Zoo trip

On the weekend, we went to the Inokashira Park zoo. It's a nice zoo, though it's much smaller than some zoos I've been to. It had a fair number of animals (most of which I forgot to photograph) as well as an area for kids to pet guinea pigs and some small rides (also for children).

Goats being goatly.

On our first pass, perhaps the most fun animals were the goats because goats are pretty entertaining when they're just being themselves and daytime is a time that they seem to actually like. They were housed with some chickens, which was an interesting combination. When we went by the first time, one goat was standing on something and trying to eat it at the same time while another was also trying to eat the wood.

We came back toward the end of the day and got to witness feeding time as well. The chickens tried going for the food at first, but then the goats stampeded in and they all got out of the way very quickly and snuck back to steal food when the goats were almost done.

Near the goats were some porcupines that were stubbornly refusing to get out of their sleeping area on our first pass (probably because they're nocturnal). The second time we went by, one of them was awake and pacing about, occasionally bristling up his quills. They make a very interesting sound when they move, it was very similar to the sound that leaves make when the wind blows through them. This seems to be a pretty good adaptation for an animal that lives in the forest. After a while of this, a little door opened up and the porcupine went into the building. The other porcupine, however, refused to get up. We saw it move its head and it seemed to be awake, but it promptly put its head down and pretended to be asleep when the porcupine keeper opened the door to its enclosure and tapped a broom on the cement and made various knocking sounds to try and entice it to wake up and come in. After some time, this porcupine also went into the building, presumably having made its point or whatever it was trying to do.

The capybara poses.

The zoo also had capybaras, which I was pretty excited about. I've known about capybaras since I was 10, but I'm not sure I've seen one in person. One was sitting still near the front of its enclosure watching the people who were watching it. The other one was hiding in a little shelter they had at the back.

We barely missed getting to see the elephant. It was an Asian elephant, which would have been nice to see as well since I think I've only seen African elephants in person. Probably in the summer it would be easier to see the elephant since it could go outside, but it was likely too cold for that.

This place also had some monkeys which had a fairly large place full of various toys, including a water slide (though it was probably too cold for them to want to use it). They were variously running around or climbing and jumping on things (where "things" includes "each other") and generally being pretty funny.

Omg, kitty!

There was also a squirrel area where you could walk amongst the squirrels. This was not quite so interesting to me, since I've had to evict squirrels from my balcony before. These squirrels were much smaller and kinda cute though. They're probably also the only squirrels I've seen in Japan, so I can see what the attraction might be for people around here.

The zoo only had one kind of cat and it was a pretty small one (like a large house cat). They seemed to have a lot of them, but they weren't all out on display.

There were a lot of other animals, but many of them were sleeping when I felt like taking pictures so I didn't take pictures of them (balls of fur don't photograph so well) or they were moving too fast (like the monkeys). I also hardly took any pictures of birds (thought there were many of those).

Fun with acronyms?

Yesterday daid and I were chatting and somehow the subject of the NHS came up. He'd forgotten exactly what it stood for, but that it was national health service... or system and we'd both forgotten exactly what the "S" stood for.

He suggested that the "S" stood for "sabretooth" and so this happened:

Obviously a candy striper sabretooth is the answer to everything.

Note that this has very little to do with the actual NHS apart from the acronym. Although I haven't experienced it, I don't think the actual NHS provides "service with a scowl" and it would be nice if all countries were sensible enough to have a single payer health system that includes such "luxuries" as dental and optical care (unlike, say, Canada). However, I suspect that a sabretooth cat would not have the best bedside manner and so the tagline was born.

Also, I know that the candy stripe uniform was a thing in the US (in the '40s, even), but it was the first outfit that sprang to mind.

Rush hour train insanity

It was a little after 9 in the morning when we got down to the platform. I took a picture of a funny-looking bench and we chatted while waiting for the train. We were both pretty tired, having been out until we missed the last train back home the night before (fortunately, Chase let us crash at his house) and I wanted nothing more than to get some breakfast and take a nap.

The train rolled up and as the first few cars rolled by, I didn't notice anything unusual. However, as the train started to slow down, I began to realize how uncomfortable our ride to Shinjuku would be.

I thought that I'd seen crowded trains before, but I'd never seen anything like this. Behind each door, there was a wall of people. In one car, a mittened hand was smushed against the window on a door. In the next car, a man's cheek was flattened on the glass.

