New Adventures: Berlin 2013

This blog began as a travel blog, segued into a food blog, and then lay dormant for over two years. It's now being resurrected to document the adventures of a little blue animal named Anchois who will be traipsing across Berlin and assorted European places from April to June, 2013. Enjoy!

Pictured: The German countryside in the grips of an unusually snowy March, just before arriving in Berlin.

My Wandering Days Are Over

Photo: Kamakura-Enoshima Furii Kippu, day pass for a trip to the region in Kanagawa-ken, with a background of commuters hurrying for the Shonan-Shinjuku line back to the city. I had visited Kamakura for the first time on my first trip to Japan, in July 2008. It was such a pleasure to return on my last full day in Japan, in Asia, to go back to see the Daibutsu (Great Buddha) and the Kannon Hasedera Temple, as well as new discoveries like Enoshima Island. Six months on, so much to revisit, so much new to find.

You know my wandering days are over
Doesn't mean that I'm getting boring
You tell me
I'm tired of listening to myself here

I'm back! Safely home! And although, like in the song by Belle & Sebastian, "six months on, the winter's gone", I'm not filled with melancholy like the lonely circus boy and disenchanted pony. Instead I'm full of energy to leap into my new life, to settle into Vancouver, and to sort through the detritus of what seems like several past lives currently tucked into myriad boxes.

But I'm not turning my back on the trip altogether. I've transferred all 7,389 photos to my computer, and eventually I'll start sorting through them and posting some more here. Although I never got around to writing most of my planned posts on my travel music, I might get around to it now...and there are always future trips to plan.

You know my bip-bopping days are over
I hung my boots up and then retired from the disco floor
Now the centre of my so called being is
The space between your bed and wardrobe with the louvre doors

Lyrics here.

The playlist: revisited

I've just passed the halfway point in my trip and in honour of this milestone I wanted to revisit my original idea for the blog focus - my travel playlist. To date, I've only written the initial post, but with a few months left I might still manage to get the better part of it in.

The night before I left I managed to put some of the songs up to be listened to, but to my frustration I could only get about half the playlist on there. More frustratingly, it's a skewed half that cuts out nearly everything that wasn't in English (half the list) and even some of the less popular anglo stuff. Furthermore, now that I'm in a different region, I can't actually see what's there and what isn't. So I thought I'd start by posting the entire list all together, then continue with individual posts on the songs as I go.

Without further ado:

1. KYOTO, Polémil Bazar
2. BARCELONE, Jean Leloup
3. GO PLACES, The New Pornographers
4. BRIDGES AND BALLOONS, Joanna Newsom
5. SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?, The Clash
6. DESPIDIDA DE IMMIGRANTE, Cesaria Evora
7. SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW/WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
8. CITY OF THE DAMNED, The Gothic Archies
9. NICOTINE & GRAVY, Beck
10. MY WANDERING DAYS ARE OVER, Belle & Sebastian
11. NANTES, Beirut
12. PARADIS PERDU, Jean Leloup
13. THE LEGIONNAIRE'S LAMENT, The Decemberists
14. TIENS-TOÉ BIEN J'ARRIVE, Diane Dufresne
15. J'ERRE, Dumas
16. THE LADY IS A TRAMP, Ella Fitzgerald
17. READING IN BED, Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton
18. ALL WE HAVE IS NOW, The Flaming Lips
19. JET SET...GO!, The Guild League
20. AMSTERDAM, Jacques Brel
21. JULY, JULY!, The Decemberists
22. VOYAGER, Jean Leloup
23. LA TRAVERSÉE, Les Colocs
24. COME BACK FROM SAN FRANCISCO, The Magnetic Fields
25. GREEN ROCKY ROAD, Kate & Anna McGarrigle
26. CLAM, CRAB, COCKLE, COWRIE, Joanna Newsom
27. PAPA WAS A RODEO, Kelly Hogan & the Pine Valley Cosmonauts
28. SHOREBIRD, Kim Barlow
29. THAT TEENAGE FEELING, Neko Case
30. J'Y SUIS JAMAIS ALLÉ, Yann Tiersen
31. VOILA L'ÉTÉ, Les négresses vertes
32. I'M SO FREE, Lou Reed
33. GUESS HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU, The Lucksmiths
34. CALIFORNIA (ALL THE WAY), Luna
35. ALL THE UMBRELLAS IN LONDON, The Magnetic Fields
36. WALKING SONG, Kate & Anna McGarrigle
37. JE SUIS PARTI, Jean Leloup
38. CARRY ME, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
39. DESAPARECIDO, Manu Chao
40. TODAY IS A GOOD DAY, MC Solaar
41. LAND DOWN UNDER, Men at Work
42. MUTINY, I PROMISE YOU, The New Pornographers
43. PAR REVE, Misia
44. RACING LIKE A PRO, The National
45. WORLD IS SPINNING AT 45 RPM, Pizzicato Five
46. THIS TORNADO LOVES YOU, Neko Case
47. MYRIAD HARBOUR, The New Pornographers
48. THE GET GO, New Young Pony Club
49. THERE SHE GOES, MY BEAUTIFUL WORLD, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
50. COLD COLD GROUND, Tom Waits
51. LE VENT NOUS PORTERA, Noir Désir
52. UN HOMME À LA MER, Stéfie Shock
53. FADO DO RETORNO I, Misia
54. VIA CON ME, Paolo Conte
55. CHICAGO, Sufjan Stevens
56. KIMBERLY, Patti Smith
57. ALL AROUND THE WORLD OR THE MYTH OF FINGERPRINTS, Paul Simon
58. WHERE IS MY MIND, The Pixies
59. I'M GONNA BE (500 MILES), The Proclaimers
60. WALK UNAFRAID, R.E.M.
61. LIFE ON MARS?, Seu Jorge
62. GENOVA PER NOI, Paolo Conte
63. WEIRD DIVIDE, The Shins
64. IS IT REALLY SO STRANGE?, The Smiths
65. TOXIC HOLIDAY, Stars
66. LE DÉCOR, Stéfie Shock
67. SEVEN SWANS, Sufjan Stevens
68. ISTANBUL, They Might Be Giants
69. SINGAPORE, Tom Waits
70. ASK, The Smiths,
71. EVOLVER, Veda Hille
72. MON AMOUR TOKYO, Pizzicato Five
73. ISLAND IN THE SUN, Weezer
74. SEVEN NATION ARMY, The White Stripes
75. THE STATE THAT I AM IN, Belle & Sebastian
76. ADVENTURES IN SOLITUDE, The New Pornographers
    

Itadakimasu!

When I was staying on the farm in Fukushima, the kids would lead us in a little pre-eating chant that I hesitate to call grace, but anyway, a pre-meal chant.

o te te o pon!

oishii gohan

itadakimasu!

Which roughly means, "Hands together! Yummy rice, itadakimasu!"

Adults mostly just say the itadakimasu part. I'm not sure what the literal translation would be, but it's what you say before you eat and both has the connotations of bon appetit as well as thanking your host for the meal. You bring your hands together and bow slightly as you say it all together in unison. Then you can start!

When you're done eating, you do the same thing but instead you say gochisousamadeshita, thank you for the delicious food, more or less. Again there's both a sense of thanking the host or chef, and saying that the food was delicious, and maybe even thanking the food for being delicious. At a restaurant you say it to the staff as you're leaving.

Gochisousamadeshita, Japan!

Edited to fix the spelling mistake I persistently made. Thanks to Raph for pointing it out. He also points out that itadakimasu is usually translated as "I humbly receive".

Something Problematic About Japan

is that everywhere I go, I realise I will need to go back again later because it is so awesome.

Also, it is very difficult to pay your own way, as people are always snatching the bill away and not letting you have it. It's surprisingly hard to do anything about this when you can't talk to the staff and they can. And then even when you do succeed, it's a Pyrrhic victory because your host will probably add on something else more expensive that you didn't know about and sneakily pay for it when you are not looking.

These are the kinds of problems that I am having currently.

In other words, I am having an amazing time.

(though I am thinking of implementing a policy, once I'm back in Canada, of randoming paying for things for Japanese tourists I've never met before just to even the scales a bit!)

Ine, Kome, Gohan

Rice, of course, is the staple food of Japan and as such has great cultural importance. So much so, that there are different words for it in its various stages. I went north to Fukushima prefecture to stay on an organic rice farm and among many amazing experiences, learned a few new words.

