Pretty quiet day today - Mom and I woke up at 9ish and called the Kualoa ranch to see if there was any chance of getting on a ride today or tomorrow - they said they were all booked up, but we could call them at ten to see if they'd had a cancellation. We went out for a quick Mcbreakfast, avoiding the spam platters(!), and then tried to phone again at ten, but there was still no room at the ranch, so we decided to just have a quiet day around Waikiki.

Mom and I headed to the beach by the Hilton Hawaiian Village to read for awhile while the boys ate breakfast and got organized to go. Mom, Grampa, and in the end Peter all headed to the Bishop museum which they all seemed to really enjoy. I didn't really want to go to a museum today, so I struck out on my own, walking down through Waikiki, into the International Marketplace, along the beach, etc. I ended up buying a huge rolling duffel bag to cram in all the crap I seem to have acquired, including a bunch of workbooks and stuff to use for teaching in the New Year. Bringing only one, overstuffed to begin with, backpack on this trip was probably always going to be a mistake!

After I dropped the bag off at the hotel, I walked to Walmart, about 20 a minute walk away, and got a few photos printed, and then framed them for Mom, Grampa, and Peter as mini end of vacay pressies. Since they weren't allowed to be 'Christmas' presents, we'll call them oshogatsu (sp?) presents, or just because presents, or something - I couldn't resist anyway ;) I wanted to have them wrapped by the time I got back to the hotel in case they beat me back, so I wrapped them on the patio tables outside the Walmart-framing and wrapping photos outside doesn't get you weird looks or anything :p

It turned out we all arrived back at the hotel simultaneously, just after six, and then split back up again - Peter finally got in touch with his friend Yuki, and they went off for dinner, while Grampa and Mom watched hockey and I halfheartedly packed in our room. A bit later on, Mom decided she wanted a bag like mine, so we walked back down to the International Marketplace to procure and even (!) larger one...

As we were packing, we watched a bizarre show about people who are Chimeras - in this case, they have two different sets of DNA... It was weird, because just before we left, I listened to an All in the Mind podcast about chimeras and then to hear about them again in three weeks was probably not too likely!...interesting show and topic though!

At about 11:45, Peter and Yuki swung by the hotel and picked me up and we took Yuki to her first ever Honolulu Walmart experience, I hope she enjoyed it :) We got our cereal, peanut butter, baking soda, etc. to bring back into Japan, the requisite Macadamia products, and then Peter also got a pay and talk cell phone, so next time he comes over here he'll have a Hawaiian keitai number...I'm shocked and disappointed that you can't get Stoned Wheat Thins here! Who would have known those are a Canadian thing-I didn't think we had anything individually on our own like that...well other than ketchup chips and timmy's donuts, but anyways... weird!

Back to the hotel at about 1:15, and just basically heading to bed now - tomorrow we're doing the North Shore again, a Kualoa ranch and movie set tour, and then Peter and I are dropping off Mom and Grampa at the airport :( before heading out for some New Year's celebrations :)

D.

Breakfast in the Wailana Coffee Shop again today, and then middayish we headed up to the North Shore to check out the bigger surf up there. It was pretty amazing! The surf wasn’t super huge but it was the biggest we’ve seen and there were a few people attempting to surf in what looked like pretty messy surf.

We went to Waimea Beach park and watched a few people do a lot of waiting for surf but not so much surfing, and then drove back to Haleiwa which is a really cute little town! We went to this little shopping area and looked in at the free surf museum which was pretty cute, and entertaining because just about everything was for sale! I bought a ring which was part of the ‘recycled jewelry’ display – everything they had for sale was found in and around the beaches of Oahu, which is a bit weird but a bit cool all at once. I really want to know some of the stories behind some of the jewelry!

They also had some pretty interesting articles, surfboards, photos, etc. They had one surfboard that had a motor built into it – it was first used as a rescue board and was a precursor to the jet ski. Incidentally, we saw a jetski rescue truck racing down the highway when we were at the beach, but it continued past us so we don’t know what happened – hopefully they managed to rescue whomever was having issue in the (crazy powerful) surf.

We didn’t have time for lunch up there, as we were trying to get photos of cows before we lots the light for Mom’s ‘Behind the Scenes at the Ranch’ book, so we just grabbed coffees at this funky little coffee shop. My ‘milkyway mocha’ was delicious, but they were sooo ineffiecnt it was funny – two 15 ish year old girls who were having tons of fun but not getting too much done, it was a bit ridiculous!

We stopped at another lookout to get some more surf photos and found a guy who has this crazy contraption – a 1968 VW bug which is being pulled around the US by a big motor bike. The whole thing is painted with the American flag, and he’s taken it to all fifty states, over one year and nine months. I got my picture taken sitting on it- it’s pretty comfortable!

We headed back to Waikiki stopping at the Kualoa ranch for a little bit just before they closed – I think Mom and I might be trying to go for a ride there before we go so that she can get photos for her book (I’m just the hanger on cum assistant). We got back to the hotel around 6:30, and just hung out for awhile. I got to say hi to Britt on MSN – congratulations to them for their new horse purchase! Danny is a Halflinger formerly owned by some people that I vaguely know through vaulting, and he himself can be used for vaulting (I’m so jealous! He’s a total cutie too!)

At 7:30 we were shocked by the loud booming noises, which turned out to be the Hilton Hawaiian Village’s weekly fireworks next door, so we looked out our big sliding glass doors to watch them, and then walked down to Koa’s for some amazing Thai food – very very good! We walked back along the beach and through the Hilton Hawaiian Village which is a 22 acre resort that’s pretty impressive! Back to the hotel at 11:30, and just blogging/watching ellen/reading etc... Just two more days with all of us here, so we have to b efficient in the next couple of days, and need our sleep to prepare!

D

This morning was a bit grey and cloudy, but by the time we dragged ourselves out the door for breakfast at the Wailana coffee shop at 10ish, it had turned sunny again, so that was nice. The big shocking news of the morning was that someone from my class in middle/high school was the first person my age I know to get married! I guess we're all actually growing up!

Anyways... back to Hawaii, after breakfast we decided to head up to the Polynesian Cultural Centre near the North Shore. Its a 43 acre complex which has seven villages representing the different Polynesian nations, a canoe pageant, canoe tours, imax, a luau, show, etc. It's somewhat like a Disney-esque slice of the islands.

We got there at two fifteenish, and headed straight to the canoe pageant, where they have about eight big flat pontoon type canoes being poled down the central river thing by one pole boy, and then there were six-eight dancers in traditional dance showing off something from each of the islands - it was pretty interesting!

We walked up to the Marquesses Islands (sp?) for a snack, and then Peter and I jumped on the canoe tour while Mom and Grampa went to Tahiti and the Marquesses. The canoe tour we took was a ten minute, one way ride down the river and back to the other end of the park - it was a good way to get an idea of the park's layout, and we saw some pretty cool buildings along the river banks. We jumped off the canoe at 3:59 and then raced into see the 4:00 IMAX showing about Coral Reefs. It was amazing!

The reefs were so gorgeous, and it was also shocking to see some of the dead reefs. We saw one scientist/diver, who after observing how a huge potato cod fish got its mouth cleaned by these funny looking insecty type creatures which ate the parasites in its mouth, decided to whip out her ventilator and get her own mouth hoovered! It was crazy!! She was just floating there with her mouth wide open and these two creatures cleaning her out. She was like 'well, I was worried that I was going to inhale him, but it turned out OK'. I was thinking it wasn't a great idea to open your mouth underwater, invite some creatures in, and not be able to breathe without the ventilator thingy, but I'm the one completely freaked out by snorkeling, so there you go!

We met back up with Mom and Grampa, and slowly headed over to the buffet, before heading to Horizons, the big show everyone seems to go to at the end of the night. It was a pretty impressive 1.5 hour production, with singing and dancing from all the regions, and then a pretty spectacular set of fire dancing/fire walking/sitting in fire/setting grass skirts on fire, etc. The set was pretty cool, and the exploding volcanoes at the end were great!

We didn't really have time to see any of the islands, but we get reentry once in the next three days with our tickets, so I think we're going to combine a trip to the North Shore with a look through the islands which would be cool - I want to try spear throwing!

Back to the hotel relatively early, at about 10:30, and I think everyone is just collapsing for an earlyish night - our quiet vacation week hasn't exactly been slow and I think we're all ready for a good sleep!

D

Well today was exciting! It started out innocently enough with mom insisting on going to the beach - no surprise there! I wanted her to take the shopping trolley with me to Borders so I could buy something to read at said beach, but she was insistent that she wanted to go to Waikiki Beach and do some body boarding. We compromised with going to the bookstore in the Hilton Hawaiian Village across the street together, and then she kept going to the beach, I came back to get some stuff organized at the hotel, and then met her at the beach a bit later on.

It was pretty miraculous that we found each other in the first place - I got off on the wrong stop, and then had to hike down the beach, which was FULL! Luckily she spotted me from the water and came to meet me. Then we decided to meet up again in a couple of minutes, so I only left her for a second, to see if the Billabong store across the street had the rash guard I'd been looking for, (it didn't, I think I'm not meant to have it!), but when I got back to her, she was kind of limping, and her foot was wrapped in a good half inch of gauze.

"What did you do?"
"Oh, you know, nothing that a few stitches won't fix"

Good god! Turns out she'd found the only piece of coral at Waikiki Beach, and had a fight with it, ripping off her fin and gashing her foot in the process. I never saw the cut, but I gather its long, deep, and yucky! Poor girl! We ended up taking a city bus which was faster back to our hotel, and then going across the street to the medical clinic, where she did indeed get three stitches - this is why you get travel insurance! Unfortunately, it means no more time in the water which sucks for her since she was well on her way to becoming a beach bum on this trip! Condolence bouquets can be sent to... Haha just kidding - she'll be fine! A couple of Tylenols and Grampa's newly procured cane, and she was ready to salvage the day.

We axed the trip to the North Shore, since we were three hours behind schedule by this point anyway, and went back to the Kohala hotel to check out the dolphins during the day. They are so cool! There's around eight of them, and a couple of them were flirting with us - staying above the water and posing for the camera. We were really lucky to catch them before the last feeding time, so we got to see a couple of tandem flips as they worked for their fish - awesome! We stayed for coffees and then headed back to the massive Ala Moana shopping centre for some gauze and the such. We parked Mom in a coffee shop and then grabbed a few things before heading up to Bubba Gump's for dinner. I have to watch Forrest Gump again! I can't really remember much about it - just the part about the box of chocolates, and 'run Forrest, run!' which is probably about what everyone remembers. The restaurant is pretty fun and themed, and good food - I had a fantastic salad and everyone else seemed to enjoy theirs as well.

After that we headed back to the $1.00 cinema to check out the late showing of 'Employee of the Month'. It was well worth the $1.00, but probably not a whole lot more :) Honestly it was a fun movie, but not exactly thick on the plot or art! Although, with the basic premise being: Jessica Simpson's character comes to work at the local Coscto impostor, and two guys fight for her affections by competing for employee of the month honors, you shouldn't really expect too much I feel. The grandmother was hilarious though, and it all ended up the way you want it to, so I'm happy :)

One weird thing tho - when we got to the movie theatre, I got stopped by the ticket taker who didn't want me to take my backpack in. It was empty except for basically my wallet and a book because I'd been dumping stuff out of it all day, but she was adamant that I not take it in until I went to get special permission from the manager, who told me it was fine as long as I went straight into the movie (which was starting by then). Honestly, what did they think I was going to do, steal something? I should mention that the weirdest part of this was that the sign also says you can't bring in large shopping bags, but Mom had no problem bringing in her absolutely massive/overflowing beach bag/shoulder bag which was FULL of crap. (err I mean important belongings). Ageism? Feeling sorry for the woman with the cane? Not sure, but it was interesting though!

Anyway, after that just headed back to the hotel and set mom up with her 'sitcom ice bag' (the funny blue bags with the top on them that they always use in the movie) and then blogging. We don't really know what's going on tomorrow - it really depends on how well Mom can get around...

Hope everyone else is staying out of the clinic/ER!
D

Since today was boxing day, after a relaxing morning of crappy VH1 TV (the True Hollywood Story about the Sex and the City girls), Peter, Grampa and I headed off to the Ala Moana Shopping centre for some boxing day shopping. Mom opted out of the shopping and headed for a walk around Waikiki and along the beach, etc. Just before we left we also got to chat with Sascha for a few minutes which was great, Happy Belated Birthday! (I think I forgot to mention on the phone!) I also said hi to Toby briefly - he got a Wii for Christmas, lucky boy, and it sounds like they are as cool as they look!

On our way to the mall, we stopped at Best Buy, and Peter bought TiVo to hook up to the Victoria cable, program through his Internet, shoot across the ocean, pull down through his sling box, and timeshiftingly enjoy TV through his laptop. If that confused you, don't worry - it makes even less sense in real life! Nevertheless, it's pretty exciting - we set Gilmore Girls as a season's pass, so I won't miss any more episodes this season :) Also very exciting is that 'Hockey Night in Canada' on Saturday nights, no longer needs to be 'Hockey day in Oyama-cho' all day on Sunday - we can now leave the house before 4:30 since the second game of the day can be time shifted to another evening during the week.

Anyway, after Best Buy, we went to the Ala Moana Shopping Centre, which is a HUGE mall! It's pretty cool because it isn't fully enclosed - you can enjoy this amazing Hawaii weather while you shop! We stopped for a chaotic lunch in the crazy food court first - that really did feel like a Christmas meal in Metrotown! Then we headed out into the nuttiness for a few hours. They didn't really have the same kind of Boxing Day sales as in Canada, but it was still pretty packed, espcially in Hollister! We spent a couple of hours there, but its way too big a mall to cover in one day! I got a few things at American Eagle and Hollister, and Peter and Grampa picked up a couple of things as well...

Headed back to the hotel to meet up with Mom at about 5:30, and Peter promptly re wired the hotel (who brings a cable splitter on vacation, anyway?) to test out the new TiVo - it all seems to be working which is great - it's already sucking down the Shaw Cable info via the internet here, but recording what's being played here, so we tried out the 'rewinding to catch the missed sentence' feature.

It's pretty entertaining, because although TiVo now works in Canada, they don't sell it there, so you have to bring your own box there, and once you get it, you have to set it up by telling it you live in Leo, Wyoming. If you do that, it knows you are Canadian and you're good to go. One wonders how that might screw over any of the legitimate Leo-onians who are trying to get TiVo (I guess it's probably not a major issue since the entire state only has 493 000 odd residents).

I jumped online now that Mom can get online through an Ethernet cable again thanks to Pete's network adaptor USB present to her, and chatted with Navina (any game plans formulated yet?);) and Andee before heading to Outback Steakhouse for dinner. I had the same salad as in Shibuya, and it was just as tasty - probably not what you go to Outback for generally, but still yummy! Mom loved her steak salad and claims its one of the best salads she's had.

Walking back to the hotel, we stopped in at Crazy Shirts, which does NOT sell three armed shirts (though that would be funny, and I would probably buy one, and apparently gullability runs in the Wellsview arm of the family!) and then jumped in the car to head out to Borat(wikipedia). We managed to find it playing at a $1.00 cinema just past the Ala Moana Centre - it's a great deal, they have nine screens playing just past first run movies for a buck, all day, any movie.

Anyway, Borat was um interesting... I haven't seen much Ali G, but I hear that is hilarious and Borat was less so, which I would probably agree with - some of it was funny, but a lot of it was let's laugh at the asshole being crappy about people. I was expecting it to be a lot more clever- there's certainly enough about North America to spoof and be cynical about, but he went a little far with some of the jokes, imo. That wrestling scene was fairly spectacular for lack of a better word though! It had it's own coordinator according to the credits (incidentally, there was a 'Borat Feces Producer' credited as well). One review I saw a quote from compared it to Spinal Tap, but I think that's a bit generous! Anyway, I didn't hate it or anything, and it was probably worth our $4.00 investment ;)

Back to the hotel just after midnight to blog and get ready to check out the big waves of the North Shore tomorrow.

D

Mmm Christmas Day at the beach! We slept in this morning until 9:30 (you know it's been a busy vacation when sleeping in equals 9:30! I don't think Peter's been up this early so many consecutive days since high school!) We met up for breakfast in the boys room, and then just after eleven, headed off for a day at the beach.

We drove about 40 minutes out of Waikiki to Lanikai Beach, which was fantastic! Gorgeous white sandy beach, crystal clear aquamarine water, no waves, etc. We scored a great shady spot under a palm tree, and hung out for most of the afternoon. There was even the opportunity to do a bit of snorkeling right near the beach. I did a tiny bit using my boogie board with the viewing hole in it, but I really don't like not knowing how far away the coral is/not being able to kick my feet down (it's not the depth that freaks me out, its feeling like I can't swim properly without disturbing everything, neurotic, I know!) so I didn't last too long, but Mom and Peter enjoyed it I think. I did see some cool coral and black and yellow fish which were pretty cute.

