One of the best parts of travelling around the world is that you get to meet the friends around the world that you never seriously meet. One of those people are our dear friend KG. She flew all the way from Houston to see us in Vancouver and told my husband straight off that if she ever were in Spain, she’d expect us to do the same. I am sure we would as well, because she’s all kinds of ace.

We reached KG reading on her Kimble, the electronic book, where you download the books you read and no longer do you need to feel the burden of carrying tons of books with you. As this is clearly the future of things, I agree… But there is something so poetic, harmonic, feel of goodness and back to nature, when one steps into a bookshop or even opens one to leaf through the pages. I don’t think I am ready to give up books just yet, perhaps ever. Not the least because I married an author which means that my house is generally wall-papered with books. I certainly don’t mind. They mere feeling of them around gives me a sense of my past, all those weeks at the summer cottage with my grandfather in the corner reading. Or sleeping in my Grandma’s library room. Books are my way.

For catching up the gossips and each others lives, we decided to walk downtown via the Grandville bridge. I think we were about half way over the bridge when it started to rain and the day turned into all kinds of Vancouver misery. Suddenly I was glad that I bought matching Star Trek fleeces with my friend Tero in San Francisco.

The Grandville street takes you all the way downtown, through plenty of shopping opportunities. We visited a couple of department stores and finally stumbled into the Gallery of Bill Reid, a man who has made a significant part of the aboriginal art in this area. His perhaps the most famous piece is the ‘Raven and the First Men’, which is a huge piece of a yellow cedar sculpture, which he made to the museum of Anthropology here in Vancouver. There was series of earlier versions of this piece in display in this gallery.

All three of us were very touched with the art of the native Americans. On this area the art focuses on masks, sculptures, clothes, capes, canoes, jewelry and of course the totem poles. I think my husband in particular was very impressed as he started to decorate our imaginary future house with stuff that he could have bought (with also imaginary funds). I thought the most impressive parts were the red and blue capes that were worn in the rituals of the area. Even if I fell asleep just a little during the 50-minute film about canoe art… The ravens, the bears, the foxes, the seals… This is all animals that I recognize, because they feel like the same animals back home. This is my kind of art, definitely. Makes me wonder why the Finnish natives didn’t come up with Totem poles.

The weather took a turn to much more cold as we left the Gallery and had a small lunch in town. Vancouver sure is an end to the Autumn. If it’s like this tomorrow, we’ll stay indoors. People always think that it’s wrong for Finns to be cold. What they don’t realize is that when Finns are cold, it’s not just a small drift of cold air. It means you might have only a few hours to live before you die of being too cold. So we have warming in the house. We have secured clothing that might make us look like pixies or Michelin men, but at least we are warm. There is no cold weather, there is only unefficient wardrobes.

In any case, we checked out the cinema of Vancouver, which would have provided entertainment, but only after an hour and a half wait, so we decided to get the skytrain back to West Broadway, where our hotel, the Park Inn is located. The Olympics are kicking in in Vancouver in February, which means that they’ve just completed a series of very impressive building processes in this city. One of those is the Canada line which connects the airport with the waterfront of downtown. Luckily our hotel is only 4 blocks away from one of the stops, so we had a really cheap way getting home.

Day 30/63

On Sunday morning we got a flight from Sydney to Melbourne. I was seriously educated on the way, that I shouldn’t say anything positive about Sydney to the Melbourneans (or vice versa). They apparently have some rivalry going on between them, up to the point that they had to build an artificial city to be the capital because they couldn’t agree which one would be the better one.

In Melbourne we are staying with my husband’s old friend and his family’s house. And there he was this old friend, meeting us at the airport. He was easy to spot as his chemistry with my husband is on its own level… They used to be flatmates in their twenties and had spent countless hours playing Resident Evil together. Somehow they’ve even created their own language in the process. So I was not surprised as his wife yelled: “Yimms!” when she saw my husband. I have never met this family before, but they started instantly feel like meeting family members of my own.

