Month: April 2007

We’re checking out of our hotel in 20 minutes and heading to the bus station to catch the bus to Kanazawa. As before, don’t panic if no new posts appear here for a day or so; it merely means that I’m unable to obtain an internet connection. Also, since we’re arriving early in the afternoon and leaving the next morning, I will probably scurry out to see a little bit of Kanazawa before I post again.

Tracie seems to be perkier this morning and while her hands are still very itchy and sensitive, the rash itself seems to have abated for the most part. Now she’s just hoping that our stash of emergency medicine, which is in our luggage that we forwarded ahead to Kanazawa, contains a tube of cortisone cream. read more

Since I just wrote at some length about the Japanese medical system I suppose it’s as good a time as any to post a couple of photos I’ve been saving. Both of the hotels we’ve stayed in have rather elaborate toilets. My description of and commentary on these devices will require a descent into bathroom humor, literally. You may skip this post if you suspect it will offend your sensitive nature.

Ah, still reading, are you? Good.

Before we left on this journey we read up a bit on Japanese bathrooms. Part of the story is that Japanese toilets are different than Western toilets. They’re more like a trough you squat over than a bowl you sit on. So far I haven’t encountered one but Tracie has successfully made use of two of them. Western-style toilets are proliferating, however, and can be found throughout the country. read more

Here’s what you don’t want to see if you visit Takayama:

That’s the hallway of the emergency room of the Takayama Red Cross Hospital. We spent our morning exploring the health care system of Japan as represented by this local hospital. I won’t leave you in suspense: Tracie is basically okay but still does not feel well and we may end up cutting our trip short.

The long version of the story starts late last night. Tracie was still not feeling significantly better, and noticed two things: first, her symptoms were roaming from one part of her body to another, although mercifully her lungs were staying clear. (For those of you who are not as intimately acquainted with Tracie’s medical history as some of us, Tracie has a long history of asthmatic bronchitis, pneumonia, allergies, and other ailments of the respiratory system. If she gets a cold, it’s bad; if it moves into her lungs, it’s Very Bad.) Second, and more disconcerting, she noticed a strange rash on the palms of both hands. read more

I sort of blew it this afternoon. After doing my “Morning Stroll” entry and showing Tracie photos of the town, I set out again in search of lunch. I made several mistakes. The first was that I got a later start than I should have. The second was that I forgot to bring along the English map of the town that I found previously. The third was that I decided that I could find my way around without it, and got lost as a result. Takayama is not a big city so there wasn’t particularly any danger of becoming lost in the strict sense of the word, but I did get sufficiently turned around that on at least two occasions when I did find a sign or other landmark that reoriented me, I was traveling at right angles to my intended direction. read more

I plan to post an entry here devoted to the wonders of Japanese beverage vending machines, but first I need to comment on just one particular beverage: Bikkle.

Someone I know told me about Bikkle. It was either Dan or Gregory, I think. (Any guesses, guys?) I have to admit that I mostly forgot what I was told about it, but the name stuck with me. I spotted some in a vending machine for the first time today and of course had to try it as a matter of sampling the local cuisine.

I think this one gets filed under “acquired taste”. Tracie was so amused by my reactions that she grabbed the camera: read more

I just returned from a brief walk in Takayama. My main objectives were to locate various things to make Tracie feel a little better (e.g. cough drops, orange juice, Sprite, Vicks Vapor Rub). Remarkably I was able to find all of these things (yes, even the Vicks) within a very short distance from the hotel. I also visited one of the morning markets. It’s fairly cold outside and I wanted to take Tracie’s things back to her quickly, but I did take some photos while I was walking.

Takayama is a small but tightly packed town. old, traditionally styled buildings stand cheek to jowl with modern convenience stores and trinket shops. there are many shops with beautiful hand-crafted objects like furniture, pottery. etc. The streets are quite small but fairly busy.This is the largest street in town, if one can accurately judge scale from the tourist map I picked up: read more

I apologize for the somewhat anemic previous post. Our travels have been complicated somewhat by Tracie having fallen ill. She has a cold of some sort which we were hoping was just allergies, but no such luck. She’s going to rest in bed today while I make a solo exploration of Takayama.

Here are a few more photos from the train trip. These are the sorts of signs that one is confronted with when trying to make a connection in a train station in Nagoya:

You’ll notice that there are bits of English on them. They do in fact eventually display the names of the trains and the destinations in English, but you have to wait for awhile for them to change, and they change back to Japanese quite quickly. It all works in the end but it’s a little nerve-wracking when you’re trying to figure out where you’re supposed to go to meet a particular car of a particular train on a particular track headed to a particular location, and you’re laden with baggage and you’re trying to be helpful to your traveling companion who is a little unsure of foot on her best days and now happens to be struggling with a cold on top of it. But obviously we made it. read more

I just flipped through the photos I took en route to Takayama, and sadly they’re mostly not very good. It’s quite difficult to take a photo of something from a moving train. Things move by so quickly (or rather you move by things so quickly) that by the time you see something interesting, decide that it’s interesting enough to photograph, ready the camera and frame and focus the shot, the thing that you were trying to photograph has already moved past. I shot quite a bit of video but I have no way to transfer that into the computer. read more

We have arrived in Takayama and have checked in to our hotel (a Best Western, which doesn’t make much sense for a hotel in Japan but it is very nice). We took the bullet train, or shinkansen as it’s called in Japanese, from Tokyo to Nagoya. The shinkansen was fast and fairly smooth, the seats were comfortable, and there was more than enough leg room even for gaijin-sized legs. We changed to a smaller train in Nagoya which brought us to Takayama. Both train rides were about two hours long. I dozed a little on the first one and gazed out the windows. The second leg of the trip was particularly enjoyable. The train climbed into wooded mountains, following a river in a sometimes spectacularly rocky gorge. The rain that started in Nagoya turned to snow briefly, but it seems to be sunny now. read more

We’re about to catch a taxi to Tokyo Station to board one of Japan’s famous bullet trains bound for our next destination. Don’t panic if there is a lapse in postings for a couple of days; it simply means we are unable to get an internet connection. If that happens, we’ll catch up when we reach Kyoto.