Lots of Ramen and a Castle

It's pretty late, and I don't want to miss church, so just a quick update. I've gone through and added photos later, so if you read the original post, just scan for pictures this time...

First thing in the morning, we went to a ramen museum. Most of the activities were free or reasonably priced, and we ended up only spending money on a T-shirt. The museum would be a lot more fun if our reading skills were better, but we did borrow audio guides, which at least gave us an audio track for two of the exhibits. I'll note that we're talking specifically about instant ramen here; the museum is basically a giant advertising stunt for Nissin, the original makers of "Cup Noodle" and inventors of instant ramen in general. The original shack in which Nissin's founder invented instant ramen is one centerpiece, and there's also a movie theater where they tell a heavily animated story about how ramen was invented. You can sign up for a course where you make your own ramen in a big, commercial kitchen upstairs, and there's a make-your-own Cup Noodle, heavily geared toward little kids. We did neither.

Of course, I left craving ramen, so we picked some up at the tourist trap ramen place conveniently nearby. It was good stuff, although I think Rachel prefers the pork broth to the soy broth that I ordered (she wasn't hungry, and just ordered gyoza). I've got a photo here now -- this was really good stuff, possibly even worth the ten bucks I paid for it. The noodles are decorated with green onion, a bit of seaweed, crispy onion bits, several slices of grilled pork, and an entire soft-boiled egg. There are a further half-dozen things you can add to adjust the flavor along the back counter.

Next stop was Osaka castle. It's got enormous stone walls around it's base, and a windy entrance path that traverses fully two moats, both wide enough to sail a steamboat down. There are ramparts overlooking the path all along the way, loaded with murder holes and all the usual castle features. The castle itself doesn't have any windows for the first several floors, and the walls are made of enormous stone blocks. The lowest ornamentation and windows are perhaps 60-70 feet off the ground. There's a well out front, covered with a heavy wooden grill which also, presumably, is defensive. Of course, the one time it was invaded, the castle fell, but it looks impressive, and the defenses did kill quite a lot of people before eventually not working well enough. There's probably a message in there somewhere.

Incidentally, we finally tried takoyaki. They're kind of like fritters, but with octopus and onions in them. They're also not deep fried, but rather shallow fried in cup-shaped pans. Alas: the dough was raw. We'll probably try again some other time, but probably not in the same place. The frying trick is really interesting, and probably both uses less oil and goes faster. I wonder if the same trick would work on fritters.

Anyway, church tomorrow, and I need to sleep. The images on this post were added after the fact.

Doing business in Japan

I'm going to lump days 2 & 3 of our Japanese trip into a single quick post, because it's getting late and I need to get to sleep.

On Wednesday, Rachel and I went to Nagoya to get ready for the seminar I was helping to present on Thursday. I ended up spending a lot of the time developing subtitles for the two videos we wanted to show -- the last of the subtitles were typed out on Thursday morning, while the first sessions of the seminar were running. The final system we worked out was for me to take a machine transcription and fix it to be proper English; then, Luna would convert it to Japanese, and I would fix any linewrap and timing problems in the Japanese. Doing it that way, we managed to get about 4 minutes of subtitles done in a little less than an hour.

Lunch in Nagoya was "Hokkaido" cuisine, I think. In my case, that meant slices of seasoned pork on rice, and in Rachel's case that meant fried chicken. Probably the most interesting dish was the "Hokkaido Oyakodon." Oya means parent, and ko means child, while don is short for donburi, which refers to a rice bowl. Normally, oyakodon is chicken with egg, but Hokkaido oyakodon is salmon and salmon roe. Luna thought the name was funny and clever, so she ordered it. By the way, Luna has been a huge help this trip; I did my best to give her a pile of gifts, but it's really hard to say thank you enough.

After we were done with business stuff in Nagoya, we went sightseeing with Ikeda-san. He took us to see Nagoya tower, and then we went for kaiten-zushi (that's conveyor-belt sushi, the first time we've had it!). It was good; I've discovered that tuna sushi can indeed be delicious, you just need to get the high quality stuff.

The next day's seminar went fine; I did some of it in Japanese, but the modeling I did in English with Luna interpreting. I wanted to do it in Japanese, but I just didn't have time to memorize enough terms. It was a pretty big stretch just getting the videos ready. There was one glitch ("Matches perfectly, you can join it! Oh, apparently you can't, sorry"), but we worked out what was going wrong before the end, and use it to illustrate a common mistake ("This is what compatible mode is for! So if you also see this problem, switch to compatible mode!").