The hospitality of this family has completely surprised me. Not only had they made their incredibly posh house spotless, but also cooked a really complicated dinner involving barbeque and two stages of sauces… They have even gotten a hotel for their cats while we are staying, since I am heavily allergic to that sort of furrballs. They’ve got two very well behaving children, the eight year old daughter had done a research project *for fun* about Finland, just because we were arriving. I am sure I didn’t feel this special even at my own wedding!

I have been told, that Melbourne is a city much more gorgeous and posh than Sydney, so I am looking forward on finding that out for myself as well.

Day 19/63

We got up extra early to get the 7:22 Shinkansen to Nagoya. Our friend, Alex was waiting for us in the station. He is Jonathan’s friend from the Anime business and we visited him and his lovely Japanese family in Nagoya two years ago as well. First stop of the day was to post off 12 kg of souvenirs and shit that we had mastered together in the last week or so. This is still a Japanese holiday, so we were a bit worried about none of the posts being open. However, Alex knew that there was an ‘emergency’ counter open in the main post office and so we put together boxes of yukatas, rice bowls, trays, books, comics, t-shirts, totoros, whiskey and whale meat… Those are just examples on what it is that we wanted to export. Over the last three weeks we’ve sent around 25kg of stuff back home. And as expensive as you think it might be, it’s still a lot cheaper than the Finnish postal system.

Alex had chosen to take us to see Meijimura, a whole theme park of Meiji era buildings and railways & such, which is about an hour drive from Nagoya. The park turned out to be a great place. There is tens of buildings that have been brought from all over Japan and replanted around this area of a lake(?) and some mountains. Inside the buildings you can read about its history or get a guided tour. We only visited maybe 20% of the houses, because of the limited amount of time, but we did get to squeece in a post office, old hotel from the middle of Tokyo, a church, a couple of prisons, a kabuki theatre, a photographer’s house, a doctor’s house, a lighthouse, a ride in the bus, the tram and a steam train, and the judo hall. There might be some that I forgot, but this is clearly a place where you could spend more than one day. The architecture is beautiful and it wasn’t very crowded, either. A perfect place to spend a day.

My personal favorite of course was the judo hall, which had tons of tatamis and a lovely, old wooden floor. I did some hokei, but unfortunately couldn’t stay for a long time. The photographer’s house was also great: It had one of those triangle shaped roofs, except one side was a glass ceiling. This was because of there not being any electricity at the time and they needed studio lighting. I personally think that natural light is always better, so if I had a lot of money, that would be something my house would also have.

Alex has got three half-Scottish, half-Japanese children: Isla, Kainan and Sasha. My husband and I both agreed that having three Finnish or English kids with us through out a long day, walking around – it would have been a nightmare. But these three are specialy well behaved and caused no trouble and were actually excited about the history – which apart from sweets and ice cream, was the only thing that the park could offer. If we ever have kids, I am sending my husband to get lessons from Alex about raising children.

Later on, we met Reiko, Alex’s wife at their home in Nagoya and got the most amazing cultural experience of them showing us how to do taco-yaki for dinner. Taco in Japanese means ‘Octobus’. However, ours were filled with sausage, cheese and chikuwa (fish paste) rather than real tacos, but never mind. Tacoyaki itself is something that I could see Finns getting excited about. It cooks on a hot plate with little round bundles, on top of the table, so everyone can participate into the cooking and seeing it get done. The Yakis are little round bundles of something close to a pancake/okonomiyaki mix with the filling inside. Now we only have to find a pan like that in Finland, or export one in our luggage;)

Overall, it was a lovely Nagoya day and always a pleasure to see Alex and his wonderful family.

However much you think you are the master of killing jetlags, going for a 6 time-zone difference at one night – it’s always going to be painful. We flew through the night so that our night basically disapeared and we had to do two days in a row without sleeping. I had slept pretty badly for the last week, so this was not helping the body to adjust: Even if it was not as bad as we had been preparing ourselves to – the flight was probably the most comfortable 9,5 hours in a plane that I’ve ever experienced, and the heat was *only* +30degrees celcius – which it could have easily have been something closer to +40… It was still a hard day. Luckily my husband’s Japanese is fluent, so we had no real problems getting a Haruka (ray-of-light) train from Osaka Kansai airport to the Kyoto central station.

I was shocked with how normal this felt to me: there is small, dark haired people everywhere and all the signs in kanji. But I’ve been to Kyoto before, so walking around station, looking for food, shops, post office, atm and what not is a piece of cake. Also it felt very natural and normal to be surrounded by the Japanese all the time. Our week in Kyoto 2007 probably did just that. However, Finland has been comfortably cold for many months now, so the last I was this hot was in Crete. I know that I’ll just need some adjustment time right now.

Our hotel is called ‘the Kyoto Tower’ hotel, which means exactly what it says: It’s *in* kyoto tower. My husband and I get a very comfortable room with airconditioning which is great at medium, but at high starts to make horrible noice. However my fellow relatives travelling with me have some adjustments to do for their airconditioning before they are happy with it. We waiver the first day without too much of hard goals – we buy tickets to Tadotsu for Monday, where the headquasters of Shorinji Kempo is located. we’ve been to Japan for the amazing amount of two hours when I see a familiar face: One of my friends told me about these four boys travelling in Japan on the same time as us… What are the chances of meeting someone you know like that… I don’t know. But in any case, we have a nice chat before they head off to Tokyo surroundings to spend some time in a spa and to drink some more sake I assume.

After a much needed lunch and nap we find ourselves in the Teramachi, the shopping arcades of Kyoto. We visit my favourite camera shop which temptingly offers the lens of my rdeams second hand (Canon 28-70 /2.8L) for third of the price in Finland. I try it and it feels quite bulky and huge, the pictures are excellent of course, so I might end up regretting that I left that lens to the shop. Decisions based on the fact that I had to buy a new camera two weeks ago as well as the fact that my good friend lended me 70-200mm/4L, which I know I would not use as much if I had this new lens to go about. Plus I love wide-angle view just a little bit too much. Check out my pictures and you’ll see what I mean.

I don’t know if we are just another version of those *burger-king-lovers* as the two restaurants we ate today were “Japanese Chinese” and “Japanese Nepalese”… The latter one, “Yak and Yeti” has soon become my second favourite restaurant in Kyoto. But it also might be that I get an orgasm when having curry – instant calmer, instant happiness, that’s what it is! Overall, with the jetlag hanging over me, I feel extremely satisfied of this day number one. i got some pictures that I was happy with (the quality of my photography has really taken a turn to the better over the last two years – Back then I was nothing but a learner… But yes Darth, perhaps I’m not a master, but however a person who feels happy about her skills), and we got to do some shopping, eating and sightseeing.

Tomorrow is our only full day in Kyoto, which we are spending by temple hunting and in the evening we’ve got an invitation to the Rakuto-doin, a home and training hall of a Japanese sensei whose son (now a sensei as well) visited Kajaani (my ex-home town, check from the map, in the middle of nowhere near the artic circle) and stayed with us when I was around 8 years old. Finn out.

I’ve still got sand in my shoes and I can’t shake the thought of you.
I know we said goodbye, anything else could have been confusion, but I want to see you again.

For the record, this is not going to be a very informative post. So I apologise in advance. It’ll be closer to a diary entry.

Well, I’ve got sand in absolutely everywhere now. In my room floor, in my bag, in my shoes, in my hair, and most of all, inside the fabric of my bikini, somehow it goes in but doesn’t quite come out… I hould know more about the laws of physics to figure out on how to get it out. I am seriously going to tip the maid who cleaned my room today. They must get a lot of sandy bathrooms, but mine was seriously like hairpin and sand explosion in the morning.

It was one of those nights. You know the ones. They make films of nights like last night. I feel blessed to experience them in my First Life though. Last night reminded me so much of another night in my life, after which I felt pretty much the same. I feel blessed that this time I don’t have to walk through Rome in a hangover like I did back then. Because just getting yourself out of the bed is a serious effort.

I’ve been to Greece for a week now and it’s time to leave. This trip I has been a special one. It certainly has made me friends for life, it’s incredibly hard to say goodbye to Daniela. One more dinner at the hotel and definitely an early night. It’s been one of the best weeks in my life.

I lost the lens cap of my camera, seems like a fair price for it all. My work here is done.