I arrived in Tokyo early in the morning and waited for my mom and sister to arrive on their bullet train. Afterwards, we went straight onto the next train to Hakone, about 2 hours southwest of Tokyo in Kanagawa prefecture. We decided to buy the Hakone Freepass offered by Odakyuu Railway. They offer 2 or 3 day passes for fairly reasonable prices, which cover nearly all the public transportation in the rural Hakone as well as the trip to and from Tokyo. It cost us 5000 yen each, but it paid for itself twofold by the time we were done with it.
On the trip into the mountains surrounding Hakone, the first checkpoint is at a small town called Gora. I had desperately wanted to try several shops and restaurants that sold the local specialty, 銀豆腐 (gindoufu) "silver tofu". To my dismay, both the tofu shop and the restaurant that uses 銀豆腐 in their dishes were closed for three days, enveloping the days that we'd be there.
Depressed, we continued to our hotel by taking the steep uphill cable-car, followed by the Hakone Ropeway into Togendai. The Ropeway is famous for the amazing views of Mt. Fuji, which is about 20 km away. Unfortunately, it stayed cloudy and hazy while we were there, so we never had a good look at Mt. Fuji. Such a disappointment...
What we were hoping it would look like...
The Hakone area is popular for day-trippers, so most of the attractions and restaurants close before sun-down. With little other choice for dinner, we headed further north into a town called Sengokuhara, and found a quaint traditional-style restaurant called 大地 (daichi) with wooden walls, an open kitchen, and indoor fire pit. We enjoyed the delicious local favorite, ginger pork, while the shop-owner's kids played in the empty spacious dining area and local regulars drifted in and out. Without much else to do for the rest of the night, we headed straight back to the hotel, took a bath in the onsen, and went to bed.
Family portrait in the traditional-style wood and tatami room.
The next day, we first went back on the Ropeway to visit 大涌谷 (Oowakudani), which is a valley filled with volcanic activity. Steam bubbles out from crevices in the earth, and the air smells distinctly of sulfur. The view from above while riding the Ropeway makes it seem like dwarves have begun mining the remnants of a meteorite crater.
Picture taken from someone else's blog
If you walk up the short trail, you'll get to a teahouse next to a murky pool of bubbling water. Here, they cook eggs in the hot springs and sell them. When the eggs are removed from the water, their shells are already black from the chemical reactions. They tasted similar to normal eggs, but with a distinctly sulfuric smell.
Murky sulfuric hot spring
Owakudani's famous black eggs, with salt pack in hand.
Still white on the inside...
Next, we went back down to Togendai to take the Hakone Sightseeing Boat, or what I like to call "the fake pirate ship". It's nothing special, since it's just a decorated ferry driven by engines instead of the fake sails. They even had some Japanese chumps dressed up as sea captains trying to take pictures with you for money.
The fake pirate ship.
Mom and sister messing with the props on deck.
We rode across Lake Ashi and alighted at Moto-Hakone to do some souvenir shopping. We got to take a look at some cool Japanese puzzle boxes and swig some 甘酒 (amazake: sweet, warm sake with very low alcohol content). We then walked down the ancient cedar tree-lined path to Hakone-machi to visit Hakone Shrine.
Entrance to Hakone-machi. Holy mother that's big...
Hakone Shrine is like any other shrine, but bigger and with a bunch of smaller shrines to other gods scattered throughout the grounds. We didn't do much here other than marvel at the amazing power of religion to suck money out of people's pockets. Visitors were paying 100-200 yen to draw fortunes out of a box, and up to 2000 yen to buy a decorative arrow shaft, all this while chucking money into the collection boxes in front of the various shrines. Cha-ching!
The iconic lakeside torii gate.
The shrine itself
On the other side of the lakeside torii.
We took a break in a cafe next to the shrine's parking lot. Here, they served a delicious 五色糯セット (goshoku mochi set: a 5 variation set of pounded sticky rice), which I had seen on TV before. It was indeed a fabulous food experience.
