Hong Kong, day one

By mutual agreement, Miss H and I decided not to do much today. I was exhausted from my losing battle against Singapore's confounded autocracy, and my other half had just come off a startlingly harsh week at work (and a long flight). So we went to bed early the night of Saturday, August 2, and had a lovely lie-in Sunday morning. 

The weather was a factor as well. I hadn't expected Hong Kong to be the hottest, most humid, most stinkingly sweltering destination on my journey, but that it was. We could hardly breathe. The heat and wet were living things, clawing at your throat, clamping your clothes against your body, blocking your pores like some invisible blob monster. I've always been prone to sweating when the temperature's anywhere above 70 degrees, and whenever the humidity's above 40 percent. You can imagine how I felt in Hong Kong, with the temperature hovering around 85 and the humidity at 81%. Even Miss H was melting. 

Nonetheless, we hadn't come all this way just to sit in our air-conditioned room. We practically sprinted the ten feet between the hotel lobby and the entrance to North Point MTR station, and then we were on our way to Central and the IFC Mall. 

The view from the roof deck. We'd been planning to have cocktails up there, but the prices were exorbitant.

Pepero is the Korean version of Pocky, a Japanese biscuit stick covered with chocolate. So weird seeing it labeled in English in Hong Kong...

We did a bit of shopping (Victoria's Secret, Dymocks Bookstore, Godiva) and ate a hefty lunch of salads, sandwiches, and smoothies. Then we went to see The Guardians of the Galaxy in 3D. It cost about $15 per person—not including the glasses!—but what the hell, it was a date. In Hong Kong. 

Back at our hotel—ibis North Point—we switched rooms. I'd gotten one of the cheapest double rooms, but 1901 was a closet-sized space with a view of the building behind. So we paid an extra hundred HK$ (about $12.89 US) per day and moved our stuff up to 2504, which had a gorgeous view of Victoria Harbor and Kowloon. 

30 Days to a Better Man, Day 5: cultivate your gratitude

There's two parts to this challenge. Part 1 is to cultivate your personal gratitude. This means making a list of ten things that you're grateful for. The trick is to not be thankful for superficial or general things, like health, family, a good job, and so on. No, the idea here is to dig under the layers and find things, little things, that you're grateful for on a daily basis. So, without further ado, here is my spirited attempt at such a litany:

10 THINGS I'M GRATEFUL FOR:

• sunsets - Heaven knows the universe doesn't need to light up the atmosphere with all those reds and yellows and oranges and pinks, but it does, and I appreciate it. 
• Korean immigration laws - Thank goodness there's a country that lets me live in it and pretend to be a professor and teach its students and pay me through the nose, because without it my dreams and I would have been sunk long ago.
• having a job that lets me travel - Working on a professor's schedule means that I have four whole months of the year to gallivant around the world and see the sights I've wanted to see since I was twelve. You can't beat that. Two years of hagwon purgatory have suddenly become worthwhile. 
• Swedish Fish - Without those little red fish-shaped candies, no visit Miss H and I made to the Skyline Drive-In movie theater in Barstow, California would ever have been the same. She brought a few bags home with her today. Time to catch up on all the TV shows that we missed!
• Brant and Joseph, my beer-brewing buddies - I would never have had the determination or the gumption required to start home brewing in Korea by myself. Thanks to them I have a store of goodly memories to tell about my time in South Korea...and a few dozen bottles of tasty brew in my fridge.
• my mad bomber hat - Made of real leather and rabbit fur and given to me as a Christmas gift by my parents a few years back. It really keeps my head warm in winter and cuts those icy winds down to size. It'll come in handy in Hokkaido. It may seem daft to be grateful for a hat, but no other chapeau suits my personality (or my head) as comfortably as that one. 
• absurdity - For reminding us that life is fundamentally crazy on so many levels, and that we need to slow down, realize it and laugh at it before we all go nuts. Also for being my modus operandi.
• radio - For connecting people, places, ideas, news, music, politics and free-mindedness across vast distances (and even between Earth and space) long before there was TV or Internet. There's a simple sort of elegance, warmth, beauty and intimacy to radio that television and the Web both lack. Radio (and vinyl records) fostered in me my love of music — long before I bought my first CD, I had a radio on my bedside table, dial twirled to the classic rock station. It brought me The Beatles, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Coldplay, Owl City, and too many others to name. There's something about gathering around the radio set and listening to A Prairie Home Companion that no episode of Family Feud or Golden Girls can equal. 
• H.G. Wells - He didn't trust his fellow man, accurately predicted the future (grim as it was) and taught imaginative youngsters like me that there was more to life than what we could see. Good on ya, Herbert.
• flying small airplanes: Not sure who to thank for this, but Orville and Wilbur Wright and Clyde Cessna all seem like likely candidates. I don't know who or what I'd be without flight. I'm so grateful to the aviation pioneers and airplane manufacturers who allowed me to taste that heady magic previously allotted only to birds and pterosaurs (and take Miss H out on some kick-ass dates).  

