Portugese Getaway

Portugal isn’t exactly a short, easy travel destination when your starting point is Japan but I had a conference there and Shawn came along and we stayed for a couple extra days of relaxation. The trip there from Japan is long but relatively painless. When we first arrived we had a day to explore the downtown area of Lisbon so we spent the day walking in the old district.

We stopped at an old church, soaked up the sun in the bustling main square, drank sangria at the base of St. Jorges castle and had a nice dinner. In Portugal, you have to make an effort NOT to have wine with dinner, and when you order wine the waiter brings a bottle, not a glass. We enjoyed a local vino verde (green wine, but it’s not actually green, it’s white with a bit of sparkle to it). The next day was conference time for me, and Shawn spent the day at the zoo in Lisbon. Day three, I was still in conference and Shawn spent more time exploring the city.


Our fourth day was the mid-point of the conference and the organizers built in an afternoon off with some planned excursions. Shawn and I joined the 4WD winery tour. We piled into 4WD trucks that took us along a coastal route to the winery where we stopped along the way to take in breathtaking views of the Atlantic Ocean. We drove along a dusty road through a vineyard and made a short stop to see a cork tree before arriving at the winery. We visited the Jose Maria da Fonseca winery, one of the oldest and largest in Portugal and famous for Moscatel wine (read more about them here). We toured their newly built computerized winery first where they have capacity for 7 million litres of wine in fully automated stainless steel vats. From there we drove through a small town to the original site of the winery that is still in use today. We saw the old handmade mahogany wine casks that they can’t replace so have to still keep in continual use so they don’t shrink. We also got to peek in to see the family’s wine collection where they have been storing one keg and 30 bottles each year since 1834. The room, with dim lighting, spiderwebs covering every surface and Gregorian chant playing, was the perfect way to end the tour. From there we went to the tasting room and tried a few of their wines. We enjoyed all three that we tried, and liked Portugese wine in general.


The next day was another full day of conference followed by the conference banquet. We had an amazing dinner in a building that had been resorted after the Lisbon earthquake with beautiful arched brick walls and ceiling. Through dinner we were entertained by a Fado group, traditional Portugese singing accompanied by guitar (more info on fado here). The room that we were in was perfect acoustics to accentuate the strength of their voices. After the banquet, most of the conference attendees made their way to the bar district in downtown Lisbon, where narrow streets wind up and down hills and small bars spill out into the cobble streets. Shortly after we arrived, the bars were supposed to stop serving and the police arrived to keep the crowds moving. The police didn’t really stop any of the drinking and just seemed to move us periodically from one bar to the next and the party continued for a few hours after “closing time”.

After the conference wrapped up the next day, we joined up with another couple of conference attendees and their spouses for a trip to Sintra. We stayed in a nice guest house near the train station, ate a tasty dinner and discussed our plans for the next day. Sintra is a small hillside town full of castles and amazing old architecture. A Moorish castle, dating back to the 7th century, overlooks the entire area and commands views of hundreds of kilometres in all directions. While at the top of the mountain, after walking around the castle walls, we visited the Palace of Pena which is only a short walk away. The palace is more recently built and is a unique mix of styles. It is colourful and well kept and contains plenty of treasures accumulated by the royal families.

The view of the Moorish Castle looking up from Sintra.

Us on the castle wall overlooking Sintra and the Atlantic.

Looking across the hilltop to the Palace de Pena.

Our final castle in Sintra was Quinta da Regaleira. This was by far our favourite and we could have spent an entire day exploring there. Built in 1910 by a rich doctor, the place is more a puzzle and piece of art than it is a castle. On the grounds of the estate, passageways, secret doors and hidden staircases interwoven with symbolism create a spooky and exciting atmosphere. We explored down winding narrow passageways in complete darkness, our camera batteries dead from using the flash to try to peer into the black to see if the tunnel ends of continues. The castle itself was also breathtaking, but we didn’t have much time to look around because we spent so much time on the grounds.
Looking up from the bottom of a well - we ended up there after taking a passage hidden behind a waterfall and exited via the winding stairway.

We enjoyed another nice meal and more Portugese wine, then visited a local pub on our way home. We sat and had a couple beers and chatted with our travel partners and soon the bar owner shut the doors explaining that the bar was “closed” but patrons who were already inside could continue drinking so long as the doors were closed. We stayed for another beer then gathered our things to leave, but the bar owner (who had joined us for the last beer) insisted that we stay for a taste of his uncle’s homemade cherry liquor. He poured it from a dusty old Jack Daniels bottle and it was sweet and strong, and failed to warn us about the potency of the cherry in the bottom of each glass. After more chatting with the bar owner about life as a young entrepreneur in Portugal, we finally made our way back to our guest house.



