Day 48/63

We reluctantly left the save haven that is our friend’s place in San Francisco and got a taxi to the airport. San Francisco has been much better than could be expected and certainly a place where we’ll return one day.

Today’s flight was the only one that we couldn’t do with One World tickets, so we got United Airlines cheap flight. This meant that we got surprised with another 40dollars to check in our bags. I have to say that the Around the world ticket is a pretty good deal: You don’t have to pay for everything else in the side… You get luggage for free and you also normally get served food and alcohol. Not with American Airlines though, so don’t be surprised. If they say they are selling ‘entrees’ on a 5 hour flight, what they mean is: Do buy food if you are hungry.

In any case, San Francisco airport had little shopping to do, so I continued to bury myself into the Twilight saga, which I am reading now, so that I don’t have to waste my time back home. It’s very addictive, even if it’s not all that good. I suppose Best Sellers are like that.

As we arrived to British Columbia, it was immediately like coming back home. It’s about as cold, I can imagine, and there seems to be plenty of water. The immigration’s decorations were filled with aboriginal cloths and poles, they made me feel like I will have a good time in this city. We got another taxi to our hotel, the Park Inn, right outside Downtown Vancouver.

The selection of restaurants around the hotel are various and promising. Three metres to a liquor shop and seven eleven, three Japanese restaurants in the same block and so on. We also have wireless internet in the room as well as my husband’s number one fantasy: A Coin Laundry inside the hotel as well. Oh, and did I mention the Post office five metres away? We clearly have picked the best position so far to be in.

We had a lovely Indian buffet for dinner, while watching the city lights. Our friend from Dallas is joining us for a few days, so we decided to leave sightseeing for tomorrow and the seven days we are spending here. It didn’t take me long to realize that this is the most promising city yet. Sure, it’s freezing outside, but that’s just like home: Just need to go shopping for some tights!

In the airport I realized that I will never move to the Southern Athmosphere, it’s just not my thing. I am a Northern girl.

Day 20/63

We left Japan expecting it to be a culture shock. Even as we’ve been to both countries, we’ve never gone from one to another. We got the Maglev train from the Shanghai airport to town. This is a bullet train that goes 300km/hour, just because there are no rails, just magnetic tracks where it floats on. On curves, it goes kind of sideways, which is very spooky. The train journey to Shanghai only takes eight minutes, which my husband decided that we’d spend in the first class, as it was the whole of 10euros each.

We got a taxi from the other side of the river ‘Huang Pu’ to our hotel, which is the Astor House hotel, the first luxurious and modern hotel in the city, right on the Pund. The Pund is the area where the British settled down after the opium wars and eventually all the other foreign powers such as the Germans, the Americans and so on joined them. However, the French couldn’t live with the British, so they have their own area ‘the French concession’…

Our hotel the Astor House is rather impressive. Even as they are over 160 years old, they have gotten the hang of modern days. There is internet installed in the rooms for a small fee (very slow connection, but anyways) and the bathroom has hair dryers, the light switch is on the door so that you keep your key in a safe place and so on. The room reminds me of the room I stayed in Athens, wooden floors, huge bathroom… All very nice. You could even stay at a celebrity’s room, meaning where someone famous stayed like Charlie Chaplin, Bertrand Russell or Albert Einstein. What is more attractive to me though, is that in three metres out of the door, you get to a bridge which gives out the classic view over Shanghai with the television mast building. I’ll use that for some photos later on for sure.

Of course when you step out of the door, the misery of life in China immediately begins. You get the herds of ‘Hello Lady’s excuseme, would you lie to buy some tat?)… In here they are mostly pushing to buy watches.. Perhaps that’s the thing, certainly not postcards like back in Beijing. The best way to look at pushy sales people is not to give them an eye of any kind. You put your ‘ignoring’ face on and move along. I have been surprised on how they do come to you in English, rather than in Chinese. But I suppose this is the foreign area.