"What in the fuck?!" I exclaimed in disbelief. "Maybe some of them will get off?"
"Not enough." daid replied.

When the train stopped, some people got off and I was hopeful for a moment. Until they all turned around. They'd gotten off the train because they were getting out of the way in case anyone else wanted off, not because they were getting off the train.

After the few people getting off the train were clear, we approached the train and tried to press ourselves into the solid wall of people standing in front of the door. daid managed to get into one door and a railway employee helpfully directed me to the next door over where there was a small space (though it took him two tries because I didn't understand what he was saying since my Japanese still sucks).

I got on the train and the doors barely shut in front of me. I managed to move my arms enough to hold my bag up to make more room at hip level where it seemed to be required and I tried to hold onto the small ledge above the door. Although everyone was tightly packed, the trains on the Keio line lurch more than most trains around Tokyo and I didn't want to accidentally lean heavily on one of my neighbours. The ride was uncomfortable enough without doing that.

It was a bit difficult to breathe from the weight of everyone around me and someone behind me was squirming a bit. I couldn't turn around to see who it was and I couldn't move anywhere to give them more space. I just stood there waiting for the next stop and hoping that nobody else would want on the train.

At the next stop, the line ups extended from the edge of the platform to the wall. I got off the train to let anyone who wanted off get off the train and I got the first look at the person who was squirming behind me as a woman and a young boy got off the train (I imagine that as bad as a train that crowded is for adults, it's probably worse for kids).

Luckily, almost half the passengers on the train got off. When I got back on the train, I was able to actually stand in the aisle and move my arms and hold onto a strap. The train was still pretty full once all the new passengers were on, but it was much better than before. When the train got to Shinjuku, everyone emptied out and I reunited with daid as we followed the crowd up the stairs and through the transfer area to the JR line.¹

As we waited for the train on the Yamanote line, we discussed how ridiculous the last train was and how it was somewhat infamous for this sort of thing. In principle, busier trains exist (at least the guy at the station didn't have to push anyone into the train) and probably the train we were on was much busier earlier in the day since we got on the train after 9 when many people would already have to be at work. I do not especially wish to experience those trains though.

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^{1. In general, it is much easier to follow the crowd when getting off a train and typically, the crowd knows where to go so you probably want to follow them anyway.↩}

Keeping warm in drafty apartments

In the winter, perhaps one of the most noticeable differences between Canada and Japan is the fact that buildings in Japan do not really have central heating. Maybe some do, but I have yet to encounter such a luxury here. Things like double paned glass on windows and good insulation in the walls do not seem to exist here either, which means that our apartment does not retain heat well. Although even if we had real insulation, our apartment has a mail slot in the front door that is exposed directly to the outside air because the stairwell for our building is not enclosed. 

In some ways, the lack of central heating and insulation are not so terrible because it's much warmer around Tokyo than it is around Toronto in the winter (with an average low of 2.5°C in January compared to -6.7°C). However, having the temperature drop below 10 or 15°C in your apartment is pretty awful no matter where you are.

Fortunately, we are saved by space heating. While it is possible to buy air conditioning units that can be installed on the wall or in the ceiling to heat an entire room (and cool it in the summer), these can be expensive to purchase and operate so we don't have one at home. Instead, we have one small space heater for the bedroom and a kotatsu for the kitchen.

A kotatsu is basically a table with a heater underneath. By default, the table top is screwed into a frame with the legs and heater. In the winter, one can remove the top, put a blanket on top of the frame and replace the table top (minus screws). The blanket traps the heat from the heater, making for a really toasty space underneath. One can then put their legs or as much of their body as they can fit under the kotatsu and blanket to keep warm. 

As the only real furniture in our apartment,
the kotatsu also stores a lot of things.

Kotatsus are so useful and wonderful that this is the only piece of actual furniture we have bothered to get for our apartment (unless futons count as furniture) and it is something that we would totally have shipped to us when we move.

Since we left to visit our families before it got especially cold here, we only bought a blanket for the kotatsu yesterday. We installed the blanket last night and I promptly took a nap underneath it.

A good thing about the kotatsu is that since it only heats a small volume, it doesn't require as much energy as using a space heater to heat an entire room which is good for the wallet as well as the environment. It also means that if you want to heat the space to higher temperatures than you would heat a room, you're still not being especially wasteful. The only downside is that if you have to to leave the warmth of the kotatsu for bed after you've decided that sleeping on the floor with your arm as a pillow is not a good plan, you may quickly become be very uncomfortable.