After we had our fill of time at the beach (including a turkey sandwich picnic in honor of Christmas), we drove around through the little town near the beach, though just about everything was closed, and then headed about another twenty minutes up the road to look an interesting island called Chinaman's hat, because of it's shape. I got the gymnastics urge because of all the great grass (I really am still 7!), so all of the pictures of me here are with my feet in the air-typical! I did get my handstand full turn back fairly quickly, which seemed important at the time!

We headed back to Waikiki, and stopped at the Christmas Lights at the Honolulu City Hall, as suggested by Hitomi - very cool! It was a great display, and the trees inside the city hall were very cool as well - at lot like the ones in the Empress every year. We had enough time to quickly look at everything, but since we'd left Grampa in the car, and had to get back to the hotel, we didn't see it all - we'll probably end up back there at some point before we go.

Back to the hotel around 7ish, and just enough time to change before we went out again, this time to Christmas dinner at the Kahala Hotel and Resort (formerly a Mandarin Oriental Hotel until earlier this year), which was very, very nice! We'll definitely be going back here in the daylight for lunch - they have a dolphin lagoon, tropical fish pond, turtles, etc. which we must photograph during the day. We saw the dolphins a little bit, but it was a bit hard to see with it being almost totally dark-you can get really close to them though! I'm torn between not liking them in captivity, and being selfishly excited about the photo opportunities (see, there you go Andee, you'll get your dolphin shots ;) )

We ended up sitting outside on a terrace fairly close to the ocean for dinner, which was very pleasant except for being a bit chilly for those of us who thought we were eating inside and didn't dress for spending two hours by the ocean breeze! It wasn't bad at all though, some warm tea did the trick! It wasn't a super traditional buffet, although there was turkey and stuffing (key!), but we also ate sushi, rice, sashimi (well some of us), other sea foods, etc. It was very tasty! Peter and I were also excited to see the candy bowl with rockets and mini Reese's pieces to go with the super tasty strawberries and whipped cream, yum!

Had a quick walk through the hotel, they have a very impressive 35+ft. real Christmas tree in their massive lobby, and we also checked out the wall of fame, where many of the famous people of have stayed there (everyone from Konishki to Jerry Bruckheimer, to Drew Barrymore, Adam Sandler, Mr. Solheim (of the Solheim cup), to Elton John, and to the President of Tonga, etc) have photos and signed quotes lining one rather length hallway. It reminded me of the staircase at Sassafraz, the restaurant I went to with Chuck in Toronto last year, which shockingly burnt down a few weeks ago - I gather it was quite the Toronto institution, and I hope they are able to revive as they hope to do!

Back to the hotel around 11, very happy and full! I was hoping to be able to post photos today, but my bags are still mostly packed from the cruise, and the memory card reader is buried in one of them, so unless it comes out in the next little bit and I come back downstairs, I think that will be a long term tomorrow type project - there are hundreds to sort through just on my keitai!

Tomorrow Pete and I will be boxing day shopping (TIVO, anyone?), Mom is going for a walk/beach (she's turning into a complete beach bum on this trip!), and we're not quite sure what Grampa has planned for the day... fun in the sun I'm sure!

Male kalikimaka!
D

We're back to having regular Internet access since the hotel lobby has wireless, so should be back to daily blogging. Merry Christmas to everyone! I hope it's a great holidays for you all!

We woke up this morning at about 7, and Mom and I had time to go to Crossings for breakfast, eat one last meal on the ship, and say goodbye to Anna before we had to get off at 8:30. I can't believe it's over already, it was a great week though! Peter seems to have also discovered that five days worth of Sudafed does wonders to get rid of a mild cold, and luckily he's completely recovered from the trip he sent himself on yesterday!

We got off the ship and Peter and Grampa went to get the rental car while Mom and I guarded the mountain of luggage - we were in our rental car (lucky we got an SUV, we barely fit as it was!) by 9:30, and I was asleep by 10:30 in the hotel - the Aqua Palms Waikiki. Mom briefly woke me up to tell me they were going to get some food at about 11:30, but I rolled over and went back to sleep until about 12:30 - they didn't get back until 2ish because of a walk around the neighbourhood, so I just hung out at the hotel, and then got Subway for lunch before we all piled into the car and headed to Walmart to buy a few things... Ha! We went a little bit beach toy crazy, and should be able to snorkel and body surf our way all the way through the next week! We also stocked up on snacks and towels and the such. I was trying on bathing suits while the rest of them had quite the scare - they managed to all leave the cart unattended, also leaving Mom's purse in the cart. When they all realised simultaneously what had happened, they raced back there to find the cart, and Mom's purse, missing.

Thinking it had been stolen, they called security to look up the tapes, and Mom went to guard the entrance. Luckily, it had been found by a stock person, so it all turned out OK - Mom just got a stern reprimanding for leaving her purse unattended but other than that, everything was all still in the cart (plus some faulty merchandise tossed in there by someone who mistook it for the restocking cart), so we got lucky there!

Headed back to the hotel to dump the perishables in the fridges and then jumped back in the car and headed up past Diamond Head a little ways, stopping at a small beach/pull in just in time to watch a really nice sunset. It's a gorgeous area! After that, we headed back into Waikiki to see Casino Royale, the current Bond flick, about which Don Morton says: "This could be one of the best action flicks of all time" (incidentally, I say I must be a bit desperate for links!) It was pretty good (opening title sequence fantastic!) but given that I'm not really a Bond/action fan, I'm probably not a good person to be reviewing it! I was jumping around like a flea dodging bullets as Mom so kindly puts it, but I did appreciate the more character/story based side of the whole thing, I won't ruin the plot, but there were some lovely romantic bits (yes, I'm the hopeless romantic over here, I think we all know that!), before it all went a bit wrong. I love Judi Dench, and even though I'm in no way qualified to judge given I've maybe only watched two or three other Bond movies all the way through, I thought Daniel Craig did a pretty good job.

After that we just headed back to the hotel, I think we're just going to hang out for awhile in the boys room before crashing... It seems very weird that it's Christmas today. I know I've been saying that all week, but it really does tonight, now that its here! I'm obviously having a great time, but I miss having everyone together, having a tree, making tons of food for everybody, dressing Elli-blot up in his Santa suit, baking Christmas cookies, shopping for presents, proxy shopping, hoping for the unlikely white Christmas - the whole bit. It's been less stressful, but just not quite the same! Hopefully we can get in touch with everyone tomorrow, and I'm sure a day at the beach will cheer me right up!

Mela-kaliki-maka!
D.

Saturday, December 23, 2006 – Maui Day Two
This morning Mom and I had a fairly leisurely start – our shore ex didn’t leave until 9:30, and since Grampa and Peter had an early trip (Road to Hana) leaving at like 7:30, it was just Mom and me for breakfast this morning. We decided to go to Crossings, and even though Anna was off (good for her, not for us!), we had a pleasant breakfast before getting off the ship and meeting up with our ‘Catch a Wave’ group.

While waiting for the bus, we saw one of our fellow surfers, who was um, brazen to put it mildly – she was wearing a shirt with a silk-screened picture of a bikini and a ‘bush’ in the slangy-est sense of the word with ‘good bush’ written under it, and then beside it, a silkscreened picture of President Bush with ‘bad bush’, printed under it. I felt a bit bad for the kids (her nieces and nephews) she was with - a time and place for everything and all that – it was a ballsy shirt, but um yea... Anyway – I tried to take a picture with my keitai, so if it turned out, I’ll post it. Oddly enough, I heard her tell someone that she lives in Japan (I would have guessed Saltspring to be honest), so when we were both bobbing around waiting for a wave, I asked her where in Japan she lives – turns out she’s an English teacher in Saitama... She seemed fairly shocked that I live in Shibuya, which I guess is fair enough! It’s so exciting to actually have a job to tell people about now-much less slackertastic!

So, surfing – it was interesting! It was pretty fun actually, but I’m way too competitive about sports to really enjoy something I’m not good at (let’s be honest here!), and since I really wasn’t great at surfing, I have to be honest and say I’d give it a mixed review. In terms of the teachers and lessons and everything, they were all great – it’s just kind of tricky! I’d say my canter stands were actually easier which surprised me! I was able to stand up, but not at the same time as catching the waves – every time I made it up, I’d run out of wave (they were super baby waves), and like basically start sinking. Mom had the opposite issue to me (she was out in the bigger waves) and was able to go zipping around, but only kneeling and semi crouching. I think, since we’re both determined to get sorted out, we’ll try it again in Waikiki. The actually zipping around in the waves was pretty sweet, when the instructors pushed us off, we got going fairly quickly, and I can see how this could become addictive! I also definitely want to try snowboarding now!

Anyway, after the lesson, we had about half an hour in Lahaina which seems like a great little town, but we basically just walked a block or two and grabbed a snack before heading onto the bus – it’s about half an hour back to the ship, along a coastal road with amazing scenery.

Got back to the ship at 2:30ish, had our requisite lunch buffet stop, and then went back to our cabins to pack a little bit as tonight is the last night on board *tear* Then we headed up for some relaxing/reading on the pool deck and waited for the boys to get back. Grampa turned up at about 6, but Peter wasn’t feeling so good with a cold, so he stayed down in the cabin to rest before our 8pm dinner reservations.

Dinner was quite an adventure tonight! First, Grampa and Mom disappeared off the deck where I was, right as I dozed off, and then got sidetracked, so I was waiting for them for like 20 minutes, before finally meeting them down at the dining room right at 8 – turns out that Peter mixed his cold meds and ended up overdosing on Sudafed, leaving him fairly high, plastered to the ceiling, and unable to make it for dinner – our table for ‘five’ was now down to a table for 3. When we checked in with the hostess (who has been great all week trying to accommodate our section requests!) she said that we couldn’t have a table in Anna’s section, and tried to seat us elsewhere, but Mom and I were firm, and we held out for Anna, which I’m really glad we did! It took us forty-five minutes to get into her section, but completely worth the wait! (I think we sound like we’re really picky here, but it just happened that we really got along with her, and besides that, we had a Christmas card to deliver ;). We also all love the freestyle concept, which might not come through with this, but honestly if we hadn’t hit it off with her that first night, we really wouldn’t have cared where they put us! With the exception of Ned when Oma was sick, I don’t think we’ve ever gone to this much trouble for a specific person before!)

Anyway, with the meal itself, there’s also a bit of back story here, because on night one we were looking at all of the menus which were on display, and I happened to see Cheese Tortellini was on the menu for the last night, and since I love it I was looking forward to having it tonight, despite much teasing from everyone else about my over planning. So, of course, I ordered it, and then I was a little surprised when the cheese tortellini Mom and I had ordered came out as lobster ravioli (they’d run out while we were waiting stubbornly to be in that section, so it was my fault, really). If it had been nearly any other substitution, I would have had no problem with it, but since I don’t eat seafood (though I’ve tried a few bits the last few months that I have to admit have been OK), I was trying to decide what to re order when Anna stepped up in a big way for me.

She grabbed the plate and marched off to the kitchen (she knew about the weeklong anticipation thing), and promised to fix it. Five minutes later, she was back with a rather chastened looking chef in tow! (cue me being embarrassed about making a scene haha!) He was very apologetic, and since they were completely out of tortellini, he offered to make me a trio of pastas – I had some delicious risotto from the pork dish, and then he made me penne, and linguine with really really good tomato sauce that had lots of big fresh tomato chunks in it. I felt really bad for being picky about the whole thing, but they were so nice about it, and it was really delicious! Certainly service which was above and beyond, I could have easily had something on the menu, but he insisted on trying to make it as right as possible for me, which he certainly did!

Poor Grampa still had to pack and was pretty exhausted after the Road to Hana trip, so he bailed before dessert, but Anna got his cheese plate packed up to go, and then thoughtfully and spontaneously made one for Peter as well, to hopefully help him feel a bit better with his cold/Sudafed combi raging in the stateroom. Mom and I closed the restaurant again (oops!), and left in great moods – after our HAL cruise, I really didn’t know why people stayed in touch with their servers and stuff, because while our server was perfectly nice and friendly, we didn’t really have any kind of relationship with him, despite more nights at his table. After this week, I can really see how one person can make a big difference in your vacation (and I’m not just saying that because you have the URL to this blog, Anna!). If anyone from cruisecritic is reading this, after January 7th, you’ll have to go to one of the specialty restaurants to meet Anna, but it would be worth it!

We missed the shows and stuff (just karaoke and do it yourself adult standup, so I’m thinking it was potentially no huge loss!), and I’ve ended up in the Longboard (sports bar) to do this final from the ship blog. I can’t believe this week is over so soon! I’m very glad we’re not all flying home tomorrow!

I seem to have landed amongst the teen group having their last night, and I have to say that’s the one thing that I missed from our last cruise, I should have just fudged my age and gone to chill with them occasionally! They seem to have made the same kind of fast, intense friendships we all formed too...

I was so lucky with our group the last time – Alex, Aaron and Candice really helped add a lot to the experience, even though this was definitely awesome as well, nothing quite beats dying your hair in the sink of your miniscule cabin washroom, and quickly scrubbing not so un permanent un permanent hair dye out of the grout and sofa before the cabin steward sees it (we were successful on that front luckily!) That was a good last night, plus making friends I’ve kept in touch with, and seen since which is pretty cool!

If that’s my only complaint though, I’ve done pretty well for this week! I think we all know I’m a cruise addict, and hearing Anna say that she loves working on here makes me continue to consider this as a way to spend six months or so at some point after I turn 21...(I will be going back to school at some point, REALLY!) Anyway, I hope for anyone who found their way over from cruisecritic.com that this was vaguely helpful for some of you...(and I do apologize for the lengthiness of it for everyone reading!) If you have questions, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them...

Happy Holidays!

D.

Friday, December 22, 2006 – Maui Day One

This morning started pretty early, with a trip to the buffet en route to our 8:15 shore ex meeting point. It was my first trip to the fully stocked breakfast buffet, and it was pretty good – too many choices! Lots of nice fruit (which I’m definitely going to miss at the end of the week!)

Mom and I headed down to the Stardust Lounge at 8:10ish, and waited for our group to be called – at 8:15, we were sent downstairs to get off the boat, two members of the tour short... any guesses? Yup – Peter and Grampa were the last ones on the bus, about 5 minutes after the rest of us.... They did have a valid excuse though- Peter’s card stopped scanning and therefore he couldn’t get off the boat until he went up to the front desk and collected a new card.

We were doing our only shore ex with the four of us together, and were headed up to Haleakala Crater, which is a dormant shield volcano at one end of Maui, standing (is that how you describe it?) at about 10 000 feet. I was a little bit worried about the drive, because it wasn’t until after I booked it that I heard them say it was one of the windiest roads in the country on the in cabin TV. (As in twisty, not windy). Being a fairly car sick prone person, I was a little worried about it, but it turned out to be completely fine!


Our guide, a native Hawaiian was really good and kept us entertained for the 1.5 hour ride up to the crater. We had a brief stop at 7000 feet in a visitor center in order to get acclimatized to the altitude, before continuing up to the top. The scenery the whole way up there was pretty spectacular, including 8 miles of open range, which was SO green! As we were driving up, at about 9am, there was amazing light as well – like that afternoon golden hour light – gorgeous!

We were in a big comfy tour bus, and mom and I scored front seats, so we could see over our driver’s shoulder, plus out the huge picture windows beside us, which definitely helped us with the carsickness! That road is pretty amazing though – switchback after switchback, and a huge rise – It’s in the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest/highest climb by road in the world, and it WAS a pretty quick way to get up to 10 000 feet! There were also no guardrails, which on the way back down was a little bit worrying – there were some fairly sharp drops, and because of the way the bus is constructed, it looks like the bus is going off the edge of the road, even though all four wheels are still on the pavement. Luckily, the road was in fantastic shape, and Henry the driver (that’s his middle name, his Hawaiian name, which means ‘the king will never die’, escapes me) was really slow and careful – he also went off the mike for the worst part of the road coming back down in order to concentrate better.

We saw a ton of cyclists on the trip – you can go up to the top of the crater and then cycle down the road for 38 miles. Henry had tons of horror stories about it though – people seem to drive either off the road or across into the oncoming traffic on a fairly regular basis, which I can completely see, especially since the trip starts at 4am so you can be up at the crater for sunrise before you go flying down the mountain.
(crazy bikers about to start their trip)

The crater itself was pretty impressive – its 3000 feet deep and pretty wide as well, a very Martian landscape. There is a five hour horseback ride into the crater which would be pretty cool as well – the horses were pretty entertaining - they looked like coin operated horses for all intents and purposes, though I’m sure the people riding them, who didn’t look very horse experienced won’t be walking too well tomorrow – 5 hours up and down hills is a rough ride!
(above the tree line and clouds! approx 9000 feet)
(interesting yard art)
Came back down to the ship at just past noon, and Grampa and Peter continued on Peter’s goal of seeing as much of every island as possible. They rented a car and drove to the town of Lahaina on the other side of the island from where we dock. Since we’re going there after our surfing lessons tomorrow, Mom and I decided to relax, and just do what we wanted to even though it wasn’t so ‘vacation-y’.

