Seattle view of the world

Here's the living-room view from the corporate apt where we'll stay for a week until we can move back to our house. A pretty cool - and cloudy - view of the Space Needle and (on the right) the Frank Gehry-designed Experience Music Project museum owned by billionaire Paul Allen.

A smooth first morning here. In past years, the children have awakened at 4 a.m. after Tokyo flights, but Lucinda is still asleep at 8:30am after 10 1/2 hours, and Arno and Blaine are napping after waking up earlier. Today we'll arrange some basics, buy cell phones and groceries, go to Ikea and Target. Later this week, we'll test-drive a Prius after 3 carless years.

Last full day

Well, it's come down to the final 36 hours in Tokyo. Blogger tells me that I've previously written 500 posts (!!) on Jessica in Tokyo, and this is #501.

Great news is that the foggy image on my camera's LED screen mysteriously cleared while I took last photos of our pyramid house in Nishi-Azabu. Unfortunate news is that we packed the USB thingy that I need to download the shots into my computer -- so no pix today.

As always, some novelties to contemplate. Instead of lugging 4 enormous suitcases to our hotel tonite and then to the airport, we hired the Yamato "Black Cat" delivery service to takkyubin our bags directly to Narita Airport. Black Cat (or Kuroneko in Japanese) trucks are ubiquitous in Japan, and friends routinely use it to ship skis and bags directly to resorts in Hokkaido ahead of time -- that is, no schlepping skis, etc., on the shinkansen! Anyway, it's fantastic for us. For $80, we can pick up our bags at Narita's Terminal 1 two hours before our flight.

With a few hours to go, we're taking a family ice cream break at Cold Stone Creamery in Roppongi Hills.

Packing up

The movers have finished 1 of 3 days packing and our house is more than half empty. Dining table and chairs, books, most big furniture and all of my clothes and shoes are gone. Today: children's rooms, rugs, odds and ends.

But there's always something new to learn: the US doesn't allow us to "import" foods unless we personally carry them in -- which means we have to leave jars of Bonne Maman strawberry jam and Costco peanut butter that I bought in Japan and several boxes of American cereal (our only direct Tokyo import, from Expat Express) or fill a suitcase. Kinda weird. I mean, these are US products, so why can't I return with them?

The moving process in Japan is different than in the US. Because Tokyo has small streets, the company fills a series of smaller trucks outside our house and empties them elsewhere into a shipping container. Also, the workers take off/put on their slip-on shoes in the entry hall every time they walk thru the front door, which is quite a trick when they're also carrying a piano or a dresser! When we moved in, they did this in heavy rain, an added degree of difficulty.

And during scheduled rests, a few workers take cat naps in the shade of our garage. In Tokyo, people grab sleep wherever they can: commuters on trains and buses, taxi drivers on their reclined seats by the side of the road, customers sitting at Starbucks tables and, it seems, workers on flat packing boxes on top of concrete.

Groceries

7 days to go until our departure, and I'm cleaning and throwing stuff away like crazy. What's in our pantry? Flour, sugar, brown sugar, baking soda... chocolate chips!

So we've just made a last batch of cookies in our lame French oven -- perfect timing for Arno's sayonara playdate this afternoon.

Back to the U.S.

It's official: we're leaving Tokyo and moving back to Seattle on June 29. We've had a terrific 3 years here -- an excellent family adventure, with great friends, schools and restaurants! -- and it's time to return to "normal" life with a car, backyard and wild salmon on the bbq.

Next projects: Blaine is leaving The Washington Post and will write his third book, "Escape from Camp 14," about a young man who was born in the North Korean gulag and escaped when he was in his early 20s. I'll start looking for work. And Lucinda and Arno will join the ranks at the Seattle public schools.

I've been lax about posting on this blog in recent months, after (1) my computer broke, (2) my camera broke, and (3) as I've been more focused on trying to get a job that would keep us in Japan. (Despite best efforts -- and a lot of support and help from friends -- my job prospects here did not pan out.)

I'll try to post some photos, at least, of some of the sights we've seen in Asia that didn't see daylight yet. Thanks for reading my blog!

Tourists in Beijing

We're on a 5-day family tourist trip to Beijing!

Staying at the Grand Hyatt with a very reasonable rate from Expedia. Seeing the highlights. Last 36 hrs: hutong neighborhood and houses, dim sum, Peking Duck, stuffed pandas supplied by hotel.

Today, Great Wall. Last night, amazing acrobat show. Next few days: Tiananmen, Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven and maybe a few other things.

Photos to come. But it's v exciting for all of us to be here.