Ine is the rice plant. I arrived in the last days of the rice harvest on the farm, so I was able to work with bundles of ine that had already been cut. The host farmer built a frame of wood and bamboo and then we twisted the rice stalks and hung them over it to cure for a few weeks before they can be threshed. I went crazy taking photos of the gorgeous green and gold bundles! The wild pigs who come out at night also go crazy for the ine, so one of my tasks was to help raise the electrified fence to preserve the carefully placed rice stalks.

Kome is the uncooked rice grain. While it was too early to sample this year's crop, there were huge bags of the farm's rice still remaining from last year. The small farm, which is totally organic and largely tended by one person, with sporadic volunteer labour coming and going (much of it, like me, totally unskilled), produces about 1200kg of rice per year. Most of the farmers in the area have their own threshing machines, but they tend to store the grains whole (as brown rice). Vending machines are of course practically a symbol of Japan in their omnipresence, but rice-producing areas have their own particular kind. There are apparently small machines dotted over the country roads that, for a 100 yen coin, will polish a bag of rice from brown to white! Sadly I didn't actually get to do this myself as I really loved the idea of it.

Gohan is the word for the cooked rice, as well as basically meaning meal or food, as it does in many Asian languages. And we ate gohan every day, sometimes three times a day.

Coming as I do from Canada, I've never before been able to eat rice where it was grown. Here, I could look out the kitchen windows and see the fields that it came from. I can't possibly express what it was like to eat this rice. I could have happily eaten it on its own with no seasoning at all, and needed no more to my meal. It was so full of flavour, so bright and shiny, each grain soft and sticky yet retaining a subtle chewiness, a feeling of being alive. We ate it polished white, we ate it brown, we ate it cooked with a few grains of black rice, so that there was a scattered purplish colouring through it. We ate it in the mornings with miso soup, and at lunch patted into little onigiri and flavoured with tsukemono (pickled vegetables).

Rice.

Street Proportions/Ebbing and Flowing.

The stereotypical image of a Tokyo street is something from Shinjuku or Shibuya, lined with tall buildings flashing with neon lights, and mobbed with people filling the intersections at each walk light (but not jaywalking - that's not really done here).

And that definitely exists. But what makes Tokyo so much more interesting to me is the huge contrasts available in the city, and not necessarily ranging over a large area. In fact one of the things I found amazing on my first visit here was that you can take a turn off one of the huge high-tech boulevards of Shinjuku and turn into a little narrow street filled with old-fashioned wooden buildings, traditional lanterns hanging to advertise the kind of food served inside. Or turn between two skyscrapers into a small Shinto shrine sandwiched at ground level and looking quite ageless.

While the main thoroughfares have raised sidewalks, the smaller streets can get quite narrow, and are paved all flat, sometimes with a line painted to divide a small side lane, though I think that's supposed to be for bikes. They're not closed to cars or motorbikes, but pedestrians are free to roam widely, and cars will yield to them, usually quite patiently. It makes the city feel like it belongs much more to pedestrians and cyclists...

While most of the buildings are new thanks to the various disasters of the 20th century (earthquake, fire, bombing), the streets have retained their old-city feel in their variable width. Maybe for a wide-streets North American it's especially impressive, but I always love little tiny alleys that give the feeling they've been occupied for centuries...here they range from the smaller streets still wide enough for a car to the narrower ones barely wide enough for a motorbike (not that that deters anyone) to the little tiny ones not wide enough for two people to pass side by side.

And everyone seems to cultivate a little garden along the outside of their house (so that the tiny streets appear to be long lines of spiky and exuberant green with narrow bands of sunlight separating them) Another example of Tokyoites' trust in their neighbours' good behaviour. Sometimes flowers or ornamental plants, often little pots of edamame or eggplant, even huge fruit trees, growing in pots right on the street. So far I've seen mikan (Japanese mandarins), several different oranges, and persimmons. Everything is so beautifully tended. Yesterday, stepping off Omotesando, one of the fancy Champs-Elysees-esque shopping boulevards, I found this adorable cafe called Motoya Espresso Express, which was indeed an espresso bar operated out of a little VW van, parked in a little parking lot of the type that has a car stacking-elevator to fit more in. It was quite cosy - chairs, ash trays, art books and newspapers to look at, and all presumably tidied up every night when the owner had to park the van! Despite this, the owner had carefully placed tiny plants in a neat row all along the front and side of the van. Of course I had to have a latte - it was delicious.

