I have been back now for over three weeks, back in the real world. My trip to Seoul and to southern Japan was great. This report/reflection will be long, so you may want to read in installments.... :)
In Seoul I visited my friends Amy, Joe, and Naomi. It was nice to see what their daily life is like, their home, where Joe works, Naomi's preschool, the grocery store, the bus and train they take around etc. Now when they write on their blog or facebook about their life, I can really picture it.
One highlight while I was there was my birthday, which we celebrated with a yummy cake and going for norebang (renting a room and singing karaoke). Amy wasn't able to get the major reverb turned off (I was of no help), so it was super loud and echo-y, which was hilarious because we were screaming into our shower-capped mics to hear ourselves and giving ourselves sore throats. It was a lot of fun! We sang some Alanis, Bon Jovi, Kelly Clarkson, ABBA and more ABBA (for Naomi), Cyndi Lauper. Good stuff.
Earlier that day Amy and I went to the Olympic Park too, which was really cool. The Seoul Summer Olympics in 1988 were the first Summer Olympics I remember watching, and it was a big deal because our own Canadian Ben Johnson was a favorite for the 100 metre dash... and then he won...and then he had his gold medal taken away because they found out he had taken steroids. What a rollercoaster for a little groupie like me. I also remember Carolyn Waldo, the synchronized swimming champ from Canada. It was pretty cool to be where those Olympics happened.
Another fun excursion was the Dongdaemun Market where Amy buys quilting supplies. This was basically a giant, multi-storied indoor market. Amy's friend and neighbor Rora came with us that day, and it was nice to meet a local and someone who has become a friend for Amy. What a kind, generous woman.
Another day Rora came with Amy and I to the bathhouse in their neighborhood. Amy and I had gone another day with Naomi, but this was a more relaxing grown-ups time. This time I got a body scrub and mini massage, which was great, but also funny to me, not being able to communicate with the woman who was doing it. Whenever I needed to turn over or whatever, it was a little confusing what I was supposed to be doing! I had been to a Korean-style bathhouse, ironically, with Amy before. She and I and two others went together 4 years ago in the Seattle area when Amy was about 8 months pregnant. I would say that one was pretty authentic now that I have been to one in Korea too, just a little different. Getting your body scrubbed by a stranger is quite an experience. I am so glad that I am not so self-conscious about my body anymore. Everyone has one, and no one's is perfect (or hardly anyone's!). It is quite freeing to be able to experience something like that and not have a huge amount of anxiety over it, and actually enjoy it!
Another fun outing was going to Seoul Tower, which had beautiful views in all directions of Seoul. It also had a beautiful washroom!
We ate a lot of food, which involved cooking at the table, either grilling/BBQ, stirfry, or soup. I had some good food, but I wouldn't say Korean food is on my favorites list. There is a lot of red chili paste in many dishes which gives the food a spicy kick, but also tends to make many foods taste the same. I really enjoyed the BBQ (inside at the table) that we had the first night. I did appreciate that there were lots of vegetables, especially cabbage, in meals. I also enjoyed making soup at our table the last night (shabu shabu). That was tasty. And I have to mention the pastries. I love the little European-inspired bakeries in Korea (and Japan and Hong Kong). It was definitely a weakness of mine for the whole trip. Oh yum. There were also the little fish-shaped pastries filled with sweet red bean paste sold on the street in Seoul that I really liked. Another street food, the hot dog on a stick, battered and covered in bits of french fries sounded good, but got old really fast after a few bites! And I wasn't a fan of the rice cakes in red spicy sauce. But another thing I did love was that there were a lot of coffee shops, and it wasn't that easy to get sugar-free or non-fat, so I indulged and drank a fair number of rich, sugary mochas, topped with a mountain of whipped cream. Delicious!
After being in Seoul for 5 days, I went to Japan. The itinerary was changed only a few days before going there. Instead of going to Tokyo, I decided to go to Osaka, because in Tokyo the concerns from radiation were still pretty uncertain due to the the Fukushima nuclear disaster as a result of the earthquake two weeks before. They were still having aftershocks too and have even had a few big ones since I left Japan. In retrospect, if I had gone to Tokyo it probably would have been fine, but hindsight is 20/20. The other part of my trip could still happen, which was Kyoto and Hiroshima, which are also south of Tokyo and had been unaffected by the earthquake, and there were no concerns of radiation there. So I flew to Osaka and stayed there for 2 nights. I had no idea what to do in Osaka, but I figured it out the first morning. It was overwhelming at first in Japan, not speaking any Japanese, not quite getting how the subway tickets/fares worked, and not really knowing what I wanted to do in Osaka. But I figured it out pretty quickly. The language barrier was definitely a factor the entire time I was in Japan, because I don't speak ANY Japanese, and I certainly don't know how to read the Japanese symbols, and there was very little use of our alphabet to write Japanese words (I forget the terms for these different ways of writing out Japanese), but anyway, that made translating signs very hard.
Osaka, I'm told, is the most similar to Tokyo of any other Japanese city. Shopping seemed to be the biggest thing there. I was there the first 2 days of my Japan part of the trip, and the last night as well, since that was where I was flying out of. I walked around a lot in the shopping areas, such as Namba. So many places to shop and eat.
