your songs with them, you get money whenever you have a gig and you send your set list to TONO, or whenever someone reports playing your songs. Decent way to make money. The problem is that venues have to pay fees to TONO no matter what music is played there, and if you DON’T register your songs with them, they get your money. TONO is against file sharing and the free web, frequently speaking out against sites like The Pirate Bay and lobbying for making sites like that illegal to view in Norway.
All my tunes are licensed under Creative Commons, and I don’t know how that works if you register them with TONO. This is what a CC licence looks like:
Winter Rose by Maia Jern is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
And anyway, I don’t really believe in royalties. I mean, sure, if a radio station plays my recording some royalties would be awesome, and I don’t want anyone to record my songs for commercial purposes without my permission. But I don’t think it’s right that I should be paid every time someone performs one of my tunes. And anyway, I’d much rather be paid for playing gigs than for selling records.
Which reminds me, I have a small project going. Keep your eyes and ears peeled for something new that might be turning up on Bandcamp in the next few weeks. In the meantime, I shall leave you with this inexplicable piece of artwork:
Till next time! xx
Body Complains
“Ow! Why do you DO this to me???” my body complains loudly.
“Well,” I respond sheepishly, “I thought it would be a good idea for us to get into shape. You know, get healthy. Besides, climbing is fun!”
“Not for me, it isn’t!” Body is fuming now. “For you it’s all excitement and dropping down from high places, but for me, it’s agony! Especially when we haven’t been doing anything harder than lifting two-year-olds in months…”
“Oh, come on, it’s not that bad!”
“It is! And why, oh, WHY did you insist on an hour and a half long walk after?”
“Hey, that wasn’t my fault!” I shoot back. “We missed our bus, we would have had to wait an hour until the next one, it would have been cold and tiring and just annoying!”
“Yeah, but Sebastian was about to call a taxi, and you’re all, ‘No, the weather’s nice, let’s WALK!’”
“Oh, stop your yammering… I treated you to sushi after, didn’t I?”
“I WANTED chicken tempura maki. Instead you gave me AVOCADO. What the fuck is the point of avocado, anyway?”
“Avocado’s good! Besides, I’m trying to be a little healthy here, and to stay off the animalia as much as possible. Don’t you want to be healthy?”
“Sure I do, but not THAT healthy! I want chocolate, and beef, and all you give me is rice jacks and red peppers!” Body is pouting. “And now I hurt too, I’m all owie and it’s all YOUR fault! I have half a mind to make sure you can’t play any music tomorrow…”
“How are you going to do that?” I ask, nervously.
“By making your hands too shaky to play piano or uke, and by letting my guard down so you get a cold and can’t sing, that’s how!”
“…What if I bake some scones?” I coax. “And we can have scones with strawberry jam.”
“I suppose you’ll bake them with MARGARINE and water instead of milk, right?”
“Well, yeah, but they’ll be tasty anyway, I promise!”
Body sighs. “Fine!” she says at last.
“Great!” I say, beaming. “Oh, hey, I was thinking we might go swimming on Tuesday.”
“Don’t push it!”
Why International Women’s Day is Important
Ignoring for a moment the fact that a lot of people in a lot of countries are completely ignorant as to there even being an International Women’s Day, I’ve noticed a few articles, Facebook posts and tweets today from people who DO know about it that frankly make me a little angry.
Mostly, they’re along the lines of “What’s the big deal?” “We don’t need to have a Women’s Day anymore!” “We have equality!”
These sentiments are carried by men and women alike, and they piss me the fuck off.
International Women’s Day is not about celebrating femininity. It is not about making women more powerful than men, and it’s not about men telling us how much they appreciate us or giving us gifts to appease our hormone-induced menstrual rage.
“We have equality.”
Three words, which are wrong on so many levels.
Firstly, while women in western society may enjoy a high level of equality, this is unprecedented in many parts of the world, and it’s important to stand in solidarity with women in other countries who don’t have it as good as we do.
This year, the UN theme for International Women’s Day is Empower Women – End Hunger and Poverty. There is a general consensus that if we empower women in third world countries, if we give them education and the means to work, they will improve their communities, not only by adding a second income to every household, but also by putting a lot of it into their communities, and by raising more girls who get to be educated and independent and happy. There’s a metric fucktonne of awareness campaigns and charities that focus on empowering women, among them The Girl Effect, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The UN’s Girl Up programme as well as foreign aid programmes in loads of countries.