The second part of this challenge is showing your gratitude to others. 

3 PEOPLE I THANKED:

Mr. A: My animator/illustrator. He's been very patient with me, and has done some pro bono work for me in the past, creating concept illustrations of my works, which I never believe I've thanked him for. I gave him a very specific and heartfelt thank-you.

Mrs. G: A very classy wife, mother, and former classmate from the High Desert. She's actually taken the time to read (truly read, and think critically about) some of my works, and give me thoughtful and helpful feedback, not the usual "your grammar sucks" or "I liked this part" blather. She is my intended audience: the person I write to when I write science fiction. I thanked her sincerely for that, and for paying attention to what I do on FB (she never fails to "like" or comment on the silly stuff I put up there, inflating my ego enormously). She also sends me neat stuff from around the Web that she finds: hilarious memes, the latest gadgets from ThinkGeek, or the coolest updates from Popular Science.

Miss H: My fiancée, of course. I took her for granted there for about 18 months of our three-and-a-half-year relationship, and am trying to cure myself of that horrendous habit forthwith. She went home to the States last week and she brought back a truckload of useful stuff for me: delicious candy and snacks, extra pajamas and workout clothes, a new eyeglasses case, and a host of other assorted gewgaws. I took her in my arms, told her I loved her, what a wonderful wife she is (even if we haven't tied the knot yet) and that I really appreciate what she did. 

There you go! I've cultivated my gratitude. This day, more than any other, I think, has been a valuable lesson for me. I let things go. I take people for granted. No more. I think I'm a little more mindful of things now (isn't that what the Buddhists, gurus and psychologists are always on about — mindfulness?). Looks like this challenge is helping me out already, and we're not even a week into it.


Stand fast for Day 6.

the International Manga Museum, Rokkaku-dō, and Nishiki Market

A few quick messages before we begin:

1. Yes, I'm a day late with this post. Sue me. It's humongous. And I spent last night down at the Gecko's Terrace Restaurant inaugurating myself into the Shooters Club with an Alabama Slammer, a kamikaze, a mudslide, a yak's milk, a turkey roaster, and a Dr. Pepper. I was a bit too busy to blog.
2. I've told you only a teency bit about the prices and cost of things in Japan: admission fees and whatnot. I have not, however, told you much about the ancillary costs. By that I mean bottles of water (¥105-200), which I bought about once every three hours to offset the gallons of sweat I was shedding in the Japanese climate; snacks (¥110-400), stuff like onigiri (rice balls) or gimbap (yes, they had that in Japan) or sandwiches (which actually didn't suck) purchased in convenience stores; meals (¥800-2500, depending on whether I bought it from a snack stand or a bona fide restaurant), and so on. Just know that in between all the Big Crazy Things I Do In Japan there's a lot of small stuff like munchies and agua.
3. I was in Itaewon (the foreigner's ward of the Yongsan borough in central Seoul—remember?) yesterday and I happened to find myself in a bookshop. I picked up something by Bill Bryson. Now, Bryson's reputation as a grammarian is well-known and well-deserved. However, I had no prior experience with his travel writing. Even a superficial glance at his book In a Sunburned Country revealed him to be a humorous and entertaining writer. Looking back over my Japan posts, I've had the feeling that something was slightly off; now I know what it is. The writing's boring as hell. I need to make my posts funnier. So that's what I'll try to do from here on out. 
4. We're in Kyoto now. It's August 4. I just got off the Shinkansen from Tokyo. It's about twelve o'clock in the afternoon.

Let's settle the bet right now: I'm a geek. I'm not going to apologize for it. Geek is the new sexy. That's why we have TV shows like The Big Bang Theory. It's the reason people who've attended Comic-Con more than once in their natural lifetime haven't been burned at the stake. It's why my mother finds William Shatner attractive when he's in a Star Trek uniform (or rather, the tattered shreds of a Star Trek uniform).

Thank goodness for this new liberalism in the way geek culture is viewed! Five years ago I would have sneaked out of my 14th-floor hotel room in Kyoto with a knotted bed sheet, crept down to the International Manga Museum in the dead of night, paged through a couple of issues of Barefoot Gen, and then hightailed it back to bed and never uttered a word about the affair to anyone. Now I can stand up and boldly tell you about it.