Groggy from the night before, we piled on a bus the next day in search of a beach. If we had more time, I would have stayed in Sintra for a few more days. It was such a romantic and beautiful spot and we didn’t see even a fraction of the things that there were to see there. We ended up at Praia das Macas, a small tourist town on a nice beach northwest of Lisbon. We found a room for the night and went to sit on the beach. The water was pretty cold, and the wind off the Atlantic was chilly so we hid out at a beachfront bar and sipped sangria and chatted with our travel partners (a couple from the US). Praia das Macas is quiet and had less European tourists than Sintra and has two other beaches within walking distance to the north and south.
The town and beach at Praia das Macas



The next day it was time for us to make our way back to Lisbon and prepare to return to Japan. Along the way we stopped in Cascais, another tourist destination west of Lisbon. We only had time to take a walk along the waterfront and eat a nice meal, but Cascais seemed like a place that would have been nice to spend some more time in too. Our last night in Lisbon, we poured ourselves into a nice hotel facing the Rossio Square. We had a beautiful room with a view of Castelo St. Jorge from the balcony so we sat there and ate nice Portugese cheese and bread and toasted our last night with Port wine. The trip was too short to really see very much but it was nice and easy to travel there, and the weather was unbeatable.

The Fuzz

The Japanese establishment is especially proud of their incredibly safe and secure society, a fact that I have come to enjoy and get very used to. There is no need to worry about locking many things here (although everyone does, religiously), the streets – nearly any street – is safe for a young woman to walk alone at any hour, there is homeless but you don’t see them and they certainly don’t bother you for change or a treat for their dog. I will have a hard time adjusting to keeping track of my wallet full of cash during a night at the pub or making sure not to leave my laptop unattended in a public place once I return home.

In about 1 week, Hokkaido will host the 2008 G8 summit at a Lake Toya. The Japanese establishment is also very proud of their incredibly non-confrontational society. Of course, hosting the G8 summit brings with it a fair share of controversy and host countries are always the launching point for all sorts of protest and debate over the summit. Japan, however, has decided that they will absolutely not allow such bad behaviour while they are hosting important guests (and international press) who might not believe their country is one that follows all the rules without question and never has any crime. They intend to implement this no-protesting hooliganism strategy by laying waste to any progress in the way of racism and human rights.
For starters, they have spent more money on security for this event than any other country has in the past (again – this in a country where I could have stolen 72 cars by now and two of them were police cars). They have enlisted additional police forces here in Hokkaido, bringing cops from every corner of Japan. They are preventing any police currently working in the southern Hokkaido area from taking even one day of holiday during the month before and the month after the event. We just drove through the region of the summit on our way to field work and there were police inspection points at every highway intersection for miles around the summit location. The police were very serious about their work and were sure to stop our vehicle and take a peek in all the windows, who wouldn’t with a dangerous looking white woman in the front seat!

Here is a picture (sorry - it is a terrible photo - of one of the roadblocks).


One would assume that the natural beauty of the forest surrounding Lake Toya factored largely in the decision to host the event there. Well, security has also trumped that one! They have cut a swath of old-growth forest in a belt around the hotel where the delegates will be staying in order to ensure that no “bad people” can sneak in under a cover of beautiful pristine national park forest.
One of the excursions planned for the event will involve the delegates going from the hotel to a nearby attraction. It seems that the current road connecting these two locations wasn’t secure enough so they built a whole new “secure” roadway. It so happens that this road passes through and destroys a long-term forest research plot used by one of the labs in my faculty. Certainly, a smoother and less noisy car ride for Bush and his cronies is worth years of carefully planned and ecologically relevant research down the drain.

Others foreigners have told me that they have had some difficult times lately with random police asking to inspect their backpacks and ruthless checks of foreigners (even those of us who are living and working here) at airports and train stations. We are on our way to Portugal this weekend for a symposium on larval biology and ecology and as expected, we had more fun with the fuzz at the airport. Here is a security guard on a stepladder carefully watching the airport trainstation traffic.

Summer Field Season

This week was the start of the summer field sampling for the rocky shore team (team iso). Six of us loaded into a big rental van on Monday morning and we headed off to the southern Hokkaido field station for sampling.

Last time I was out at these sites it was late fall so we were sampling during night low tides so I didn't get a very good look at what these places look like. It was nice to come back and do this sampling in beautiful summer weather. With low tide at about 8:00 am, we had to be packed up and leaving the field station to go to the sampling locations by 4:00 am. These sites are all on the eastern side of Hokkaido so we started work with the beautiful Japanese red sunrise to warm our backs as we worked.



Since last time was dark and I didn't get many photos, I thought I would share some images. In most of these you can see that the Japanese coastline in upshore from us is highly reinforced. This is pretty typical of all of the coast that I have seen so far (east and west). In many places small fishing villiages are built right on the edge of the coast and roads pass within meters of the high tide mark. Miles and miles of the coastline is fortified with massive concrete tetrapods (shown in the background here) that we carefully navigate our way through and over to get down to the shore.




