Progeny-1 is heading to Merry Ol' England for a bit. She's been added into a church choir that's taking up residence at a cathedral for a week. Lucky kid!
Ooh - which cathedral?
Worcester! They sang their first Choral Evensong today -- the Choir of Christ Church Cathedral from Cincinnati, Ohio.
We got back from spending 2 weeks in Japan late on Thursday. We seldom go abroad on holiday and this was the dream family holiday, planned and booked for 2020 to celebrate my sons finishing their respective exams and then cancelled due to the pandemic. It’s taken this long to co-ordinate our diaries again, and the Youngest’s girlfriend joined us.
We stayed 5 days in Tokyo, 6 days in Kyoto, and 3 days in Tokyo again, using hotels for Tokyo and staying in a traditional Japanese house with sliding doors, tatami matting and futon mattresses in Kyoto. We walked about 6 miles most days visiting temples, palaces, gardens, a monkey park, anime shops, etc, and I can still feel it in my arthritic bones. It was also hot there, in the mid 30s.
Navigating the trains, subway and buses was straightforward as everything is signposted in English; if you can navigate the London Underground you can get around Tokyo. We used a Japan Rail pass for trains across Tokyo, which also allowed us on a slower bullet train to Kyoto, and used pre-payment cards for subway and buses.
It is fascinating culturally, a place where every toilet is electronic with bidet, even in parks, yet small simple cafes might cook eels outside on a side street. Everyday clothing is monotone and lacks patterns (though sometimes beautifully constructed) but alongside this are the young girls in Lolita dress or plaid mini skirts, others heading out to parks or parties in bright kimonos and even dating couples wearing traditional dress to the fireworks. There is rampant consumerism in the form of crowded anime shops selling tat and expensive themed cafes (which we were dragged into by our offspring); some train stations even have ‘character’ shopping malls. But there are also small shrines wedged between office blocks. Temples are formal and require cleansing and ritual but also sell good luck charms. Tea houses, and some cafes, require the removal of shoes to walk on the matting, emphasising the division of clean and unclean that is important in Japanese culture. We drank a lot of tea; often chilled oolong tea is offered straight away in cafes, and tea houses selling matcha and mochi are at many tourist attractions.
The formality and politeness is noticeable, I particularly liked the marked queues for alighting trains, but it is also possible to overstate the polite culture; we had an old lady and two young girls cut in front of us in a bus queue, presumably on the grounds that we were tourists and didn’t count. But there was also kindness, such as the teenage girl who found my son’s reservation ticket on the platform and delivered it to us on the train (she spoke no English and clearly had been summoning up the courage to approach us, using an app to translate).
Finding food for the two vegetarians was a nightmare, the land that invented tofu only eats it for breakfast and pork ramen is the staple food everywhere and often the only thing available in cheap restaurants. In Kyoto we were lucky to find a nearby ramen chain that used an app to add or remove items from the variations of pork ramen (including the pork!) and did miso as a stock option. We did resort to a ‘British pub’ on one occasion for fish and chips/pizza, as well as a Hard Rock Cafe another evening in Tokyo. The last night we went to an Indian restaurant and the curries there were British Asian; it was the most familiar and relaxed meal we had on the holiday. But the breakfasts were great, in our first Tokyo hotel (Apa, a budget chain) we had both a full English buffet and a fantastic Japanese breakfast (miso soup, salmon and/or pork/chicken, rice, tofu and sticky soya beans), in the second (a business hotel we got cheap on a late deal) we had a buffet of English breakfast and a random variation of other items (mini tofu burgers, vegetable omelette, flavoured rice, chicken and basil, sourdough, matcha muffins).
So an exhausting yet interesting two weeks. My highlights were the palaces and temples, especially in Kyoto which was less rushed and crowded than Tokyo.
Am currently sat in Bangkok Suvarnabhumi airport. Arrived about 2 hours ago. But of bumpiness just west of Myanmar. Took an hour to get through immigration and by the time I was done, the baggage carousel was already loading bags from the next flight.
Waiting for a bus to my onward destination.
Comments
Worcester! They sang their first Choral Evensong today -- the Choir of Christ Church Cathedral from Cincinnati, Ohio.
We stayed 5 days in Tokyo, 6 days in Kyoto, and 3 days in Tokyo again, using hotels for Tokyo and staying in a traditional Japanese house with sliding doors, tatami matting and futon mattresses in Kyoto. We walked about 6 miles most days visiting temples, palaces, gardens, a monkey park, anime shops, etc, and I can still feel it in my arthritic bones. It was also hot there, in the mid 30s.
Navigating the trains, subway and buses was straightforward as everything is signposted in English; if you can navigate the London Underground you can get around Tokyo. We used a Japan Rail pass for trains across Tokyo, which also allowed us on a slower bullet train to Kyoto, and used pre-payment cards for subway and buses.
It is fascinating culturally, a place where every toilet is electronic with bidet, even in parks, yet small simple cafes might cook eels outside on a side street. Everyday clothing is monotone and lacks patterns (though sometimes beautifully constructed) but alongside this are the young girls in Lolita dress or plaid mini skirts, others heading out to parks or parties in bright kimonos and even dating couples wearing traditional dress to the fireworks. There is rampant consumerism in the form of crowded anime shops selling tat and expensive themed cafes (which we were dragged into by our offspring); some train stations even have ‘character’ shopping malls. But there are also small shrines wedged between office blocks. Temples are formal and require cleansing and ritual but also sell good luck charms. Tea houses, and some cafes, require the removal of shoes to walk on the matting, emphasising the division of clean and unclean that is important in Japanese culture. We drank a lot of tea; often chilled oolong tea is offered straight away in cafes, and tea houses selling matcha and mochi are at many tourist attractions.
The formality and politeness is noticeable, I particularly liked the marked queues for alighting trains, but it is also possible to overstate the polite culture; we had an old lady and two young girls cut in front of us in a bus queue, presumably on the grounds that we were tourists and didn’t count. But there was also kindness, such as the teenage girl who found my son’s reservation ticket on the platform and delivered it to us on the train (she spoke no English and clearly had been summoning up the courage to approach us, using an app to translate).
Finding food for the two vegetarians was a nightmare, the land that invented tofu only eats it for breakfast and pork ramen is the staple food everywhere and often the only thing available in cheap restaurants. In Kyoto we were lucky to find a nearby ramen chain that used an app to add or remove items from the variations of pork ramen (including the pork!) and did miso as a stock option. We did resort to a ‘British pub’ on one occasion for fish and chips/pizza, as well as a Hard Rock Cafe another evening in Tokyo. The last night we went to an Indian restaurant and the curries there were British Asian; it was the most familiar and relaxed meal we had on the holiday. But the breakfasts were great, in our first Tokyo hotel (Apa, a budget chain) we had both a full English buffet and a fantastic Japanese breakfast (miso soup, salmon and/or pork/chicken, rice, tofu and sticky soya beans), in the second (a business hotel we got cheap on a late deal) we had a buffet of English breakfast and a random variation of other items (mini tofu burgers, vegetable omelette, flavoured rice, chicken and basil, sourdough, matcha muffins).
So an exhausting yet interesting two weeks. My highlights were the palaces and temples, especially in Kyoto which was less rushed and crowded than Tokyo.
Waiting for a bus to my onward destination.