We got back on the ship and had a snack in the buffet before Mom headed back to the cabin for a nap in the hopes of kicking some cold she has percolating through her system. I stayed up on the deck, but since I had nothing to read, I continued listening to my ‘This American Life’ podcast that I started on Anna’s beach, and, predictably, fell asleep for about 15 minutes, just long enough to completely lose the plot, since they switched acts on me while I was snoozing. Went back to the cabin, and sensibly set a wakeup call before settling in to ‘watch’ CNN for about an hour.

Thanks to the wake up call, we were up at about 3, and jumped on the free shuttle to the biggest shopping center on Maui, only about 5 blocks away. We finally got internet access at a Starbucks, and so I had a chance to back post the last four days of blogging (I stupidly didn’t bring the card reader, so no photos yet!), check my email (my email forwarding seems to be screwed, so I hope nothing too critical is sitting in Tokyo), and chat with Andee for a bit (get better soon and I hope Denver defrosts for you soon!). It was good to touch base with the world! I also went to Boarders and got a few magazines which was great –they’re one of the things that I really miss from home, I can’t justify paying 12-15$ for a magazine like AZURE, or even Cosmo – they’re so expensive in Tokyo, and I really love reading them, so I’m planning a stock up in Walmart here when we do our food shopping next week.

Headed back to the ship, via Longs to get a snorkeling film of Mom’s developed, and then went to Crossings for dinner again. Peter and Grampa got stuck dropping the car off at the rental place, so Mom and I ate alone tonight. We tried to get Anna again, but unfortunately for us (good for her though), she got closed early tonight so she could go rest up and sleep off her pain medication (broken tooth). We felt really bad for her, but we were in the section next to hers, so we got to chat with her a few times during the night as she finished her prep for tomorrow morning which was great – we have breakfast and dinner tomorrow to try and connect with her a last time before we get off the ship.

Our waiter was great though, and Mom and I took Freestyle dining to a whole new level tonight, eating dinner in reverse order. It was great, because we’ve been having issues having enough room for dessert, but we didn’t mind being too full to finish our appetizers. The dining room was nearly empty tonight, which was a bit odd – there are 2100 pax on board, and only 500 went to the Luau, so not sure where everyone else was. The entire ship has actually seemed fairly empty all day – guess there were lots of people out enjoying Maui!

Met Grampa and Mom for the crew talent show which was good fun – there are some very talented people on board! Highlights (err well entertainment wise moreso than talent wise) included Fith and Mike’s (cruise director and asst. cruise director) swan lake rendition, and ‘Fountains’, the disgustingly hilarious water spouting show involving most of the entertainment staff.

Grampa and Peter wanted food, so we headed up to the Longboard Café (the sports bar), which is where I am right now – they’ve finished their meals and headed to bed, and I’m just finishing up the blog. This thing is getting out of control on this trip! When I add photos its going to be ridiculous!

It seems very weird that it’s almost Christmas! For everyone traveling home in the next few days – which is probably a few of you since exams are finally finished for everyone, hope they went well, have a safe trip back, and enjoy the holidays!

Aloha!
D.

Oh my goodness, finally back online! I won't post too much about today right now, because a) there is tons of new stuff to read, and b) that would get me all out of sync. Mom and I took the free shuttle to a big local mall (we needed a beach/tour break and tomorrow is another full on Maui day *surfing!!*), and are cooling off in a Starbucks with a Tmobile hotspot (its actually fairly crappy but that's ok, much better than the ship!) connection... Just posting the blog, checking emails, etc before heading back to the ship - most people are at the Luau tonight, so we're hopeful we can get into Anna's section without a reservation for five, especially since it may just be Mom and Me tonight - Grampa and Peter are partying it up in Lahaina, 11 miles from the ship.

Aloha,
D

Thursday December 21st, 2006 – Kona
Mom and Peter went off on a snorkeling adventure this morning, and I was sleeping in until Grampa called and woke me up at nine to get breakfast. Since he didn’t want to go to the buffet, and breakfast in Crossings ends at 9, we decided to tender into Kona in order to get breakfast. The tender ride was on a lifeboat and held 120 of us as well took the five minute trip over to the dock. It was pretty efficient and a fun ride over – I love being on the water, and its not like you really feel like you are on a boat on this ship!
(looking back at the town)
(always good advice!)
We found a slightly sketchy place on the water, with a non so enthusiastic guy working there, but we were hungry and didn’t really know what other options there were, so we went in there, and the macademia nut pancakes I had were actually really good. Grampa just had eggs and toast, but they couldn’t poach them because they didn’t have the water for that apperantly – makes you wonder!

After breakfast, we just spent about three hours wandering around the little town near the port – we checked out an old historical site (I would check the name, but that would require getting up), looked at the artifacts in a hotel lobby, checked out the beach, took photos of the ship, went inside a really nice stone church, checked out the outside of a summer palace, bought some books about Hawaii, and had macadamia nut ice cream (me), and Long board lager (Grampa) at the Canoe Club on the water. We saw a really cute and colorful lizard while we were eating, and Grampa got some good photos I think.
(Macademia nut icecream and Longboard Lager pitstop at the Canoe Club)
(Summer palace, we didn't go in, just looked at the outside)
(stone church from across the street)

Headed back to the ship and tendered over at about 1pm Mom and Peter were still away on their tour, so Grampa stayed in his cabin to rest, and I headed up to the buffet for lunch – they had good salad stuff today! Then I actually went to the Outrigger lounge, but they were having a crew training session, so I went to the sports bar, and read my Outpost magazine, and actually broke out the Genki textbooks for about 45 minutes. That got to be too unvacationish pretty quickly, so I headed to the pool deck and read my magazine until 3:45 when it was time for the pax vs. crew beach volleyball game.

I ended up making a complete fool out of myself at the beginning – I waited until one other woman got up and joined in the two crew guys who were playing with the volleyball on the deck before we started. Then, they started doing ridiculous aerobic/stretching on the deck, with the microphone, in front of everyone... The other woman (not wearing a name tag or anything) joined in, so I did as well. It wasn’t until they introduced all the crew, that I realized I was the only one not getting paid to bounce around like an idiot – it turns out she was the piano bar performer!

After the game (the pax won 2 games to 1), I headed back down to shower off the saltwater from the pool, and get changed – everyone was back by then, so we made a plan for the rest of the evening, and Peter, Grampa and I headed up to the buffet area to jump on the wifi – I was trying to upload the blog finally, but it didn’t work out too well... So far, this ‘live’ blog has only been live on this file – sorry!

At 6:45 we went to see the magician Matt Marcy again in the Blue Hawaii this time, doing close up sleight of hand magic – he was really good again! He also taught the audience how to do one trick, so I’ll have to try that out at some point... Then, it was time for the ‘On the Radio’ Pride of Aloha Crew Show in the Stardust theatre, which was pretty good – the dancers all know and perform an amazing amount of choreography between the two shoes, and the singers are all fairly good (though I’m not exactly the best judge!).Peter figures the music selection was a bit random (I didn’t even recognize about 1/3 of the songs, but I figured that was just me), but we all enjoyed it, and we’re a pretty varied audience in terms of music, for sure!

Then, it was time for our 8:30 dinner reservation – we’d reserved for five, in Anna’s section, on her suggestion – they won’t actually accept reservations for four or fewer. Unfortunatly, when we got there, Anna was sick, so not working – it’s much harder to play off the mystery fifth person when you’re missing your inside man! We figure our server (who was also nice) had seen this trick before, but since the dining room was basically empty, we didn’t feel bad about having an extra seat or two at our table.

Hopefully Anna will be back tomorrow so we can conquer this dining room malarkey! In anycase, my dinner was delicious – corn chowder and beef Wellington . I also tried a piece of tuna sashimi! And It was pretty good as well...

After dinner, we headed up the Blue Hawaii for Liars Club (who says that vacation is for relaxing?) and voted on which member of the celebrity panel was telling the truth in a balderdash type situation. After that show, Grampa and Peter bailed, and Mom and I stayed for the ladies night – ‘Ship ‘n Males’ show. There are some things best done with girlfriends and not mothers, and really, watching strip shows is probably one of them! I think we both expected a bit more of a caberet dance type thing, but really it was pretty full on stripping (down to skivvies). I wonder when they told the bartenders and waiters that they’d be strippers on the side? Before or after they signed their contract to pass out bread? Unfortunately we didn’t have any ones on us, and therefore couldn’t stuff money where the sun don’t shine, and besides that, who goes to a strip club with their mothers? We passed on the blow job shooters and headed back to the stateroom to sleep and blog. We have an early morning tomorrow (my first proper tour – the Haleakala crater, I’m really hoping I don’t get too carsick!) so I’m going to crash now too...

Aloha,
D

PS- how about that Rosie vs. Donald feud?

Wednesday December 20, 2006 – Hilo
This morning we all went for breakfast in the dining room at about 8:00, and then got ready to get off the ship just about immediately after docking in Hilo at 9:00. We all had shore excursions leaving at 9 – Grampa and Peter went up to the top of Mauna Kea on a long day trip, while Mom and I rented bikes to ‘tour Hilo on our own’. We got the bikes (one speed ‘mama charees’ with back pedaling breaks instead of hand brakes (quite a challenge when I was trying to steer around a car with my foot and ended up running into the curb instead because I’d run out of feet to brake with!)

Following the map I’d been given by Tom, the guy who rents the bikes out, we cycled a couple of miles into downtown Hilo and checked out the farmers market, which had an amazing variety of fruits and vegetables and orchids, etc. It would have been great to be able to shop there on a regular basis! There was a cute choir of 8-12 year old kids singing Christmas carols there as well – it’s funny because it really doesn’t seem like Christmas at all until you hear Silent Night in some loudspeaker or something like that!

We walked down through some of the little shops on the main street, and went into a free ocean museum which was interesting, though we didn’t stay long at all... We were heading up to Rainbow Falls (the operative word being up!) It was a big, looooooong hill up to the falls, and by the time we got there, we were REALLY ready to cool off in some water! There were some sort of swimming holes, but there were also a lot of signs about undertow and drag and stuff, and since we didn’t want to get washed down the 80 foot falls, we just waded in up to our waists and then continued on. We headed past a HUGE, amazing banyan tree, and through a jungely forest which seemed like it was the kind of thing Disney would make! There was a nice lookout with a great view of the falls and big cave behind...
(Huuuge Disneyesque Banyan Tree)
(Rainbow Falls with large cave behind)
(part of the Rainbow Falls Park - where we went wading is just behind and to the left of the rocks in the middle of the photo)

We walked across the street and got some water from a very friendly woman with a snack shop – we also bought a local snack from her, a kind of flat bread cracker dipped in chocolate and macadamia nuts, very tasty! Then we headed back down the hill, much better than coming up! And stopped at Kosmic Kones for soft ice cream before cycling back towards the boat. We took the scenic route and drove past a nice looking park in the Shinto style, though we didn’t go in – we wanted to find the beach that Anna had told us about at dinner the night before. It was about a mile past the ship, in the opposite direction from Hilo, but we didn’t have too much trouble finding it. We did have one false start, where Mom claimed we were there, but I convinced her there was no way that was the beach Anna meant, so we kept going and found it – it was lucky she’d described it well, as it certainly is hidden away! There were just a few other people there (including Anna, but we didn’t recognize her so didn’t find that out till later!), but we hung out there for about 45 minutes, going in the water briefly, and then reading under an overhanging tree on the sand for awhile (well, if ‘This American Life’ on my ipod counts as reading anyway)...
(Anna's Beach (she's actually way down at the other side of the beach, we found out later. We thought we saw her, but weren't sure until we talked to her at dinner that night))
(Anna's Beach with Mauna Kea in the Background - Peter and Grampa went up to the top (the world's tallest mountain; possibly, for their shore ex - they saw snow!)

Headed back to the ship at about 2:45 to beat the crowds of busses getting back at 3, and then got showered and changed and headed to the buffet for a snack. Then, Mom headed back to the stateroom for a nap, and I stayed on deck to read a magazine, and yes, nap too. Just before six, I woke up and found Mom on the same deck as me, and we headed downstairs to the Canadian Trivia in the Captain Cook lounge. There were about 10 of us Canadians on board, and we played first to 10, with three teams competing. We ended up not winning, but having the next highest number of points after the game ended. I also ran into deekay from the cruisecritic role call which was fun, I didn’t think we were going to end up meeting anyone from our roll call on this cruise.

Then the four of us headed to the main theatre for the comedy of Ed Voss, which was OK, but not great – I didn’t think he was as good as the entertainers from the last two nights. There were certainly some good lines, but some not good ones as well!

Headed down to Crossings at about 8:30, and had to wait about 10 minutes for a table, which was fine, but unfortunately, we couldn’t get into Anna’s section, which was too bad, although she did make a point of coming over to say hi to us and see how our day had gone which was really nice of her! Even though we’ve found the service to be fine in the dining room (and really good in Anna’s section), it does seem like it’s a little bit inefficient – a lot of people milling around yet not accomplishing a whole lot. There are also often a lot of empty tables when they have lines out the door – I’m sure its just the time it takes to turn the tables when they have to deal with the people coming at so many different times for Freestyle, and it doesn’t bother me at all – I’m enjoying the cruise parts at least as much as the HAL cruise (with the exception of not making friends through the teen club this time around which is a product of my age not the line!), but I know some of you reading are curious about it, so I thought I’d put in my 2 yen.

We finished dinner just in time to see the lava flow. It was pretty cool, but a bit foggy and rainy, so I think it was probably harder to get a sense of the scale than it might have been otherwise. It was gorgeous though, and so powerful! Very cool – you could even smell the sulphur! Of course, photographs were nearly impossible, but that didn’t stop everyone from trying – I got one cool one, even though you can’t really tell what is going on, but most of mine, and everyone else’s are just blobs of orange blurring into the black background. Enjoy the view and buy a postcard!

After that, at about 1030, we just came up to the staterooms – Mom and Peter have an early snorkeling excursion, and Grampa and I will be doing some kind of chose your own adventure day – we wanted to go on the horse drawn wagon tour, but it isn’t running, so we have no plans as of right now. There’s also lots to do on the ship, as usual, so maybe I’ll check some of that out. Off to bed now, an early night tonight, it’s only 11:05!!

D.

Tuesday December 19, 2006 Kauai Day Two
This morning Peter and Grampa headed off on their helicopter tour ridiculously early, and Mom and I slept in, relatively speaking, until 8. Today we decided to go to Crossings for breakfast, and had a different server from dinner (we hadn’t requested Anna). He was fine, and we enjoyed our breakfasts (I had the fruit plate and waffles, and mom had an omlette and toast). At about 9, we headed off the ship and walked to the nearby Marriott where we rented boogie boards and flippers (so ridiculous to walk in!) and went boogie boarding on their beach. It was so much fun!

The waves were about 6 feet at the roughest times, and around 4 feet the rest of the time it was rough enough that they weren’t letting anyone have surf lessons, and only experienced surfers were allowed to rent the boards. Mom quickly got the hang of catching the waves, but I didn’t have quite so much luck with it! Finally, on the last wave, even though it was only small, like around 2-3 feet, I got rocketed into shore, it was awesome! The comedian yesterday was pretty correct though when he said that boogie boarding is the equivalent of pile driving yourself into the shore, and getting sand everywhere! We filled our shower with sand even though we thought we’d basically rinsed off at the beach, it was nuts! The only bad thing about the boogie boarding was the board rash we got on our stomachs, and a little bit on our legs... When we do surfing lessons in Maui I think we’ll be wearing t-shirts for sure!

The most challenging part of the whole thing was trying to get past the first set of breaking waves, which could really pound you if you didn’t get through or over them sufficiently... Given that this was baby surf on the scheme of things, it must be an amazing amount of power when you get into the big 30 foot North Shore style waves! We’ll have to go watch them next week in Oahu I think!

We headed back to the ship via a stop for shampoo and conditioner at the ABC store (there is only 2 in 1, so pack accordingly!), and were back on the boat by around noon. By the time we finished showering, Grampa and Peter were back on board, so we all went for lunch together in the buffet, and ate on the aft lanai while we watched the sail away from Kauai.

We were getting completely windblown down there, so Grampa headed up for a nap, and Mom, Peter and I went to deck 12 and grabbed some lounge chairs to chillax for a couple of hours. I’m slowly starting to lose the ‘Yes, I’m a Canadian’ skin color I came out here with (and I had such a great Kabuki tan earlier this year L ). There was ‘scenic cruising’ with announcements explaining what we were seeing, but I only vaguely paid attention – I was too busy napping and reading, and Peter was catching up with his sleep from his early morning, so we loaded mom up with cameras and sent her to the railing to document the scenery – we’ll see it later! I did get up to check it out once, and it was gorgeous, but the lounge chair was more chillerific at the time...

At about 4:30, we were getting way too blown around, so we came back to the staterooms, and, um, napped a little bit more (its vacation after all!) At six, mom and I went to the necklace making class in the cultural center. We made a necklace and a bracelet each, and I also had enough nut and shell beads left to make a kind of zipper pull thing.

We came back to the cabin to dress for dinner – it was formal night, and Mom and I were opting in....The ship was generally dressed more formally than last night, but there was a huge variety! I don’t care what anyone else is wearing, but it’s fun to get dressed up occasionally, so that’s what we did!

