Another Overseas Adventure

I’ve managed to stay put on the East Coast for almost a year now, saving up for our big trip to see my cousin Robin who is currently living in Tokyo.  My brother Kevin, who loves all things Japanese, will be travelling with us for the first time overseas.  Kevin seems to have this silly notion that he might actually have time to sleep and relax on this trip.  I told him that’s what the plane ride home is for. We’ll see if I’m still his favorite sister when we get back to the U.S.

We’ll be spending the first few days at Robin’s apartment in Tokyo.  She assures us that there is enough room for all of us to have a place to sleep.  I believe that her Tokyo apartment is even smaller than her Hong Kong apartment.  Small living quarters seem to be the norm in Asian cities.

On Tuesday, June 18^th we join our tour group. The first day we’re in Tokyo and then it’s a six day trip west stopping at Mt. Fuji, Hakone, Hamamatsu, Iga, Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, Okayama and ending in Hiroshima.  On June 24^th we fly from Hiroshima back to Tokyo where we hope to catch a baseball game before leaving to come home to the U.S. on June 26^th.  Here’s a link to our travel itinerary https://www.box.com/s/m79l3my3s2b1z7gob319.  I also want to plug Robin’s blog as she does a fabulous job at sharing her experiences living in Japan.  http://robinhood72.wordpress.com

I’ll leave you with a recap of our trip to Vancouver last July.  Robin invited me to be her “plus one” at a wedding for her friend Janet  with whom she taught in Hong Kong.  Since the couple had so many guests coming from out of town, they planned activities during the week prior to the wedding --  very ambitious on their part.

We left the morning after New Jersey got hit with those terrible storms in late June and ran into some other weather issues trying to get out of Chicago.  Robin and I were booked on different flights.  I was able to get into Vancouver on our expected arrival date but Robin was stuck overnight in Chicago.  Our first two nights were at a beautiful bed and breakfast called the Windsor Guest House.  We had a delicious made-to-order breakfast each morning. 

Our first full day together, Robin and I explored Vancouver stopping at the Granville Island market, hopping on a water taxi over to Vancouver’s China town (not as impressive as San Francisco’s) finishing the day in Gastown.  We celebrated Robin’s birthday with dinner at a Mongolian barbeque.

 

The next day, Janet and her fiancé picked us up and we started on a road trip up to Whistler Mountain, picking up other guest along the way. Bring eleven almost total strangers on an overnight trip could be disastrous but we all got along fabulously and had a great time. 

Whistler was gorgeous. It was one of the sites for the 2010 winter Olympics so I’m sure that everything was recently refurbished.  I had never been to a ski village so maybe they are all this way.  The hotels all opened up into a piazza that was filled with outdoor restaurants and cafes. 

While New Jersey was in the midst of a heat wave, we were bundled up in winter jackets, sitting under outdoor heaters.  We had hoped to do some hiking but the alpine trails were all still closed because the snow had not yet melted.  Instead, all eleven of us went mountain biking. The the views were astounding. 

In the evening, we went out to dinner to celebrate with the soon-to-be newlyweds and then to an Irish pub where we saw this amazing band, just two guys and their instruments, who are evidently staples of Whistler. http://www.ruckusdeluxe.com

The next morning, after a group breakfast, some of us went to the Squamish Lil'Wat Cultural
Centre and then half of the group went back to Vancouver.  I was semi-familiar with the Pacific Native American tribes from a recent trip to the American Museum of Natural History in New York but the cultural center provided more insight into Squamish life today and their attempts to preserve their heritage.

Robin and I stayed on an extra night in Whistler with a couple from Hong Kong, Mike and Veronica. The four of us decided we would take the ski lifts to the top of Whistler mountain. 

This was on 4^th of July and it’s the first 4^th of July I’ve ever spent in the snow.  By the time we got to the summit of the mountain, the temperature was 1 degree Celsius. There was one short trail that was open.  Robin and I were able to hike around and see the surrounding valleys below.  It was absolutely beautiful and eerily quiet.  I guess I don’t realize just how much background noise there is in our every day lives.

