Cycling Scenery: Winery Visit

A few weeks ago I spent a day cycling trying to find a winery I saw advertised while on a previous ride. The picture below illustrates what most of the countryside looks like out in the hills where I was wandering.
I did eventually find the place: Hakusan Winery. Wine really has no tradition in Japan, and this particular location has only been in operation for less than 10 years. Basically, they grow a few grapes in the hillside. Not much to look at, but still I had a nice afternoon ride, nonetheless.
Not much else to report. If weather allows, I'll be going back to this same area this weekend to do some hiking with an elderly couple that are friends with my Japanese instructor. I've never met them before. Should be interesting.

One last thing, a friend of mine wasn't updating her blog, so I did it for her. You probably don't know her unless if you live in Fukui, but, anyway, if you're curious, here's a link: friendblog

七夕: Of Stars and Separation

七夕

Tanabata
(The Seventh Evening)

July 7th is is "Tanabata", a day in which we recall the star-crossed fate of a heavenly princess and her beloved cowherd and celebrate that most Japanese perspective on romance, "love means never actually having to see each other".

Orihime (the star Vega), daughter of the King of the Heavens (the Universe), used to weave beautiful clothing next to the Heavenly River (the Milky Way). She was so busy with her work, however, that she was unable to meet a good man and fall in love. Concerned, her father decided to arrange for her to meet Hikoboshi, the cowherder (the star Altair). The two hit it off instantly and fell so much in love that they no longer performed their duties. Orihime no longer weaved her beautiful clothes and Hikoboshi allowed his cattle to roam freely across the sky. This upset the King of the Heavens, so he separated the two across the Heavenly River and forbid them to see each other. Orihime became despondent, however, and her father, not wanting to see her so sad, told her that if she did her work dutifully she and Hikoboshi could meet once a year on the seventh day of the seventh month.

It is said that the first time they tried to meet, the Heavenly River prevented them from being able to draw close to each other. Orihime cried so fervently that a flock of magpies overheard and came to build a bridge with their wings for the lovers to cross. This is why people say that if it should rain on Tanabata, the magpies cannot come and Orihime and Hikoboshi will have to wait another year to see each other.


Various places in Japan hold Tanabata festivals, but the most common way to celebrate is simply to write a wish on a piece of paper and hang it on bamboo. I get this impression that this custom is most popular with children in primary schools, but that doesn't mean that you won't see older people making wishes too (The 2008 Hokkaido G8 Summit, for example).



Somehow, it seems very appropriate to me that a festival about separated lovers should fall in July. Our contracts with the Fukui Board of Education expire this month, and most of those who have chosen not to continue working here will leave before August. Summers are always strange in Fukui. At the same time that we bid farewell to our old friends we welcome in a new crew of people - most of whom we will probably have to say goodbye to this time next year, anyway.
Sunrise, sunset, ebb, flow, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Black or White?

More than 98% of the Japanese population is ethnically Japanese. A large portion of the remaining population is of other East Asian descent.

Needless to say, people notice differences in appearance.
Hair color, eye color, facial structure, facial hair, arm hair, noses, eyelashes and more can all be a source of curiosity when a Japanese person encounters a foreigner. Some of the most interesting conversations I've had about appearance, though, revolve around skin color.


Last weekend I was outside almost all of Saturday and Sunday cycling and practicing for an Ultimate Frisbee tournament. Both days were very sunny, and my skin naturally became darker as a result. Then, when I returned to school on Monday I had an amusing conversation with some of my more entertaining first year middle school students.

"Sensei," one boy asked (in Japanese), "are you Black or White?"
"White, of course."
"But you have Black people in your family, right?"
To which another boy chimed in, "only White people can have White kids!"
"Yes, but if a Black and White person marry they could have mixed kids."

The silly thing is, this isn't the first time people have asked questions like that. Here in Japan I have been Black, Brazilian, Spanish, Indian, Scottish (someone once even said that I had a "very Scottish face") and more. Such are the joys of internationalization!

Love Grows Under my Umbrella

相合傘

I learned a fun Japanese expression the other day. When two people share an umbrella it's called, "ai ai gasa" (see above). The characters basically mean something like, "coming together under an umbrella". We get a lot of rain here. In fact, the entire month of June usually falls under the category of "rainy season".
"Ai ai gasa" isn't limited to shared efforts to stay dry. As one of the teachers at my school informed me, "little girls like to think that when a boy and a girl share the same umbrella it means romance". He told me this after half of our classroom rushed to the window to see a single female teacher sharing an umbrella outside with a man.

In the romantic instance of "ai ai gasa", it's possible to employ a common Japanese word play method and use different characters than normal. Instead of 相合傘 (coming together under an umbrella), we can write 愛合傘 (love meets under an umbrella) . Both are read as, "ai ai gasa".