We went to the Stardust theatre at 7:45 to watch Mark Marcy, the magician and comedian perform – he was very clever and a great performer! They’ve added an extra show we’ll be going to on Thursday if we have a chance, when magicians are good, they’re really good, and he definitely was! He had us laughing and impressed throughout most of the show – a pretty good combination of entertainment!

Straight after the show we headed back down to Crossings for dinner. True to her word, the hostess had held a table for us in Anna’s section (we tried to make a reservation this morning and found that they only do reservations for tables of more than six, which was fine, we weren’t that bothered, but would have liked to be in Anna’s section again, so we were happy to be seated there).

She was just as friendly as yesterday, despite having had a terrible evening – someone had yelled at her before she’d even gotten a chance to introduce herself, and they were really upset about the whole Freestyle concept, and mad about something to do with what table they were at. While they may have been upset, swearing at Anna was way over the line! We tried to cheer her up, and I think by the time we finally left (last ones in the dining room again, oops!) I think her night was looking up a bit – she even gave Mom and I some super secret instructions on how to get to a beach for on our ‘Tour Hilo on your own Bicycle’ tour we’re doing tomorrow while Peter and Grampa tour Mauna Kea, which may or may not be the world’s tallest mountain (see also: Kong, Odaiba dinner, dinner at Sohan’s for all the back story on this debate!)

After dinner, at about 10:45, we walked down to the photographers to see if there was a better picture of Mom (the one Peter bought was unfortunate, to say the least), and then Peter, Mom, and I went to the Blue Lagoon to bring in the ‘New Year’. We didn’t dance as much as yesterday even though there were more people, but we did participate in the Conga Line, throw the New Year’s streamers, learn a couple of dances, and make total fools our of ourselves for a couple of songs. There was a hilarious couple’s balloon popping game where you had to pop a balloon by hugging, and then the guy turned around and your popped it by squishing it between the girls stomach and his ass, and then finally put on the balloon on his lap and popped it by sitting on his lap – no hands allowed for any of this. There were a few surprisingly hard to pop balloons, I have to say!

Came back to the room around midnight again (New Year’s on the Pride of Aloha actually happens at 11:30 pm apperantly), ate our mint chocolates from the pillows (we also got a super cute towel elephant today!), and now I’m blogging while Mom gets her beauty sleep before the 7:40 am wake up call.

Seas are, I’d say, definitely mild! You can completely tell you are on a boat tonight which is nice, but it’s nothing more exciting than a slightly rough BC Ferries ride (ie: not rough at all). Occasionally you walk a bit sideways, and the dance floor was a bit disconcerting – sometimes we’d all be spinning left and it would be rocking right, it was the ‘everyone is now equally and instantly tipsy’ dance floor! We have a gentle side to side roll, but no noticeable front to back pitch.

At the shore excursion desk earlier though, when it was even more mild and you could only feel the motion every ten minutes or so, this one guy walked up and asked when we’d be getting to Hilo. The person told him at 8, and the guys goes: “So, like, its going to be going like this all that time then?” Gesturing wildly up and down with his hands. The poor shore ex. Staff member had to explain that yes, the small boat in the big ocean would probably continue to move for the duration of the journey. I’m not sure exactly what the guy was expecting to feel on this trip, but I guess he’s happier when we’re docked, which luckily for him is most of the time on this trip!

Time for bed I think!
Aloha
D

Monday December 18, 2006 – Kauai

This morning saw Mom go off on her zipline adventure (she lived to tell the tale, and will be guest blogging about it) early this morning. I woke up when she was getting dressed at around quarter to seven, and then went back to sleep until 9:45 when Peter and Grampa called me to go get breakfast with them. Unfortunately, we missed breakfast in the main buffet, and the dining room, so we ended up in the buffet on the aft lanai, deck 11.

It was OK, but we’d managed to get there right in between them putting out food, so there was almost nothing left... Peter got an omlete made to order, and I ended up waiting for pancakes, and then going back for some bacon just before they closed at 11, so it worked out OK in the end, now we know we need to get organized a little bit faster in the mornings!

Peter and Grampa were originally planning to go on the Heaven and Earth Helicopter excursion today, but that got moved to tomorrow morning because of space issues, and I had nothing planned for today anyway, so we ended up going to a plantation I’d read about in a guidebook. The Kilohana Estate was an old sugar plantation owned by Gaylord somebody or other! It was at one time 26 000 acres, and when the main house was built in 1935, at 15 000 square feet and at a cost of 150 000 it was the largest and most expensive house on Kauai for quite some time!
(The plantation house from the back)

We took a lovely 20 minute carriage ride in a reproduction 19th century carriage pulled by Tuck, a 24 year old 17hh bay Clydesdale. He was lovely! He’s been doing this for twenty years, so to say that he knew his job would be a major understatement! We got to see the old gardens, go through a forest, around the grounds, and see lots of fruit trees, coffee plants, etc. It was very pleasant! Then, we stopped in at Gaylord’s Restaurant and had lunch on their covered patio. I had a chicken ceasar salad which was nice, and Peter had a fruit plate, with Grampa having fish and chips.
(our lovely horse - neither headed or tied as he waited for the next go around! He's a 24 yr. old clyde who has been doing this job since he was 4 - he knows the drill to be sure!)

The waitress suggested Koloa Town to us as a cute desination just about ten minutes away, so we asked the hostess to call us a taxi. When the taxi driver arrived, she slipped the host a twenty, and thus began the great ‘Kauai Kidnapping Kaper’! Jo, who worked for Sue’s taxi partially railroaded and partially convinced us (quite a bit more of the former!) Into a two and a half hour tour of the island, where, incidentally we never stopped at Koloa Town!

The first thing she did was get into her fairly beat up late 80’s van/taxi, and turn on the meter, while saying:
“Now I don’t want you folks to be looking at the meter, I just have it on incase any cops stop me. In fact, it’s too distracting like this”, at which point she picked up her napkin and covered the meter for the duration of the ride. She did point out to us that while there was a county mandated tour charge of $60/hr for the van, she’d been known to take a bit of time off at the end, which, she confided in us, her boss didn’t know, but since she ‘brings in so much money to her anyway, she’ll never care!’
(covered meter, the first sign of trouble on the Kuaui Kidnap Kaper)

We went to see a cool blowhole where the ocean pressurizes under the rocks and forces the water up in a dramatic spray, followed by a mandatory shopping stop at her friend’s stalls (we didn’t buy anything, though I think she did). Then we stopped at several beaches for photo ops (both rocky and sandy and both), and then continued on for a drive through Koloa Town, and then a twenty-minute drive up the coast to the Cocoa Palms Hotel, where Elvis got married in Blue Hawaii. It’s looking pretty run down though – it’s actually been closed since the hurricane in 1992. Then, we went up to some waterfalls and a big river canyon, and then back to the boat, with a brief stop at the Meneuhenue (sp??) Fish pond on our way.
(dramatic coastline and blowhole)
All of that was fine, except that it wasn’t really our choice. Granted, we could have put our feet down collectively and got dropped off somewhere, but we were fairly happy to be doing stuff and seeing the island, the main problem we were having was her constant running commentary. There were no stories about Kauai, or the history, or Hawaii, or anything, just her feelings on life in general.

For instance, we heard a forty five minute rant about the building going on down by Poipu Beach area, where they will developing some of the huge fields and turning them into million dollar homes, supposedly. She said she’d be all for it if they were low income houses, but she was very annoyed by the fact that ‘snobby rich people’ would be moving in, given that ‘there are enough of them around here anyway’. Looking at the big fence which has been constructed around the soon to be construction site, she bitched about how it blocked the mountain views several times (fair enough), but the classic comment came as follows:

Rant, rant, rant...”I mean, it’s not like that wall needs to be that high, and I should know, I’ve pretty much dated every construction worker on this here island.” Umm good to know? Looking back on it, it was pretty entertaining, but in the car, we kept shooting each other some ‘OMG what bus did we go on?’ looks. I did however pick up several tips I could have used to make waaaay more money driving Kabuki Kabs this summer ! For instance, don’t ask where your passengers want to go, continue to insist on adding more stops, continually add on ‘just this one last thing’, etc. I was just way too polite when I did my tours, obviously!

Finally, about an hour and forty five minutes into the ride, she asked the first question about us (after talking about the development (for a good solid hour), the practice of training rottweilers to hunt wild boar (she’s not a fan), how she wants to fence her backyard, how she’s rescued her Dalmatian from the neighbors, how she’s a fantastic cook who wants to turn her garage into a kitchen and feed her (unsuspecting I would imagine), guests some of her famous bbq chicken during their tours, etc.) The question she asked was ‘what do you all do?’ A simple enough question, until Peter revealed that we live in Tokyo. Well, that sparked off another one of her massive rants, based on her work with Japanese tourists, mostly during the bubble years I think, when she used to work at a restaurant.

For instance: “...and they were BIG! I mean, the women, they had like boobs and everything! I guess from all the hormones in the milk they drink and stuff now, because like, they’re grandparents would be these miniature people, but the newer generations, they were like tall, if they keep growing like that, they’re going to be big over there!”

I think safely, they have a LOT of catching up to do to get to US sizing standards! Its not like there are too many Japanese people you’d even want to classify as chubby, and given the massive industry based in the padded bra sector, the milk hormones have only been marginally successful!

She also told us about how one guy from the countryside went to pay for his beer by pulling down his pants and extracting his cash from his underwear (and she was surprised when the table started laughing at her face?), and also how she used to work at a golf course with some Yakusa clients “just the sweetest baby faced guy you’d ever want to meet! And a big spender too; obviously” Just don’t get on the wrong side of his non existent pinky finger I suppose!

Anyway, it was a bit trying while on the tour (probably not helped by me not being a huge fan of ‘scenic drives’ in general, but looking back at it during dinner, we realized how funny it had been!

We ended up back on the boat at around five, and met up with Mom for a quick snack of fruit and bread and salad in the buffet. I also had some yummy apricot sorbet. Then, we headed down to the Blue Lagoon Nightclub to see Chris Alpine perform. He’s a standup comic who has been on Comedy Central, according to the Freestyle Daily. We all agreed that he was pretty funny, but not great – we weren’t tempted to buy his CD or anything. In his defense though, it was an all ages, clean show, and he only had 40 minutes to try and put together a show to entertain the 8-80, crowd, which can’t be easy! Even though he spent a lot of time (entertainingly, but still), picking on various members of the audience, and we thought he could have maybe prepared a bit more of a set, we certainly laughed most of the way through it...

Then, we headed straight for the Broadway medley show put on by the NCLA cast in the Stardust Theatre. It was pretty good! They had lots of energy, good costumes, and decent choreography. Given, I’m so musically challenged that I’m impressed by just about anything, but I thought it was good. I love Broadway, so I was excited to go to the show, which featured medleys from Hairspray, Wicked, Mamma Mia, and more. I was sad to see there was no RENT involved, but that’s OK, the show was definitely enjoyable and a good hour or so of entertainment.

At this point, it was 8:45 or so, so we decided to head to Crossings, on of the main dining rooms (the one most at the aft) for dinner. Initally, when we got there, we were told there would be a thirty minute wait if we didn’t want to share a table, but it ended up only being about five minutes, ten at the absolute most. We were also the only one in our server, Anne’s, section, and she was great! Our table all hit it off with her right away, and had fun entertaining her with stories of our cab ride (and assuring her we’d be on shore ex the rest of the week).

She was from Texas, and couldn’t have been more friendly! She offered to combine the lobster and prime rib onto one plate if anybody wanted that, so Mom, Grampa, and Peter all had that, with a salad to start, while I had the Vermont Cheddar Soup to start and a red curry noodles with Shitake mushrooms. It was good, not so curryish, but that’s good because I don’t like super hot food! Then for dessert, we all got cappuccinos, and Mom and I split the crème brulee with chocolate covered Macadamia Nuts and the apple pie a la mode, which were both delicious! (I also tried some of Mom’s dinner and it was all good too, including the lobster, which for me to even try, is ummmm amazing!
We finished dinner at about 10:30 or so, and it was lovely to have the nice relaxed dinner, they didn’t rush us at all, even though we ended up being the last table in. It’s amazing how early everyone is eating, I guess I’ve gotten very used to eating later in Tokyo, but to see a restaurant THAT big, completely empty that early seems very weird!

I think we might be requesting her section in the future, which is pretty rare for us all around, we’re so go with the flow about stuff like that, but we all really liked her, so when Mom and I go for breakfast in the dining room tomorrow, we’re going to get reservations in her section seeing as it’s the optional formal night and we think more people may eat in the dining room because it’s the half sea day.

After dinner, we all came back to the staterooms, and Grampa and Peter went to bed in preperation for their super early morning tomorrow. Since we don’t have to be up so early, Mom and I ate our yummy mint chocolate pillow candy (our cabin steward has so far been great, though we haven’t me him yet), and headed back to the Blue Lagoon for the sock hop. What a difference from the HAL cruise!! There were actually quite a few people dancing, off all ages from mine up to about 65. At about 11:15, they announced that everyone under the age of eighteen had to leave (not that there were any kids in there anyway), and we all boogied away for about an hour. We requested a Grease medley which was quite a hit, and learned the hand jive, as well as doing the twist, dancing to Elvis songs, etc. The 50’s were so cute! And the music so completely danceable! It was good fun!!

At midnight, we finally came back up to our stateroom, worn out and ready for tomorrow! Mom and I are going to go to the Marriot hotel down the road and rent boogie boards for the morning, while Grampa and Peter are doing their helicopter tour. We have the half day at sea, so we’ll be finalizing and booking shore ex, watching the lava, dressing up for formal night, and generally having lots more fun! It’s now one am, and I’ve blogged 2300 words, which I’m sure is about 2000 more than you wanted to know! If I’m not going to die at the 8am wake up call, I better grab some sleep, so-

Aloha!
D.

Sunday December 17, 2006

Got up this morning at 7:15 am (yikes!) to finish packing before 8am, when our bags were picked up by an NCL employee for transport to the ship. I read for a little bit and then fell asleep on my book until about 9:15, when Grampa called to see if we wanted to grab some breakfast. Peter decided to keep sleeping, but the rest of us walked about a block down the beach to Cheeseburgers in Paradise, which is a pretty fun, if very touristy restaurant right across the street from Waikiki Beach. I had guava juice and macadamia nut pancakes – sooo good!

On our way back to the hotel, Grampa stopped at the Aloha Shirt store to pick up an Aloha shirt for himself, and Mom went to an ABC store to get a Hawaii hat... By the time we got back to the hotel, it was just about eleven, I uploaded yesterday’s photos to the blog and then had a quick nap while Mom insisted on going swimming in the beach. By the time she got back and showered, she ended up having to rush onto the bus, and was the last one on, at 12:25. We pulled out of the hotel at 12:27, and got to the pier at 12:52, very excited to be getting on the ship! We cleared security in minutes, got our leis, and then picked up our keys from the ‘Marriott Waikiki key pickup’ line. A quick stop for our embarkation photo and then we were on board by 1:05, pretty quick!
(overlooking the pool deck from deck 12, Waikiki in the background)
Headed straight to our stateroom, and dropped off our bags before heading to the buffet on deck eleven for some salad and fruit. We also got our soda cards and souvenier cups, and then after a lovely lunch outside on the stern deck, looking across the harbour at Celebrity’s Mercury, we went on a tour of the ship. Photos to follow when I get an internet connection, probably one on land that doesn’t cost 75 cents a minute!
(stateroom before the chaos of exploding bags, etc. ensued over the next week)

After the ship tour, we headed back to our staterooms, and Mom and Grampa stayed in the rooms to rest, while Peter and I headed up to deck 12 for some sun (and rocky road ice cream on my part). We had about an hour up there before the call came to get back to our staterooms and start getting organized for the muster drill, taking place at five pm. We collected our life jackets (I had to climb on the dresser in the closet to get mine – lucky it wasn’t an actual emergency!) At the same time, most of our bags arrived (Peter is still missing one, at 9:10, but hopefully it will turn up soon, he’s just gone to investigate at the desk ). UPDATE: tag had fallen off, but he’s been successfully reunited with it.
(one part of the Aloha Atrium)

We were the first ones to arrive at our muster station (B, deck six port side), and the lady who was telling us what to do was pretty entertaining she certainly took her job very seriously, which was good, but pretty funny! She seemed to be channeling the muse of the soup nazi from Seinfeld. She put us in our lifejackets, and tugged them tight, making sure we never stepped over the line diving the walkway in half lengthwise, and if anyone stepped over at all, she ran over to push past us. Of course, Peter, standing behind me, kept playing the class clown roll and making me laugh, but I managed to avoid her stare of death. Our little group even scored a thumbs up for proper life jacket adjustment. Thinking about this, I’m guessing you actually had to be there, because it was really funny, but in a sixth grade kind of way. Anyway, we did pay attention in the key parts, so should there be an emergency, I think we have as good an idea as anyone else what to do.
On the way to the elevator, we hear a guy trying to knowledgably teach his girlfriend they way of the ship
“The starboard side is to the right, and the port side is to the left, and the front is to the.....front.”

Good to know, I’ll make sure to remember that!

