Japan: Chinatown, believe it or not

While on holiday in Japan, I kept a detailed series of notes in honour of Nanowrimo.  All posts about Japan comprise excerpts from my journals. 

6th November, 2013

"This morning, I said to my mother that we should detox today by eating things that are slightly healthier.  She agreed and we ate a super healthy Japanese breakfast with cold boiled vegetables and porridge and fish and then after lunchtime passed, we shared a tiny calzone.  Nearer to seven pm, I was getting hungry and trying to decide what to eat next and she looked rather confused and said, "Eat?  I thought we were detoxing."

We looked at each other and then it hit me.  My ever-loving mother thought we were fasting and had been suffering in silence out of solidarity with me.  

Boy, did we laugh hard at that one.

                                           ____________________________________

After we eat our breakfast overlooking the Yokohama bay, my mother puts her spoon down and says, "I want to go to Chinatown today."

Chinatown?  Come on.  Chinatown is everywhere else, I argue, but you can't take the Chinese out of the... well, Chinese person, so Chinatown it is.  As consolation, we look at the map and see what looks good in the vicinity of Chinatown.  We hit upon the Baby Fish Aquarium at the same time.  Obviously, I'm crazy about fish and if there's anyone crazier, it's my mother.  She loves her little brick pond and sits there for hours watching the guppies frolic.  Baby Fish Aquarium sounds like something too cute to miss - it's either going to be fish that are really tiny, or literally baby fish.  I have an image of cheerful little fish fry playing in bubbling plastic tanks, which is a big yes for me, so we head in that direction.

Chinatown is like Chinatowns the world over.  Dim sum, roast duck, elaborate dragon gates.  It smells like incense and medicine hall herbs and for some reason, every shop sells pandas.  People sit and eat noodles street side, nestled up against shops selling phone trinkets and souvenirs.

We stop by a temple, crowded with heady joss sticks and again, I tell the Universe that I am filled with gratitude.  Against the backdrop of the sky, the dragons on the roof gleam like jewels.

We get lost several times on the way to the Baby Fish Aquarium and at least one thing is consistent here: how helpful and kind people are.  They'll go out of their way to help, looking at our scraggly maps and leaving their posts to walk us down the street to point the right way, occasionally laughing good-naturedly at us once we manage to express ourselves.

We make it to the Baby Fish Aquarium which is located, intriguingly, on the second floor of a building hidden in an alleyway.

When we enter, the man at the counter eyes us strangely.  Like everyone we have encountered so far, he is exceedingly polite but seems a little bit curious as he issues our tickets and gives us a map to the aquarium.  He also points out a cool quiz that you can play on the sill of each tank - a magnetic pen can be touched to three magnets that symbolise multiple choice answers to a question printed at the top of the tank.  The correct answer attracts the pen and the wrong answers repel it.  It is so ingenious and simple and, unlike fancy electronics, hard to destroy.

We start walking among a series of small but well-appointed tanks.  Right off the bat, I recognise frog fish, fiddler crabs, some kind of pipe fish and garden eels (my favourite!).  Gradually my mother and I start to realise something funny, which is that each tank, or each group of tanks, actually has a theme.  Unlike other aquariums, which are made to simulate the natural habitats of the animals, the tanks here are made to demonstrate what the fish seem like, if that makes any sense.

The alien, floating pipe fish get a tank that resembles the surface of the moon, complete with a little space shuttle and the tank full of random fish actually gets a fish party.  I can't emphasis enough how bizarre and funny it all is.  It takes me a second to realise that a tank full of what looked like model houses is actually full of hermit crabs - an interesting way to teach children that hermit crabs literally carry their homes on their backs.  Parts of it are rather odd and I'm not sure if the fish mind, or feel mistreated, but my mother and I keep giggling and pointing out crazier and crazier set-ups.

Some of the fish get decor that touts their skills.  A school of fast swimming fish gets a swimming pool, the archer fish get their food put on an actual bull's eye and the mudskippers, who have dry platforms from which they can hop into the water, get high jump bars.  A sucker fish of some description has walls lined with tiles of different textures so that we can see which one he likes to suck on best.

The poisonous fish are put in tanks that look like they are covered with police cordons.  It's all rather entertaining and clearly meant for educational purposes.  Even more amusing are the signs about sea creatures with English translations on them, such as the one that states that the octopus has three hearts and labels a drawing of said octopus with "Gills the heart" which, well, I'm not sure what that means.

Some of the signs are oddly poetic, like one about flounders that reads:

The body is hidden.

This fish has transform
eye.  From child to old very
aglessibe From child to old.