The ebbing and flowing thing is a more general observation from travelling in places like Venice or Prague, which seem to be mobbed with tourists all the time. My experience there has been that stepping one or two blocks away will take you to places that are completely deserted. We seem to flock together in huge congregations, or not at all.

And it's that way here. In a city of so many people you might think it would be crowded all the time, but actually I keep wandering through places that are almost empty and silent. It's not just that I have been getting up early - you can go from the hurly-burly of Ameyoko, former black market and good place for cheap shopping and meals (on which more later), on a Sunday afternoon to pleasantly quiet pretty backstreets where you could hear crickets chirping if it weren't for the fact that they don't chirp until evening.

Monday was a holiday, which affected my plans a little (I showed up at the fish market at 6:30 to find it was closed!) but ended up turning out well as I ended up wandering around the nearby neighbourhood (and island) Tsukishima and finding the most beautiful, peaceful shinto shrine I've yet seen, all green and stone in the morning light, and with incredible wooden carvings of waves tucked into the upper corners of the buildings. Hardly anyone was up early on a day off, so I seemed to have the city to myself for hours and hours. Eventually I was so hungry I headed for Shinjuku to have breakfast (the part of the city that never sleeps is a good bet even on a holiday!) and was almost disappointed that the famously busy station was almost sleepy at what should have been rush hour! A few hours later though, the holiday crowd made up for it.

Crowded or deserted, narrow or wide, this city is fascinating.

Wrapping your mind around Tokyo and Japan.

Well, it can't be done. Too immense! But just to give some kind of idea...

Imagine that every single Canadian moved to Toronto (or maybe Vancouver, it's coastal), and invited an extra two million people to join them. That's a city the size of greater Tokyo. (We'll imagine that the infrastructure suddenly and magically adjusts to cope).

Now imagine that millions of people ride bicycles. Since naturally 35 million people can't all drive cars, public transit is used a lot, but bikes are a great option for getting TO the subway station or just getting around for short distances. Subway stops, schools, etc, have huge lots to leave bikes in, and they are also everywhere just hanging out on sidewalks.

The thing is, PEOPLE DON'T LOCK THEIR BIKES. Sure, a few do, but nearly all the bikes I have seen are just peacefully resting on their kickstands, waiting for their owners to reclaim them a few minutes or many hours later.

That to me says so much about Tokyo the city, and Japanese culture as well. Imagine doing that in Montreal - your bike would be gone in about 5 minutes, in a city less than a tenth of the size. Amazing.

Familiarity.

A lot of posts today as the computer is unexpectedly free, and I don't expect to have much access, if at all, after this for another week or so...

Very little about Japan should feel familiar to me. One glance marks me as a permanent outsider, not to mention my highly imperfect grasp of the language, my lack of knowledge about the culture, etc, etc. But what's funny about travelling is that way that familiarity quickly becomes a very relative concept.

Arriving in Narita Airport after the long flight felt a lot more like coming home than it really should have, at the start of such a long trip and in a country that I know so little about. But it did - the way the arrivals area is laid out, which ATM I could take money out of, where the convenience store was on the way to the train station...I knew them all, and so felt comfortable and relaxed. Just having been through the airport before made such a difference even if it was already a year ago.

And it's been the same thing over the last few days. Seeing things that I have seen before, revisiting Senso-ji Temple in Asakusa or getting a pon de ringu at Mister Donut (ah, Mister Donut!) gave me these strong feelings of nostalgia, however little sense that makes.

Not that I'm complaining. While I've had my moments of feeling incredibly foreign and hopelessly unable to blend in or even function, I appreciate very much having at least some small sense of belonging to this wonderful city. Riding the Tokyo Metro, usually the only blonde(ish) head in the car, I realised how much I take for granted being able to move around this city already! It's a good feeling.

Child mind.

One thing I realised, sitting on the plane, is that I still actually have no idea what it means to be travelling for six months. I can't really wrap my mind around it at all. I can tell this in several ways - how giggly I feel when I think of how long I have, joyful yet incomprehending; also how I feel nearly panicked in my huge desire to rush around and experience EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW before it's too late. (Note to self: not really the best strategy when jet-lagged.) I try to tell myself, relax, you have a whole month in Japan, you don't need to eat everything all in one day. Although, given the variety of amazing things to eat, I still can't afford to slack off!