Picture taken from someone's blog: (from left to right) grated daikon (radish) w/ sauce, shouyu & nori (soy sauce and dried seaweed), goma (black sesame powder), kinako (soybean powder), and anko (read bean paste).
Finally, with the day coming to an end, we gathered our luggage from the hotel and took the train back to Tokyo. Before the ticket machine gobbled it up, I managed to take a picture of the Freepass that worked so hard to get us around everywhere. お疲れ様!
Milkin' the Freepass. Milkin' it hard.
Next time, we go to the swanky part of Tokyo! See you then!
The day after getting back to Aomori, I rented a car and drove to the Hakkoda Mountains to
do some skiing and snowboarding. This was the first time I've driven on
the left side of the road, let alone in horrid winter conditions, so it
was pretty terrifying for me. Halfway to the ski area, the snow walls were already above the height of the car, and the ground was layered with inches of fluffy slippery slush. We were drifting through every turn and had visibility of less than 20 meters, so being a bus driver is probably the only
thing that saved me!
Before the storm started...
The snow on Hakkoda is legendary powder, and I've never skied on anything so quiet. With the inadequate equipment I was provided by the rental shop, I had a lot of trouble turning and braking. We all still had fun despite having taken some hard slams. After we used up our lift tickets, we went to look at the biggest icicles we've ever seen!
Before the sun set, we went a little
further down the road to Sukayu Onsen, one of the largest remaining mixed-bathing
hot springs in the country. My sister and mother still hadn't gotten
over the public nudity, and they sure as hell weren't going to get naked
where there were men, so Kristin and I went in by ourselves. The water
was really salty and smelled of sulfur, but we left feeling warm
and relaxed.
Inside the bath (taken from Sukayu website)
The same night, Kristin needed to leave Aomori and go back to Nagano to teach. Before she left, we dined on Aomori's specialty ramen: 味噌カレー牛乳ラーメン Miso Curry Milk Butter Ramen. It's a rich and creamy combination of a lot of unique flavors, somehow blending into this delicious concoction. Kristin and I also decided to try the Natto ramen, which turned out to be pretty yummy as well.
miso curry milk butter ramen
The next two days were a big mix of going downtown, buying souvenirs, and trying different food. A particularly tasty meal we had was at Asari Ramen near my house. Their specialty is the Negi (Scallion) Ramen, which is made with a home-brewed ラー油 (laayu: spicy oil). When you order, you tell them what fraction of the "standard" amount of ラー油 you want in your serving. A "5" is family-style spicy, "4" is fun for heat lovers, "3" is painful, "2" is really no joke, and "1" is pure masochism. We went with a 5, but I'll try to up the ante next time.
Asari's Negi Ramen
We also took a trip to Gappo Park to try our hands at cross-country skiing. The park's recreation center offers free equipment rentals, so even my mom decided to try. It was fun for a while, but the deep powder was difficult to plow through. Hopefully it'll be faster and more fun once the snow packs down later into winter.
Free ski equipment! (and my Chinese Communist hat)
Before we left Aomori to move on to the next destination, our time was cut a little short because my phone decided to stop charging. After a morning at the au shop doing my best to communicate with the store attendants and dealing with a borrowed phone, we spent our last remaining time buying souvenirs in ASPAM, the tourism center of Aomori City. It's a gaudy triangular building downtown next to the waterfront:
ASPAM on a less snowy day.
Once again, I'm on the highway bus while my mom and sister get the luxury of the bullet train. Next time, we go south to get a look at Mt. Fuji! See you then!
After leaving Taiwan and arriving in Tokyo again without a hitch, we met with my mother in the airport and took the train downtown to check into our hotel. It was during the New Year holiday, so everything was closed and the place looked abandoned.
The next day, we headed for Aomori. My mother and sister took the shinkansen (bullet train) in the afternoon, which took only a little more than 3 hours. However, Kristin and I aren't able to get JR East passes because we are foreign residents instead of tourists, so the bullet train was too costly. We opted to take a bus that left in the morning and arrived late in the evening that saved us about 75%. To kill time, we played chess on a magnetic travel board I bought at the 100 yen shop.
