Curry or Soy Sauce?

I have to say, the second time around proves to be much easier, especially in Tokyo. From the previous posts, there was a lot of funny stories to be told when I arrived in Shanghai. But Tokyo is very westernized. The biggest challenge in everyday living is probably the language, especially when I need to purchase something specific. A couple of examples:

(1) I wanted to purchase some soy sauce marinade for chicken and came home with a big packet (which kind of looks like the Jack Daniels marinade pouches). From the pictures, I was 99% convinced it was a soy sauce based marinade. When I started preparing for dinner, I opened the packet to find out that it was curry. It turned out to be good curry, but quite a shocker when you see thick yellow sauce as opposed to thin dark brown sauce.

(2) Lint brush - actually, I'm still not sure if I bought a lint brush or refills to a "swiffer" like cleaning tool. All I know is that the lint comes off my jacket nicely.

(3) Facial products - I purchased a night creme.. but maybe it's a wash? I'm not sure if I need to wash it off or not. Reminds me of a funny story when my 19yr. old teenage cousin was using pro-activ. He said, "Anne, it doesn't work, I put that stuff on and it just looks funny" Well Anthony, it says "mask" on it, do you wash it off? No.. I just rub it in and then go to school. That was probably one of the funniest things I have heard.

Tsukiji Market

On 1/17 Anne and I went to Tsukiji Market (pronounced Skee-gee). Tsukiji is the largest fish (and various seafood) market in the world. Everyday, except Sunday, they unload and sell 2,000,000 pounds of seafood between 5:00am and 12:00 noon. It is one of Tokyo’s most famous places. The biggest draw comes from the tuna auctions. Various restaurateurs and food distributors bid on the tuna based on the quality of the fish. The Japanese take their seafood very seriously. The record of the most expensive tuna in Tsukiji market was a Blue fin Tuna fish auctioned in January 2001 with a shocking price of $184,000.00 US (that’s just for one fish).

We arrived at 6:00am after spending a good 20 frustrating minutes trying to find the market which we knew was only 3 blocks from the subway exit we came out of. Prior to arriving we had been told it is very busy there. That apparently was quite the understatement. It was crazy. There was constant traffic in the form of little trams (see picture to the left), trucks, carts, 60,000 some workers, tourists, and locals. The rows where the fish are sold are wide enough for 1 person. This makes it a tight squeeze when people pass you, which they do every couple of seconds.

After looking around we ate some sushi in a restaurant about 10 feet from the market. There were several restaurants which were filled with people enjoying their sushi breakfast. The fish market is surrounded by several blocks full of very small restaurants, seafood, cooking, and vegetable shops. We spent about 30 minutes checking many of these stores out. We ended our adventure by picked up some squid to enjoy later and heading back home.

Our Japanese home

Welcome to our Japanese home. We moved into it on January 10th and 10 days later I finally have everything where I want it. We were very happy to see our shipment arrive to the apartment one hour after we moved in. In case you haven’t made it to the earlier portions of the blog it took 6 weeks to arrive in Shanghai compared to 8 days in Tokyo. The name of the building is the Atago Green Hills. It is owned by the same company who created the Shanghai World Financial Center (mentioned in a previous entry). It is located in the Minato-ku ward of Tokyo, which is the south central part of the city.

Our apartment has a small bathroom, kitchen, living room, bedroom, and balcony. Though much smaller than our apartment in Shanghai, I (and I am sure Anne) likes this one much better. Why is less space better? Well, it is all about the little details. The Japanese are know for paying great attention to the little things. For example, the floors in our kitchen and living room are heated. We can control how hot or cold we want them to be. Though it may not sound interesting to most of you, after a week you will find yourself missing it.

Here is a video clip of our home. Don’t blink; you will miss one of our rooms.

Extreme Blog Makeover

In an attempt to keep up with the Jones's and from the prodding of my wife, I have updated the look of our blog and added a couple features. I hope you like the new look enough to continue to share our adventures with us. On the right you will now notice a small world map. This map is used to monitor where our blog readers are reading our blog from. You can click on it to make the map larger. I also included a couple world clocks just to let you know what time it is here. Lastly, I added a visitor counter so we can see how popular our blog is or if we are starting to bore you.

The Tokyo Tower

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Paris… or Tokyo. Apparently both have a very similar tower. In Tokyo it has a very original and creative name. It’s called…. drum roll please… the Tokyo Tower. Okay I guess it isn’t really creative and you probably already guessed that name based off the title, but I hope you enjoyed my attempt at drama. The Tower is build from orange painted steel. At night it is lit up in varying colors depending on the day and or mood of the people who run the lights. It is usually orange, but we have seen it as white and purple too. The Tokyo Tower is 5 blocks from the Kamiyacho subway station and is one of Tokyo’s most distinguishable buildings.