You can also see the foreign area in the prices of tat. We know that there are places, quieter streets, where the prices are about 20% of the prices here on the foreign area. We had a meal for 10euros, but we know, that is rather expensive for what we got, even if it was really good and three dishes with two teas. They have looked at the foreigners around and come to the conclusion that they *will* pay more. So why not charge more.

In any case, for our first day in Shanghai, we went walking around, shopping and photographing. I bought some really nice pashminas and we went a bit mental in a bookshop that had a DVD floor. The Chinese really like awards of all sorts, specially the Oscars, so they have fifteen different kinds of Oscar box sets, oscar films in different covers and so on. I recently watched all the best Picture winners, some of which were quite hard to find. Here they were all… Even “Wings” from 1928, for 1 euro… I bought some that I had not seen and some that I’ll rewatch, like “Mrs. Minniver”, which is a great film btw. These were not illegal copies of the films, even though those are also easy to get from the streets – normally with English and Chinese subtitles… We had earlier come across to one seller, but they have already gone to Blue-Ray… What kind of world is it, when the pirates have a format that you cannot play???

We eventually walked as far as the people’s square and then home again, through a detour that seemed to take forever. The pushy-yelling Chinese tired us out so much that eventually we got into a ‘Family-Mart’ (Japanese 7-11 chain) and got salad and sushi for dinner in our hotel room… This is how much we missed Japan! China such a difference to Japan, where politeness is *everything* and here you are expected to be as agnry, impolite, rude, shouty, pushy and merciless as possible. You should spit on the streets and lie and cheat. The whole consept of the society is so different… It’s like my husband pointed out. You feel like you are in Japan, but it looks like everything is falling apart. When you come back to your hotel, you feel like you are never going to wear your clothes again, because they are so dirty.

I think for tomorrow, I need to learn how to bargain and cheat… We are going shopping again in the French concession.

16th of September

Day 13/63

Today started well, my husband dragged me out of bed and we were on our way to Ishinomaki by nine. We stopped by at the station to pick up reserved seats for some of the shinkansens that we’ll be travelling on in the days to come. We’ve got two weeks of Japan rail passes, which cost us around 350 of euros/pounds each, but it means that we can travel on JR lines as much as we want, including the Shinkansen.

It’s about an hour to Ishinomaki. While on the train, we got to see the Matsushima airbase, where some pilots were practising their flight movements – beautiful.Then 20minute taxi to see the San Juan Babtista, which was our main target of the day. My husband is thinking of writing a book about this guy who was basically send against his will in the 17th centrury to built the 500 ton Galleon and sail it to Europe to see the pope. This man was called Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga. He was sent to Europe by Lord Masamune of Sendai who had an evil plan to try and persuade the Spannish (Hispania as it was then called) empire to trade with him and in return, he’d let the people of Sendai to be turned into Christians.

I visited the ship, San Juan Babtista, or actually the well made replica of this gorgeous piece that now served as a tourist and school children attraction. It’s a tall ship that you don’t really see in the Tall ships race back home in Turku every year, gorgeous and huge. The fact that it actually took 180 people to Mexico and Philippines was really astonishing to me. It had three levels of living/goods sections and at the back, I think around four.

This guy Tsunenaga must have had a lovely seven years on sea trying to complete a mission that was doomed to fail when he left in 1613. Japan on those times had convinced that Christianity was destroying their own culture, which is why they slaughtered everyone who wouldn’t deny the fact that the Christian god exists by swearing on a plate. My husband wrote a book about Shiro Amakusa, who was a young, Christian boy leader samurai, who fought to the bitter end back in 17th century for the Christianity. We investigated him on our previous visit in Japan and went through Kyushu for that.

Japanese are a cruel kind when it comes to torture and death, which you probably know… However, boiling people alive in hot springs, crusifying them and letting the tide then drown them, burning people alive in their straw rain coats and buring them up to their necks alive and then stomping on their heads with a horse while their wives were watching – were just a couple of the charming examples on what would happen to you if you had *anything* to do with Christianity in Japan, in the 17th century.