We were lucky to have some extra hands helping out and were able to sample all of our sites (5 shores and 25 sample plots) in just 2 days. It meant long hot days, but it was worthwhile to get home a day or two early. The next field trip will be to the northern Hokkaido region in a couple of months. I am crossing my fingers for more great weather.

Canucks Versus the Volcano

Raise your hand if you have climbed to the top of a Japanese volcano. We had a weekend with nothing else booked so we jumped on the chance to get out of the city and do just that. Yotei-zan is an inactive volcano in the Shikotsu-Toya National Park south of Sapporo and is otherwise known as Fuji of the north or Ezo-Fuji. It is the tallest volcano in Hokkaido and is only a short drive from Sapporo. We didn’t want to miss our chance to climb a Japanese volcano and be the first to greet the red sun as it rises over the Pacific, so we hired a car and off we went.

We left town early on Saturday, took our time getting groceries and enjoying a meal in Niseko (a ski town close to Yotei) and got to the parking lot at the trail head around 2:00. The hike up to the hut takes about 5 hours and we were hoping to hit the hut by sunset. The trail initially winds slightly uphill through a nice park-like area; this continues for about all of 15 minutes before the trail takes a hard right and the uphill incline begins. The trail angle is about 60 degrees and this continues all the way up the mountain (honestly, 5 hours of that kind of incline without a break). It is a relentless trail and I felt like a bag of pathetic huffing and sweating my way up as we were greeted by happy, fit looking 65 year old ladies on their way back down from the summit.

The steep trail - me and our downstairs neighbour (a British masters student) behind me.


The forest soon gave way to scrubby, winter-worn shrubs, which in turn gave way to thick underbrush and beautiful alpine flowers. We were lucky to be there while almost every plant we passed was in bloom. The trail we took (the one closest to Grand Hirafu) led us up to a point a clockwise quarter way around the mountain from the hut, so we traversed through the alpine to get to the hut. We arrived to see about 20 other hikers already enjoying a rest for their legs and some dinner at the small picnic table outside the hut. We put our packs down inside, paid our 800 yen for the night stay and went back outside for a sunset dinner. Before we left we were told that there were no fires allowed in the park and that included camp stoves. We thought that was a bit odd, but went ahead and planned an easy no-cook meal of convenience store soba noodles, onigiri (rice ball wrapped in seaweed and stuffed with fish), cheese and a nice bottle of wine. It turned out that our adviser was wrong and camp stoves were allowed, but the ease of our meal (no cooking or washing dishes after) was a surprising treat.

Our sunset dinner with some fellow gaijin hikers.


The hut has a 9:00 curfew that we thought we would have a hard time sticking to, but with sunset at about 7:30, no lights in the hut or outside and most of the hikers intending to summit the next morning for the 4 am sunrise, it was just the right time for bed. It certainly would have been nice if we could have slept. The hut is a big open space with no separated rooms. Hikers all sleep side by side on the floor and I suppose if everyone just went to bed at 9:00 it would have worked out ok. There was a guy about 3 feet from us who thought it was a good idea to get some extra energy for the next morning and opened a bag of peanuts or crackers or some other insanely loud sounding food at 11:00 and continued crunching through till midnight. The guy next to him was busy sending text messages on his cell phone for a few hours. Another woman had to go into her pack and find things all night, and amazingly everything she brought was wrapped in 2 layers of noisy crunchy plastic that for some reason needed to be rewrapped before putting it away. Hikers started rustling around at 2:00 am to prepare for the sunrise summit. We tried to get another half hour or so of sleep but it was pointless. Everyone felt it necessary to pack their entire packs, bedrolls and have a chat while doing it before leaving, making an enormous racket. I guess if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, so we left the hut just before 3 am heading for the top of the volcano to watch the sunrise.
We made it to the top of the caldera with plenty of time to get a nice seat, eat some breakfast and watch the show.


Hanging out over the caldera - it was deeper than I expected.


The highest point on the volcano.


It was a beautiful sunrise (asahi is the Japanese word for sunrise – yes, like the beer) and the weather was good. The mountain was skirted in clouds that had moved in overnight and it made the ambiance even more fairy tale-esque. After greeting the sun, we walked around the caldera then back down to the hut where our hiking partner had opted to sleep while the noisy people were out. We packed up and hung around the hut for another few hours before the big walk down. For me, down is always more painful than up, so Shawn was patient while we took it slow.


We cleverly stashed ourselves an incentive beer and some fresh fruit in the cooler at the bottom. We savoured our rewards and headed back to Sapporo and city life. It was great to get out of the rat race even just for a couple of days.