Post muster drill, it was time for the shore excursion talk, which turned out t be fairly disappointing, because they basically just reiterated what was said about a few of the shore excursions on the website. Nothing new or anything, the photos weren’t that great. There was also a lot of shopping talk which Peter dubbed ‘a word from our sponsors’. We ended up bailing about two islands in, and went to get, what else, more food! There was a BBQ on deck, and then I supplemented my burger with some salad and fruit and veggie polenta, of all things, from the buffet – I’m loving all the fresh fruit and salad!
(Crossings, Anna's restaurant and where we ate all the dinners after this one)
When we were sitting there eating, one of the cruise staff came up to us and asked Mom and I if we would participate in a competition. Without knowing what it was, she signed us up for it. We got put in a team with two other ladies from Colorado and then had to pick a random guy out of the crowd. Since Grampa and Peter weren’t going to be a part of it, and the two other ladies didn’t know any guys on board, we just had to grab an innocent person off the pool deck. We ended up with a guy named Shawn, a very natured guy indeed! The competition ended up being a seven minute mission to make over your man into a beauty pagent contestant. Luckily, the two ladies were traveling with a selection of muu muus, so we headed to their cabin, threw him in a muu muu, put a towel down his front, a bikini top to hold him up and together, and then put a ridiculous amount of make up and a lei on him, and sheparded him back onto the pool deck. Unfortunately, we didn’t win, but he got a consolation prize which was good, he was well abused!!

We stuck around on the stage area to take in a hula lesson from a Hawaii Ambassador (I guess I couldn’t hold our for too long, even after giving it a miss at Kong’s Hawaii Night... I have to say that everyone was much worse on the cruise than they were there – though there was no ABBA involved tonight! At the electric slide competition, however, we were a bit confused, not having a clue how to actually do the electric slide! We endd up bowing out of the competition, just watching as someone won a 180 dollar shore ex. Package... Then, we played fifteen minutes of bad table tennis before heading to the spa raffle give away, which we didn’t win anything at – there were SOO many people trying to win, it was pretty packed! We collected our free champagne and were on our way, this time to the Outrigger lounge (deck eleven, forward).

It’s pretty funny how strict they are about carding on this boat! Compared to Tokyo where they don’t card at all, ad I’ve gotten into several places with huge ‘We don’t let you in without valid ID signs’ and could definitely be drinking if I wanted to, here they are very into it! My actual key card has a corner cut out of it to denote me as being underage, and entertainingly, when they were talking about the free champagne at the spa thing, the girl turned right to me to add ‘well, for those in your party over 21 anyway’. Regardless of me being the uber lame non drinker, I still think 21 is ridiculously old for not drinking, given that you can go off to war at 18 in the states, and some states allow you to get married at like 14 or something obscene with parental permission.

Anyway, its not about 10, and we’re just trying to decide where the rest of the evening will take us – perhaps the jet lag busting dance at the Outrigger lounge.
(Outrigger Lounge - part show lounge, part dance floor/nightclub, part strip joint)
A few first impressions for cruise critic readers – the boat is clean and in good shape, some of the rooms are certainly pretty overly decorated, but its all Aloha-ish! There seems to be lots of room for people to get around, and so far it hasn’t seemed too full at all.

Lots of food choices at the buffet, and it all seems pretty hot and fresh, I had some sundried tomato bread which was sooo good! There are sani stations all over the place, and people are using them from what I can tell – we are also being encouraged to do so by attendants at the station.

Our stateroom is clean, and although not huge, certainly enough room for two! I think the bed is good as well, though I like hard beds. Haven’t met our cabin attendant yet, but we had ice waiting for us, and the beds got turned down while we were out. In general, the staff have all been really, really friendly, greeting us with ‘Aloha’ whenever we see them, coming by to take our plates, asking if we need drinks or anything like that. It’s interesting to find out where everyone is from around the states, and they’ve all been great. Our cruise director seems friendly from what I saw during our pool side activities, and so far, everything is going very well!

We’ve been moving for about two hours so far, and the seas are just barely noticeable – basically like the good ol BC Ferries – just a nice gentle roll, but nothing dramatic at all! I think everyone is waiting for me now so we can get going, - we’ve finished up our drinks and seem to be moving on. Besides that, the entertainment is coming back on, which is fine, except that so far this evening, we’ve already heard ‘Drift Away’ live three times, so we probably don’t need to hear it again.

Ahola!

Saturday, December 16th, part two...

Going by Tokyo time, its now 7pm on Sunday evening, and I haven't had a proper night's sleep since Thursday night, so I'm very, very tired!

Shortly after I posted the last blog entry, I successfully adjusted the Santa and then we jumped in a cab which took us to the Keio Plaza Hotel in Shinjuku. Once there, we transferred to a 'Friendly Airport Limousine' bus, which took us to Narita, dropping us off at about 6:45 pm. We checked in quickly, and then headed to McDonald's for a quick pre flight meal before clearing security and then immigration and heading to the gate. The only hiccup was the grumpy immigration officer who was mad that I'd gone with Peter into his line, but in the end let us both go through, and we got to the flight just as they were starting to wrap up boarding. They were checking every back that was being carried on, and we also had a film crew filming four twenty-somethings on the flight, but I didn't find out what for...

Luckily, the flight was only about 70% full, so we had lots of room, and I basically slept for about 4 hours I'd guess... I listened to the metpod, had the dinner, slept until the breakfast, and then did about 20 minutes of 'genki' nihongo studying before it was time to get ready to land. That rescue remedy really is magic stuff! Between that and a couple of nighttime cold relief pills, I was pretty genki myself for the flight :) Hopefully the way back will be equally good - too bad its so much longer!!

We got our rental car and headed to the hotel Mom and Grampa crashed at last night, waited around for about 45 minutes for them to get up and ready, and at around 9:30 HST, headed into Honolulu to the Hau (sp?) Tree Lanai restaurant where we ate a delicious breakfast outside just beside the beach. Mom was the most adventurous of all of us, eating poipu pancakes with some kind of coconut syrup on them, actually very tasty!

(Grampa at breakfast)

(Mom's pineapple)

After that, we walked along the beach until we got almost to our hotel, at which point, Peter headed back to pick up the car and the bags, and the three of us went to Starbucks so I could get some caffeine, and then to one of MANY ABC stores to pick up some cheap beach mats. We kept walking about half a block until we got to our hotel, the Marriott Waikiki.

(view from the hotel balcony down to the pool)

(view from the hotel room at dusk, looking along Waikiki Beach)

(same view, but later on...)

It's very nice! We're on the 21st floor with an ocean view. After we checked in, Mom and I headed down to the pool for a quick swim and a gossip, while the boys stayed in their room for a nap. We met back up at around 4, and did all of our pre cruise check in in the NCL office conveniently located in the lobby, and then did a bit of shore ex. research via the wireless connection in the lobby. We've all booked on one excursion so far (mine is a bike tour of Kona), but will probably add more as the week progresses - we were pretty disorganized about the whole thing since we haven't really been able to co ordinate with each other what we wanted to do.

(lots of pool pictures! I promise I won't post every picture we take at the pool!)

Just past six, we got changed, and then went out - Mom and Peter to the Billy Joel concert which was a surprise Mom found out about this morning, and Grampa and I went first to a kua'aina burger (restaurant wasn't as Hawaii themed as in Japan!) and then to the Ward 16 theatres to watch 'The Holiday', starring Jack Black, Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, and Jude Law. Despite falling asleep for about 15 minutes, I still enjoyed the movie, it was a pretty light hearted rom-com, a perfect end to this long but fun start to our vacation! Grampa and I went to (another) Starbucks, where I got one of those great green juice concoctions and we waited to meet back up with the concert goers, whom seemingly had a great time. Now we're back at the hotel, and packing the bags that seem to have exploded across the room in order to have them ready to put out for the cruise pick up at 8 am.
(Grampa at Kua'aina Burger)

I've started to download photos, but I don't have the patience or energy to post them right now, so I'll edit them (and maybe some more details) in tomorrow before the shuttle for the boat leaves at 12:30. It's a bit later than we would have liked, but it's the only one they are running tomorrow, so c'est la vie! It's vacation after all!

Aloha,
D

Saturday, December 16th, part one... Still in Oyama-cho...

(welcome to any cruisecritic.com members who may have come over here :) )

Well I'm packed and basically ready to go, we leave in about an hour and a half, and Peter is still frantically packing - I'm glad I got as good as start as I did last night, even though I wasn't exactly efficient between 4 and 5 am!

I ended up going to bed at 5, not so much because I was tired, but because I knew I'd feel really bad if I was completely useless at teaching this morning, so I decided to grab two hours of sleep... got back up at seven, had a shower, and left at about 8:30 to go to Roppongi Hills early for a Starbucks. I had a caramel frappacino (yay for sugar and caffeine!) and a croissant, and then at ten walked over to teach for an hour and half.

Unfortunately, I hadn't brought much to work on, since I'd had to take the books back to the library yesterday, and it would have been fine, except the kids got out on winter vacation yesterday, so they had no homework! We spent about 20 minutes on grammar (her), and reading (him). Then, I decided we could write a story together, one line at a time. It ended up being more like a paragraph at a time, which is was fine - they got totally into it (luckily!) and we ended up spending an hour writing a four page story which went something along these lines:

Today John is happy and excited because of the magic tree. He climbed up the tree to the top of the clouds and found a castle. In it there was a big monster. He was fat and short and he looked like a sumo wrestler. John turned around, but the door was magically locked. The monster put him in a jar, he had a note about how to cook people. He got put on the shelf with lots of other monsters, then a bat came to try and help, but he didn't understand the bat. He was tired, so he lay down in the jar and it rolled off the shelf and broke. The monster heard him and came running, John hid under the bed. Then he found a mouse house, but he got stuck in a mousetrap. The mouse came to find him and ate the cheese, but the monster found John and swallowed him whole. John crawled into his nose, but the monster was cleaning his nose and sneezed. John got wrapped up into a tissue and then managed to escape and go home. His mother didn't believe his story and since he was late for lunch, he got sent to bed with no food. The end.

I was so impressed with how creative they were, and thank god we were able to pretty easily keep it going for so long - they were really into it, and I think for the boy, its the most interested he's been in any of our sessions, so this is definitely something we'll be doing in the future!

I went to Aoyama Book Centre on my way to the eki to pick up a Metropolis and a Weekender for the plane, and then also got the textbook and workbook that go with the website I found when I was trying to learn katakana - the Genki books. They seem pretty good, and I'm bringing them on the plane with me, so if my Buckley's Nighttime Remedy+rescue remedy+2 hours of sleep in the last 24 technique of sleeping doesn't work, I can add some studying into the mix and hope that does the trick! I managed to ask for them in Japanese, small progress! Hopefully in the new year, there will be some more situations like last night, which would be good practice times, though I can see how drinking would be very helpful to aid the whole situation a little bit!

That's about it - just packing, trying not to forget anything too crucial, not having enough room for enough shoes for Mom and me for two weeks, etc. I won't bore you with the details, but I did keep it to one checked bag (my big backpack), with potential one bag expansion for the way home, which is handy so I can bring cereal and peanut butter back with me!

Not sure when I'll be able to post next, but probably on HNL's Saturday night I should be able to get online at the hotel and post from there...

Peter's just thrown a rope into my room, which I take to mean I have to go adjust Santa on the roof before we can go... If I fall off the roof and break my leg two hours before the flight, I won't be impressed!!

Aloha!
D

Did not a whole lot of anything this morning, except going to Sasazuka to get a key made for Sarah, who is going to be house sitting for us (that doesn't really count as doing anything, does it?)

Anyway, this afternoon, Sarah came over, and I gave her the house tour and explained everything about Venus, etc... Hopefully I didn't forget to tell her anything crucial! We walked back to Sasazuka with Venus, since that's probably the best station for her, and then I just came back here, and made the equivalent of a TV dinner here - it's like a brick of frozen noodles, with some frozen goo on top, that when boiled for a few minutes turns into a fairly thick noodle and veggie soup. It was pretty good! I think this one was called 'goo-ta'. I had another one a few days ago which was a microwave one, and it was fine but definitely not as good! V. and I watched a couple of episodes of Sex and the City while I ate (I'm just plowing through them!)

Tonight was also the bounenkai in Koenji that Jordon was organizing, so at eightish I headed out there, stopping in Harajuku to drop off my library books (I no longer have anything to read, so I hope Mom is bringing books to Hawaii!). Met Jordon at the station and then we walked to the little bar/cafe place (Orange) where the event was. A couple of his friends got there at the same time as us, including one guy who was also at Yukiko's wedding party, so we all went in together, and I ended up chatting with them quite a bit. It was pretty funny since there was a pretty big language barrier between all of us, especially when Jordon left, so we had an electronic dictionary party, and basically communicated through very simple language with a lot of help from the electronic dictionaries... I really need to get one of them, I heard tonight that they're coming out with one where you can write a kanji character on the touch pad and then it will translate for you, which would be pretty sweet!
(edited to add photos from Jordon...thanks!)
Stephen, whom I met at Design Festa turned up a little while after we did, and came to join our little group, luckily he's way more bilingual than any of us were, so he could translate a bit! When Jordon's two friends had to go b/c of getting the train to Saitama (last train is at 11 which is early, but it's not close!), Stephen and I ended up chatting with a singer in a punk rock band called 'Daddy Longfeet'. His English was only a little bit better than my Japanese, so we had a pretty kindergarten level conversation, but it was fun though :)

There were probably about 30-40 people through the course of the night, though I left while it was still pretty much mid party, and people were still trickling in. Most people seemed to be in some way involved with a band (lots of Molets members too) which was cool, and lots of people brought records and took turns DJ'ing...

Unfortunately, since anyone who lives on the Odakyu line and doesn't want to get a taxi turns into a pumpkin at 12:52 when the last train pulls out of Shinjuku (and we're a pretty late line!) I had to leave just after midnight to have time to get back from Koenji, since the trains don't run so frequently this late. I discovered the third rush hour of the day here, the last trains were all packed, which I guess makes sense! Lots of salary men making their way home, and a few people coming from parties probably, although lots of people will either stay out till first train (5ish), or get a taxi, depending on where they live...

It really sucks how early the trains stop running here, especially since I think the taxis raise their rates by 30% between 12-5am, but Peter said someone told him it also helps out the salarymen who actually want to get home at some point, and can use the last train as an excuse to get out of another round of karokee (or work), or whatever... I tried to take a couple of pictures of all the people, but it's a bit hard to see... I don't have any pictures of tonight, but Jordon took a bunch, so hopefully I can get a couple from him and edit them in, I've been bad about taking photos at events recently!!(platform at Shinjuku, either Yamanote or Chuo line, all those people are cued up at the markers on the ground which show where the doors to the trains will be, and then they'll all cram on... Once you're on a train like that, its like a sardine can, but no one gets mad about it when people fall into them as the train moves or anything, everyone is just pretty resigned to the way it's going to be...)

(it's a little hard to see through the windows, but that's solid people on that train! (at Koenji)

Anyway, I should probably start packing, since it's 2:45 am and we leave tomorrow (not till the evening, but I teach tomorrow morning)... I'm kind of avoiding sleep tonight, so that I'm so tired I have to sleep on the plane... That's the plan anyway, hopefully it doesn't completely backfire on me! As for blogging while we're away, I'm planning to write every night on someone's laptop, and then hopefully post as well, but I might end up having to update online every couple of days, depending on what sort of net access I can get...

Happy Holidays!
D.

Woke up around ten this morning, just in time to wave Peter off to an eleven am meeting, poor guy :), and then after breakfast, etc., dragged myself out for another 'Anytime, Anywhere workout' from itunes (why is the hardest part of a workout the getting out the door?)... This time I just stayed in the area instead of biking down to Yoyogi Koen to run, and it was pretty good - there are so many tiny roads and parks around here that you can really do it without getting too bored, or having too hard a time finding the park bench/open area required for the plyometric part of the workout.

I'm really not sure why I saw almost no one when I was running, but when I was squatting, lunging, doing squat thrusts (burpies in Mully talk), etc. There seemed to be tons of people walking by and no doubt thinking 'that is one weird Gaijin grovelling around in the dirt!' Anyway, it was pretty good except that I could feel my shin muscle start to act up again which is annoying! I'm sure its mostly from not being in great shape, and running on concrete, but still stupid... I iced it for a bit when I got home, and that seems to have helped - when I walked to the station and climbed a bunch of stairs and stuff it was fine, and its not too swollen or hard now which is a relief! I'm sure it just needs some time in Hawaii to recuperate :p

Anyway, post workout/ice/shower/etc. I headed down to the station to meet Jordon for lunch. We went to this little cafe, which of course I can't remember the name of, but I think is something like 'Live'? (And by Live, I meant Dish - thanks for the comment/correction!) According to their coaster it's an organic cafe, and it was very tasty! I had no idea it was there, despite it being just across the street from the eki, but I'm glad Jordon knew about it, I'll definitely be going back - it was really cute, and just enough of the menu was in English to get by. I got the chicken rice plate which was really good, it had a bit of salad with it, and, both randomly and inevitably, an egg on top of the whole thing... Jordon had a big salad which looked really good too - maybe next time I'll try that!