For the record, the teacher and the man were fixing a fence in front of the school.

台北: Formosa Entry #4

The long overdue updating of my on-line travel journal begins.
The picture atop the page is from Eiheiji, which I visited in January.
For now, let's get back to Taiwan.

Previously, in Formosa entries I was wandering the hills near the city of Hualien on the East Coast. The Hualien portion of the trip was only a couple days out of a full week, but it was the most unique and exciting part of the journey. The rest of the time I spent in Taipei, Taiwan's political, cultural and economic centre.

Taiwan is not a large island. Next to Bangladesh, it's considered one of the most densely populated places on the planet. In spite of its small size, however, Taiwan has one very sexy, sexy global influence: half the laptops in the world are manufactured here.
A large number of computer chips are manufactured as well. Chances are, if you've owned a computer, you've benefited from the Taiwanese technology industry.
Rowrrr...
(that's an imitation of a seductive cat purr, in case if you couldn't tell)

So, how do you cope with such a dense population in Taipei?
Construct the world's tallest building, Taipei 101.*
The entire population of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, could work in this tower and there would still be positions available.

Taipei 101 is not only tall, it also can withstand powerful earthquakes, typhoon-force winds and Japanese tour groups.
It is considered one of the greatest feats of modern engineering.
Here's the view from the cafe on the 89th floor. Notice the mountains in the background. It's possible to take a bus into the mountains to a tea village that I will mention later. Remember that. It'll be important. You may want to have a notebook ready (but not yet - it'll be in a later entry).

Taipei has some great night markets. Meals, souvenirs, clothing, drinks and the ever-important snacks-on-a-stick are all available. Most of my time in Taipei was spent wandering around trying various foods in markets like this one and looking for museums.


*construction should finish this year on a tower in Dubai that will become the tallest building in the world.

Setsubun, Risshin & Formatting Updates

Greetings all!
Sorry I haven't updated in a couple weeks. I've still got some things to share from my experience in Taiwan, and I recently spent the evening at Eiheiji learning zazen (meditation).

In the meantime, I've made some changes to the format of this blog. You'll notice along the left hand side that links to other blogs have changed, and you now can see a list of labels. I added that for easy archiving purposes. Now, if you want to see anything I've written about something like temples or festivals, all you have to do is click on the label for temples or festivals. I also inserted a translation service at the bottom of the page.

While looking through the archives I noticed that some pictures seemed to have disappeared. I checked my storage limit, and I really don't know why this has happened. While looking up the storage limit, however, I found out that all the pictures I post here automatically get sent to an online photo storage service. If I ever organize that, I'll post a link.

Now, on to some updates:

This is a photograph I took in January shortly after returning from my travels. We had a decent amount of snow for probably less than two weeks in Fukui City. Then, it warmed up just enough to change to rain, and all the snow disappeared.

I noticed something with the snowfall this year that I don't recall from last year - THUNDER. Turns out that Western Japan is one of three places in the world where it can thunder while snowing.
February 3rd was setsubun this year. (click here for old post on setsubun). It's the end of winter on the lunar calendar, and people celebrate by tossing beans to ward off demons. I decided to check out events at a local shrine but heard the wrong starting time and showed up just as it ended.The day after setsubun is called risshin. This is the first day of spring on the lunar calendar. I believe it snowed on this day last year.

花蓮: Formosa Entry #3

Continuing with the Formosan photography sessions, here are some shots from the city of 花蓮 (Hualien).
Looks like the Jews were just a little misdirected. Should've fled Egypt a bit a further to the east.

When the Portuguese first spotted the island of Taiwan in the 16th century, they dubbed it "Ilha Formosa" meaning simply, "Beautiful Island". That name, "Formosa" (Beautiful), remained in common use even into the late 20th century. Not quite as epic as "the promised land", but flattering, nevertheless.
Hualien lies on the East Coast and serves as a point of entry into the Taroko National Park. The beaches are too rocky for swimming, but, on the other hand, the naturally occurring variety of colours in the rock and large reserves of marble make for some nice jewelry and statues.

Hualien is the origin point of Tzu Chi, a large international Buddhist missions organization that focuses on medicine, education and disaster relief. Due to its apolitical stance, Tzu Chi has been able to work extensively in mainland China in spite of often bitter political tensions that may prevent businesses and government organizations from venturing across the strait.

This picture was taken just outside of Hualien in the national park. Taiwan, like Japan, is filled with mountains and prone to typhoons. This trail used to lead to a natural hot spring, but rock slides and typhoons about four years ago have caused it to close. At the time of the rock slide, several people were actually in the hot spring and some of them were killed.