Yes, chess aficionados, we're terrible, but we kept ourselves busy.
After spending the night in Aomori, and eating a bunch of raw fish for breakfast (remember nokkedon?), we boarded a ferry boat to Hokkaido. They ferry boats in Japan are different from the ones on America because they don't actually provide seats. Instead, they give you big carpeted rooms with long tube-shaped pillows for you to rest your head on. People sit or lay on the floor and sleep, eat, read, and play with their children in these "playgrounds". In my opinion, it was much more comfortable than being forced to sit upright for a long period of time.
Four hours later, we arrived in Hakodate and took a taxi to our hotel. Then, we wandered around to look for some food to eat. We found a Hakodate specialty called Lucky Pierrot. It's a hamburger chain found only in Hakodate, and each store has a certain eccentric theme. This one had Santa decorations everywhere, and we later went to ones that obsessed over Mother Mary and a type of bizarre art.
Santa-themed Lucky Pierrot
Mother Mary-themed Lucky Pierrot. Not sure if glorifying burgers or just blasphemous...
Then, we took the Hakodate Ropeway up to the top of Mt. Hakodate to appreciate one of the best night views in Japan. We showed up right before it started snowing, so we barely had enough time to get a decent picture before everything blurred out.
While in Hakodate, we traveled around by Hakodate's iconic streetcars. We enjoyed the famous 海鮮丼 (kaisendon), or seafood bowls, filled with fish, fish eggs, squid, shellfish, and crab. There were also ample opportunities to try food colored black with squid ink.
One of the famous dishes here is called 踊り丼 (odoridon), which consists of a decapitated live squid sitting atop a seafood bowl. When the customer pours soy sauce over the brain-dead creature, its body still reacts to the stinging of the salt. It struggles about, toppling off the bowl onto the table, and the suckers still fight back while they are being eaten. This seemed way too gruesome an activity to participate in, so we stuck with the standard fare of completely dead seafood. Actually, I can't quite say that, since we ate shellfish 踊り焼き (odoriyaki), which is shellfish that "dances" while it's being grilled alive. Japanese food is pretty grim sometimes, ain't it?
Odoriyaki: clam on the left, scallop on the right.
We also had fun exploring the old foreign structures. We had a look around 五稜郭 (Goryoukaku Star Fort), and experienced the glory of the replica magistrate's office, or 奉行所 (bugyousho). We also went to the old trading district, including old European-style municipal buildings and red brick warehouses converted into shopping centers. Here, we had pseudo-western food at Hakodate Beer Hall, and also taste-tested the yummiest dried squid (saki-ika) we've ever had. I also found my little friend Ika-musume lurking in the senbei aisle.
View of Goryoukaku Tower from inside the fort.
Replica of the Bugyousho: newly built with that fresh-cut cedar scent!
The Old Public Ward - 区公会堂
Ika-musume squid crackers.
Finally, we finished off the trip with a bath in the local public hot spring called 谷地頭温泉 (Yachigashira Onsen). I particularly enjoyed the outdoor bath, or 露天風呂 (rotenburo), that was shaped like a star. Sitting in water that was too hot while my head and shoulders were being peppered by the falling snow was a unique and enjoyable experience. Sadly, neither Kristin nor Raina nor my mother even noticed that the outdoor bath was there. They even began denying its existence until I showed satellite imagery clearly displaying the five-sided roofs covering the rotenburo on both gender sections. Kristin went back in for a short dip for the experience, while my mom and sister didn't care enough to bother. A glorious opportunity wasted on these gaijin...
The next day, after some souvenir shopping, we got back on the ferry and returned to Aomori. The trip continues...
After landing in Taiwan's SongShan Airport, I was greeted by my sister and girlfriend in the Arrivals lobby. Yay, reunited! But first, I emailed a buddy back in Aomori to have him call Haneda Airport and inquire about my missing glasses. Fingers crossed... I'll just have to over-wear my contacts while in Taiwan.