After lunch we went to Shinjuku so Jordon could pick up some presents in Tokyu Hands. On our way there, we walked past the Krispy Kreme donuts which is opening tomorrow. They were making practice donuts and it smelled pretty good! Hitomi had told me that the first person to buy a donut will get 50 dozen donuts over the next year, so we asked the manager about it, he spoke good English and was able to tell us that they were indeed giving away that many donuts to the first person (I think the second person also gets half as many or something).

He basically told us that to have a chance, we'd have to be camping out, and even though no one had unfurled their sleeping bags yet, there were already a few people hovering, though I don't know if they were planning on staying! I could kind of see doing it with a bunch of friends or something (in the summer!), but I'll settle for stopping by on my way to Koenji tomorrow if I have time, to get one on the first day... In any case, 600 donuts is a LOT of donuts! Even if you took them to the office every week or whatever, that's a lot of sugar, especially with Krispy Kreme donuts which aren't exactly on the 'lite' side of things! It's also pouring right now, so I'm thinking its going to be a long, cold, wet night for whomever decides to do it...

After that, Jordon headed off to work and I went and got some Christmas cards and then headed back here... I was trying to decide whether or not to go back to that Japanese class since 'my' teacher isn't going to be there this week, and in the end, I decided to stay home and try and tackle katakana, so I've been working on that this evening, and I'm getting there, slowly. The most frustrating part is how some katakana characters (like ho) look (to me at least) a lot like a different hiragana character (fu), and also how there is barely any difference between (shi) and (tsu), and (n) and (so)I found some really good websites today though, with interactive learning and stuff, so I'm pretty happy with that decision for today, and katakana will be really really helpful to get sorted!

Very excitingly, Peter discovered that TiVO is now available in Canada, so we can time shift our shows to not being right in the middle of the day here (though that might mean I start watching a lot of random tv again which is probably not so good!)... We have to buy the box in Hawaii since they don't actually sell them in Canada, but then it can be muled home and set up by Mom and Grampa (and aren't you guys just thrilled about that ;) ). I've wanted TiVO since Oprah included it on her favourite things show all those years ago. Besides, if Miranda on Sex and the City can call it her lover for two episodes, it's got to be good!

Other than that, not too much for today, starting to think about packing, etc. but will probably successfully procrastinate that to tomorrow and Saturday. We have an evening flight, so there's lots of time to run around like crazy after I teach on Saturday!

And lastly, purely for your entertainment, comes this story, courtesy of the Mainichi Daily News, about a man who survived for 24 days on a mountain....with only a bottle of BBQ sauce! Hands down the funniest/most Japanese quote from the entire article:

"I'm sorry for all the trouble I caused everyone. I want to get better quickly and return to work," he was quoted as telling his boss."

That's the salaryman ethic we all like to see!

D. (who would be taking some time off to eat if she ever subsisted on bbq sauce for 24 days!)

Yay, I'm officially employed (in a not quite gainful way, but anyway...)!! Had my interview/meeting with the Being a Broad/Weekender folks today... Left the house at about 12:30 for the two pm meeting to make sure I had lots of time to get lost. In the end, I didn't so I had about half an hour before the meeting to spare. I ended up checking out this amazing home/design/book/etc. shop called AXIS which is GORGEOUS! Pretty expensive - 90$ cheese graters for instance, but truly everything you could ever need to turn your home into a gorgeous European spa style experience...

Anyway, finished drooling over the amazing stuff and then headed up to their offices, where I met Kieron, the head of marketing and sales, and Helen, the editor. It was a pretty short, informal meeting, no real interview aspect at all (I wasn't sure what to expect before I got there). They're probably going to split me between marketing and editorial, with some design work thrown in. I might get to do some movie/food reviews for the editorial side which would be fun :) Since we've run into Christmas/New Years, etc. I'll be starting the day after my birthday, January 10th, (at 10, since that was nice and matching). Sounds like the hours are fairly flexible, probably 3-4 days a week... Their last intern worked 3 days a week from 1-6, so I'll probably work a fairly similar number of hours.

That week is going to be pretty exciting (and good for the blog!), since on the 8th, I'm doing the 'coming of age day' ceremonies (Hitomi called, and it's OK for me to go, and she can come to translate for me), and then the 9th is my birthday (and getting a bank account at Shinsei day), and then work starting on the 10th! Pretty cool :)

After the meeting, I headed back to AXIS and checked out 'Bibliophile', their design bookstore. It was amazing!!!! They had such a complete and varied selection of books, I was busy spending thousands in there! They had, for instance, two retrospectives just on Josef Mueller Brockman (we talked about him in Critical Issues last year, which is why they caught my eye), a book on Equestrian Design, an entire shelf of typography books, etc. Pretty fantastic!

Wandered up to Roppongi Hills to eat lunch, and read my current book for awhile. It's pretty fascinating! It's called 'a man with no talents; memoirs of a tokyo day laborer', and is about, as the title suggests, the life of a day laborer, living in San'ya, which is an area of Tokyo with a lot of day laborers of fairly transient lives (he, for instance, lives in a shared dormitory in a Doya. Previously, he lived in a 'one mat' room, which is literally the size of one tatami mat, and had no windows. It's beautifully written, (it won the Kaikoo Takeshi prize), and very interesting!

I then walked up to the Canadian Embassy, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but about half way through the 35 minute walk, it started raining fairly heavily, but I wasn't really near a station at that point, and besides, I am from wet and wonderful BC and don't mind rain that much, so I kept going, and ended up at Tully's, where I bought a present for Peter to take to Hitomi's office's bounenkai (sp?) or year end party, which has a gift exchange component... (I'm not going, but I think I'm going to a different one in Koenji, so it's all good :))

Anyway, sufficiently dried off and warmed up after a hot cocoa, I headed to the Canadian Embassy theatre for another movie (that's where Jordon and Peter and I saw the movie about pottery that Lisel was in on my second or third day here). Today, Peter, Scottie, Hitomi and I all went to 'The Rocket', which is the Canadian movie about Maurice 'the rocket' Richard. It was good (esp. for a hockey movie :p) and very Canadian! I thought it was really well shot and produced, and Roy Depuis, the actor who played Maurice was really good - he won Best Actor (I think) at the recent Tokyo International Film Festival. The movie was mostly in Quebecois, with English and Japanese subtitles... I can't believe how they used to play hockey without helmets...Nutters!

After that, Peter and Hitomi and I headed to Tony Roma's, where we sat one table away from a famous Sumo Wrestler (from Bulgaria of all places!), Kotooshu. Peter recognized him because he'd just seen a segment about him on CNN's Talk Asia a couple of days ago! I could see his arm through a gap in the screen thing between tables, it was definitely bigger than the biggest part of my thigh...crazy! Our meal was also made more entertaining by 'Tiger' a very good, and quite bilingual magician who randomly came up to our table to do about ten minutes worth of tricks. He was very entertaining! He did card tricks and coin tricks, and did one where he had Hitomi hold a deck of cards between her hands, and then switched it for a block of Lucite. She swears she didn't feel him do it, and has no idea how it happened! It was pretty cool to watch, he was very good at it, and since we were so close, we could really examine what he was doing!!

Just arrived back home after that fairly eventful day, not sure if there's anything else going on, but I'd suspect not too much of anything!! Next couple of days there's a few things coming up, but mostly getting ready to go, and then on Saturday evening we leave! Pretty exciting!

D.

More soccer memories courtesy of Maggie and the 'GNS Soccer Girls Old and New' Facebook group - 200+ photos and counting!! (regular post for the day below)

Just after winning BC's in 2003 at West Point Grey... (l-r: Maria, Katie, Megs, Me, Tina)


(provincial champions 2003-great tournament!)

(Maria and me on the ferry on the way home from '03 BC's...That whole 'rwar' thing was a team thing that year... all the cool kids were doing it!)

(Sarah and Hugh...costume King Louie day...I miss King Louie! and um costume days such as this one)

D.

Got up mid morning and just hung out chatting with Andee, researching business card concepts, playing a typography/kerning game (I was surprised it existed too!) etc. until about 12:30. Then, since we had basically no food, I took the bike on a desperation trip down to Sasazuka to get a few last minute things to tide us over until we leave on Saturday...

Got back and ate lunch (big bowl of cup noodle and pot stickers from the deli), and then walked down to Shibuya in the rain (it's been VERY west coast weather today!) to teach at three. I got down there a little bit early, so I went into KAMO, which is this AMAZING four story soccer shop. They have so much amazing stuff in there! The cleats area is really cool, because it is all AstroTurf, so you can actually try out knocking a ball around a bit. They have a huge selection of stuff, and so much team branded clothing etc, it's amazing! The stairwell is also really cool because its like a little museum with signed boots, jerseys, posters, etc. There's a big Michael Owen display (swoon), and basically all the key players in European soccer are represented in their displays.

Anyway, taught my conversational lesson from 3-4:15ish, and then headed down to Tower Records to pick up the Weekender. Unfortunately, they were out, so I headed down to Shibuya station to go to Roppongi for my second lesson of the day at 5:30. I was basically figuring I'd just look around Roppongi Hills in the extra time I was planning on having, but instead, I managed to spend that extra time by getting on the wrong line, in the wrong direction no less from Shibuya! In my defense, it's one of those weird lines that kind of changes from Shibuya (in one direction its the Hanzomon line, and in the other direction its called something completely different... Very confusing!) By the time I got turned around, etc. I ended up getting to their house at exactly the correct time, which was handy!

We worked on some spelling (ha, lucky I was just testing him!), and did my Olivia activities and some basic grammar homework... The English language is bloody bizarre! On the way back to the station, I ate the bento I'd gotten grocery shopping earlier today, and then headed back to Yoyogi Uehara. Since I'd hijacked Peter's computer today (sooo purdy!), and needed to work on Karen's business cards, I stopped at the station McDonalds and got a thimbleful of diet coke in exchange for my Y100. Worked there for about an hour, and finally decided on a direction to pursue with the design.

Walked home, and spent four episodes of Sex and the City (finished season six now) working on the business cards, and now have a solid start on the design! Now I'm just watching the first episode of Corner Gas, and waiting for Peter to get home from his meeting... Tomorrow I have that interview, and then we're going to the Canadian Embassy to watch the Rocket Richard movie...

Dani

Post # 90! I'm accidentally writing a book over here!

Watched the finale of ANTM today, the not so annoying girl won, very important! I also spent some of the morning talking to Grampa (being the good grandchild and calling home for his birthday and all that :) ) Glad to hear that his reentry Visa getting was as successful as mine, so it looks like we're all going to be present and accounted for in Hawaii next week! I can't believe it's so soon!

Since that started to sink in, of course I had to do some online reading/research/shore ex planning, etc... Love researching stuff like this - its so many bonus hours of cruise enjoyment!!!

At twoish, I walked to Shibuya, kind of randomly, since I had no destination. (OK, so in my guidebook, I'd seen the TEPCO electric museum listing, but a forty minute walk does a lot to convince you of the utter lameness of going to a museum which suggests 'let's make electricity fun!') So anyway, it was a gorgeous day and stretching my legs (which are protesting after the futsal yesterday!) was great despite the not so organizedness of it all. I did end up listening to a couple of Japanesepod101.com podcasts though... I ended up looping through Shibuya and then walking across to the Wendy's on Omotesando for a salad (not so good as in North America!), and a couple of hours of studying Japanese... I finally finished recopying my notes from class last week, and making sense of most of it... Whether or not anything is sinking in is another story entirely, but at least I feel like I'm making an effort!

I also learned something very interesting reading one of Peter's 'how to learn Japanese efficiently' books - that katakana loan words aren't necessarily just a syllabalised version of an English word, which is what I thought - no wonder I was reading words and still not having a clue what they meant - I thought I was reading the katakana wrong (and yea, probably that too since I definitely don't know it all), but there are pretty tenuous links between some of those English origins and their katakana equivalents!

Came home at 6:30ish, and found out from Peter that I have an interview with the Being a Broad office on Wednesday, which is pretty exciting, hopefully that all goes well and will be something for the New Year!

Then, Venuppi and I settled in for some more Sex and the City (season six part 1, yes I know this order makes little sense, but I wanted to watch more, so whatcha gonna do?) Did a little bit more Japanese note organizing while I was watching, and then after Peter let me know he was going to be late, made spinach and feta ravioli for dinner (so good, I love Costco!)... V and I ended up gorging on two discs of Sex and the City before Peter made it home just before midnight... Just writing this and then heading back downstairs to watch Friends... I think I smell burnt popcorn (yum?).

Tomorrow I teach twice, and the rest of the week is slowly filling up with stuff which is nice, gotta keep the blog fed!

D

First things first: Happy Birthday Grampa!!!

This morning I taught those two kids from Saudi Arabia again, the Dad has decided he wants me to do three hours a week instead of one now, and also that he wants me to just help them with school stuff, which is good because it cuts down on prep time, and I know it's basically be at their level...

On the way home, I had my first getting off the train at the wrong station experience...what you get for reading I guess! It occurred to me that it might me my stop, so I glanced up, and saw kasumigaseki, so I lept off the train seconds before it pulled away, and realised that I'd looked at the part of the sign showing the next stop...oops! Not really a big deal but I felt stupid for leaping off the train like that, and then having done so at the wrong station!

Came home and hung out for a couple of hours and then headed to the Aquafield at Shibakoen to play Futsal with the Tokyo Gaijins. I just tried to google the location, but couldn't find a website for it. What is amazing though, is that googling 'Aquafield shibakoen' produces no results! I didn't that was possible anymore!
(interesting lighting! taken with the keitai at dusk, so amazing anything is visible! Tokyo Tower in the background, pretty cool!)

I was a little bit worried about playing, since I haven't touched a soccer ball since uvic intramurals in the summer, and I've never played futsal... It was probably, (LUCKILY!) just about the best group I could have stumbled into! It was a pretty international mix, all guys except for me, but everyone was super nice and there wasn't the anti-girl vibe like at York intramurals.... As per usual, they were all too scared to tackle me for the first five or so minutes, but I scored twice and got an assist, so they got over that pretty quickly!

Thanks to Hugh, of course, for teaching me how to play nice soccer! Since the group was predominantly British, with the rest being from soccer popular countries, we all played nice passing soccer, and everyone pretty much stayed to two or three touch which was great! Probably the size of the field (20x40 ish metres) helped as well, there just isn't time or space to mess around with the ball, you have to get it and give it pretty quick!
(you can see how narrow the field is in the this picture...we had endless kick ins, but not so much running!)

We were all about the same level, and even though everyone was trying, no one was overly competitive - both teams switched keepers ever goal, and we were switching players between the teams to keep the numbers up. It was lucky about the field size since we played for two straight hours with only one sub for two teams! It was also a gorgeous water base turf - such a nice surface! I've completely exfoliated/turf burned one leg, but that's OK, war wounds and all that!

I'm actually amazed how quickly I got my touch back and how easy it was to play fairly decently, a lot of the passing desicion making is just ingrained in there I think... (or maybe they were all just shocking so I couldn't tell how crap I've gotten!) But it was really good fun, so I'm glad I went! Will definitely be going regularly in the New Year once we get back from Hawaii...

Came back home, and Peter was at the office, but came home pretty quickly after me.... He made curry for dinner (very good!) and then we watched this weird movie called 42 up. It is part of a series of movies (7up, 14up, 21up etc) where the film makers followed these British kids starting from when they were seven and made a new documentary about them every seven years. It was pretty interesting, but I also found it incredibly depressing to see how crap so many of these people's lives ended up! And not like they were all homeless or anything, but just that all of their childhood dreams and convictions somehow got swept up and out... And most of the ones who swore up and down they'd never have kids, have like three (YIKES!) And failed marriages, and crappy council flats... It's really not an uplifting group! It's a very interesting and ambitious project/snapshot though!

Now Peter's watching Cars, which is cute, I saw it flying over here from Vancouver... I worked a little bit on some business cards for Karen's new venture, Braid Bling and now I'm just blogging, before probably reading a bit and then bed pretty early I'd guess, not so much sleep last night!

D

Well Maggie sent me on a trip down memory lane today, starting a facebook group for 'the girls of GNS soccer old and new', and posting over a hundred photos of us through the years! There are even some from the 1998 soccer trip to Toronto (where I had no hair, and we found champion under the bushes, and some other stuff went on in bushes, and we were absolute shit the first day, but sorted it out for the rest of the tournament, and I was totally terrified of Hugh...ahh good times!)
Me dressed up as the Gryphon during the year GNS-SMUS hosted CAIS in Victoria, and GNS won (2001)... I've decided my wearing a mascot twelve sizes too big has a lot to do with their success!


Some sort of left foot cross... (look at all my hair!) I have a feeling this may be from the Southlands tournament we won when I was in grade 11 or 12 and pretending to go to GNS... We beat St. Ann's in shootouts (I had to take one I think) and Sasch and Toby came to watch the final game... I think that was the tournament where Carley got her ribs bruised or something when she was in net?

OK, enough reminiscing I suppose!

I got up the first time at 5am this morning when Mom miscalculated the time zones and called me to get me to email her some photos for the book, which I did, I don't think I was too coherent about the whole thing, though!