Beauty, it seems, is not without its dangers.

Taroko Gorge: Formosa Entry #2

Here are some more pictures from the national park I mentioned in the previous entry.

This is the inside of the pagoda that you can see in the background of the temple picture in the first entry.

And here's the view from the top of the pagoda. A sign at the temple said that the Buddha statue holds a world record for being at the highest altitude of any Buddhist statue of that type.

我們都是一家人: Formosa Entry #1

The holidays are over, and now I'll be posting about Taiwan over the next couple weeks.
I could introduce my venture with information about the island, but I decided instead to begin with the story of my first couple days.

I've been on many good trips by myself. I often find the solitude and freedom of traveling alone to be preferable to having to suffer the whims and whimpering of a group. With that being said, I also find that when you leave yourself open to adaptation and accept situations as they come, you never really travel alone. This trip is, perhaps, the best example of that to come from my experience.

The overall impression I had throughout my time in Taiwan was that someone had been waiting for me to arrive. Rather than a first trip, it felt like the island was greeting me with a hug and saying, "Welcome back. We've missed you."

Frankly, it caught me off guard.
Anyway, on to the first couple days (I insert spur of the moment thoughts in italics).

Remember, you can click on the pictures to view them in a larger format.
I arrived in Taipei in late afternoon, spent the night in a cheap hostel with no windows or shower curtains and skipped out early in the morning for the East Coast city of Hualien. Hualien is known to tourists mostly as the starting point for trips into Taroko National Park, a cascade of mountains and marble cliffs surrounding a highway that runs along a river gorge (these pictures). The park has also been home to a few of Taiwan's dwindling indigenous groups, some of whom were headhunters until the Japanese colonial government outlawed the practice less than one hundred years ago.

That afternoon I walked along the shoreline and tasted various delicacies on sticks at street markets. When I returned to my hostel I met my two roommates for the evening, an engineer from Singapore and a Guatemalan graduate student who is currently living near Tokyo. The next morning the three of us set out for Taroko.
The advantage to tagging along with someone from Singapore while in Taiwan is that Mandarin is an official language in both places. The night before our trek into the national park he was of great help in our trio's quest to sample food from every vendor that the hostel recommended.

At 06h30 we took the first bus up the gorge highway and began our day in Taroko. There's not much to say about hiking along the highway and side trails except that the scenery is wonderful and public transportation is hard to find. Sure, there are group tours you can take, but then you have to deal with group tourists.

After trekking at least 20 km (13 miles), we found ourselves tired and unsure of where the local buses would stop. We decided to try to hitch a ride to the nearest bus stop. After several cars passed us over the lad from Singapore reassured us saying, "Whatever you believe in just have faith. It'll work out."
Yeah, sure, who wouldn't want to pick up three strangers while driving in the mountains far away from the city?
Taiwan did not seem to understand my mind's intrinsic need for sarcasm and cynicism.

Shortly after my Chinese-speaking comrade's religious appeal someone did, indeed, stop to give us a lift. A woman, her husband and a friend pulled over, and, in the course of highway conversation, revealed that not only did they normally not pick up hitchhikers, but they also had passed over someone along the road just before finding us.

"This is fate," said the lady at the wheel, "we were supposed to meet each other."
Arrrgh, cynic senses are tingling. People just don't talk like this unless if...oh, no...it can't be!
I'm surrounded by Buddhist missionaries!

As it turns out, only the driver was actually a Buddhist missionary, and, technically she wasn't so much a missionary as a volunteer for a Buddhist charity organization that builds hospitals and schools around the world. Her husband, we soon realized was actually a Japanese man who spoke no Mandarin. They normally reside in Japan but had recently purchased a house in her hometown of Hualien and were vacationing for a few months.

She offered us the chance to stay at her place for the same cost as the hostel and promised to donate all the money to her charity. Although I had planned to return to the Taipei that evening, I altered my schedule to allow for a Hualien homestay.

That night, as we were sitting around chatting in a mix of English, Japanese and Mandarin, our generous host taught me the expression written above,
我們都是一家人: "we're all like one family"
This is nice, but, c'mon, you can't talk like that to people you've only just met. Can you?

The next day she drove us all over Hualien introducing us to snacks, drinks and scenery we would've been want to find on our own.


Having lived in Japan for a couple years, my standard expectations for polite friendliness to guests is rather high. I had read that Taiwan was one of the most welcoming places on Earth, but, given my experience in Japan, I figured I was prepared for it. Even so, my first couple days left me completely disarmed. As I sat on the train for Taipei after my time in Hualien I found myself shaking my head in disbelief.
This level of hospitality just can't exist, and, yet, in spite of everything evil in the news today, it does. Could there still be a few people out there worth believing in?