Secondly, gender equality in the western world is not at all at the level it could – and indeed should – be.
Just take a look at the English language. If a person is brave, what does he or she have? Balls. If he or she is not so brave, he or she is a pussy, or such a girl. You can call someone a dick on TV, but you can’t say “cunt”. In fact, “cunt”, which is really just derived from the latin for vagina, is the worst word in the English language aside from certain racial slurs.
Traditionally male qualities are valued above traditionally female qualities. If a girl wants to seem cool or tough, she’ll say she’s into boy stuff, likes having guy friends, that she’s not a girly girl, that she never liked playing with dolls, etc. Little girls can play with legos, but little boys can’t play with barbies or like the colour pink. We start them early, too. Toddlers don’t care whether a toy is a girl’s toy or a boy’s toy (in the kindergarten where I work, boys and girls both fight over who gets the pink cup), but kids are bombarded from a young age by the media, with the idea that girls like pink stuff and boys like “different coloured stuff”, as one Riley so nicely put it on YouTube a while back.
Boys will be boys, they say, too. Boys get to act out, it’s just natural, they have so much energy, while girls are expected to restrain themselves and sit quietly. There’s an idea that boy’s brains and girl’s brains are somehow different, and it’s simply not true.
We are conditioned and molded into our gender roles. And if we step too far outside them, then there’s something wrong with us. Us girls have some leway, since masculine qualities are so highly valued, but God forbid a woman says she doesn’t want children! Boys, however…
Homophobia and sexism are, I believe, two sides of the same coin. Men who exhibit feminine tendencies will at some point in their lives be called gay, whether they actually are gay or not, and they will be mocked for it. Gay men are not only mocked because they “like taking it up the arse” as several sensitive individuals on the Internet like to put it, but also for being feminine. Gay women are mocked and hated because they don’t like men, and if you don’t like men there must be something wrong with you, right? Cause men are so superior. Or maybe it’s just that you have some serious penis envy and want to be like a man. This, of course, also applies to female-to-male transsexuals, while male-to-female transsexuals once again are cursed with wanting to be women, which is obviously a degrading and awful thing to be.
That’s what society seems to tell us. Being a girl is degrading. Bitch. Whore. Slut. Cunt. Pussy. Nancy. Sissy.
Slut is another word worth looking at. In the wake of Rush Limbaugh’s apalling outbursts regarding Sandra Fluke last week this word is once again a relevant discussion topic. Women who like sex are sluts. It’s that simple. Especially women who sleep with a lot of different men. While men who sleep with a lot of different women, well, they’re just being men.
I’ve seen men on the Internet try to justify cheating on their wives by saying it’s “how God made them” and they “can’t help themselves”. Basically, claiming to have the impulse control of three-year-olds. If their wives cheat on them, however… “Wow, what a slut!”
This is why Women’s Day should matter to you. You, in your comfy home, you who are happy where you are. You, who feel like you’re earning what you’re supposed to, who are financially independent and think that inequality has been stamped out. It hasn’t. This is just the beginning.
Lastly, if you haven’t heard it already, here’s a tune I wrote today:
I hope you’ve all had a fantastic Women’s Day! Liberty, equality and sorority!
New tune for International Women’s Day, 8th of March 2012. “Run, Little Girl”:
Source: SoundCloud / Maia Jern
New tune for International Women’s Day 2012. Run, Little Girl!
Source: SoundCloud / Maia Jern
Women’s Day Live 2012 - International Women’s Day (by vbsondemand)
Here’s what’s going on for International Women’s Day this year!
Source: youtube.com
dorkstorm asked: Mr. Gaiman, I urge you to find a different source than the visible children blog. While it’s clearly a good idea to follow your gut, that blog is problematic, and most of the information there is NOT fact-checked at all. Most, in fact, comes from dubious sources. I hate the idea of people getting their information from iffy sources.
Well, I’ve now spent a couple of hours this morning reading KONY2012 stuff, doing my best to avoid iffy sources.
This article from the Independent was eye-opening.
It led to this Twitter Feed. Which led to this article from Justice In Conflict on what the Invisible Children video does and does not say.
All of which seemed un-iffy, and all of which have reservations, to a greater or lesser degree, with the Invisible Children organisation and video.
(via newly-poly-nyc)
Source: neil-gaiman
Please read and share Invisible Children's response.
Insvisible Children respond to our concerns.
This is precisely the sort of information I was hoping they would be more up-front with. Please read this - it’s great that IC is providing this resource.
Source: visiblechildren