Adventures in air travel

Last time, I mentioned that we were unable to fly out as expected last Tuesday because of the weather which gave us an extra few days in Canada. We almost didn't make our rescheduled flight either due to massive computer glitches at Pearson airport. We arrived at the airport early and found that all the self check-in kiosks were down and that there were massive line ups for all the desks. The Delta desk did not seem to have enough people, which is somewhat annoying because these glitches started hours before we got to the airport so that should have given them enough time to call in extra staff.

I got out my laptop and checked us in for our flight online while we waited in line, but we still had to get boarding passes and check our bags so we had to continue waiting. Eventually, they pulled the people for our flight out of the main line and into a secondary one because it was getting close to our boarding time. The guy dealing with this secondary line promptly disappeared for 20 minutes so we asked one of the other agents to help us. We then got our hand written boarding passes and headed for US customs and security.

We got through security at the time our flight was supposed to leave, but lucky for us they were still boarding our flight because they had to check all the boarding passes and documents by hand at the gate and everyone else was late too. Then when everyone was on the plane, they announced that the flight was overweight and they got some people to get off the plane, causing another delay.

In the end, we left for Detroit about 45 or 50 minutes after our expected departure time. This was concerning for us since our connection in Detroit was relatively tight (about an hour and 20 minutes), but we did make it to the next plane in time for the last call for boarding by running from one gate to the next. 

Initially, on the flight to Japan daid and I were seated separately. However, an entire row was empty when we got on (I assume others had their own troubles with connecting flights) and one of the flight attendants suggested that daid could move there for additional leg room. So I moved there too.

Unfortunately, our new seats had screaming children on three sides of them. One kid is usually not too bad because one kid can only scream for so long. Three young children, however, is pretty awful because they can all take turns screaming. This is exactly what they did. Also, one of the sets of parents thought that their special little snowflake deserved to have an iPad playing without earphones at top volume, which was delightful. 

The airline somehow forgot to transfer our meal preferences onto the new flight when they rescheduled us, which was pretty terrible. Not only did we have to pick around a really gross piece of chicken in one meal, but I'm pretty sure the vegetarian meals (and maybe all the specialty meals) are just better than the regular meals on airplanes. So instead of reasonably okay meals, we had the stereotypically bad airplane food. The only upside is that one of the meal options for the second meal on the flight was vegetarian anyway.

When we landed at Narita, we were told that our luggage had been left in Detroit. Luckily, Narita is an excellent airport so they're supposed to deliver our luggage to our apartment instead of having us go pick it up (they're also supposed to call us with status updates every day until it arrives). This makes up for our luggage missing the plane, since we basically crammed as much stuff in there as possible and now we don't have to take it on the train and carry it to our apartment from the station.

In the end, I think we might have had as much bad luck as we possibly could getting back here, but we finally made it.

Poor weather not dodged

We were supposed to fly back to Japan on Tuesday, but there was a ground freeze at Pearson airport which delayed our flight to Minneapolis Saint-Paul where we were supposed to connect with a flight to Narita. Since flights were doing just fine leaving Minneapolis, there was no way we were catching our flight to Japan so we had to reschedule. The earliest we could have flown out was Friday, but that flight was going to be through JFK and the woman who rebooked us did not recommend that approach.

Now we're flying back Saturday through Detroit, which means that we have some time to hang out here some more. I got my haircut earlier today, which I meant to do and then ran out of time to do earlier. I figure getting a haircut in Japan would be an issue since I don't really know how to describe what kind of haircut I want in Japanese. I also got to check out some of the damage from the ice storm that hit just before we got here.

Trees doing telephone
pole impressions.

The trees all around the city seem to have taken a hit, but parts of my parents' neighbourhood were really bad. There's one street nearby where it looks like "there were telephone poles on both sides of the street, but someone just went down the street and chopped off all the tops" as daid describes it.

According to my parents, the neighbours on that street lost power for more than a day (my parents only lost power for 5 hours or so). That street had much larger trees than the ones on my parents' street, which is probably why the trees did not fare so well, but the power lines run underground so I'm not sure why it was so much worse for them.

The maple tree in my parents backyard took a beating, but it was pretty bushy before the ice storm, so it should hopefully be okay for the most part. 