Like every other time I've visited, I stayed at my grandmother's place in downtown Taipei. It's two stories in a condominium-like building, and my youngest uncle's family used to also live there before they found their own place. Basically, the place is too big for just my grandma, so she liked having the company.
Since I was taking care of all travel plans in Japan, I gave my sister the responsibility of showing us around Taiwan. The result? Night markets... EVERY DAMN DAY! I definitely got a little night marketed out near the end, but there was still some fun to be had.
There's too many people...
The first thing was balloon popping. You can go to game booths and pop balloons for prizes using various methods. Some booths had darts (kinda boring), most had bb guns (a lot of fun), and some even had bows and arrows (fun, but painful). I was pretty terrible at darts, but I've gotten a lot better at the bb guns since I learned how to hold a gun correctly. They even have assault rifles, sniper rifles, and pistols with realistic recoil to make you feel like more of a badass. At the archery ones, they didn't provide us with finger guards, so I started to lose some fingerprints. Then the attendant told me I wasn't supposed to pull a full draw like I'm used to, and pointed to the red line halfway down the arrow shaft where I was supposed to stop. I had been sticking the arrows so deep into the backboard foam that the booth attendant couldn't pull them back out. He was pretty annoyed.
Next was shopping. Night markets are packed with shops selling cheap crappy knockoff clothes and trinkets. My sister went wild, going into a bunch of the stores and buying clothes and little accessories. She used to abhor fashion, and now it's all she seems to care about. She's changed a lot in the past few years. Kristin and I were much less interested, so we spent a lot of time waiting for Raina to resurface and breathe.
Finally, we get to the good part: food! Taiwan has some pretty awesome street food. The most interesting ones were stinky tofu, fried whole crabs, blood cake, and snake soup. Stinky tofu is tofu that's been fermented for a while and served with sauce, either in a soup or fried on a stick. I used to hate stinky tofu because it smells like a dirty harbor, but after tasting it, it's actually very savory and delicious. Kristin and Raina, unfortunately, couldn't get over the smell.
Fried whole crabs are delicious, albeit a bit crunchy because of the
shells. Just make sure you don't accidentally eat one of the fried
garlic at the bottom of the cup, or your tongue will die a pungent
death.
Blood cakes are usually served in soup, and have a consistency and flavor shockingly similar to tofu. They seem pretty mundane, until you realize that you're consuming the blood drained from an animal! We had both pig and goose blood cakes this trip.
Goose blood cakes in soup
Lastly, snake soup was much more mediocre than I thought it would be. The soup tastes like chicken stock, and the snake meat was small, tough, and still connected to the spine and ribs. Eating while surrounded by live snake cages was an interesting experience, which Kristin had some trouble getting over.
They're watching me eat their brethren...
Combining the aspects of games and street food, we had some fun with shrimp fishing. You pay for a certain number of fishing rods (chopsticks with paper strings and hooks as line). You can catch as many shrimp as you can with those rods, but the paper strings break easily when they get wet. I got greedy and tried to hook some of the big shrimp, but my string broke every time I pulled them out of the water. I decided to lay off the big guys, and finally started catching some shrimp.
Kristin did an amazing job. She's now the official shrimp wrangler of the group. With fewer lines than anyone, she ended up catching the most shrimp. I think she caught more than my sister and my cousin combined, with less than half the number of rods! Spectacular! And spectacularly delicious, since they grill the caught shrimp on the spot. It was a little unnerving watching the attendants skewer the writhing shrimp up their backsides with bamboo stakes, but we got over it once we started eating.
Munch munch shrimp head
Besides night markets, we spent some time outside the city exploring temples, museums, and general landscape with my cousins and aunts/uncles. It was nice to eat together as a big family like the old days, but now that everyone is grown-up and and studying in various parts of the country, getting together is more difficult.
To top off the vacation, we crossed over to the new year at Taipei 101, once the tallest building in the world. I propped my video camera atop Kristin's head so you could enjoy the fireworks show we beheld.