We took another cable car that stretched between the two mountains, to the peak of the adjacent mountain, Blackcomb, and then went back down the lifts to the village.  On our way back to the hotel, the band from the Irish pub was playing at another outdoor pub.  They were so good that we had to stop and listen to them again.  Whistler actually had 4^th of July fireworks (I guess a lot of Americans must vacation there) so we found a Mexican restaurant where we could sit outside and watch the display.

Ironically, my first experience riding a Grey Hound Bus came in Canada as that’s how we travelled from Whistler back to Vancouver.  Upon returning to the city, we stayed at a different bed and breakfast, King’s Corner, in which we were more of guests in the owner’s house.  Our host, Anne, was very health conscious and cooked us an organic breakfast each morning.

The weather had warmed up considerably by this time and we were able to spend an afternoon walking the around the 5 ½ mile seawall at Stanley Park stopping to see the rose garden, totem pole collection and a somewhat anti-climatic light house (which was nothing like the lighthouses we have here on the east coast). 

               

  

On our way back into town we stumbled upon a Japanese bakery which also sold these gelato dessert creations with ingredients such as red bean, rice cakes and cornflakes.  The combinations sounded a little strange but they ended up being delicious.

Our last free day in Vancouver, we took a bus out to the Capilano Suspension Bridge Park.  The original bridge was built 1889 by George Grant Mackay who owned the tack of land.  His house was on one side of the ravine and the best hunting grounds were on the opposite side.  Mackay grew tired of trekking to the bottom of the ravine, crossing the river and hiking back up the other side just to go hunting so he built a bridge. 

The current bridge is somewhat of a tourist trap, but it was nice to be outside in the fresh air and we enjoyed the Treetop Adventure Course and Cliff Walk.  We also took one of the nature tours where I learned quite a bit about the Pacific rainforests and its native Douglas firs and Western Red cedars.

  

 

 

Our final day in Vancouver was Dave and Janet’s wedding.  They choose a beautiful outdoor venue for the ceremony.  Janet looked stunning and Dave wore a traditional Scottish kilt.  The reception was held at a country club atop another mountain just outside of the city.  The couple blended their Chinese and Scottish heritages together with some local Canadian traditions.  This was the first wedding I attended where each member of the bridal party gave a speech during dinner.  A guest list of people from around the world meant that the speeches were given in English, Mandarin and Cantonese.  At one point, a toast was made in Italian.  It was a much different experience than any American wedding. 

Here, There and Everywhere

It’s travel time again.  Robin and I are getting ready to embark on our next adventure, this time to Germany.  It’s a new continent for me and another stamp in my passport.  Before I leave, I thought I’d share some of my domestic adventures during the past year.

  

When Robin was home this summer, we decided to hold an international food fair making dishes we learned in the various cooking classes we’ve taken.  After whittling the list down to only our favorites, we still ended up with a total of eleven dishes.

  

Of course, we picked the hottest weekend in July to do all of this.  The biggest challenge was converting the metric measurements in the recipes to their English equivalents and then trying to figure out substitutes for some of the Asian ingredients we couldn’t procure in the US.  Most of the first day was spent wandering around the Asian supermarket.

Aunt Karen and Uncle Anthony were gracious enough to let us use the kitchen in their brand new house, which had the absolute perfect arrangement for our ambitious endeavor.  Even starting everything early in the morning and using the help of the electric food processor, a luxury we did not have in Asia, we still managed to delegate jobs to almost everyone in the family in order to have food on the table by a reasonable dinner hour.  We made everyone try chopsticks before breaking out the silverware and finished the night off with hot milk bubble tea.  It was great fun and I hope that maybe we can do it again this summer.