After the seminar, we wandered around Osaka with Luna, visiting the massive shopping district of Dotonbori. I have a video of Dotonbori, but no photos, sorry! Various random things were bought, and we ate dinner at Luna's teenage hangout, a kind of all-you-can-eat pizza place. Available pizzas included ham/pineapple, squid ink/squid/onion/tuna flakes, chicken/corn, and shrimp/corn. Yes, the Japanese really do put corn on pizza. It tastes fine, really--the squid ink on pizza probably deserves more attention, although it mostly makes it black and tastes vaguely of ocean (of course I tried it, don't be silly). We're planning on meeting Luna again in a couple of days for a trip to Nara, her parents' current hometown.

A new word for you: Shokuchuudoku

Here it is in kanji:　食中毒. It's pronounced shoku-choo-doku and the literal meaning of the word parts are food/by means of/poison (food poisoning), and it's a pretty good summary of my flight over the Pacific from Sunday night to Tuesday morning.

It might not have been food poisoning -- it might have been me getting too hot in the overly warm plane cabin -- but at any rate, I had a miserable time which I won't describe in detail. As a sidenote, I have discovered one way to get transferred to a business class seat! If you just get so miserably sick that you can't sit up anymore, and if there's turbulence so you can't lie down in the back anymore, they'll move you! I cannot recommend this method, however.

I was still unable to walk for more than a few seconds at a time when I arrived, so they bundled me into a wheelchair and we went running around Haneda airport, with a rapidly shifting escort of similarly uniformed Japanese women pushing me around. We only had about an hour to get to our next flight, and the stewardesses felt that I was so badly sick that I needed to be reported to quarantine, so I had an interview with a doctor as soon as we landed. The doctor decided that whatever I had probably wasn't infectious (he guessed it was probably food poisoning as well), and said I could go ahead and catch our next flight.

On the following flight, they moved me to a row where I had 3 seats in a row, so I could lie down and sleep a little more. All the sleep helped, I think. Then they stuck me on a wheelchair when we reached Itami airport as well, complete with a fresh complement of helpful uniformed Japanese women to push me around.

We had been going to take a series of trains to get to the airport, but that sounded too complicated by this point, so we went by a direct bus to Osaka train station, which is very close to our hotel. While at the train station, Rachel spotted an escalator that looked cool, producing the only photo I have from this section of the trip. Sorry about that, but I was really not in a good state of mind for taking photos. Once we got to the hotel, I decided to try and eat something; if I could do so without dying, then I thought I'd try to keep going for the rest of the day. We had planned to go and see the cherry blossoms in Yoshino, a high-altitude area where they bloom later, and I still hoped to go. We went and bought breakfast at the hotel cafe, wherein I dropped about twenty dollars for, um, a tiny glass of apple juice, two small croissants, and a glass of warm milk. Rachel had a brief episode of sticker shock and decided to go for the six-dollar croissants only. After that cafe, all the food has looked pretty cheap!

I was still a bit woozy from the flight ordeal, but I felt better after breakfast, so we decided to risk the trip to Yoshino. We called Luna (normally a resident of Seattle, but visiting her parents), who had offered to be our tour guide, and set off. She had never been to Yoshino either, so this was new for everyone.

The cherry blossoms here are at least partially growing wild, so there are many different types, and they bloom at different times. Most of the forest consists of enormously tall cedar trees, with little tufts of greenery at the top, making it look like you're driving through a vast hall of pillars, but every so often there are cherry trees blooming among them. We went for a short hike to get to the best area, called the "upper thousand trees" (okusenbon), which is where a passing man dressed entirely in purple took a photo of the three of us.

The purple man was very friendly, telling us about his wonderful trip to the Atlanta Olympics, and the friendly Georgians who told him that they had been told by God that they should be nice to visitors. He said they were indeed very nice. He gave Rachel a cat-shaped bookmark as a memento.

The photo here is a pretty good idea of what most of Yoshino looked like -- scattered cherry blossoms among the cedars. Mind you, some of these cherry-blossom trees are over 100 feet tall, so they're by no means an insignificant part of the forest.

One last thought: In Utah, when you go hiking, you're on your own. We don't have bathrooms on our mountains. We don't have running water. We don't have a little cafe at the top where you can kick off your boots and sit down to chat with the other hikers over a cold Gatorade. This, then, would be a difference between Utah and Japan. The last photo is the takoyaki stand at Okusenbon. So once you're done traipsing around the mountains, you can stop here for some fried octopus dumplings and a can of green tea. It's a pity they weren't carrying water, or we'd have bought something!