Coming Out Day

On 1/12 Japan had it's Coming Out Day Holiday. It is on the second Monday in January. Coming Out Day is a day when all of the young men and women who turned 20 (the age of majority here) dress in traditional Japanese apparel and walk around town. The holiday and dress is to recognize them as adults.

To our disappointment we walked around the Ginza District of Japan for about an hour and only saw a handful of 20 year olds dressed up. One of the reasons for the low turnout was that it did hail today, but it was a very light and almost more like snow than hail. Since they don’t usually see hail here, it was likely considered very bad weather. Here are a few pictures of the youths we did see.

Dollah on the dollars

It’s all about the Benjamin’s or in these cases the Mao Zedong’s & Fukuzawa Yukichi’s. I thought I would do an entry on money as it is an important part of daily life.

Chinese Renminbi (RMB) 人民币 written as yuán元 and spoken as kuài. All of the paper notes have the picture of Mao Zedong on them. The paper denominations are 100, 50, 20, 10, 5, and 1 yuán. They have 1 yuán coins. The small coins are 5 jiao, 1 jiao, and 1 fen. Here is a value break down for you. 1 yuán 元= 10 jiao 角 = 100 fen分. Basically like a dollar, dime, and penny. As a side note the word that has similar meaning as cents in Chinese is máo. At the time of this blog entry the conversion rate 6.83 RMB per US dollar

Taiwan Dollar TWD written as yuán 元 and spoken as kuài. The TWD has the same value break down as the Chinese RMB. The paper denominations are $100, $500, and $1,000. The coins come in $50, $10, $5, $1. At the time of this blog entry the conversion rate was 33.31 Hong Kong Dollar per US dollar

Hong Kong Dollar HK$. The paper notes are also very colorful and many of them have a picture of a lion. The paper denominations are in 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, and 1,000. The coins come in $10, $5, $2, $1, 50¢, 20¢, and 10¢. At the time of this blog entry the conversion rate was 7.75 Hong Kong Dollar per US dollar

Japanese Yen 円, sign: ¥. It has paper denominations of 1,000. 5,000. and 10,000 yen. I am not certain about the pictures on the 1,000 and 5,000, but the 10,000 has a picture of Fukuzawa Yukichi. The coins are in 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, and 500 yen. At the time of this blog entry the conversion rate was 89.69 yen per US dollar.

“Um, Bill where are you taking me…”

We arrived and checked into the Mitsui Garden Hotel in Shiodome (She-oe-dome-ae) on 1/01 after the 1 hour commute from the airport. Why this hotel? Well it is a 1 minute commute to Anne’s work, it is literally the building right next door. We explored the city, watched a bunch of the TV series Lost and 30 Rock. The hotel only had CNN in English and after an hour it essentially looped the same info. Trust me when I say you can only watch so much of the same story on the war in Gaza before you get a little restless. We also started to explore a little of the city. We had a couple appointments to see apartments on 1/05. We've been told that navigating in Tokyo is difficult so we decided to do a dry run on 1/04. I had the concierge give me directions and a couple maps for each place. Feeling comfortable, since we could see our first building, we began our adventure.

The first building was a 15 minute walk. Pretty easy. The second building… well even with 3 maps and directions from 2 different front desks we got lost. At this point I want to warn potential tourists of the uniqueness of Tokyo. We have been told that Tokyo was built with invasion in mind. For that reason navigation is very confusing. Many of the streets do not have names. There are many bulletin maps on the streets, but they never seem to line up with the city maps (I am sure locals can do this, but I can’t seem to). Also, most blocks are different sizes. So 1 US size block might have anywhere from 0-4 streets going through it. Also many of the busier city streets might not have intersection streets for several blocks so it makes it very difficult to get to the streets behind them.

Subways… Tokyo has the most subway lines of any city I have ever seen. This subway map does not include the even more detailed Railway Lines. The subway stations do not sell tickets based on the name of the stop, but rather the cost of getting to that stop. So you wouldn’t buy a ticket from Kamiyacho to Akasaka-mitsuke, you would buy a ticket for 160 yen. How would you know that it is a 160 yen ticket? Well they have maps showing the cost; unfortunately we either didn’t see these the first time or didn’t know what they were. Fortunately we found someone kind enough to walk us through it.

Long story short, what would have taken us 1 hour to see (just the outside) of 3 buildings took us all day. We asked (in our best Japanese, which is terrible) over 10 people, including various concierges, for directions and help. We now understand why the vast majority of cars here have GPS systems.