Despite of the excellent visit to the San Juan Babtista, we’ve had a bit of a low day. This was due to a lost wallet with four credit cards and a huge amount of cash inside. In an occasion like this, it’s very difficult to enjoy the day as it is – I even if had Whale on a stick as my lunch…

We made a visit to the local police station, where we completely fucked up their computer system, as they didn’t really get Gaijin who loose their wallets… Like, ever. That was about half an hour when they took all our details, and another hour on the train back to Sendai. I cancelled my one card in three minutes in the internet. Jay for Finnish banking system. Don’t come and tell me that Sampo is a bad bank… I already ordered a new one as well. It wasn’t quite as simple for my husband’s cards though, due to the difficulties we had for not having a working cell phone at the moment. Who knew, that the number *before* the actual number that you need to dial before you get out of our land line hotel phone to abroad is:  0-001010 and then the actual number… This took about an hour and a half. Finns are efficient, what can I say.

After all this upset and faffling around, we decided to have a 7-11 dinner with some booze at the safety of our hotel room. Sushi, salad and stringy cheese with wine… On a day like this you have to look at the perspective: 1. Neither one of us is dead. 2. We are not ill or injured 3. We still have access to money, 4. We’ve got our passports, our tickets and our railpasses (which btw, saved us a ton of money since we can get as many seating tickets on the Shinkansen as we want) So to be far. It could be worse. And as one of our very best friends told us before we left: “There will be a day when you reach the bottom. For me it was when I woke up on the beach with a crab eating my hand.” So could be worse, there’s no crabs in this hotel room yet:)

Day 8/63

My husband and I left my family memebers to Tadotsu and took the morning train to Takamatsu. From takamatsu, we took the bus to the airport. I was looking at postcards in the gifto shoppu when I saw a familiar face: You know how in the middle of a crowd of Japanese, you are not sure if you recognise someone or not and you question your capability to know if it actually is someone you know, or just someone who looks exactly the same as someone you know… This was one of those cases. This time I was right: It was Kawashima sensei, who was on his way to Tokyo on a seminar and came to talk to us briefly on the way. Kawashima sensei visited Finland back in 2001. I think I’ve seen him since in Paris and perhaps also in Italy… Time does fly by.

I slept through most of the legs of our flights, there was a case of turbulence between Tokyo and Hakodate, but I didn’t really let it worry me too much. At Haneda airport, the toilet boots have got their individual screens that tell you what is on sale… I wonder if the squatting toilets also have those and do people hang out in the boots more because of them… Japanese are obsessed with toilets. Even the hotel toilets start their own theme songs or water sounds to cover the possible noises one might have in the toilet. I may not be completely happy with someone listening on me to pee, but for god’sake, it should be a natural sound!

We were the only Gaijin (foreigners) in the plane as can be expected and as we landed on Hokkaido, I immediately thought this was going to be a very different experience from Shikoku… For one, no vending machines at sight. Obviously less need to drink up, when it’s colder. For two, the weather was seriously colder. We digged up our long trousers, socks and even rain coat. I was happy that all these big items we carry around are not going to be just luggage. Plus it’s seriously easier to do power sightseeing in a colder weather.

Our hotel, the Chisun Grand is near the harbour, close to the cable car that takes you to the mountains. We can see both the sea and the mountain from our window. As you probably have also noticed, the room provided us with a long lost internet connection, which meant that I could seriously upload some pictures. There is a coin usable washing machine and “Lawson” the seven eleven at the corner. This supermarket sold gorgeous packed sushi, anime magazines and even stringy cheese. I felt like I had entered a comfort zone in our trip. Trip advisor said that Chisun Grand is a little bit away from the action, but our smallish walk to find dinner showed that it’s actually very close to everything, there is even a statue of a Samurai on our street. Hurrah.

We had weird curry noodles for dinner and walked around town in a small rain. The feeling that my husband got was that the town was a little sad, it has got a lot of western looking buildings, but not really a lot of people around… My feeling however was, that this is a home away from home. Climate, the limited amount of culture, the small town feeling – these are all what I feel is home. What can I say: I’m a nothern girl.