Japan

Some of you may remember that Jane was very excited back in the second grade when she discovered someone shorter than her, still a rare thing at home. So the first of many thrills that Japan provided was for Jane getting to consider herself as tall.

We landed at Osaka, and took a bus ride for a couple of hours to Kyoto. We were blessed by a wonderful tour guide, who shared not only the history of her beloved country, but also many personal details that one rarely gets as a visitor. She had a great sense of humor, which made us laugh. She appreciated this since she had recently given a private tour to the actor Tommy Lee Jones, and he was very serious the whole time.

We saw many temples and shrines, both in Kyoto and Nara. Some of the highlights were a hall with a 1000 statutes, a beautiful serene rock garden and a Golden temple upon a peaceful lake. In Nara, we visited the largest wooden building in the world as well as the oldest. We were joined at these sites by many Japanese schoolchildren, and one of our lecturers made the interesting observation how these impressive buildings were built for the purpose of creating a sense of Japanese unity and identity, and how they are still serving that purpose with all these school trips.

We found Japan to be a fascinating place. On the one hand, it is a very homogeneous nation, which has in its past closed itself off to the outside world for many hundreds of years. On the other hand, it has been greatly influenced by outside forces, whether because of the geographic necessity to deal with its larger neighbor, China, or in the adoption of the Buddhist faith as an import from India and China. What is striking is that Japan imports these outside influences and modifies them in a unique way that works for them. For instance, many people have Christian marriage ceremonies even though only 1% of the people are Christian. And they celebrate Christmas in a particularly garish manner as an excuse to celebrate family, friends and co-workers, give gifts, and have some great parties.

It is always interesting to learn how other societies are dealing with the same issues that we are. Health care, an aging population, the breakdown of the nuclear family, are all topics we enjoyed discussing at length with our guide and lecturers. Now lest you think that this part of the trip was all intellectual, we ate our weight in sushi, took an early morning walk amongst young children going to school, and gave the unique functions on our toilet a try.

Pardon the Interruption

I interrupt this blog to ask everyone a question. You do know that if you click on the pictures a bigger picture will appear, right?And if you click on some of the pictures, like Jane over Siberia, its actually a movie. Just checking.

And a quick note to Nancy, and any other web gurus out there. No One warned me that when I am on a lot of web sites, including this one, the options are in the language of the country I am in. So I have to do it by memory, because " Để lại nhận xét của bạn" just isn't making a lot of sense. Now, the original blogger in the family was Neal's cousin Rachel, who blogged from Thailand while in the Peace Corps. So Rachel, if you can interrupt your training for the New York Marathon long enough to answer, was this a problem you encountered and overcame, or was it another reason you learned to speak Thai?

There I feel better, now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

34,000 feet over Siberia

The Adventure begins

Friday we met our tour group for the first time at a dinner at the Boeing Field Museum of Flight, which is where we met our plane the next morning for the start of a very long day. If you have to have a long day, however, we will take this kind of treatment anytime! The plane is a 757, outfitted to handle only 80 people, with seats that let us recline more than if we were in reclining chairs at home! The crew attends to our every desire, and feeds us far too much yummy food. Before you start to think that we are only on this trip to eat, drink and be merry, we have already had three lectures from college professors on our first day. After a refueling stop in Alaska, maybe because we have enough food and drink on board to feed a small town, we traveled over Siberia, and as we write this, are over China heading for Osaka, where we will transfer to Kyoto for three nights in Japan. Our only complaint so far is that we have not been able to convince the English crew that we really need to know the score of World Series game 3. When we all get to Japan, however, we know that Dice K’s countrymen will be happy to inform their fellow members of Red Sox nation.


UPDATE, as we type this, we are in our room in Kyoto Japan, 9:30 in the evening, having already learned the Red Sox won, and watching the game with Japanese announcers, a very strange but happy experience. After our 14 hours on the plane yesterday, we have recovered nicely, and today we saw the beatiful city of Kyoto, including many Buddhist temples and Shinto Shrines and beautiful scenes, pictures to follow soon.

And Neal Thinks Jane keeps a close eye on him!

Seattle

Alright, so here is the deal – for those of you who do not really know why we have departed the comforts of our home, right during the World Series with the Red Sox in it, we have not lost our minds, but have embarked on the trip of a lifetime with Neal’s mother and stepfather, Carole and J. This is not just any trip, as we are literally going to go around the world in luxury aboard a private jet with 75 other people. We will try with this blog to make you feel as if you are joining us, minus the jet lag, of course, and seeing things through our eyes.
For those of you who know us well, you might remember that we travel through our stomachs, which is to say that we will eat just about everything, and that started on our trip out to Seattle. During a quick change of planes in Chicago, we had some Greek food, and decided to keep a running tally of the various cuisines that we sample along the trip. Delighted to be in Seattle, a great city, we were hosted for a night by our close friend, Jill, we were promised an early night at a yummy Mexican restaurant, not because of our jet lag, but because Neal was nearly having fits not knowing what was going on in the game.

Thursday was Neal’s birthday, so after checking in early to the hotel, we worked out, which also will not surprise many of our friends, as just a few might consider this our other obsession. We then had a delightful stay, walking all over the city, enjoying the Seattle Art Museum , and then ate our way through the Pike Place Market, including French crepes and Russian piroshkies. The blueberry oat bar for desert was too good to belong to any one nation. We walked to a beautiful new sculpture park before Jill and her friend Mac treated us to a delightful Vietnamese birthday dinner, capped off by another Red Sox victory. What more could Neal have asked for on his birthday? We have been getting some flack for leaving New England during a Red Sox World Series run, but we did appreciate being in the Pacific time zone so the games were over before our bedtime for a change. OK, so before we even left the country, we had at least five different cuisines, so are you seeing a trend here?

The Camera

I bought a Canon S5 specifically for the trip, since it has a 12X zoom and is much faster than my old Canon S50. Here are a couple of shots from Josh Beckett's masterful four hit shutout in Game 1 of the ALDS. It also takes movies, and I for my first attempt at posting a movie, here is Sweet Caroline at Fenway. I also took a home run by David Ortiz, but its over 100 mb, the limit for this site, so I need to learn how to edit. I also need to learn to be steadier holding the camera.