Spring flowers

I already wrote about sakura (cherry blossom) fashion. Now here are some snaps from our annual picnics (hanami) under the cherries.

Last weekend, the peak of the flower experience, we went to Shinjuku Gyoen, a huge, well-kept park near Shinjuku station, with many families from Arno's school, Willowbrook. Crowds lined up outside the gates to get in.


Blaine took this gorgeous shot that expresses the pure hanami experience of picnicking beneath the boughs.


Arno took charge of my camera and delivered this self-portrait...


... and a shot of his parents. I am drinking a can of hot green tea purchased from a vending machine.


Lucinda and Arno


The finale to this year's hanami was in Kinuta Koen (Kinuta Park) in Sendagaya-ku, Tokyo, at the Willowbrook spring picnic. Amazing trees!


An elegantly dressed older lady brought out to gaze at the blossoms.


And Arno's Take/Takenoko (Bamboo/Bamboo shoots) class this year.


Happy spring!

Living in the present

"Mom, what's a typewriter?" - Arno, born in 2004, asked tonight.

Arno's joke

Whilst eating his Cheerios this morning:

"Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to other slide."

(With credit to Elmo.)

Happy New Year!

Happy 2010! We went to Thailand for 12 days, a wonderful and entertaining vaca, returning on Dec 31, and I'm just now catching up on non-immediate business after sleeping in, doing heaps of laundry, and tossing out ancient art projects and other clutter.

After 2 weeks with the children, Blaine and I escaped tonight for our Saturday date: to see Avatar. Wow. I'm not a "big movie" person, usually hate them, but I thought it was great: plot, special effects, action, flying dinosaur-like creatures.

November activities

It's been a very busy month here. My mother and stepfather came to visit (her 5th trip to Tokyo!) for a few weeks. Blaine traveled to Australia and South Korea and covered Obama's visit to Tokyo and Seoul. I had an interesting corporate assignment, to research, conduct interviews and write a report about Japan's foreign aid policies.

Also this month, Lucinda really learned to ride a bicycle and sang karaoke with several friends and their moms (including me). Arno turned 5 and will have his birthday party this weekend. Blaine took the children to Mizuno, a huge sports store, to buy baseball mitts. Both schools had parent-teacher conferences in recent days, when we get a vague sense of how much Japanese the children are absorbing. And today, the last of a 6-day school vacation, the children and I went to see Cirque du Soleil.

Based on this month alone, they seem to be the luckiest children alive, though I don't think they've realized that... yet?

Red letter day

Today was Arno's 5th birthday, which seems like a pretty big milestone in childhood. He loved his presents, especially 2 Star Wars Lego sets from my mother and stepfather and a motorized build-it-yourself dinosaur from Lucinda. And he loved his gingerbread cake (served with cinnamon whipped cream), which is suitably sugar-free for me to take to his school tomorrow. A party at home w/his friends will happen in 2 weeks.

Lucinda was less than thrilled about Arno's birthday but she rallied for her own achievement today: She really learned how to ride a bike! Last summer she could pedal if Blaine ran alongside to get her started, and so far this fall, she'd resisted riding at all. But today, Blaine suggested that she give it a try - and she was off in a flash. Then she went around the block about 20 times, no problem.

Night at the ryokan

Traveling in Japan is shockingly expensive: about $500/night when you include shinkansen (bullet train) tickets, a decent but not stellar hotel, meals and extras.

Fortunately, I won a top raffle prize at Nishimachi's recent Food Fair for a family one-night stay at Nasu Onsen Sanraku, a luxury ryokan (traditional Japanese inn). We knew this would be a full-on Japanese experience: a room with tatami mats, an elaborate kaiseki (multi-course meal) served en suite by a maid in a kimono, a bath in an onsen (natural hot-springs bath), and sleeping on futons on the floor. The real cost for the four of us -- in Japan, you pay for each guest, not for the room itself - would have been $1,000 for that one night. So we were feeling pretty lucky!

From the start, the service at Sanraku was exemplary. When we explained that we'd left our suitcases at the Nasu-shiobara train station to go hiking, the staff offered to pick the bags up for us, a round trip of about an hour. Here's the ryokan's entrance:


Here's our pristine room. You eat and sleep in the main room, with an alcove by the window for reading.


Our window framed the autumn leaves, an essential part of the decor.


On the table when we arrived: a warm towel, a warm sesame-paste sweet, and frothy, freshly whisked matcha (green tea).