   

In December, I took a trip to Las Vegas to visit my friend Jim and run in my first ever half marathon, the Rock ’n Roll Half up and down the Vegas strip.  Never in my life did I ever think that I would be able to run 13.1 miles, but after three months of training it really wasn’t bad at all and I finished in 2 hours and 28 minutes.  The one thing that training did not prepare me for was the experience of running with 40,000 other people.  I think that I probably added another mile to my total with all of the weaving I did from one side of the strip to the other trying to find some space of my own.  I will admit that I do prefer running the back roads of Waterford.

Of course, I’m not content to have a relaxing vacation, and while we probably should have been resting both before and after the run, we managed to do quite a bit.  Jim was able to get us tickets to see Le Rêve at the Wynn.  I was blown away by the combination of aquatics, dance, diving, gymnastics and trapeze work in the show.  I was so mesmerized by what I was watching that I didn’t even realize that the music was also being preformed live until the musicians took their bows at the end.

The NASCAR banquet was at the Wynn that same night so we were able to see some cars and Tony Stewart’s championship trophy, but we didn’t bump into any celebrities.

The next day, we made a stop at the Pinball Hall of Fame, which houses the world’s largest collection of pinball machines from the 1950’s through the 1990’s.  Almost all of the machines are in working order.  We went through quite a few quarters.  I think that I’m actually worse at pinball now than I was as a kid when I would get to play every Friday night when we stopped for dinner on our way to the shore.  Of course that might have something to do with the fact that I wasn’t big enough to reach both flippers so I would play one side and my dad would play the other.  I’m sure he made most of the saves.

The day after the run, we took a ride out to the Hoover Dam.  One of the things that always impresses me about being in the desert is that the sky is so much clearer and bluer than on the East coast, and that day was no exception.  We walked across the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge that was completed the year before and then spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the dam.  You could tell the visitors who had run the night before.  Many still had the scoring chips on their sneakers and I think we were all walking a little more gingerly than everyone else.

  

  

On the way back from Boulder City, we stopped at the Railroad Pass casino, the oldest casino in Nevada, which opened in 1931 to cater to the construction workers building the Hoover Dam.  That night, Jim also took me to Ethel M’s Chocolate Factory and Cactus Garden. For Christmas, the cactuses were decorated in lights.  I would like to know whose job it was to take the lights on and off of thousands of prickly cactuses.

I finished out my stay in Vegas with a visit to the Atomic Testing Museum, which chronicles the history of nuclear testing, much of which was carried out in Nevada.  I guess my Vegas vacation was quite a bit different from the average Vegas vacation, but after running up and down the entire strip and all the way out to Freemont Street, I was just as content to see something else.

It seemed a waste to only run in one half marathon after all those months of training, and I needed something to motivate me to continue running through the Christmas holiday, so I began looking for race Jim and I could enter in the new year.  We tentatively agreed on running in Pasadena, but somewhere along the way those plans morphed into a mini vacation to San Francisco, no running required. 

While all of the pictures I’ve seen of San Francisco are always beautifully bright and sunny, I kept hearing that rain and fog were more typical.  We lucked out big time with the weather, especially for mid-February.  Temperatures were warm and we only encountered some brief fog.

I think that San Francisco is my favorite US city to date.  Public transportation was easy to navigate, the streets were clean, and for the most part, people were polite and friendly.  We chose to stay at the Hotel California in Union Square, an area which got its name because it was once used for rallies and support for the Union Army during the Civil War. We actually learned quite a bit more about California’s involvement in the Civil War during our trip to Alcatraz.

Our hotel was quite charming. Built in 1913, it had an elevator that was nearly that old.  We had to physically open the door when it stopped at our floor.

We spent our first day exploring Chinatown, which was eerily reminiscent of Hong Kong, complete with medicine shops, tea stores and bakeries.  According to the travel guide it is the largest Chinatown outside of Asia, as well as the oldest Chinatown in North America. One my favorite parts of the area was the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory.  It was just a very small space in a row of buildings on a back ally. The women sat at an old conveyor type machine which flipped out the round pancake cookies in front of each woman into which she placed the fortune and folded the cookie.  Unfortunately, there was a somewhat intimidating older gentleman who made sure that you didn’t stay too long watching.