None shall pass!
(Without ducking)

The entrance to the park was in pretty poor condition, as you can see. The one tree lying across the path in the front had a trunk that was probably about 30 cm in diameter, but it was snapped just like it was nothing.

The trees further from the road (behind the fallen tree in the image) fared better, but the fallen branches still made for a nice obstacle course if one wanted to go to the park.

Of course, we did want to go to the park.

Our reward for climbing over and under the fallen tree and limbs was a wonderful view of a frozen park that we had (almost) all to ourselves. Here, the trees were sheltered by the valley so many of them had escaped major damage (though the forest was impassable).

A winter wonderland!

Sick day

We're still visiting my parents and will be flying back tomorrow morning. It looks like the weather should hold out and if it does, we'll have dodged storms by one day each way (we flew out of Toyko the day after the ice storm hit over here). Our connection in Minneapolis also looks like it should be fine too so we should be able to get back to Tokyo for Wednesday.

As much as I generally do like the snow and the winter, the temperature here has been pretty ridiculous, dropping to -20 C at some points (and it will drop again tomorrow as we're preparing to leave). During the cold snap, the furnace in my parents' house also broke which wasn't especially pleasant (though possibly the house was still warmer than our apartment gets in Tokyo) and I got sick as soon as the temperature started to hover around freezing so we haven't really gone anywhere.

We meant to make a trip to Toronto while we were here since daid hasn't been to the CN tower before and we have this trend of visiting tall buildings/things together. We also wanted to go to Snakes and Lattes to pick up some expansions for Cards Against Humanity, but that didn't really happen. This is perhaps the disadvantage of being in town for only a week.

We haven't quite managed to get all the foods we were planning on bringing back with us either. So far we have 9 kg of dried legumes (4.5 kg each of lentils and chickpeas), but we still have to go find some tahini before we leave so we can make hummus when we get back to Japan. It's always fun to explain what chickpeas and lentils are to the customs officials in Japan. Last time I think I explained that lentils are things that you cook like rice and that seemed to be an acceptable explanation.

Anyway, sorry about the somewhat boring blog today, not much has happened this week and I'm feeling a bit crummy still (but better than a few days ago). Next week should be more interesting.

Resolutions

Happy New Years, everyone and I apologize for the late post. It turns out that visiting family and being social takes away from blogging time.

I don't make New Years resolutions every year and I think last year was the only time I kept all my resolutions because I only made one (I resolved to finish my thesis). This year I have free time so I'm feeling a little ambitious about this sort of thing. So ambitious, in fact, that I will not only make resolutions, but also share them publicly.

First of all, I resolve to read more books. I'm not sure how many books I read last year, but it might have been less than ten. I read a lot of papers, but those aren't quite the same. I think a reasonable goal is somewhere around 26 books (this is one book every other week), but since I'm feeling ambitious right now I'll set a goal for 30 books. In addition, half of the books I'll read this year will be written by women simply because women are severely underrepresented on my bookshelves at the moment. I'll keep a running tally of the books I'm reading/have read in the sidebar.

I also resolve to draw more by making a point to draw something every day (or spend some time working on a larger drawing every day). Here, I'd like to make a point of drawing things I don't usually draw and playing with techniques I don't usually employ (because I'm lazy). Granted, usually, I don't draw things if I don't think about them so it's not especially easy to think of what should be included in this list so I might ask for suggestions from time to time. I'll probably post some of them on here every once in a while.

I also resolve to run more. I've been working on getting back into a habit of doing this regularly in Japan (coming somewhere cold and snowy has not been helpful for doing this at all) and I would actually like to participate in a race this year. However, since I'll still be in Japan, this means I'm forced to make an additional resolution.

I resolve to study Japanese more. Based on some preliminary googling, the way to register for the small races in Japan involves being able to register on websites that are only in Japanese. As good as Google is for translating these, sometimes it does some funny things during translation. Also, it would be nice to be able to communicate effectively (for obvious reasons). Thus, I resolve to learn at least one new kanji a day and to spend some time every week practicing my reading/writing/listening/speaking.

Finally, I resolve to blog more. Starting either next week or the week after when we're back in Japan and things have settled down, I will include a post on Thursday as well as the regular Monday posts (or normally regular). I'll try to keep the Monday posts about interesting things that happened during the week and observations about living in a new place (or however you would describe the topics of my posts so far) while the Thursday posts might be about something else entirely (I have some ideas).