When you walk into the hotel lobby, you take off your own shoes and put on slippers. Then in your room, you leave your slippers in the entryway (called a genkan) and tread on the tatami in bare feet or in white tabi socks. You also change into a yukata, a cotton kimono.


We went to the hotel's onsen, which was amazing. You shower and shampoo before you get into steaming water for a soak. Sanraku has an indoor pool and an outdoor pond with rocks to sit on. Men and women are separated because everyone is naked. It's delightful and incredibly relaxing. After the bath, Lu and Arno hung out in the electronic massage chairs.


After the bath, we returned to our room for supper. It was delicious and somewhat overwhelming. The maid brought in about a dozen plates, some of which had 4 or 5 different foods.

The intro (top) photograph in this post shows the first offerings served with a pear-wine aperitif. The menu also included:







Did I mention that the food was overwhelming? Arno didn't know what to make of the "kid's" meal, which included some delicious grilled steak and wasabi-free sushi. He drank orange soda and ate rice and omochi (pounded rice balls) filled with azuki bean paste. But Lucinda was amazing and tried almost everything.

Here's Blaine, drinking a beer and lounging in his yukata at the very, very low table - which is not so comfortable for tall people like us.


After supper, the kids watched Japanese TV in the ground-level chairs...


... and then we walked around the hotel, checked out the gift shop, and returned to our room to collapse on the futons by 10pm. Sadly, I took no photos of the futons, but a worker moved the table to a corner and put four futons in a row against a wall of the main room. A very comfortable family sleepover.

The next morning, the maid returned with a massive and complex kaiseki breakfast of a dozen dishes, including fish shabu shabu, grilled fish, seaweed and pickles. This view shows my breakfast.


At this moment, all I wanted was a fresh croissant, a pot of jam, and a big cup of cafe au lait - or maybe some bran cereal, walnuts and sliced banana. I realized, as the maid walked in with maybe the 10th dish, that a little ryokan goes a long way. An amazing cultural experience, but one night was enough.

As the hotel van pulled away, en route for the train station, the staff bowed to say goodbye and thank you.

Day at the volcano

Last weekend, we went away for three days to Tochigi Prefecture, a mountainous region about 200 km north of Tokyo that has natural hot springs created by quiet-but-alive volcanoes. We made two stops, Friday in Nasu and Saturday in Nikko. I'll cover the visit in three posts: The volcano, the ryokan, and Nikko's temples - with lots of photos.

I planned extensively to make train and hotel connections work smoothly. This great website, Jorudan, gives you all the train options and prices, incredibly valuable in a country where trains leave precisely on schedule.

Shinkansen arrives.


Shinkansen apple juice!


An hour and 100 km later, we were in the country.


The shinkansen took us to Nasu-shiobara, from which the main road leads into the Nasu highlands. It reminded me of upstate New York: country houses, grape vines, high-end shopping and autumn leaves. We caught a bus to our first sightseeing stop, Mount Chausu (Chausu-dake), a steaming volcano that last erupted in 1963.

A 5-minute tram ride...


... takes you up to a small building where you can buy ramen and corn dogs for lunch and read amusing signs.


You can hike to the summit but we followed the near-empty trail that circumnavigates the peak. It was foggy, then clearing. It looked like the volcano had spit up massive rocks everywhere, leaving a lunar-with-plants landscape. The kids loved climbing on the rocks.



The geology was pretty cool: huge ash-gray boulders, plus seams of rust-colored (iron?) or yellowish (sulfur?) rocks.



We walked for about 75 minutes - certainly not all the way around - because we had to catch a bus down the mountain to get to the ryokan. This warning sign was posted near the tram doorway.



Next... a night at the ryokan

Reading out loud

How delightful: On this cloudy Sunday afternoon, Blaine and Lucinda are sitting in the living room and reading "Romeo and Juliet" aloud. Lucinda is a fan of "Shakespeare in Love," and chose this play out of Blaine's everything-Shakespeare volume. Meanwhile, Arno is planning his next "junk art" masterpiece.

Trip to the mountains

We're going away for the weekend into mountains about 100 km from Tokyo. We'll do some hiking, see heaps of autumn leaves and stay in traditional Japanese inns.

I won a raffle prize at the recent Nishimachi Food Fair for all of us to stay overnight at Nasu Onsen Sanraku (the luxury Sanraku inn). Looks amazing.

Then we're going to Nikko, a well-known leaf-watching haven, with various temples and shrines, a tramway, and Lake Chuzenji. Our hotel, Nikko Toshogu Koyoen, in Shimo-imaichi looks lovely, too.