On our way back to the hotel, we had our first experience on San Francisco’s famous cable cars.  I think it’s the best form of transportation I’ve ever taken, even better than the tuk-tuk in Cambodia. It’s like riding on an old wooden roller coaster, except they let you stand up and hang off the side.   After our first ride, Jim and I were hooked and we made sure that we took a cable car whenever possible. I think that if I resided in San Francisco, I would need to make sure that I lived and worked close enough to the cable car line that I could make it my sole means of transportation.

Sunday we planned to bike across the Golden Gate Bridge down into the town of Sausalito on the other side of the bay from San Francisco.  Jim is an avid biker and does 30+ mile rides every weekend in Las Vegas.  I, on the other hand, have probably not ridden a bike since before high school, and when I did ride it was on the flat roads of South Jersey.  But 6 am spin class at the gym three days a week paid off, and once I finally figured out how to work the gears on the bike, I was able to keep pace on the eight mile ride (although I suspect Jim took it easy on me). 

We started out in Fisherman’s Wharf and biked along the bay through the Presidio, an area which served as an army post and also hosted the World’s Fair in 1939-40.  We made a stop at Fort Point, although at the time, we didn’t realize that if we had just gone a little bit past the welcome center, we could have seen the actual fort.  From there it was up the hills and onto the bridge.  It was an absolutely beautiful day, and I think  about 10,000 other people had the same idea as us, so I sort of felt like I was running the half marathon all over again, dodging people and trying to find an opening. Thankfully, Jim took the lead so I just had to follow along. 

Sausalito was gorgeous, a quintessential sea shore town. We walked around for a bit and got lunch before catching a ferry back to San Francisco.

No trip to San Francisco would have been complete without a visit to Alcatraz, another one to add to my growing list of prison tours of the world.  I was forewarned that Alcatraz was small, and I will admit that the prison building itself was, especially compared to somewhere like Eastern State Penitentiary, but the entire complex on the island was quite impressive.  We were fortunate enough to land on the island as one of the park rangers, John, was starting a tour of the history of Alcatraz and its function as a military fortress.  I did not know it was anything other than a prison. 

John explained the importance of being able to defend the San Francisco bay, especially during the height of silver mining in California.  This was especially significant during the Civil War, as the California silver was used to fund the Union Army.  John explained that the first prisoners at Alcatraz were actually Confederate sympathizers who were plotting to hijack ships leaving port.  I’m not sure that their plan was ever a real threat to the Union; however, their imprisonment likely deterred others from even trying.  We also learned that Alcatraz never needed to fire its cannons defensively.

As we were walking up to the prison building (originally the citadel during its fortress years), Jim pointed out that Alcatraz is strikingly similar to the old Overbrook High School building.  I’m sure that many a student will agree that being in school was very similar to being in jail.  The audio tour, of course, highlighted “Clint Eastwood’s” great escape, and after seeing the design of the building, it’s rather remarkable that they were able get out without alerting the guards. 

Our final day, we made a stop at the Cable Car Museum.  It was actually the working shop where all of the cables originated.  We were able to see motors driving the cables that ran throughout the entire city, and we also finally were able to understand how the whole hand brake system works.  Basically, the brakeman grabs the cable to pull the car up the hill, then releases it and uses gravity on the down hill sections.

From there it was on to Fisherman’s Wharf, where we took a boat ride under the Golden Gate Bridge, walked the piers and took a tour of a working World War II submarine, the USS Pampanito.  Once again we were fortunate enough to catch a tour led by one of the park rangers, who gave us some insight into the Pampanito’s role in the Pacific. 

San Francisco was great, and I hope to make it back again.  Ironically, after our second day of walking up and down the hills, I think that Jim and I realized it would have actually been less strenuous to run the half marathon in Pasadena.