I feel somewhat moved and I have no idea why.

Thus entertained, we get to what looks like the end of the aquarium and I wait for my mother to use the loo.  Suddenly, she comes running round the corner, telling me, "You have to come see this!  It's a playgroup!"

Confused, I trail after her into an entirely different wing of the aquarium where we have to take off our shoes.  Here, there are still more tanks of really cool fish but for some reason, the tanks are all knee height and we have to kneel to look into them.  Beyond that corridor, is, of all things, an indoor playground, and there is a group of chubby little babies playing on the equipment with their parents.

And that's when it hits us.  The cutesy tanks and the knee high exhibits all for teaching the very young.  The "Baby Fish Aquarium" isn't for small fish (even though they are mostly minute), it's literally for babies.  No wonder the man at the counter was so nonplussed.  We're in an aquarium for children.

But I don't even care right now because this is one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life.  The playground is filled with fish.  From a fish tunnel under the slide to tanks on the jungle gym that kids can climb to look at, the entire place is designed for children to get close to animals.  I'm absolutely gobsmacked at how simple the idea is.  If I'd had access to something like that as a child, I would've been positively filled with delight.

I love what Singapore has done with its animal attractions, but this is a more accessible way to get very young children close to aquatic life than holding them over too-high touch pools that may get them screaming.  (Plus their axolotl breeding programme seems to be working!)

As we're walking out of the children's playground, an elderly woman who seems to run the gift shop grabs my mother's arm and says, "Education!  Education!"

"A tour?" my mum looks over her shoulder at me, confused.  We follow the lady and join a small group of people who are listening to a very enthusiastic woman who patters away in rapid Japanese before showing us... Fish Theatre.  I'm not even kidding.  The fish have been trained to race down a plastic tunnel, "sing" (READ: eat) round a microphone for the duration of one song and then race back into their tank.

The presenter then stands behind a tank of some of the ugliest stone fish I've ever seen.  She proceeds to tell us about the stone fish (I'm guessing) and asks the audience to guess how many stone fish are in the tank.  The ladies beside us obediently count; at least ten.  The presenter then lowers a stick with a piece of meat on it and shows, with great flair, how if she pokes the stone fish or strokes its back with the meat, it will not move a jot.  But move the meat in an arc by the fish's face and... BAM!  It pounces.

We all squeal and laugh in shock.

She asks the lady beside me to point out the next fish and repeats the process.  We all brace ourselves for the fish to come gulping out of the sand and... nothing.  The stone fish is actually a stone.  Half the supposed fish creatures in that tank are stones that have been carved and painted for this express purpose.  We are deeply amused; this aquarium has a crazy sense of humour.

We wander out of the building feeling very lighthearted.  It's the quirkiest thing I've seen in some time and I'm inordinately glad that we've actually come to Chinatown for this."

Love, airflown

It's been kind of a rough week.  One of our favourite uncles passed away very suddenly and the world seems like a different place; some strange and soundless change in the air.  

Amid all the craziness, a package arrived from Australia, from Beck.  When we were in Secondary School, we were in a group of five extremely close knit friends.  We lived in each others' pockets and spent hours together in person and on the phone every day.  One day, Becky made us beautiful thread friendship bracelets that we wore constantly, like characters out of Pretty Little Liars.  Over time, some of those friendships disintegrated, while others grew stronger, but I continued to wear that bracelet religiously.

I left it on when I exercised or went swimming or on holiday.  In the shower, I liked to watch the way the string would go stiff with soap and to mould the bracelet into waves with my fingers.  I pulled on the clear blue bead on the end when I was anxious, rolled the thread between my fingers when I was bored.  Beck has since bought me other things, and I wear that bracelet less and less, but I cling to it, as I do our deep and special bond.  And a couple of weeks ago, when I noticed the thread around the bead start to fray, I begged her to make me another one.

Well, she made me three, complete with crazy instructions and an amazing card that made me cry.

There is a fishtail braided one, a diamond flecked one with a tiny hematite heart a thicker (and therefore stronger), but otherwise almost perfect replica of the original.

Losing a loved one is painful and brutal.  But it means that you had a loved one to begin with.  And sometimes, what keeps us going is that feeling of loving, being loved, and of knowing that we are privileged enough to have people in our lives that care deeply for us, even if they only stay for a short while.  

Rest in peace, Uncle Was.  You live on in my heart.

And thank you Beck, for your undying love and friendship, this year and every other.

Commitment

I am one of the most unfit people I know.  I'm flat-footed and bow-legged.

