Oops, I found some pictures

I uploaded a ton of pictures back near the beginning of August. There was supposed to be a blog entry to go with these. I don't know where it went... Please enjoy!

Where on Earth are you, Katy?

Tokyo! There's a tropical storm today, so I'm stuck inside. Reading Cook's Illustrated (dot com) and drooling.

I've been here for a couple of weeks. I'm apartment-sitting. Derek is in Europe, waltzing in Vienna, sipping pilsner in Prague, feasting upon schnitzel in Berlin, and being illuminated in Paris, the City of Lights. Or so I assume. So I have his apartment for another two weeks. I've been splitting my time between relaxing, sightseeing, exercising (a bit), and cooking.

Immediately after Derek left, I headed for the fish market. And I do mean immediately; we both left for the train station around 5:30 AM. He had a 9:30 flight, and I had a fish market to visit. The Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo is where they have the frantic tuna auction at 5:30 AM each morning. It's not open to the public anymore, but it's still interesting to walk around outside of the building and watch them packing up coolers full of fish, while watchfully avoiding the forklifts zooming back and forth.

Outside of the auction house there is an open-air market open to the public. There are also sushi restaurants scattered around. Long lines of tourists had already gathered by 7:00 AM. Each restaurant has only about 12 seats. By 7:30 most of the lines were gone. I chose a restaurant based on its attractive picture menu, and its one open seat. I ordered the setto, or breakfast set. For about US$21, I had the freshest, and most varied sushi that I've ever eaten. If you look closely at the picture, on the bottom left is my pair of mihashi, with my name engraved!

As far as other activities in Tokyo, I saw a kabuki play at the National Theater; I've been to the Ueno Zoo (a very good zoo, and only $6 admission); I saw a band from Okinawa that sings island music; and next Thursday I'm going to a tour of the Imperial Palace.

And now, from reading all the cooking articles, I've been inspired to make pizza tonight. I will take pictures, however I might not post pictures. I haven't been posting many lately. I'm not typing from my computer. Normally I upload to Picasa Web from Picasa on my computer. Sadly, my computer doesn't have a connection at the moment (no wireless). Since uploading photos one by one is a huge pain, you're stuck reading my blog with only one or two pictures to view.

Mmmm, pizza.

Hokkaido

I've been traveling with my friend Derek around the northern part of Japan for the past week and a half or so. Most recently we were in Sapporo, Japan's beer capital. We went on a brewery tour, saw a brewery museum, a sake museum, and four beer gardens--one for each of the four major Japanese breweries. We had all-you-can-eat Mongolian barbecue at one of the beer gardens. Which included all-you-can-drink beer. (Don't worry Mom, I'm not drinking to excess here; if I did I wouldn't be able to tell the taxi drivers where to drop us off. We've had terrible bad luck with taxis here. They seem to not know their way around the town.)

Right now we're passing time in an internet cafe. We are going to take a ferry from Tomakomai in Hokkaido back to Oarai, near Tokyo. It's a 19-hour trip, but we've got a 4-share room. And dramamine.

I'm enjoying Japan, but I also miss being in an English-speaking country. I try to find little pieces of America where I can. I found a box of Special K Red Berries at Japan's version of Wal-Mart, so I've been having cereal for breakfast, instead of the corn soup that they usually have at the free continental breakfasts.

One Japanese tradition that I'm really enjoying is the onsen. An onsen is a traditional Japanese hot springs or hot bath. A single-sex, completely nude hot springs. The first onsen I went to was in the ryokan (traditional Japanese hotel) we stayed at after the Mt. Fuji trip. Fortunately, I had someone to teach me how to do it the first time.

You start by going into a sort of locker room where you take off all your clothes and put them into a basket. Then you enter a shower room, where you sit on a wooden stool and take a shower with a handheld showerhead. Shampoo, conditioner, and body wash are provided. The very nice onsens have expensive brands. When you're all clean and rinsed, then you can go sit in the hot bath with other naked people. There are often both indoor and outdoor bath options. The temperature of the baths range from "very hot" to "sit very still and don't make any turbulence in the water so that it doesn't scorch you." Even though it's the middle of summer, it's fantastic. And when you're done you can go sit on the stool and douse yourself in cold water from the shower head.

I don't have any onsen pictures, for obvious reasons. But you can take a look at the onsen we went to yesterday: Hoheikyo Onsen. After I got out of the hot springs, I got a massage. And then delicious Indian food for dinner. Ahhhh...

Japan

I'm here! In fact, I've been in Japan for a week now. It's wonderfully hot and humid. After having to go through the Minnesota winter, followed by the New Zealand winter, summer is a welcome change.

I've already checked off one big item on my to do list. Last Saturday I climbed Mt. Fuji. There were eight of us, in total. Although many people do the ascent as an overnight trip, we decided to try to do it in one day. It was the most physically challenging thing I've ever done. To put it into context, when Josie and I hiked the Tongariro Crossing in New Zealand, we hiked up to just over 1,000 meters above sea level. The Fuji hike begins at 2,400 meters, and the summit is 3,776 meters.

The ascent took five hours. It's a brutal hike. The path is gravelly, rocky, and steep. For much of the time we were surrounded by cloud cover, and couldn't see far ahead. Every once in a while the wind would blow away the clouds and blue sky would come out. That's mainly when I took pictures. About three and a half hours into the hike, it started raining. I had my rain jacket, but not my rain pants. We hiked for about half an hour in the rain. As we walked, I kept saying to myself, "okay, it's time to give up now. I'm not going to walk for another hour in the pouring rain. I'm done."

At the next rest stop, it stopped raining and the sun came out. A rainbow appeared among the puffy white clouds to the east. And I thought, "are you kidding me??" Because I had to go on. How could I possibly give up when the universe had so clearly given me a sign that it was okay to go on. Stupid universe.

The last part of the hike went very slowly. I'd never been to such a high elevation before in my life, aside from being in a plane. It feels like there's nothing to breathe. I could hardly walk, because no air was coming into my lungs. I would hike for about 30 seconds, then have to stop and rest. I had purchased a can of aerosol oxygen at the beginning of the hike. I used it several times along the last few hundred meters of the climb. Every time I started climbing, my heart rate spiked and I was afraid I would black out. I didn't.

The last hundred meters of the climb felt like the longest. I was putting one foot in front of the other; I had ceased caring about reaching the top, and just wanted it to be over. As I climbed over the last few rocks, I wanted to collapse. I managed to make it to a bench, where I had another hit of oxygen, and a peanut butter sandwich.

We reached the summit at 6:30 PM. The descent took another four hours, and had to be done in the dark (Japan doesn't do daylight savings, so the sun set at 7:30). I had a flashlight, so it wasn't terrible, but the mountain just kept going down and down, with no end in sight. There were other hikers walking up the mountain as we were going down. We could see a winding line of hikers' head lamps shining below us like fireflies, showing us the trail down. We saw two fireworks displays from above.

I don't have any pictures from the descent, because they wouldn't have turned out in the dark. But here are my pictures from the ascent. Enjoy.