Episode 8

Cherry blossoms are beautiful and they are admired in many ways. From having pic-nic with your friends under the trees to spend hours using your €5 000 Canon gear to take endless pictures of the endless varieties.

When the petals fall, that is a special moment, romantic like a Nordic slow snowfall. Giving insight into the fragility of the beauty and how you must enjoy the moment. The only thing more beautiful thing than petals falling is when petals are falling into a slow stream of water.



Some simple train food. Never ride the train without a Ekiben.



These pointers tells you something about the Japanese mind.








Go cats

I am off to see the floats of the Takayama festival. Coming down for breakfast, I am wearing a high quality t-shirt with a fern in white and black. On black. Now, I got this in Auckland on one of my first trips just because I liked the fern as a symbol. It is such a good graphic aligned with the style of aboriginal design.

In the elevator down, two guys enters, and I am quickly greeted
- G'day mate!
Like always in Japan, I am mentally prepared with a few standard sentences in Japanese so I am caught off guard getting chatted to in Australian English. I mumble some mix of Japanese and English in return. They guys are not discouraged though, and try to keep the cheerful banter going.
- Crikey, meeting an all-blacks man in Japan!

Well, some may have guessed it already, my black T-shirt with a fern is the official supporter shirt for New Zealand's national rugby team All Blacks. Luckily, my sister did enlightened me on that after the purchase, and also taught me the only sports-reference needed down-under. At least when talking to anyone in the state of Victoria. I just smile at them, and as the doors slide open and I exit, I do a double thumbs up and say:
- Go cats!

(Well... what my sister actually told me was, if you ever run into someone from Geelong, south of Melbourne, you can never go wrong with a "Go cats", the call sign for Geelong well renowned AFL football club)

All you need to know






A Japanese festival is something to experience, so here are just a few pics from Takamatsu matsuri. Don't miss it.

How many guys can you fit inside the float? Enough to pull all the strings of the puppet theatre playing on top.



Ms Sling and I have been playing a bit of railway catch-me-if-you-can over several days now, tipping each-other off on different interesting locations to visit. I've put my rail pass to good use, and covered a lot of ground including a return to Kumamoto in the south and finishing off with Okayama Castle and Ritsurin garden, where I am just in time for the best time to study the double cherry blossoms.


Indeed it was the best time.


Keirinseki - Imagine someone pick this stone up and bring it to you as a gift from Korea. Well, that is how it was done in the good old days!




I wish I knew some feudal lords, this would be a so much nicer gift than the silly garden gnomes.



Now my railpass is about to expire and I withdraw to Osaka.

Osaka has quite a different vibe. I've heard several Japanese friends mention Osaka as something special but to me it is just ... confusing. Riding escalators they stand on the right, when the rest of Japan stands on the left. And while Osaka station is not very large or complicated (at least compared to Tokyo), it doesn't follow the same logic as in rest of Japan making it confusing to me.

And it is not just the station it self. There is a huge underground system connecting Osaka Station and it's "City" building with Umeda railway station and 5 subway stations (serving 5 separate lines), housing a huge underground facility filled with shopping, restaurants and exits spread over maybe 50 city blocks.
I had already decided to walk to my hotel and there is an station exit close to it so I decide to use the underground passages but quickly gets lost.
In fact, this place is so busy and complicated there are blog posts devoted to guide you and it is said that even locals tend to get lost or walk much longer than actually needed.

The relatively simple Osaka station...

.. with some of the underground passages and exits marked on Google map.



It felt like an hour, but in the end - I made it to the hotel!
To my delight, the bulletin board tells me the entrance door to my hotel is the place to be, as it will be rocked every night! (see note #2)



After installing myself in the tiny room, I get a message from Ms Sling that she too is in Osaka so we decide to end the chase-game and meet-up. We pick a famous meeting spot - the golden clock in Osaka Station - to meet for dinner and a debrief from our overload of cherry blossoms / castles / parks.

Wise from before, I decide to stay over-ground and make it to the meeting spot in less than 10 minutes.
And then the long wait begins. She's not fashionably late, she's extremely late. In Nordic culture this is violating the jante-law. Being late is a way to put yourself above others by stating "my time is more important than your time".