I spent years avoiding anything that remotely resembled exercise while my friends swam and scuba dived and played rugby and ran marathons.  I never wanted to be an athletic person (except when I wanted to be Michelle Kwan).  On P.E. days, I would run 200 metres and end up with violent stabbing pains in my chest.  The doctors couldn't find anything, but it hurt all the same. 

Some time ago, I left a comment on Grace's blog (I think) about the diffculty I had breathing and Holly, a coach and very sweet blogger, replied, telling me that it was probably because I needed to go slowly and let my body adjust.

And so, I started "plodding" regularly - moving around the neighbourhood at the slowest possible pace without walking.  It was painful.  At first I could only plod for about 500 metres without feeling winded.  And then maybe a couple of 500 metre stretches along a much longer route.  Somewhere along the way, I started plodding for longer and longer bouts until my chest didn't hurt anymore.  I woke just after dawn two, three, sometimes even four times a week and let the morning air and sunrise wash over me.

It was really difficult; everything hurt, from my thighs to my calves to my shoulders.  But my feet, over-pronating and sliding around in £10 shoes from Tesco that I'd bought on a whim, hurt the most.  The further I plodded, the harder and longer my soles ached and I limped around the office for the rest of the day in agony.  Two weeks ago, when the rubber on the heel started flapping off in bits, I finally gave in to buying a new pair.

I talked one of the fittest people I know, my friend Dawn, and she suggested I try Running Lab at Velocity so that I could get proper advice on what shoes to get.  They would be expensive, she said, but worth the price. 

Back in the office, Edie (very sporty) and Shirin (very sensible) agreed. 

"But it's a lot of money, " I said doubtfully.  "What if I wake up one morning and just decide I'm done plodding?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Shirin said, "you've been doing it for what, six months already?"

I sat there for a minute, stunned.  Surely I hadn't consistently been engaging in regular, entirely voluntary exercise for half a freaking year.  But she was right.

So I showed up at the Running Lab last week, tried not to flinch when the man looked horrified at just how flat my feet were and plodded for two minutes on the treadmill in the store while Edie filmed a video and giggled.  Lots of consideration, negotiation and lip-biting later, I was the owner of a neon yellow pair of New Balance shoes with the best socks I have ever had the pleasure to know. 

And so far?  I haven't quit.  Just taken them for a couple of long, slow plods in the vicinity and enjoyed the support and cushioning that they provide.  My feet still hurt a little but in a good way- feet that are trying to get used to an inbuilt arch where there was previously none. 

It's still hard.  I still struggle while people I know knock out amazing workouts with alarming regularity.  But the one thing I am enjoying is this new commitment to my health and to my body. 

Maybe it's the relationship I've been looking for all along.

My brother's camera

I'm guessing that right now, a review is pretty pointless.  The Canon 60D has been around for awhile and everyone knows it's a great camera.  But seriously guys, it's a great camera.

I took it out for brunch with Rebecca where she decided to test her 5D and we made fools of ourselves scrambling around in the cafe to get the best light.  It was so worth it though.  With a Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 tacked onto it, the 60D gives beautiful colour and clarity and in natural light, a lovely organic tone to photos that I don't seem to get with Big (unless I'm doing something wrong with the white balance).  I also like that the ISO comes in much smaller increments and can be pushed higher without too much consequence, and that the aperture can be controlled by a separate wheel from the shutter speed.

Not so fond of: the slightly finicky ISO function, the fact that the screen doesn't flip out and the difficulty that I seem to have with the sensitive button-and-wheel system on the back of the camera.  The Tamron's auto-focusing is also a little slow, so I spent a lot of time squinting through the crosshairs and trying to manual focus on quickly moving objects.  All in though, I really like it and I hope my brother can be persuaded to loan it out more often!

Rebecca's 5D with its Canon EF 28-70 f/2.8 takes incredible pictures.  The light and colour on these is clean and bright and the bokeh is deliciously warm and creamy.  It is ridiculously heavy though; the lens is as big as her head!

In between taking pictures, we managed to eat the broccoli that we had been yearning after for so long.  Public service announcement: it's as good as I remember. 

We had the salmon and greek yoghurt, a zucchini salad and an extra helping of broccoli.  The desserts looked amazing so we also shared a chocolate passionfruit cake and a slice of pear and amaretto loaf, which is better than it sounds.

And, of course, coffee. 

Stuffed, we finally stumbled out onto the street and started walking towards the train station.  Rebecca kindly but reluctantly modelled for me along the way.  She complains that I frequently get pictures of her in unglamorous poses (I do) when she's crouching on the floor or schlepping along in her slippers, so I made an effort this time to make it look a little more Lonely Planet and a little less lonely pariah.

I know, right?