Yosemite Falls

Look how pretty

In Yosemite

We made it and can occasionally get Internet on the iphone. Here's a
pretty picture from our drive:

a charmed plane ride...

The very last leg of our Japan trip was a flight from San Francisco to Santa Barbara. Apparently these don't run very often because we had to wait in the airport for something like 4 hours. I was taking this picture of Nike getting in a nap after some 20 hours in airports or on buses & planes when I realized that I was ALSO photographing Pru, Piper, & Phoebe's dad from Charmed!

Here's a photo from imdb for comparison:

Anyway, I briefly considered telling him that I was a fan of Charmed and I thought the series finale was just about the best series finale I had ever seen. I'm not sure if it would have been nice to be recognized or annoying to be bothered while waiting around at the airport, so I erred on the side of not wanting to be annoying.

It turns out he was also headed for Santa Barbara, so when he boarded the plane with us, I couldn't help but speculate about the news reports if our plane crashed...

(...it didn't, by the way...)

Yosemite in 1 week...

We leave for Yosemite in 1 week.



We're meeting some of my family there.

We will rarely if ever have any cell service or internet access...

...but if we can, we'll post some pretty pictures & a note that we made it safely. (The pictures are from the last time we were in Yosemite -- 2 years ago.)

Pictures (Web Albums) --UPDATED

[Links updated July 8]

When I'm not sleeping at bizarre hours or catching up on work & correspondences, I've been going through the photos we took in Japan and reorganizing my web albums. I've created 3 sets of photos from the trip.

There's a set containing pictures of us, our travel companions, and our guides / hosts / friends, like this one of those of our group who stayed at the Hotel Unizo in Kyoto:

Many of the photos of people take place in front of nice scenery, but there are also pretty pictures without the people, like this one at Ginkaku-ji (The Silver Pavilion):

Finally, there are pictures I took of everyday things that struck me as amusing, like this sign which can only mean "monster crossing":

Awake... I think

Hello! I write this on the tail end of 16 hours of sleep. (Man, never done THAT before...) I am feeling most of the way back to normal, physically, although my mental representations have been updating a bit more sluggishly. The reverse culture shock has been pretty intense considering we were only there for a hair under 2 weeks. (Apparently, some parts of our personalities really clicked with Japan!). We have loads of stories and pictures to share that we didn't have time to post during the trip. As we organize our pictures and thoughts, we will post them here when anything good crystallizes.

Now, I need to make an emergency shopping trip, since our kitchen is completely empty, but I leave you with a picture of "Captain Santa" from his eponymous store in Kyoto. It is a clothing store where a beautiful and expensive looking (but horribly engrish) sign informs shoppers that Captain Santa lives on an island in the South Seas with his wife, Mermaid. It goes on further to state that Mermaid makes all of the clothes with magic powers that make them last forever. We didn't buy any to find out if this was true...

Home

Made it all the way back home. It's about 830am in Japan so we've basically been up for 24 hours (save a few short naps). We're going to sleep now and we'll start catching up with our lives whenever we're awake and somewhat coherent...

Delayed in SF...

...just a little. I wanna go home!

Safe in San Francisco

Made it to sf... Long layover... More later...

Friday again

It's Friday night / Saturday morning here. Today (Friday) was the last day of the conference, and it ended close to noon, so we had the rest of the day to wander around and lay low. We ate at a sushi place and then headed out to do some shopping. First we went to Yodobashi Camera which puts Fry's Electronics and Best Buy to shame.

Then we headed over to the Sapporo Station Mall, which seems to be a train station with several shopping centers connected to it. I wasn't quite able to make sense of it. We took some time off to rest and then met back up in the apartment complex of a post-doctoral student at Hokkaido where we had a little potluck of foods that we had all collected from the impressive market in the basement of the Daimaru. It was a good last day. I am TIRED and my feet hurt!! Long trip home tomorrow (Saturday) and then lots of sleeping. Will check in when we can to say that we made it safely home.

no new pictures...

Today was heavy on academic discussions and light on picture-taking opportunities. It's been a tricky day. It mainly consisted of small discussions. Each discussion was conducted in English, but each group had people with varying degrees of difficulty understanding and speaking English. There were a lot of good conversations, but it was often a struggle for all parties. There's one more day and I think it's supposed to end a little earlier so we can check out the area beyond the university a bit. It's been an excellent experience, and everyone I've met has been great, but I'm glad to have only one full day left ahead of me -- I miss home.

Sapporo

It's now Wednesday evening in Japan (early Wednesday morning in California). We spent nearly the whole day at Hokkaido University, which is in the city of Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido. It was a long day for our tired brains -- 6 talks and a poster session, followed by a lovely reception. We skipped out on the following social activities which are still going on in all likelihood. We were both tired and have to write papers for a class that we took this last quarter. Plus, we have been walking SO MUCH on this trip, and my feet, ankles, and legs are so sore!!