The thing about travelling, besides the exciting travel seeing-new-places part, is that it's a way of being so open to the world all the time. I really admire the way babies are so single-minded about everything they experience, but as an adult it's hard to sustain that kind of attention (and also, it's tiring). But travelling and seeing new things all the time, you are forced to pay attention. You need to learn new ways to behave, read new signals, hopefully speak new languages and meet new people. Everything new! All your senses are alive all the time. What an opportunity, to get to be like a baby for six months! The trick will be to balance all that newness with enough rest time to take it all in.

Another reason I'm happy to have all this time to reflect is the anniversary this trip coincides with. Ten years ago, almost to the day, I stopped dancing, something which made me feel like my life was over. Obviously it wasn't, but at the same time I never fully reconciled with myself over that decision. Remembering that, it seems all the more important to be conscious, careful about the implications of what we do. In a way, this trip for me is a very long meditation on that.

Plus all the tasty food.

Sunny with a chance of scattered thoughts.

I've been in Tokyo for about 24 hours now, but it feels like so much has happened since I left home that I can't quite believe it hasn't been longer...as I sit here trying to sum up the day, all these images keep flashing past my eyes. I've been having all these great ideas for posts all day, but jet-lag leaves me with only the ability to string together streams-of-consciousness for now.

Saying goodbye to the condo for good...riding the Skytrain to the airport with Maman...the moment when the plane started taxiing and the full joy of the trip hit me so that I was craning over to see the ground falling away from the window, grinning like an idiot...

...and more of that same grin as we crossed the international date line, hovered along the coast of Honshu, and finally landed at Narita...as I bit into my first onigiri of the trip...as the narrow backstreets of Tokyo started showing up from the trainline...

My enthusiasm was checked a little bit by lugging bags about and having to relearn how to use the ticket machines for the train and subway, but getting lost on the way to the hotel was par for the course (I'm planning on writing a whole post on Japanese addresses) - it gave me a chance to wander around the narrow residential streets with their container gardens (fruit trees! edamame!)

Today was a brilliant blue warm sunny cool-breezy autumn day, which I needed to spend on foot, starting from the hotel and just wandering around. Tomorrow I've decided instead to get a public transit pass and ride around covering as much of the city as I can...and then Tuesday will have to be a combination of them both. Wednesday I head north!

J'voudrais respirer l'air de Kyoto

J'aimerais bien savoir à quoi sers-je?
J'aimerais voir une forêt vierge
J’voudrais comprendre pourquoi Tout?
Et ne plus rien vouloir du tout

If there's anything more appropriate to kick off a transcontinental adventure than a Québec francophone klezmer song about the perils and joys of globalisation, I don't know what it is.

In any case, that's what I'm doing. In a few days I'm setting out for a six month tour of Japan and South-East Asia, and while I'm currently in that stage of preparation known as "denial" where everything feels quite unreal, it probably really is going to happen.

My plan is to blog about the trip here, and since my Brooklyn blog languished fairly quickly, I've decided to give myself a bit of a focus. Another thing I did to help prepare for my trip (=procrastinate) was to make a travel playlist - about five hours of music that in my mind at least was connected with travelling. I'm still hoping to find a way to put it all up here for you to listen to, but that may not happen.

So my focus is to use the songs to structure posts about travelling itself, as well as the details of the places I visit. This is a risky project that might degenerate rapidly into pretentious rambling, in which case I will cut it off.

Today's song, "Kyoto" by Polémil Bazar, is my response to everyone who asked me, "Why Asia?" or even better, "Why travel at all?" It's not so much that I have a good answer, more that I have a worse answer to the question "Why not?" So in this case I think I'll let the song answer for me.

The photos in this post are all from my trip to Kyoto in summer 2008. I hope to be posting new ones soon...

Oh and yes, the little wombat will be coming with me. She wants to see South-East Asia too!

The full lyrics to the song are here:
http://www.hugofleury.com/polo/texte_chants_mines.htm#KYOTO

J'aimerais voler, quitter ma tête
Aller semer partout la fête
Visiter Bagdad à vélo
J'voudrais respirer l'air de Kyoto

--Polémil Bazar