So we'll be wearing yukata (cotton kimono), soaking in the onsen (natural hot-springs bath), eating kaiseki (multi-course supper) served in our room, and sleeping on futons.

Back Sunday, with lots of photos.

Japanese spareribs

I'm determined to find some new recipes to add to our staples, and this one tonight was a keeper: Japanese-style braised spareribs.

Very simple ingredients, including ribs, sake, soy sauce, honey, Worcestershire sauce, sugar, rice vinegar, oil, water and a heavy pot to brown and braise them in. Marinate for an hour, cook for an hour. I didn't broil or grill them after braising, as suggested, but Blaine, Lucinda and I thought they were delicious as is.

Fishkill

Our last three fish expired yesterday! My original purchase, Tut - the old man of the bunch, bought six weeks ago - was found at the bottom of our glass fish-cube this morning. Arno gave me a sad look and a sympathetic pat and said, "I'm sorry, Mom."

Feeling guilty - and very aware that our fish seem to die on a predictable 2-week cycle - I cleaned the cube this afternoon. Soaped and rinsed everything thoroughly, installed a new filter, replaced about 2/3rd of the water, and returned the remaining fish, Wanda and Cheetoey, owned by Blaine and Arno, respectively, to the cube.

A clean bowl usually peps them up, but an hour later, Wanda and Cheetoey were lying together dead on the gravel at the bottom, next to the plastic turtle. I can only assume the new water was too cold for our delicate, tropical friends?

This time, no one cried. When I suggested filling the void with some plain ol' goldfish of the non-tropical variety, Lucinda, who begged me in August for some fish, said: "You can't hold them, you can't pet them. I want a hamster!"

One fish, two fish, three fish, dead fish

We recently obtained our first family pets: three small tropical fish, purchased for 300 yen each (about $3) at the Azabu Juban fish/turtle store near our house. The store also sold us a $40 fish-care pack with a glass cube, filter, gravel, plastic plant and fish food.


Here's a close-up view of our happy children on Saturday August 22. They've been hounding us for a dog, a cat or some fish, and we're starting small.


Lucinda named her fish Nibbles. My fish was Tut (as in King Tut). Arno's fish was Spot. All seemed well.

Until this morning -- 18 days later -- when only two fish greeted me for breakfast with less enthusiasm than usual. Arno's fish Spot had gone to the great fish bowl in the sky; his now-lifeless tail was being pulled into the filter's intake tube.

Alas. Arno cried big tears. We left for school. I put Spot into a container in the fridge and guiltily cleaned the bowl, a few days late. After school, Arno returned Spot to the sea via the toilet. This weekend, Blaine and Arno will buy two new fish, who will, we hope, live for at least a month.

Arno's recent developments

Arno started his pre-K year at Willowbrook on Thursday. He is again in Willowbrook's dual-language program, and this year he's in "Take" (Bamboo) class, which is mixed with younger "Takenokko" (Bamboo Shoots) students.

Arno is very proud to be an older student, especially one who does not cry when his mother leaves the classroom and shows the ropes to his classmates. He's also very conscious of the privileges of being in the older group from his experience last year, as a younger student in the Sakura/Sakuranbo class. For example:

Every morning on the sign-in sheet, older (Take) students (age 4-5) write their first and last names while younger (Takenokko) students (age 3-4) write only first names. On Day 1 of school, which was a Japanese day, Arno waited for me to produce Blaine's WashPost business card so he could copy the katakana for "Harden." (he learned "Arno" in katakana last year.) This morning, he quite nicely wrote "Harden" in English for the first time.

The summer has also proven to be an effective transition time in other areas. Most crucially, Arno has given up his stroller - big news around our house! Last spring, he whined incessantly when we made him walk to Willowbrook, about 1/4 mile away. Since our return to Tokyo, the stroller is stashed in the garage and he walks most places without complaint. (We also take him places on our "mom-bike," with a seat on the back, but we don't mind that.)

This afternoon, Arno walked from our house to pick up Lucinda at Nishimachi, which is perhaps a 1/2 mile, and then to Tokyo Midtown, which is close to a mile. No wonder he is sleeping well. When I tell him he has to walk somewhere, he likes to say, "That's not very far at all!"

To finish off the week, Arno - who rarely tries new foods and particularly avoids eating most fresh fruit - sampled pear and peach tonight for the first time. I admit it: I bribed him. We had the season's first pears and some ripe peaches, and I offered him 200 yen for a bowl of each as a "fruit allowance." Timing is everything. He wants to buy a particular toy, which costs 200 yen. Now he can buy 2 of them.