Hokkaido apparently has been developed much more recently than most of Japan. What I saw of Kyoto was pieces of hyper-modernness intermixed with pieces of apparently traditional architecture etc. So far in Sapporo I haven't seen the same extremes of modernness or traditionalness. Of course, in both cases my experience is quite limited, especially in Sapporo I can say for sure that the campus of Hokkaido University is beautiful:

No sightseeing so far in Sapporo outside of the area right around the university. The conference isn't supposed to run as long over the next 2 days, so hopefully we can go off and explore a bit in the 2nd half of the days. I don't think there's time for anything on Saturday except to come home...

made it to Hokkaido

Running off to dinner nowish, so no time to post, but we made it safely to our hotel in Hokkaido. Conference #2 starts tomorrow and goes on for 3 days, and then we head home...

because I couldn't sleep in...

Here's a list of things that have amused / surprised / confused me about Kyoto:

-- People walking around with umbrellas on a clear day
-- The near complete lack of litter... especially in light of the near complete lack of convenient trash cans on the streets
-- quadruple burgers at McDonald's
-- shrimp burgers at McDonald's
-- The number of places with bad English in their names (but, of course, this makes me think of "El Pollo Loco")
-- The number of T-shirts with bad English on them (but, of course, this has led to much
speculation among my travel companions about what it is that all the Japanese tattoos in America REALLY say)
-- The stereotypic clusters of schoolgirls in uniforms walking around -- especially the group containing the brave girl who called out "hel-lo, nice to meet you" upon seeing a group of white folk wandering around and then giggled and screamed in glee when I replied "nice to meet you, too."
-- The fact that a red pedestrian light does not coincide with a simultaneous green light on the opposing side of traffic. (Red pedestrian lights seem to indicate that opposing traffic ALMOST has a green light.)
-- Smoking sections in restaurants.
-- Smoking sections RIGHT NEXT to nonsmoking sections. (I remember when California was like this, but I've become spoiled.)
-- Side view mirrors on the hoods of cars instead of next to the doors.
-- The fact that my brain seems to have decided that -- in a pinch -- when I'm having trouble communicating with someone, I should pull out my incredibly poor Spanish to help, no matter what language the person I'm talking to speaks.

I'll continue this list later, and we'll see how Sapporo compares....

last day in Kyoto

As I write, it's almost precisely a week since we left Santa Barbara. It's Monday night here -- Monday morning in California. Today was a tourist day, and we spent most of the day with Andy, Tess & Joel. It rained for a while, so my camera spent a fair amount of time hiding in my bag, but I got some photos. Apparently stuff is randomly closed on Mondays here, so our first 2 plans for lunch were foiled. We found a place eventually, and I had a 'kesadijya'.

Then we walked, bused, and walked to another temple

I started putting pictures of the trip online [link is now outdated - see more recent post for current info], and I'll keep adding more if I can. (In case you end up looking at my 'Public Gallery', you should know that I mainly use the web albums as an efficient way of giving my friends pictures that I take of their baby, so most of the pictures outside the Japan album are of him.)

Tomorrow is a travel day -- Kyoto to Sapporo. We should be able to get online at least once before we leave. We'll put up a post as soon as we can once we get to Sapporo, but I'm not sure when that will be; I'm not sure how easy it will be to get online.

not in Tokyo

In case anybody heard about this shooting that happened in Tokyo today, I just wanted to reaffirm that we are not in Tokyo and that we're fine.

Today (Sunday) was the last day of the first conference that we're attending, and it was a half day, so we spent most of the day sightseeing.





I have frequently had to laugh at myself for my ignorance here. I was walking around a temple, and my best guess was that this was a cemetery:

...until I saw this...

I've mentioned before that I haven't been eating very well. I brought a bunch of protein bars because I was prepared to have trouble finding food that I found palatable, and I've been able to find enough to get by. Today, I had basically my first full meal since we've been here. Guided by 2 VERY nice students from Hokkaido, a bunch of us went to a restaurant that I think was authentic Japanese food. We even had to take off our shoes and were served by women in kimonos! And I ate with chopsticks for the 2nd time! (The first time was a few days ago.) I tried almost every vegetarian dish, a few of which are pictured here:

I did NOT eat the fish!

We ate very well, and I don't think there was a scrap of food on the table when we left:

So THAT's karaoke...

Last night after the keynote and banquet some of the Hokkaido grads were nice enough to shepherd a big group of us over to a giant karaoke place and arrange a bunch of rooms for us. The next few hours passed in a bit of a haze (for me; Danielle went off in search of sustenance because unfortunately the banquet was a bit lacking for vegetarians...)... at some point drinks were said to be free, but weren't... much drinking ensued... then drinks were truly unlimited, but at a high premium... much drinking ensued... then drinks were truly pay as you go, and we knew it... and much drinking ensued anyway... This morning I find myself a bit hoarse and a bit queasy, but with fond memories of all of the craziness. Highlights include: Andy & Tess punking out couple-style into the same mic as all the lights and shit flashed around them; Pat beat boxing; Christina's dance party room, Oliver and Laura (apologies if I misspelled that!) duetting a lovely tune; Aaron's Elvis impressions; Eric & Chris screaming 80s rock; Joanna schooling me on how one really sings the katakana transliterations; Carolyn's Janis Joplin; Kate's dance moves; Holly & Greg's hilariously nasty gangsta rap... and then the memories get a little hazy...

On the off chance any of the Hokkaido grads are reading this, you guys as truly awesome and I very much appreciate all of last night!

Plastic food 2

We've started a collection. These photos are all of fake food: