Random Facts about Japan

I have been meaning to post a random facts list for a while. Here it is:



1. Winter at school feels like wintercamp in Belgium. Its very cold except for in the main room, where its only warm if you are close enough to a heater. They use kerosene heaters, so the smell reminds me of the heaters and gaslamps at camp. Classrooms are cold. Hallways are cold. Toilets are cold.



2. In the summer, it gets hot and humid....so people wear a towel around their neck like a scarf to soak up the sweat.



3. Police car lights are always flashing. They use their loudspeakers when they want to pull someone over.



4. People don't pull over for ambulances....I guess unless they absolutely have to.



5. Japan has three alphabets and all three are used. Katakana, Hiragana and Kanji. The first two have more than 40 characters each and Kanji is basically a new vocabulary list, which must be drawn/written in the correct stroke order and with the exact number of strokes. THEY CAN TELL WHEN ITS WRONG!

6. Katakana is used for foreign words, but those words still need serious decoding. Some examples:
ka-n-to-ri = country
a-re-ru-gi = allergy
bu-ru = ????
hu-i-ru-taa = ????

Can you figure out the last two? In the next post we'll give you some more to figure out.

7. Rice with raw egg is a typical breakfast.

8. Fermented soybeans, some sticky, stinky, gooey brown stuff (= nato) is many children's favorite.

9. Road work seems to happen mostly in the winter and at night. At night? Yes, well, we dont know when they stop working but they tend to set up the road work stuff almost every day around 8 or 9 pm. Route 50 is the road we take straight into town....maybe about 10 km from our place. On our way in town its a perfectly clear road (except for the traffic). On our way back, after 9 pm, we can run into anywhere from 2 to 6 road work activities for which our lane takes turns with the oncoming traffic to pass the roadwork in the one usable lane.

10. Apparently green is blue.

11. I'm a big fan of inside shoes and bathroom shoes.

12. They really like mayonaise and corn here. In the store, you can buy a bun that just has mayonaise and corn on it. In almost any restaurant that sells pizza you can buy a mayo and corn pizza.

13. Crosswalks. Many crosswalk signal lights have a bird chirping sound to go along with the green light. Both directions have different sounds. Yes, I realize this is for blind people, which is awesome. I just think its funny they chose two different bird chirps. Also, you can cross an intersection diagonally (busy intersections)!! Yes, they actually stop road traffic from all 4 directions so that pedestrians have a green light from any corner to any corner.

14. It is cheaper to travel from Japan to South Korea or Thailand for vacation than to travel within Japan, considering all costs.

15. There is no real bacon and you can't buy a whole chicken anywhere.

16. One of the most popular desserts is anko. This is sweet bean paste. (sometimes its chunky!) Examples of anko dishes are 1) anko-filled mochi (remember the mochi rice stuff?), 2) anko-filled donuts and 3) anko-filled pancakes.

17. Pancake mixes are everywhere!

18. Bikers ride on the street against traffic (yes, on the side where pedestrians are supposed to walk if there is no sidewalk) on busy streets. (This is quite annoying and dangerous for us as scooter drivers because we typically kind of "hug" the curb to pass cars between the car and curb when traffic is moving slowly.)

19. Kewpies are actually not just known, but popular here. (They have a kewpie brand mayonaise!!) (If you do not know what a kewpie is, look it up....it is also Derrick's High School mascot)

20. Apparently gargling water or tea prevents illnesses, like the common cold or the flue.

Fun in Thailand!

This picture was taken on a lovely rickshaw (or "tuktuk") in Bangkok. Tuktuks might be my favorite part of Bangkok. We arrived on the evening of Saturday the 20th of December. We only stayed two nights and left on a night bus for our island adventure on Koh Tao.



Once on Koh Tao (we arrived Tuesday morning around 9:30 on the Island), we started our scubadiving classes. We had to watch some videos, listen to "lectures", "read" a book and fill out a study guide before taking a theoretical test. We also walked out from the beach with scuba gear on into the shallow water to do some underwater exercises in a safe environment....you know, where if something goes wrong all you have to do is stand up. The scariest exercise was probably taking off my mask (with the breathing regulator still in my mouth) and having to put it back on under water.



Here's a picture of our group of divers. Alain was our instructor. He is the cool guy laying at our feet. He was really an awesome instructor.....also....he's a Belgian! Hurray for Belgium.







We don't have pictures of scubadiving unfortunately. Our underwater camera cannot handle that without a casing....but we did go snorkeling as well. We went to this bay on the other side of the island with a Swedish couple who was in our Scubadiving group: Elizabeth and Andre. If you look closely at the bay you can see a big rock.....thats about where we were snorkeling (actually....that rock is just where you could actually start seeing anything because the water was not very clear).Another part of our adventure seen in this picture is our fun ride in a pick-up taxi along the hilly and completely unpaved roads throughout the island. This was really fun, especially with elizabeth and Andre in the back with us!

Here is some coral/weird and colourful sealife we saw. When you wave your hand close enough to these little colourful animals they would completely suck in. It was pretty cool.

Koh Tao was awesome! Probably the best part of the whole trip!

Next we moved on to a resort in Chumpohn city, which is in Chumpohn province. We basically just chose to stay there because it was on our way back to Bangkok. We stayed three nights to be relaxed. It was nice....ok....could have been better. It was really not that bad.....but there are many reasons why we would not stay there again. Here are some of the positive aspects though:

Our little bungalow was pretty cool. It had a nice view too, but the weather was never nice enough to get a good picture.

We went on an all day snorkeling trip. That was actually pretty cool. Unfortunately it was pretty windy and cloudy so the visibility was not so good and we never got great pictures. We did see some cool fish though. Here we are on the boat that took us, a Thai family and three Swedish women to three different islands.

Here are some of the coolest fish we saw. They were beautiful! Unfortunately this picture does not show nearly how brightly colored they were!

Here's Derrick! (sorry this picture is not clear at all.....it was the water's fault I tell you!)

And here's Miranda!

We were supposed to go on a squid fishing trip one evening.....but the weather was not good enough.....it was too windy. SO, the resort decided to take us on a random sight seeing trip instead. We tried to go to a museum.....but it was closed because it was January 1st.

So....we saw monkeys! Ha, it was actually quite fun because we got to feed them.

We loved reading the English translation of the description of the monkeys. This is only some of it....our favorite part is the first line of the second paragraph.

And we saw some caves and a nice little temple. In the cave we saw a 2,000 year old painting of Buddha. That was pretty cool...unfortunately it was not well preserved and was very difficult to make out.

The man here was our guide for the caves and the small museum there that had nothing to do with the cave, lol. He was hilarious. He spoke like 5 words of english. When he was done "explaining" one thing he moved on to the next spot and would say "you you you, come come come" until we were all standing around him ready to decode his next explanation. Usually he ended up speaking Thai to our guide from the resort (the young woman in the picture on the left) who was driving us around. She would then kind of translate in broken Egnlish with a very strong Thai accent. Fun times.

And after we spent two more nights in Bangkok, we flew back to Japan.

We arrived back on Tuesday January 6th.

We made a stop in the Nagoya airport where we were told to "watch our steps" on the travelator by the voice coming out of the machine. We enjoyed this sign.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!