Got up properly at tenish, and went to Choco Cro, on Hitomi's suggestion (a good one!) which is the nearest bakery to us, just by the eki, to try and get some bread for breakfast. I ended up with a whole bunch of chocolate croissants, which is, funnily enough, what they're known for - some regular, one with bananas, just because it sounded intriguing, and a couple with hazelnut (soooooo good!). I also picked up some bread, and made french toast with bacon and scrambled eggs for breakfast.

We didn't do too much of anything, watched a few episodes of the OC, read a little bit, etc... I also finished putting together the lesson for tomorrow, hopefully I got the level and timing about right! Eventually around sevenish, I needed to get out of the house (me and my cabin fever!), so I walked to the eki and got a drink at McDonalds, just for a change of scenery... I took my scrawled Japanese notes from Thursday and started re copying them to try and make some sense out of it, which I think I slowly am, but I really don't know how well it's going to go-we were talking about it later, and it's just so easy to not learn Japanese here, since it's pretty easy to get by with just a few words in day to day life...

Came home at 9ish I think, and we chatted a little bit about 'coming of age day', which is the day before my birthday this year (it's the second monday of the month, and this year, that's Jan. 8th) The whole country celebrates everyone who is about to turn twenty in the upcoming year, so I'll be renting a kimono, dressing up, going to Meiji Shrine, taking lots of photos I'm sure, etc. Should be pretty cool!

Hitomi made us a great dinner with pork chops, mashed potatoes, corn, asparagus and rice (basically anything any of us felt like eating all combined), and then we watched another OC (we're all caught up now to where they are in Japan, somewhere in season one or early season two I think), and then we started watching Lost in Translation again. Unfortunately, I fell asleep, so I kind of got out of sync with the story, and then I had to blog, so I've abandoned the movie, and I'll be watching it on my own one of these days!

Oh - I got mentioned on Marie's blog a few days ago, she liked my carrot picture, and I feel special :)

Teaching and then hopefully futsal (should be interesting/where is my touch!) tomorrow, and then our last week before Hawaii! Crazy!!!! We finally got our cruise tickets emailed to us since I phoned yesterday to find out where the hell they were, so that's good, maybe the paper docs will turn up in the mail at some point for scrapbooking purposes :) Can't wait :)

D.

This morning we headed off to JRA Baji Koen (which had 100 horses there at all times, it's pretty busy!) to check out the barrel. It is definitely the most realistic barrel I have ever seen! It looks like maybe they took a tack store model horse and modified it or something? Its great because it has a real surcingle on it, but the roof is a little bit low, so I just need to make sure I don't do cartwheels or something, it will be great for a lot of stuff though, just not quite enough room for trying some of the harder gymnastics stuff (which will probably make the JRA people happy!).... I'm pretty excited to have found it, and they seem happy enough for me to come during the week, as long as it isn't during the weekends when this riding/vaulting club of ten year old girls from Tsudamaki comes to use it. I haven't named 'my' horse yet, but if anyone has good suggestions, please leave a comment!

as yet unnamed barrel horse
nice side conformation shot ;)
basic seat (arms too low!)
(some kind of swing/heel click... *those are compacted sawdust bales in the background*)

Peter had a valuable learning experience about grumpy ponies today! There was an OLD (maybe with cushings) bizarrely conformed pony (13hh?) in a little paddock right across the aisle from the barrel. Peter kind of went over to it, and it pinned its ears and glared, so I warned Peter that he was grumpy and to give it space. Peter came back over to the barrel, and then drifted back over there a few minutes later, same thing....A few minutes later, another horse walked by, and grumpy pony rushed the gate and glared at that horse too...This was a pissed off horse!

Yet Peter, despite warnings, still went to check it out further (not trying to touch him, just kind of near the fence looking at him)... This time, the horse swung it's quarters over to Peter, and just as I'm trying to more forcefully warn Peter that he's dealing with an aggressive horse, the pony wheeled around and took a chunk out of Peter's leather jacket! Peter and his coffee went sprawling across the aisle, and the pony looked pretty happy with itself! Luckily Peter is OK, though a bit tender in the boobular area (he's so going to make me edit this out!), and now has a much better appreciation for the power (and length of neck) of a horse. (FYI, Peter, they can also kick as far back as their body length behind them...).

Luckily, no one saw, or I probably would have been thrown off the property and not allowed back, Hitomi had JUST finished assuring them that I grew up around horses and knew what I was doing! (They should have asked about my ojisan! <-- hey, something did stick from last night!) Peter and Hitomi left shortly thereafter, and I stayed for just under an hour, working mostly on compulsories, it's great to be able to practice reverse scissors with a surcingle, and the realistic neck is weird for a barrel, but actually probably very useful for horse kur building!

After that I came home for a few hours, didn't do too much of anything, and then headed back out to the library to pick up an eyewitness book (inventions) for the boy I was supposed to teach tomorrow. It's since been rescheduled for Sunday, so I have a bit of time to type up my lesson plans, but that's better than scrambling! In the same phone call, the Dad said he wants us to go twice a week now instead of once, so that's good too!

I came back, made myself some dinner (total bachelor meal of fries and turkey sausages) and then Venuppi and I settled down for a girls night in of about five episodes of Sex and the City (a random sampling from Season Six Part Two, just before the end of the series)... I did work through a couple of the episodes, planning questions and worksheets and the such, but really, we just chilled... No idea what's planned for this weekend, with the brief exception of Sunday morning, so it could be not a whole lot, but something might crop up! Actually, I just got an email from the Tokyo Gaijins about futsal on Sunday afternoon, so I might go check that out! Through that email, I also found this website, which is a way better train planner than the one I had been using, train times and everything! Maybe all of you who use Tokyo Transit knew about it already, but just in case, there you go :)

And that about sums it up!
Happy weekend!
D

I got up at eight this morning, and headed off to the Immigration Office to get my reentry permit for my visa. This is so that I can keep my gaijin card when I leave the country, and I won't have to do anything to keep my Visa status when I get back from Hawaii.

It took me an hour and a half or so to get to the office, which is about a fifteen minute walk from Tennozu Island stn. on the Rinkai line, almost as far as Tokyo Big Sight. I managed to miss a couple of trains, and then got off the train when I didn't need to, so I had to wait for the next one to come along, which was fine, but a little bit inefficient! I love how there is a Koban on every corner here, I was able to get directions from a police officer from the station (he obviously gets this question a lot as he had a dedicated map just to point out where I was headed)!

Anyway, I got there, found the forms, filled them out, when downstairs to the convenience store to buy my stamp, then went back upstairs, grabbed a ticket and waited for my number to be called. Sixty-four people later, I went up, presented my forms and AMPM receipt (they really do like convenience stores here for stuff!), and my passport (I can't wait til I get my new one after Christmas, my poor passport is pretty embarrassing due to the hot chocolate in the not so spill proof mug dumping into my open purse while merging onto the highway incident a couple of years ago)

Luckily, I made it through just before their lunch break, so I managed to get out of there in just over an hour, QR code firmly affixed to my passport, and headed back up to Shinjuku. Not exactly sure what I was planning to do there, but I ended up exploring for a couple of hours (I use the term exploring loosely, wandering aimlessly would be more apt a description!) I also finished the Google book, as well as David Sedaris' book 'Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim'. (over the course of the day, not just in Shinjuku!) I noticed the book when it was first released because of it's cover (a Chip Kidd design), its basically a photograph of the midsection of a naked barbie...pretty hard to forget! In the end, I picked it out at the library because I recognized his name from the This American Life podcasts, and I'm glad I did. Even though I don't usually like short story collections, this is more of a memoir in several parts. I thought it was a good quick and easy read.
(skyscraper-ey!)(I also found this guy during my random explorations of Shinjuku, tucked away in the pet department of the Odakyu Department store (what's the connection between the store and train line? Is there even any?), and had to take his picture... Why? Because this garden variety bunny was selling for Y54 600! (550$CDN)... That's nuts!!!! Incidentally you know you've been living in Japan for too long (Peter!), when you're told about this and go... Mmmmm that's not so bad... and then actually take a moment to realise how ridiculous it is to spend that much on a glorified rodent... The bunny was neighbours with the 40$ gerbils though, so who knows!)

Today's other interesting event was a three hour Japanese lesson this evening! Three hours is a long time for a private lesson without breaks! I found out about it through Metropolis, they are free lessons run by a volunteer group here in Tokyo, near Iidabashi station. I ended up with a private teacher, who was very nice, but moved pretty quickly! It's really really really lucky that I know as much (or as little depending on how you want to look at it) hiragana as I do, because that's all she used, as she covered (and I'm sure this isn't a complete list):

vegetables, jobs, locations, family members, where do you live, where do you come from, how long have you been here, past and future and present tense of several verbs, giving and receiving directions, how to ask and answer several different types of questions (with variations in the answer), money, numbers, modes of transportation, basic sentence structure, and of course, an on the fly refresher course in hiragana.... I'm glad I took notes as fast as possible, I'll definitely need to sift through all of this a time or ten! I can't believe how much I've forgotten since grade 12, depressing!

Anyway, she was very very nice, and helpful and answered all my questions, so I'm glad I went! She won't be there next week, but I'll probably still go, depending what else is going on, and then we're gone for two weeks, and then the whole country goes on holiday for a week, so it might be a bit of a slow start, but better than nothing really!

Head spinning, I headed up to Orbitune, which was easier to get to b/c of being on JR, and then hung out there for just under an hour while Peter and Jordon finished some stuff up... We headed home and listened to the beginning of the metpod on the way, they put my mini concert review in, which was entertaining...It's funny how your voice always sounds so weird to you when you hear it from another source!

And that's about it for today, tomorrow's very exciting news is a morning trip to Baji Koen for some barrelling! Thanks sooo much to Hitomi for persevering and getting this organized! I hope I can still do something on there when I get to practice tomorrow... ;)

D.

Pretty quiet day today, I decided to move the Visa trip to tomorrow, so after watching Gilmore Girls, I worked on a few things...I put together a mini study guide/activity set for OLIVIA, which means I'm about half way prepared for Saturday, and at least I can re use these if I start teaching other kids...

I also submitted something to the Common Ties blog, so hopefully they like that, they're looking for short personal stories and/or essays. I finished up the Deaf Experience thing I was working on yesterday and sent that in...

Did a few other things, but nothing too exciting, and then decided to take the Venuppi Puppi for a walk, so I listened to this week's 'This American Life', about getting in over your head, and we walked around Yoyogi Uehara... It was a really good podcast I thought - Very interesting story (act 2), about this guy who has taken it upon himself to play 'doctor' and give this drug to people that can in some cases cure them of their heroin addiction (it cured him of 27 years of addiction). Unfortunately, the drug has the same level of illegality as heroin itself and can basically kill you if you do it wrong. Pretty interesting dilemma for him...

I also read quite a bit more of the Google book today, it's pretty interesting! I can't remember if I said this yesterday, but it's written a lot like a memoir which makes it really interesting... I also went to their website and checked out their jobs page, and it really does seem like a pretty sweet place to work, with free food, 20% time spent on your own interests/projects, and an atmosphere of a college campus... They offer a lot of sweet perks, and I'm sure demand a lot in return, but for the types of people (largely single, young, nerdy/otaku) who work there, it's got to be a good deal! Too bad I didn't go into software engineering :p

Peter came home around ten, I made corn, mashed potatoes and sliced steak w/ terriyaki sauce for dinner, it was pretty tasty - I've decided that anything which combines butter with salt is a good thing! Incidentally, I tried the drink which I'd always thought of as being incredibly odd today (hot water on its own), and its actually really good! I should listen to people when they tell me these things (oh wait, I did!), but yea, its like the relaxing hotness of tea, without all the issues of making tea actually taste good, or the bitter yuckiness of coffee...

A few more episodes of Friends, and that's about it... I won't even try and draw the day out further, but if you're looking for some more reading, check out this site - pingmag, which is a great online source for all things art and design in Japan and around the world, in English...

D.

Today was kind of a booky day... First, I walked down to the library to refresh my book supply, and also pick up a copy of Olivia for teaching with on Saturday - she's such a cute little pig, I hope she goes down OK! It's a pretty good foreign books corner, I had a closer look at it this time, - there's lots of selection, and a pretty modern cross section of fiction...good stuff!

On my way out of the library, I was surprised to see a car just like mine, I think it's the first cavalier I've seen here and it happened to be 2dr and the same color (I think every cavalier made in 97 is the same color as green pea!), but it was really weird, because it was branded as a Toyota cavalier (as opposed to chevy). Very odd!

Then, since I was in the area anyway, I had lunch at this tiny Mexican restaurant/shack thing I'd noticed before near the big Ralph Lauren shop. I had 'taco rice', which was pretty good, entertaining use of sticky rice as the base though! I ate outside since we are having great weather this week, cool but not cold at all, lovely!

After that I decided to go to the Kanda bookshop area, which is just a road with tons of used bookshops on it I'd read about. I'm not entirely sure why I thought that I'd have any success with doing this, although I guess I was hoping for art and design books where the language wouldn't really matter, but it didn't quite work out that way. I'm sure if I could read Japanese, it would have been amazing, since there were probably 10+ used bookstores within a block, and some of them were pretty big, but I just didn't have the energy to wade through and see if there was something relevant I could pick out. I almost found some good art books, but it was weird, because they were actually all exhibition catalogues this store had somehow acquired, as far back as from the late 80's. There was just a bit too much text to make them worth getting for the pictures alone, but they had some interesting artists represented...

After that, I headed up to Mejiro since it was just as easy to get to as home, and since it was still pretty early, got a drink and finished up The Time Traveller's Wife. I really enjoyed this book, despite its element of fantasy. I think, because the rest of the book was realistic, that that's why I was OK with it... Same sort of thing with Harry Potter or the Robert Sawyer books (even some Douglas Coupland like Girlfriend in a Coma) - they are rooted in enough modern day normalcy to let me believe that they 'could' happen...

Walked around the back streets a little bit, and found (I'm pretty sure), the building we lived in last time, but everything was dark, and I'm not exactly sure... Next I headed to the office at around seven, and settled in to alternate between three things (I'm such a spastic worker!) I started reading The Google Story, which is pretty much as described in the title - very interesting! Written almost like a memoir of the company, its detailed without being boring, and very accessible...

I also started trying to figure out what we could do with Olivia, so I started to make up a little lesson plan, (and then got distracted and started drawing Olivia and a rainy day as an example!), but anyway... Hopefully she'll like the activities and they'll be at vaguely the correct level, and useful... I feel better at least appearing to be prepared though!

And finally, I wrote three pages of randomness about ASL. Again, for that common ties blog, which I'm still hoping to submit to, but have been mulling over possible story ideas for. Today I thought it might be interesting to talk about talking ASL classes, or possibly zeroing in the deaf experience project we did, but for some reason everything seems tainted with a thin veneer of schlock. This tends to happen when I decide I want to write 'well' and instead over complicate everything... That tongue in cheek phrase 'why use a big word when a diminutive one will do', is one that I would do well to keep in mind! Anyway, I have a few pages of spewage now, which can sit and by typed in tomorrow or the next day, with a heavy edit on :)

Interestingly, I discovered I still know a surprising amount of ASL! If anyone had walked in on me in the kitchen, they would have been fairly confident I'd lost my marbles (who knows, perhaps I have), but anyway, I was seeing if I could still remember anything, so I tested it out by 'discussing' my weekend and some other random stuff, and a surprising number of signs just came completely naturally, without having to think about it at all... I'm pretty happy that I haven't forgotten it all, that would be a shame, because I really did enjoy learning it-the whole idea of Deaf Culture still absoluely fascinates me!

Luckily I'd stopped that nonsense by the time I saw anyone, and surely if I'm admitting to it that means I'm not crazy and just talking to myself, right ;) At 8:30, Peter realised that his watch had stopped at 7, so he decided to get going with wrapping up his evening, and finished up at 10ish, but as it turns out, I ended up helping Jordon out with something until nearly 11 anyway, so we didn't exactly get home early - lucky Venuppi had company for most of today! I made spaghetti, and then we watched the first two episodes of season seven of friends, and now I'm just blogging this and then about to go to sleep...

If I feel like dealing with bureaucracy tomorrow, I may go and attempt to get my reentry permit on my visa...

D.

So after getting all of that blogging over with today, watching my weekly two hours of Canadian TV, and deciding/realising it was too late to get to anything (and by too late, I mean at least partly too lazy!), I still needed something to blog for today!

I'd thought today was going to be easy, since we'd kind of planned to go to foo fighters...which incidentally requires purchasing tickets...before the day of the show...(shades of RENT!) so that didn't happen, which is fine, there's SO much going on here it's not like we won't make it to another concert, but it did however leave me eight hours from deadline with about 10 inches of copy to find!

When in doubt, make a cake.

I grabbed my favourite carrot cake recipe from allrecipes. com, and then headed off to Sasazuka with the bike to pick up the necessary supplies, Peter isn't so well stocked for baking! There were some adventures in the grocery store, for instance, I couldn't find baking soda ANYWHERE, although I found baking powder several times over (does it even exist here, and if so, how's it packaged?)... I also ran into some problems when trying to buy enough carrots for six cups without spending Y700+ in the process (solution: stop at the fruit and veggie store on the way home!).
(yes, these are individually peeled and wrapped carrots...omiyage for the easter bunny?)