The word "manga" belies any pat definition. You could say it's Japanese comics and graphic novels, but it's more than that. It's a culture. Hardcore otaku (fanboys) wait in lines to buy the next issue of their favorite manga; animation studios make obscene amounts of money turning these comics into animated TV series ("anime" for short); the merchandising industry makes a crap-ton of yen making and selling figurines, posters, lunchboxes, trading cards and other paraphernalia featuring popular characters. In reality, the anime and manga craze is a super-cult of unapologetic geekdom and sanctified nerdiness which has spread across Japan and the entire globe. From its humble beginnings in Japanese newspapers in the early 20th century to the truly massive pop culture monster that it's become (just look at Akibahara, for Pete's sake), manga and anime have become mainstream in Japan, and are rapidly becoming so everywhere in the world. You'll find manga sections in every Barnes & Noble in America. Companies have sprung up in Canada, the U.S. and Europe concerned with nothing else but translating these comics, light novels and cartoon shows so North American and European otaku can get the same kicks as their Japanese counterparts.

You wouldn't think it to look at the International Manga Museum on Karasuma Street in Kyoto, though. It's actually quite humble.

The main building is to the right and in the background (behind the netting which surrounds the open field in front of the entrance).

The resemblance to an unassuming public library didn't stop at the door, though. Photography wasn't permitted inside, but I can tell you that the museum was full of long linoleum-tiled hallways, creaky wooden staircases, glacial elevators, dark-stained and nicked wood paneling, and shelves piled high with faded and dog-eared but still colorful manga books.

It was also full of people. Some were foreigners, like me, making a pilgrimage to what they assumed would be a Manga Mecca; but most visitors were Japanese, young and old alike, sitting on any available flat surface and perusing their favorite titles. There were some English information brochures, but all the placards and posters inside the museum proper were in Japanese. There was little for us foreigners to do but peruse the photographs and the newspaper headlines detailing the meteoric rise of manga to international consciousness, and gaze with thoughtful but uncomprehending eyes at classic issues. I wound up tiptoeing through the halls like a guilty ghost, feeling like I was intruding on a fan club's private session in a public library. I wound up paging through a few issues of Barefoot Gen and then sneaking out.

It was time to stop indulging my rampant inner geek and start actually exploring Kyoto. So, on my way back down the main drag, I took some random pics:

Apparently a few green trees and some mountains in the background is all it takes to make me start liking a city, especially after the urban jungle that was Tokyo. I found myself growing fond of Kyoto within the first half-hour of strolling through it. It just seemed calmer, quieter, less pretentious and...well, greener. I like green. Green is good. We desert rats try to find green everywhere we go. That's why I like Palm Springs so much. More golf courses than Scotland.

I stopped at a Family Mart convenience store for some water and snacks and couldn't help snapping this picture.

If I'm not mistaken, the foreign stuff's on the top shelf (obviously), and all the bottled (er, jarred) sakes are on the lower shelves. Quite a better booze selection than any Korean pyeonuijeom, yes sirree!

Outside the Family Mart, I noticed this sign:

Well, who'd a' thunk it? A Buddhist temple just a few meters away? Why not?

Unlike at Zōjō-ji, this time I managed to get a pic of all the golden shinies in the temple proper. Score!

The hand-washing well-basin-cistern-thingy. Nice dragon!

This was Rokkaku-dō, so named because of its hexagonal shape ("roku" is the Japanese word for "six," so I'm assuming that "rokkaku" is the word for "hexagon"). For such a tiny temple tucked away behind Kyoto's main drag, it actually has some startlingly profound claims to fame. It's part of a pilgrimage route, for one thing. No big deal, right? But then I found out that Rokkaku is believed to be the birthplace of ikebana.

Ikebana, you uncultured swine! The art of Japanese flower arrangement!

And in fact, there was an ikebana equipment shop across the road with all sorts of shears, knives, scythes, and other dastardly instruments in the window. I'd have taken a picture but I was afraid the owner would come out and shank me.

While at the temple, I had the chance to rectify my previous mistake at Zōjō-ji. If you'll recall, I didn't cleanse my hands before tossing in the coin and praying, which probably caused the Shinto deities to install some hideous disfiguring illness in my future. This time, at Rokkaku, I did everything right. I washed my hands, tossed in another hundred-yen coin, rang the bell (there was a bell at this one), prayed, and clapped. If anything went wrong, it's probably that I didn't ring the bell loudly enough. At least the gods would just find me merely inaudible this time around, instead of downright offensive.