The next day, we headed to the airport to begin the next stage of winter break: exploring Japan! See you next time!
Hi again, everyone! Sorry for the long delay due to winter break travels. Now that it's finally over, I can fill you in on what happened starting from the first part of the trip: making my way to Taiwan.
After the fall semester ended, I packed my things and headed to Tokyo to meet up with my sister and my girlfriend. I took the overnight bus and arrived in Tokyo early in the morning. The plan was to meet up with my girlfriend and spend the rest of the day exploring Tokyo together before my sister arrived that night. Unfortunately, she had forgotten her passport at home, and had to take another round trip on the bus to go fetch it. This meant that I was stuck in Tokyo all by myself.
Fortunately, a couple of the other Aomori ALTs had taken the same overnight bus as mine on their way to Narita Airport, so I hung out with them in Ueno until they had to catch their flight. They even gave me a beer; for what reason I will never know. Eventually, Kristin made it to Tokyo, and we had a nice - even if overpriced - meal at Omoide Yokochou in Shinjuku with our friend Yumi.
After dinner, we went to the Shinjuku bus terminal to wait for my sister's arrival. Before she left Los Angeles, we had agreed to meet there, but she wasn't anywhere in sight when we arrived. Shinjuku station is very confusing, and we had no idea when she would be arriving anyways, so we decided the best option was to wait in the hotel for her to call us on a payphone. Then we could go to wherever she ended up and guide her to the hotel.
A few hours later, just past midnight, we started to worry that something had gone terribly wrong. Just then, I got an email on my phone. It was my sister, saying, "I'm in the hotel lobby. Where are you?" Thankfully, she had gotten directions from the bus terminal attendants after waiting there for a few hours (and having forgotten to print out the phone number I provided her). It's a good thing I provided a several-page-long detailed itinerary of the whole trip for her, or she'd most definitely had been a goner.
The next morning, all three of us stepped onto the train to Narita Airport to catch our flight to Taiwan. First there was some confusion with the terminals. Our flight information said to go to "Terminal I", so we headed to Terminal 1. We soon found out that Terminal 1 is only for domestic flights. It turns out the capital "I" (which was represented as a single vertical line in Ariel font, for heaven's sake) is in fact not a roman numeral 1, but actually stands for "International". We then headed over to the inconsistently named "International Terminal", and before we passed the train gates, I noticed I didn't have my backpack with me! I had left it on the train when we went to the wrong terminal, and it had my passport, cameras, and Taiwanese money in it!
I hurriedly asked the train information booth to try to find it. Thankfully, the people they called found it, but by that time, I only had about an hour left to check into my flight. My backpack was 40 minutes down the train line, so I asked if someone could bring it on the next train to the airport. They said they couldn't do that for liability reasons, and that I'd have to go fetch it myself. I had 60 minutes to catch a flight, and it would take 80 minutes to get the docs I needed to be on the flight. It was looking grim. With little other choice, I told my sister and girlfriend to go ahead without me as I took the next train to my backpack.
By the time I retrieved my lost goods, it was obvious I wouldn't make my flight. Over the phone, I talked to a lady at the counter, and she allowed me onto the same flight for the next day. I told my girlfriend to go to Taiwan with my sister first, and I got to the airport in time to see their flight take off. Despair...
I ended up spending the night in the airport terminal. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, since there was free wifi, a charging station for my phone, flat comfy benches to sleep on, lots of other sleeping people, and security guards everywhere watching over us. Here's what it looked like:
Rows of sleeping people. Haneda Airport, International Terminal, Arrivals floor.
The next morning: a sign of hope!
After 24 hours in the airport, I was finally on my flight to Taiwan!
Mt. Fuji from the plane. I would have found this gorgeous if not for...
Right after takeoff, I realized I didn't have my glasses with me anymore. That morning, I had put on my contacts and left my glasses on the counter in the bathroom! This was not a good start to a vacation...
Next time, I actually get to Taiwan! And maybe I'll have some fun!
