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!