I have no internet connection so all I can do is wait. Or give up and go home. Well, it is not like I have a better place to be, so the waiting is not the issue per se. The issue is more of starting to self-doubt if I misunderstood the time or place. But it's not like you really can be waiting by the wrong clock here, now can you?



I get to see others arrive, wait a few minutes, meet-up with their dates and leave. I start to feel embarrassed having people see me waiting when they arrive and still be here alone when they leave.

The clock ticks on and it has ticked way longer than I would wait for any normal appointment but as I said, there is no better place to be (I mean, the hotel door isn't rocked until 1 am ) so I pass time as well as I can - watching the magnificent clock, watching people, watching the tracks, the view from top of the station building, the sitting arrangements...
Eventually she turns up, and we hit the station area for a bite.

When it comes to eating out, it is good to have someone local to help and not end up with just the same simple dishes everytime. We go for a DIY okonomiyaki, the Kansai version where the batter is prepared for us and we fry it at the table teppanyaki.

DIY makes this traditional fastfood a slowfood, perfect when you have a lot of talk about. Which I am sure we had but nothing out of the ordinary and we end the night early, as I am catching a flight from KIX at 10 am the next day. Story-wise a bit of an anti-climax, but regardless important as we have firmly re-connected and will keep in touch. In the future we'll start to synchronize some travelling and we'll meet-up several times all over the world in the coming years. In fact, we'll meet so many times that she will in the end admit the whole "Oh, I remember who you are" that kicked this off was a lie...


Flying
Time to fly. KIX-ISG-OKA-ITM/KIX-HEL-CPH
For the domestic "bounces" I use the Yokoso fare on Japan Airlines. Pretty cheap (≈70€/leg) but cumbersome to book. (In later seasons I realise the ANA has a similarly priced fare for foreigners which is much easier to book)
I am going to Okinawa, but because of the cheap fare I decide to make it via Ishigaki. The route is operated by NU (Japan Transocean), a bit more colourful than JL, but other than that nothing special.
Arriving at ISG I am not in a mood for excursions so I just walk outside the tiny terminal and soak up some sun during the 2,5 hour layover.
In Okinawa, I hook up with some friends. Mainly doing a food orgy at a local izakaya while downing multiple frosted mugs of beer.



Next day I fly back to Osaka Itami. This time I stay clear of the Osaka station area altogether and go for the Osaka Namba area, a very busy and lively area. Main reason for this selection is that from here it will be super easy to take the train to Kansai airport in the morning. Finnair has a 10 am departure, so a quick route to the airport is key.

To check off one more thing from a list, I have booked a capsule hotel for this night. Not the hard core kind though, with small tubes stacked on top of each other. I've instead chose something called a luxury capsule hotel. It looked like this, small suites with relatively plenty of space




It looked pretty perfect to me when booking, but I didn't realise the "door" is just a curtain. So I ended up smelling my neighbour's spicy curry dish and listening to the TV game-show he watched, topped off later with some pretty loud snores.

The setup of the capsule hotel was also quite something, not visible when booking. In a black painted warehouse style floor plan, hundreds of these suites were aligned along tiny alleyways and you really needed to find your aisle and your house-number, because no other tell-tales to guide you to the capsule. There were like 6 floors of these.

After a night of semi-sleep and no hotel breakfast I am happy to be invited to the Asuka lounge where some decent sake, fruit and cold-cuts keeps the hunger at bay, before boarding AY78.





On this flight I am avoiding the western options. Good food but for a day flight it wasn't quite enough.



The Finnair ticket was PRG-NRT/KIX-PRG which pushed down the price to around 1500€, but I am not returning to PRG today. Like a pro, I'm saving HEL-PRG for a month later, when I need to position for PRG-HKG. So I am interleaving it with a HEL-CPH r/t, of which I'll use one today and save the other half for position too.

Back home on April 21, and there is 4 days "downtime" before going for a FT HEL meet-up (this was way before the "boys-drinking-beer" moniker was canned by the Vltava staff ) held at Weruska.

Well, I can't help but thinking how free life was in those days. Off for a 2 week trip to Japan, come home for just a few days before a quick trip to HEL and setting up positions for next longhaul just a few weeks later. Free to go where-ever when-ever. Oh, I miss that life.