Regarding the food in Japan... I loved that many restaurants had extensive displays of fake food so you knew what they served there. It was definitely helpful when I couldn't read the language. I wasn't very adventurous with food in Japan, because I am a little wary of seafood and meat when I don't know exactly what it is. I stayed pretty safe with Japanese omelet (big pile of rice in the shape of a western omelet, with a layer of egg on top and then any number of toppings), really yummy authentic ramen noodle soup, rice bowls with egg (I had one with tempura shrimp and leeks on top), pork cutlet, okonomiyaki, to name a few. I was actually surprised I didn't see more sushi. It didn't seem as common as some of those other dishes, but maybe that was because I couldn't read most signs! I was struck by how much egg is eaten there. It's a part of many main dishes. Egg salad sandwiches were also really common in convenience stores, almost as the main sandwich option, sometimes with a slice of ham in it too. Eating out I found it really hard to eat many fruits and vegetables, which was somewhat surprising to me (well, the vegetables). As I mentioned before, coffee shops are very common, and I had a good number of lattes and mochas in Japan too...and the pastries, once again. I also loved the Crunky chocolate bars and bite sized versions of these.
So, back to the journey... after a day in Osaka, I took the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Hiroshima. I actually stayed at a hostel just southwest of Hiroshima about 20 minutes by train at a place called Miyajima, or rather by the ferry terminal where a quick ferry ride takes you to the island of Miyajima. The hostel was 3 blocks from the train station, which was really nice. The island of Miyajima has a temple and a famous shrine called the O-torii shrine, which appears to be floating on the water. I had seen pictures of it before. It was a beautiful place with tiny wild deer walking around amongst the people, eating almost anything, food or otherwise, from people's hands. I got to know some people at the hostel there, which was nice after a couple of days of not really having people to talk with.
I spent my only full day in that area in the city of Hiroshima. The Peace Park which memorializes the atom bomb that was dropped there in 1945 was pretty awe-inspiring. The park is in the center of the area that was bombed. It has the A-bomb dome which was one of the only buildings left standing in that area after the bomb went off. There were also a couple of museums there telling the stories of survivors, people who died, the events leading up to the bombing and why Hiroshima ended up being chosen as the target, information about nuclear weapons and how Hiroshima and various organizations are working to promote nuclear disarmament around the world. It was really sobering and disturbing to learn more about what happened there. Since I was a little girl I have known that this happened, because we had a book that had a bunch of different peace themed stories, including the story of Sadako Sasaki who was exposed to the radiation when the A-bomb went off when she was a toddler, and then how she became sick with leukemia as a result when she was 11. She decided to fold 1000 paper cranes, because of a legend which said that if a sick person folded that many paper cranes they would get well. She died when she was 12 years old. There is a Children's Memorial monument at the Peace Park that has a statue of Sadako, and has pavilions containing many chains of paper cranes. People continue to make paper cranes and send them to Hiroshima. While I was in Hiroshima I thought about the people there, and how they have turned this terrible occurrence into a mission to promote peace around the world. Ever since then, the mayors of Hiroshima have sent letters of protest to world leaders whose countries have nuclear weapons. I was really glad I went to Hiroshima. I also found it really ironic that I was in Japan during this nuclear crisis that is going on there at Fukushima, and visiting this historic site where a nuclear bomb had been dropped, and at the same time I happened to be reading a novel that took place during the 50's or early 60's in Nevada when they were doing nuclear bomb testing in the desert. It was a little surreal.
The next day I took the Shinkansen to Kyoto where I stayed for 3 days. In Kyoto I visited several temples and did a lot of walking. I stayed in a capsule hotel, which was...interesting. I wouldn't recommend it for more than a night probably, but it worked out fine. There were separate sleeping floors and locker/shower floors with men and women on different floors. The weird thing was that I had to check in and check out everyday and got a different locker and capsule to sleep in every night. The little locker I got wasn't big enough for both of my bags (neither of which was bigger than a carry-on suitcase, by the way), so every night I had to leave my bigger bag in a locker at the reception desk and just bring what I needed for the night up to the locker room with me. And everyday I had to leave both bags with reception there. The capsule itself was comfortable to sleep in. There was only a thin shade to draw for privacy, but not for sound-proofing, so it was a little noisy when people were coming and going at night and in the morning, and if people were coughing. Thankfully I wasn't near any snorers, so I slept well. The mattresses were comfortable. The hotel was really clean, it was in a great location, and I wasn't really in Japan to hang out in my hotel anyway, so really it was a fine place to sleep for a few nights, but I was ready for something else when I checked out the last day.
One of the highlights in Kyoto was seeing the Gion district, which is famous for geisha, or geiko as they prefer to be called in Kyoto. It still has a lot of the old charm of traditional buildings and streets and red lanterns hanging outside of buildings. One night I actually went on a walking tour of the area which was to learn about the geisha culture which is certainly not what it once was, but there are still young ladies who choose this. We saw some of the famous teahouses and dormitories for geisha and maiko (the apprentice geisha). We could even see some parties happening in a few windows with geisha and maiko there. It was pretty interesting.
From Kyoto, I went back to Osaka for my last night and flew home back through Seoul the next day. It was quite an adventure. I am glad I took the step of traveling somewhere really alone, and I am happy I got to go visit my dear friend Amy in her home across the world.
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