A few blocks back down Karasuma and a left on Nishikikoji Street brought me to Nishiki Market. Like a lot of Korean and Japanese markets I'd been to, this one was an arcade, or shōtengai: a narrow street or alley covered by a roof (and the occasional glass skylight) and lined with shops and food stalls. I had heard Nishiki Market mentioned several times as one of the best free things to do in Kyoto, and as it was early afternoon and I was getting hungry, I felt the need for a snack. I meandered and weaved down the arcade's central aisle, taking note of the heavy foreigner presence and all the weird and wacky things for sale. I also tried to do some surreptitious on-the-fly photography, but the results were either blurry or zoomed-in too much. I have got to read up about apertures and f/stops.

Fish snacks!

If you know anything about the Vaunter, then you know I tried one of these (a medium-size one, for 350 yen). And it was delicious.

Eels for 650 yen?! Highway robbery!

I followed the market alley until it T-boned into a full-blown shopping mall with name-brand clothing stores (the last two pictures above), in which I have about as much interest as wood pulp. So I turned around and walked back out.

On the way, I noticed a liquor store and decided to go in. I wanted to find out if they had nigori-zake, or unfiltered sake (cloudy rice wine similar to Korean makgeolli). They did, but it was prohibitively expensive, upwards of ¥3000 per bottle. So I deferred and got a bottle of Japanese-brewed Kölsch beer for ¥456. German-style Japanese beer...fancy that?

I found a convenient place in an alley behind a large garbage can to drink it. Having thoroughly researched things like manga museums, raw horse restaurants and pachinko parlors, I had stupidly neglected to find out whether Japan objects to people drinking on the street or not. So I decided to hedge my bets and wedge myself behind a rubbish bin for a brew. It was refreshing and flavorful (the brew, not the rubbish bin).

And that was essentially that. I got back to the hotel room at about two in the afternoon. I checked my e-mails,sampled the two new whiskies I'd picked up at that loaded Family Mart earlier, and researched my next day's perambulations. The whisky helped with the research. Honest Injun, it did.

I figured I'd best get as much of this crap as I can before I go back home, right? You can't take it with you...literally.

Next up: ARASHIYAMA AND TOGETSUKYO BRIDGE. Don't miss it. This is where things get scenic.

Akibahara Electric Town

Day Three of Tokyo, continued:

What do you think of when you hear the word "Japan"? Is it sushi? Samurai? Karate? Giant hornets? 

For me and a lot of other people, it's anime. I grew up in California, and most youths in that state are exposed to a higher degree of Japanese anime and manga (cartoons and comic books, essentially) than somebody from, say, Iowa. I was no exception. Though I resisted the anime craze throughout my high school years, I started easing into it slowly thereafter, and now I'm a full-fledged nut. Why do you think I put a picture of the cast of One Piece up on this blog when I announced that I was leaving for Japan?

Every single one of these characters could mop the floor with you.

My visit to Tokyo wouldn't be complete without a stop at Akibahara (literally, "Field of Autumn Leaves"), located just north of the city center. It's world-renowned as a geek's Mecca jam-packed with electronics stores, shops full of anime figurines and DVDs, and pachinko parlors lit up like Vegas casinos.

A pachinko parlor in Akibahara. From Wikimedia Commons.

I probably should have gone to Akibahara at night. It didn't look so grand in the hazy daylight. Due to navigational error, I didn't penetrate into the very center of the Electric Town, as it's called. Instead I slunk around the edges and peeked into a few stores (including an awesome toy store with Godzilla figurines from, like, the '60s and '70s).

I also stepped into one of the pachinko parlors. This being Akibahara, almost all of the machines were anime-themed. I tried to snap a few pictures, but an employee caught me and signaled for me to knock it off. I did get one shot of this man-size statue of Unit 01 from Neon Genesis Evangelion in the entryway, though:

This means Shinji would probably be about the size of Tom Thumb.

Pachinko, just so you know, is how the Japanese scratch their gambling itch. It's sort of a cross between pinball and slots. You sit down at a big shiny machine with a lot flashing lights, into which you shoot a bunch of balls. These then cascade down through dense clusters of pins. There are no flippers. If the balls go in certain directions, they may be "captured" and more balls may then be released. The more balls captured, the higher your score. Captured balls (no dirty jokes, please) can be exchanged for prizes.

I didn't play, but next time I will. And I won't bring a camera.

Anyway, here are some miscellaneous shots I took while wandering around Akibahara:

The view that greeted me as I exited the subway station.

 

 

I really should have checked that place out...

Should I be embarrassed that I know exactly what series those girls are from, if not their names?

K-ON!, Vocaloid, One Piece...this place is hitting all the right notes.

This was a display case outside that awesome toy shop I mentioned earlier. Batman Lego sets and plastic Godzilla enemy figurines. Geek heaven!

I was somewhat put out by the pachinko parlor incident, and that combined with the scorching heat soon drove me from the area. From there it was on to my next stop: SHIBUYA CROSSING.

But that's a story for tomorrow...