Anyway, I got home and made the carrot cake, and even made icing from scratch, since you can't buy pre made icing here because of some chemical (and it was really good, I love cream cheese icing!) Anyway, I was a little bit worried because I had to fudge the soda/powder issue, and the vanilla looked weird, but it baked nicely, and so I just took it out to cool, planning to ice it later, and then send part of it to Orbitune tomorrow (I really don't need to be eating that much carrot cake!)

Around then, Peter came home, we ordered pizza from pizza hut (sooo good - deep dish crust mmmmm! *it should be good for 3x the price of home!*) and then watched the final episodes of season six of Friends (when Monica and Chandler get engaged, right up there in my favourite episodes, its so cute!)

Anyway, iced the cake and tested it, and it was fine... not quite as good as usual, but still tasty. It seems like a) sugar here is less sweet, and b) carrots have no taste whatsoever! 6+ cups of shredded carrots went into the cake, and you couldn't taste them (and also probably contributed to the sweetness issue)... It was weird, but I was stuffed from the pizza, as was Peter, so we didn't really give it a proper taste, I just had a tiny sliver, and decided to wait and see what I thought about it in a couple of hours...

... And then went upstairs to check my email, after asking-

"Peter, should I move this cake so Venus doesn't eat it?"
"Oh no," the proud daddy replied confidently, "she doesn't really steal things like that"

Well it sounded suspicious to me too, but I was only gone for a second, just enough time to skim one email, (that's what they all say!) and when I came back downstairs, there was a very happy venuppi puppi, and a very unhappy carrot cake, icing side down, on the carpet runner in the kitchen. V's Daddy was summoned to carry out the discipline, and I recorded the carnage for all to see...
She'd started eating it on the counter I think, and then pulled it down onto the carpet. From the eating pattern, and the way she just kind of scraped her teeth along the top, its almost like she knew it was bad, and just couldn't help herself (or preferred the icing to the cake!)

With the entire day thus rendered basically accomplishment free, and V. properly embarrassed, we decided to cheer up by watching Spinal Tap, (or here) for, I'm embarrassed to admit, my first time! I can't believe I haven't seen it before, soooooo funny! Definitely a movie I'm going to be watching a couple of times!

Anyway, lucky for Venus, the cake had it's flaws, so all is forgiven... Besides, I have a horrible tendency to get uncontrollable giggles when other people are getting in trouble, even though I don't necessarily find the situation funny (this did NOT make me popular among teachers!) and laughing uncontrollably makes it hard to be mad (maybe why I can never hold a grudge past the two minute mark?) So yea, I don't really care, but it kinda sucked at the time!

Hopefully I'll be a little more productive (and V less destructive) tomorrow!

D.

PS - Happy 20th Andee!

Some design festa photos finally (downloaded with Peter's green memory card adaptor, since there was some contentious ambiguity in the last post)(that Korean shop/where are you going? booth...somewhere on there is a picture of Stephen from last year...random!)
(outdoor stage/lunch break location/part of a thumb)
(crazy painting, with lots of dots!)

(the drum group that roused us from our dazed collapse half way through the day)

Yay photos and linking are back, so here's part two of the design festa/wedding party blog...

Of course, I'm still short on photos from Design Festa, b/c Peter borrowed my memory card adaptor thingy I use to get my keitai photos onto the computer, and I'm not sure where it went... Anyway, links though! - Design Festa, which took place at Tokyo Big Sight, a VERY cool/weird/space age building! It all felt a bit expo somehow, but it's pretty cool! We collected a few meishi from the people who stood out (at least that's how I collected), so I'll post links to their websites as well, a mini online design festa for all of you :)

David Wright Photography This guy was at the gaijinpot booth, and had done the photography for their calendars, I think... Very nice landscapes, etc. Brilliant colours, I was curious how much post production work he does on the computer, I don't think those were straight out of the camera! I didn't ask though...

Gaijinpot claims to be no.1 for foreigners in Japan. I'd heard of it before, but every time I go to the site, their servers are overloaded. Anyway, they gave us each a 'Japanese name for the day', and we were supposed to wear our name tags and then if we found someone with the same name, go back to the booth, and get a free t-shirt. We didn't see anyone else wearing tags, so we kind of moved them down to the bottom corner of our shirts and gave up, but it was a cute idea. I was 'Ayaka', which means 'colourful and fragrant', Jordon's name meant 'wing', I think, but I can't remember what it was in Japanese... something starting with T maybe?...

Uh.di.ga.ge, was a random booth with a person in a box, and the box had photos (including one of Jordon's friend Stephen), and writing and stuff on it. Uhdigage has two meanings in Korean - where are you going, and also it's their store in Korea. They wrote our name's for us in Korean which was pretty cool... On the stickers they gave us it says, : "Unconcerned acts; we try to focus on atypical things with consciousness the things that always stay with us but cannot be recognized by us. For instance, have you ever noticed 'third faces' of typical things on the street"? Ummm I'm not sure, have I? Anyway, very friendly girls, hope they had a successful festa!

grafe - This woman had these incredibly multilevel greeting cards, where you looked through the hole in the front, and as you kind of stretched them out, multiple scenes appeared. She also had the little toys on the left, where you could kind of poke it and make it rock back and forth. She would demonstrate, and then mime doing sit ups, but I'm pretty sure they aren't workout penguins! She told us a story about them, which I understood all of one word of! Jordon figures maybe a traditional kids toy...

Karen Stuke - a German photographer represented by an online international gallery which had a booth there. Unfortunately, I didn't get the gallery card, just hers. She had some amazing photos of Sumo wrestling taking place in Germany, which really surprised me, I didn't think there was Sumo in Europe!

Todoroki Tomohiro - cartoon illustrations of happy people in cars... Reminds me of illustrations I've seen before, but can't place them off the top of my head!

25plan.com - a plan beyond the time limit a collection of absolutely amazing, intricate claymation type models... About 8-12 inches tall, so much detail and personality, very cool!

So...there's just a tiny tiny tiny sampling of what Design Festa is all about!!!

Now, photos of the wedding party... Peter put up the entire album here, if you have lots of time on your hands (there's 100+), or were there and want to relive it :) I'll post a few up here as well though...


pulling the ribbons from the wedding bouquet (the Japanese alternative to tossing the bouquet...The person whose ribbon remains attached to the bouquet at the end claims it, in this case Nahoko from Orbitune...)
Mark and Yukiko play for the other Yukiko and Kevin... so much talent at this party!
improvisational jamming... I really have no idea how musicians can just pick a key and a style and go at it without making a complete meal of the whole thing... It's absolutely baffling (but very cool!) to me, but then again, I'm not musical in the slightest, so there you go!

The happy couple!



And there you go, lots more photos in that album if you want to check it out, gives you a good sense of the event!

D, who needs to leave the house now so I'll have something to blog about later, other than 'I woke up, watched ANTM, and blogged..' :)

Jordon and I met up at Osaki stn. this morning (both of us a bit bleary eyed!) at 11ish and then continued on our way to Tokyo Big Sight to check out Design-Festa volume 24. Design Festa is a twice-yearly event out at Tokyo Big Sight which runs along the same theme as their gallery (which I visited earlier and posted lots of pictures of the outside) - basically anyone can exhibit their stuff, so there is a huge variety on display! It is the largest art and design show in Asia.

There is no way I could do any sort of justice to describing it, think university art show/Christmas craft fair/rainbow you can walk in times about 1000, and you might get a vague idea. There were literally more than a thousand small booths, with one or two artists at each one, and the stuff ranged from clothing to music to postcards to cartoons to...? It was pretty amazing! Sensory overload though! After the first couple of hours, we realised we'd stopped actually seeing everything and that it was turning into a big blur, so we collapsed in a corner to stare at some grey concrete and re group... We weren't the only ones! Around the entire, carnaverous hall were people leaning up against the wall, sleeping or staring dazedly into space - it was an exhausting proposition to get through the entire thing!

We did our best though, and almost got through the entire thing, we only glossed over the last few rows. Highlights included a massive model of an anime world, complete with buildings, lights, train tracks etc. on a huge foam earth type thing, a cartoon with the 'soft cream disaster', various fantastic photographers, stuffed food dolls and toys of various varietyies (such as beans and wasabi), and the guy who made these incredible masks and full body costumes out of foam, such as big horse heads and whole body hippo suits...

There were a few recurring themes, one of which was bizarre and slightly worrying dolls kind of in the style of Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride (which is very popular here!), often in various states of undress, dark clothing, and just a slightly creepy aura around them...(but i've never been a huge fan of those kind of dolls or clowns and the such) On the other extreme, there was a whole lot of cute, with tons of abstract patterns, bright colors, and the things like the food as stuffed animal genre.... Most places were selling things, there was an incredible over abundance or postcards, buttons, and keitai decorations! Probably a good idea though, I think there was just so much going on that people probably weren't buying big things, choosing to wait and see, and then getting overwhelemed or forgetting where that cool (fabric, clothing, painting, furniture, clothing, etc) place had been. We picked up a few things - Christmas presents on Jordon's part, and a tee shirt w/ silkscreening that I got from some people Jordon knew, randomly...

As well as the art, there was a variety of food (we visited the French stand), and an indoor and outdoor stage... We took our lunch outside and listened to a couple of songs by a band possibly called 'machine hayato', if I'm remembering what time we were there correctly... We also saw part of a taiko drumming (and dijireedoo type instrument) preformance by Gocoo on the indoor stage - there is a lot of energy involved in one of those drum groups-fantastic!

One of Jordon's friends happen to spot us from across the stage while watching the drumming, so we checked out the last few booths and then met up with him and headed back into town on the train, dropping him at Shibuya, with Jordon and me continuing on to Mejiro to prepare for the second event of the day, Yuki and Kevin's wedding party at Mac's Carrot. It was a great event! About 50 people, mostly split between Orbitune (Yukiko works for orbitune) and non orbitune people, and it was very casual and relaxed. They had their incredibly talented friends preform throughout the night which was great - we had (among others, there were quite a few!), a couple of piano preformances, and indian dance, singing a capella, and a lovely rendition of 'Ave Maria', electric guitar, trumpet, etc.... It was amazing how many talented people they know! We were treated to a buffet style dinner (italian mostly), and a delicious cake made by Felly...

It was great to see everyone from Orbitune again, and everyone had a fantastic time, Congratulations to Yukiko and Kevin, of course! Tomorrow, I'll be adding photos and links, so when I put photos up from the wedding party, I'll add in more details about what's going on/what happened... Stay tuned for part two tomorrow, I don't have the energy to sort through photos and links and stories right now! (plus the blogger templates are down again, so I can't post links, or photos again, hopefully by tomorrow it will be ok!) It's not even that late, only 1am, but I'm telling you, that Design Festa was draining! (but totally worth it-so much cool stuff!)

more tomorrow,
D.

(I just realised that there is something wrong with blogger, so I can't post links or photos, sorry!)

This morning I met the family who I was introduced to by the woman I met at the Tokyo Writer's Day. They are from Saudi Arabia, and have two kids who are in grade three and six. I'll be helping with math (luckily just the vocab!), reading, socials, etc. Basically whatever they need help with... They were very nice, and the kids are very cute!

Got back home just before noon, and then after hockey was over I convinced Peter that we should go back to West Park Cafe (the cafe behind the station), for brunch. He's been telling me how good it is, and I wanted to see for my self (and was craving eggs!), it was pretty delicious - Peter got eggs benedict and I had a garden vegetable omelet. We were sitting beside two gaijin girls in their mid twenties, and they were having a pretty hilarious conversation...

One particular topic of interest was a story of how the one girl, some kind of journalist, had gone to an Onsen spa, where the owner was particularly proud to show her the special foot bath they have where small live fish eat the dead skin off your toes as you 'relax'! She was pretty horrified by the whole prospect, and I'm not going to lie - fish creep me out, so I wasn't exactly about to jump in and defend the process! People have the greatest conversations sometimes!

We came back at fourish and then I settled down to read some more of 'The Time Traveller's Wife', which is very weird, but I like it, it's a handy literary device that the author has come up with - if you come up with a competely implausable subplot (and base the laws of your world around that) within a book largely based in a realistic world, you can do whatever the hell you want and it will all, somehow, make some sort of sense... Handy!

However, I haven't been getting much sleep lately as a result of this stupid sensor on my pump (I got off the correct timing for calibrating, so it will wake me up at 5 am demanding bloodtests, after having (not nescesarrily correctly) told me a few times that I need insulin (plus now I just anticipate it, so I think I'm waking up imagining it vibrating too!)... V. frustrating, but I'm giving it more time for us to get used to each other! (and I'm starting to like it more during the day, even though its definitely not as accurate as I would have thought!)

The upshot is I ended up crashing for a nap with the venuppi puppy for a couple of hours this afternoon while Peter went to get more storage solutions for his closet. He has an insane amount of clothing!

After I dragged myself out of bed (why are naps so much better at the beginning than the end?) I worked on Mom's website for awhile (Mom we need to start talking about that, I'm running out of material to shove in), while Peter put together his shelves and cupboards and stuff... Then I made us some pasta with garlic bread for dinner (yum!) and we watched a few episodes of season six of Friends. Unfortunatly, for some reason, this is the last disc that Peter needs to watch, as, inexplicably, he watched the series in this order: seasons: 7,8,9,10,1,2,3,4(where I started watching),5,and now 6. Since 4-6 are the only series I'd basically seen in their entirety, I guess I'll be going back around now as well :)

And that's about it - I'm starting to wonder if I should only be blogging the days where something interesting happens, but I'm a little bit worried that that's a slippery slope of procrastinating to the point of barely blogging, which I don't nescessarily want - let me know what you think, and if you do only want the 'interesting' days, what counts as interesting?!

Luckily, tomorrow is a double header of good stuff, hopefully the photo/linking/spell checking capabilities will be back up by then!

D

This morning was gorgeous and sunny, so I decided to do one of the things from my Tokyo for Free guidebook, and went out to Gyosen Park, and the free zoo in it which is run by the Edogawa Ward. It was a bit of a trek on the subway, but not too bad, nothing a couple of podcasts couldn't take care of! I stopped at a bakery in the station (bakeries are soooo good here!) and got some stuff for lunch, and then had a picnic by the huge fountain in the park before going into the zoo.
(random fountain shot)

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about zoos, and my gut instinct would be that this one didn't have big enough enclosures (especially for the sea lions or whatever they were, practically swimming on top of each other as they did laps), but the monkeys and other animals seemed pretty happy. They had three different types of monkeys... so cool! The spider monkeys were just flying around, running up and down high tensile ropes and being very cirque du soleil-ish in their movements...There was a baby, and he was sooo cute, just generally cavorting around, while the older looking ones just hung out in their trees and sunned themselves sensibly.
(baby was so cute! he was pretty good at swinging himself around and catching himself with his tail already...I wish I could do that!)
(sharing a secret of some sort?)
(in the other enclosure there was also a baby, this one was maybe younger since it stayed with its mom most of the time...)
(big group of monkeys...I think there was food in the water just below them...)
("Look Mom! No hands...or feet!" those tails are pretty cool!)

There were also penguins and a lone snowy egret in together. The penguins weren't very big, only about a foot tall, but pretty cute! I'm not sure what kind they were, some sort that doesn't mind the heat I guess, but couldn't read the signs... They were fishing for pre killed fish which seemed a little weird (like whole, dead, small fish lying at the bottom of their pond), but who knows, maybe penguins are lazy and don't like having to work too hard for their supper?
(single snowy egret (pretty sure that's what that is, anyway), I liked the reflection of the water across it's body...)
(one of the penguins, there were several, in and out of their pool)
(having a swim and probably some lunch, the fish were just below him)
(one of the other animals, a lesser panda - kind of a cross between a raccoon and a panda visually speaking, very cute!)
(prairie dogs having lunch-funny to see these guys in a zoo! Same with the grey squirrel exhibit, those guys are a dime a dozen at home!)

After I finished taking waaaaay too many pictures of the awesome monkeys, I made my way home and discovered Felly here baking the wedding cake for Yukiko's wedding party on Sunday... It smelled delicious, and she made us a few cupcakes with the leftover batter, very tasty! I took V. out for a walk to get her out of Felly's hair, and then we came back and I worked on my scrapbook and dipped into Peter's ridiculous comedy shelf to watch Mel Brook's History of the World Part 1. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it... I think my main problem was only listening to it and not watching it while I was working on my scrapbook-the parts where I was actually watching were much funnier!

Peter came home at 8:30ish and has just been watching Sopranos season 6, while I made myself some udon for dinner, worked a little bit on that dinner party thing (starting to get a bit worried that eight people's worth or whatever I'd planned is just going to look like a big mess), and started 'The Time Traveller's Wife'. (I finished 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' earlier today - good book!)

Tomorrow at ten I'm meeting a family that I was introduced to through someone from the Tokyo Writer's Day - they have two kids I might be tutoring, so I should go get some sleep... No idea why (OK, I have an idea it has to do with my pump keeping me awake all night!), but I'm exhausted, so that's all for today...at least there are cute pictures to make up for the spotty writing :)

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