The Recap

Ohayō gozaimasu (good morning) bloggers. Here is a quick recap our time since we left Shanghai. Yes, I know Anne mentioned this already, but I wanted to mention it too. Besides, this keeps you from working for a couple more minutes (my apologies for those of you who were doing something more entertaining than work). We left Shanghai at 9:30am on 12/14. We landed in Minneapolis at 12:30pm on 12/14. Yes that’s right, only 3 hours past… strange it seems like the 2 flights were a lot longer than that. When we left Shanghai the temperature was 50F (sorry Celsius folks, I am still no good at conversions). Twelve hours after we arrived in Minneapolis it was -20F. It stayed that temperature for 90% of our stay. It also snowed just about every day which accumulated at least a half a foot of snow (about 16cm). Being home was GREAT (well minus the 4 jackets we wore at all times)! It was nice seeing the family and eating high calorie US food again. We left Minneapolis on 12/24.

We arrived in Connecticut (via New York) on the same day. Funny, it took the same amount of hours to get to Minneapolis from Shanghai. To our relief it was around 40F for our stay. The Camerato’s (Anne’s CT family) are always very entertaining. My stay was filled video games, free family entertainment and with delicious east coast foods (yes, if you haven’t figured it out by now, our lives seem to always revolve around food). We left CT on 12/31 at 10:30am and landed in Tokyo at 5:30pm on 1/01 (and you thought you had a long commute to your New Years Party).

The chicken or the egg....

Greetings blog readers! Blogger Bill will receive his computer this weekend so I’ll provide some reading entertainment for this week. Yesterday was day 3 on the job. Actually, we went through cultural training all day but it was at the office since we don’t really know our way around yet. We learned about cultural differences, eating etiquette, seating, bowing, travel and history – all very interesting!

For lunch, we went to a Japanese restaurant so our instructor could show us what “to-do and not to-do”. First, every restaurant has a specialty; this one was chicken – harmless to the fellow American. We went in and realized we needed to take off our shoes. Is this common? Yes! No prob. – I’m wearing clean, hole-free socks. We were then seated in semi-traditional tatami tables. That means on the floor but with cut outs for your legs. Pretty neat. There were two options for lunch, chicken skewers or chicken & egg. Bill and I opted for chicken & egg on rice. When it arrived, I opened the lid and realized it’s a raw egg. To eat or not to eat? Well, raw egg happens to be very common here and it was delicious on top of the chicken. Also, if you opt for all dark meat, it costs more. Funny!

Our training ended around 5. I then went to back to work, anticipating the welcome dinner from the HR group – how thoughtful! Teppanyaki was on the menu and they kindly asked me what I didn’t eat. I indicated that I tend to shy away from raw egg... but judging from this afternoon, this may not be an issue. Also, I told everyone that “I’m not a picky eater!” (esp. thinking of teppanyaki… chunks of meat, veggies, rice) Around 7, we headed over to the restaurant. Our table was on the second floor. Ah yes – shoes off. I then looked at the seating, same as this morning, but no cut outs for the legs! Uh oh… how do I sit? Well, men sit yoga style, one leg across the other. Women sit with both legs semi-tucked under on one side. Wow – I am not that flexible! So… I had to sit like a guy. Appetizers arrived – chicken sashimi, horse sashimi and an egg omelet. Well, the egg is fully cooked! I tried the chicken and it was really good. The horse meat was a little chewy. Main entrée was salmon, chicken, pork, veggies and cocktail wieners. Are you also thinking “wieners?” Yes, interesting but tasted great. We shared lots of laughs and “kuai” stories, leaving a little after 10pm. Most of my colleagues have an average one hour commute. I learned today that this is a typical workday in Japan and I cringed when I heard it but it was so much fun!

Happy New Year!

Happy 2009!! Tis the year of the Ox.
Wow - I cannot believe how quickly 2008 flew by. We just arrived in Tokyo a few hours ago and got settled into our hotel. I'm not sure, but I think we celebrated New Years three or four times on the plane. I know, it was very exciting... watching movies (Bottle shock, Ms. Pettigrew, Fred Claus) and eating airplane food (bbq beef, turkey sandwich, omlette).

Our holiday break in the US was fun but felt too short! Sleeping in our own bed felt fantastic. Driving was refreshing, eating American food was awesome. Our first meal off the plane? Chipotle - yummy. Christmas was celebrated with families on both sides - St Cloud with the Bergers and Connecticut with my side. East coast was everything we expected and more (seafood, pasta, steaks, cannoli's, dunkin donuts and so much more).

As I reflect on 2008 and our experiences, I realized how much I take for granted - friends, family, freedom and food! Other things to remember in 2008, in no particular order: (I'm watching CNN now - jet lag!)
*Bejing Summer Olympics
*Earthquake of Sichuan
*Melamine poisoning
*Myanmar cyclone
*Death of Heath Ledger
*Britney Spears breakdown (and comeback!)
*Democratic race between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama
*President elect Barack Obama
*Global economic downturn
*Opening of the 35W bridge
*Vote recount of Al Franken (who sang to us at our wedding) and Norm Coleman