Sapporo Miso Ramen

I admit that I really don't find ramen an overly appealing meal. It is a sort of Japanese style fast food and is usually pretty greasy and bland (well, at least to me). Shawn enjoys it though and has been known to go for a bowl of ramen for lunch fairly often. He and a friend found a place that they really like and have gone there a few times, each time telling me that I don't know what I am missing by not going with them.

On the weekend, before going to a friend's housewarming party, I decided that it was about time that I tried this place that I had been told so much about (that, and we didn't feel like cooking). It is a tiny place, only 8 seats in the entire shop, and we met two friends there so we took up half the restraunt. This shop, like many others, has a vending machine near the door where you order. You push whatever button you want for the type of soup you like and whatever extras you want and then put in the cash and it spits out a ticket. You take the ticket to the owner/server/cook and he makes your meal for you. We ordered miso ramen, a Sapporo specialty.

Here is a shot of the soup when it was delivered to me. Honestly, I have to admit that this was pretty tasty ramen. The pork was cut in thick tender slices and there was lots of other tasty additions. Our friend brought some sake in from the conveni nearby (the vending machine at the ramen shop doesn't have a button for beer) - you can see the small bottle in the photo too. So we dined in fine Japanese style, slurping noodles and drinking sake.

When we finished our meal, it wasn't all that late so we chatted for a while and finished the last of the sake (not a common practice in a small ramen shop that only has 8 seats, you are supposed to eat your food and get out so that the next customer can sit down). It wasn't busy and the shop owner told us to take our time and not rush out, there weren't any new customers anyway so we felt ok sitting for a while.

The owner disappeared soon after telling us to take our time. We didn't think much of it until we got up to leave. We stood on the sidewalk discussing whether we should leave since there wasn't anyone left in the shop. In mid-discussion, the shop owner came running back down the street with a 6-pack of beer in his hand (and a tea for our pregnant friend). He ushered us back into the shop and handed us the beer, telling us that it was a present for us. Wow, a present for what.... taking up space in your shop??


Not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, we enjoyed a beer with the guy (his name turns out to be Kubo-san). He mostly spoke Japanese which was ok since we had a translator with us. So we sat for a few hours and talked with him about his business and life in Sapporo while he prepared soup stock for the next day. It turned out that he had sold out of ramen so he closed the shop early (while we were sitting there finishing our sake) and decided to celebrate his successful day with a beer and picked up some for us too. I guess he didn't want to be rude. He was an interesting person, and certainly makes good miso ramen.

Park Golf

A couple of weeks ago on a sunny Sunday afternoon (ok - actually it was a windy cold Saturday afternoon.... but I thought the other opening sounded nicer), we rode out bikes down to the Toyohira River. Along the riverbanks, they have areas that they use for all sorts of recreation - baseball fields, walking trails, football fields and park golf courses.

The majority of the people taking part in the golfing were elderly Japanese people (the elderly Japanese are amazingly healthy and able bodied people - we really should work on finding out what they do to stay so healthy). The course had 18 holes and is a cross between mini-golf and pitch-and-put. The club is a short-handled driver style club and the ball is the size of a grapefruit and made from dense plastic. The course had the odd sand trap but really nothing that was all that challenging.

We paid our $5 each (that included green fees for 18 holes and rental of equipment!) and hit the links. It was a lot of fun, although not a lot of challenge. Initially I found it a bit hard not to take a full swing, which sends the ball screaming through the the srubery at the end of the fareway. The course even had a resident "golf pro" who walked around the course giving tips to the older ladies who were golfing.

It was a fun way to kill an afternoon, and it will be nice to return on a sunny warm day.

Yosakoi

This past weekend was the Yosakoi Soran festival in downtown Sapporo. This event, like so many others, was held in Odori park and attracted thick crowds to the center of the city. Yosakoi is a team dance competition held annually in Sapporo. It is loosely based on traditional Japanese dancing and dancers must incorporate a clapper and some version of the traditional fishing song "Soran". To read more about the event, check out their official website here. I say it is loosely based on traditional dance because it is much more upbeat than traditional dance with dancers moving quickly and to music that is faster and uses modern music mixed with traditional music.

It was really entertaining to watch. The costumes were elaborate and most teams had multiple costumes that were switched in mid-act with a quick flick of velcro. The colours were vivid and the choreography made the stage look as if the dancers became a kaeidescope of hues. Some teams had singers, some had drummers, one team even had about 25 traditional guitarists. They all seemed to incorporate a flag or two - some of which were massive works of art that must take incredible core strength to wave around. A few teams used Japanese umbrellas to create all kinds of dizzying effects.

It is a contest and the teams were judged on their performance. We weren't sure how the scoring worked, and it often didn't seem to make much sense to us. We had tickets for the semi-finals on Sunday and had bought our tickets early because the semi-finals and finals sell out early. Seating was limited so we were glad to have tickets, otherwise you were stuck watching the performances on one of the many massive screens that were posted around the park.

Here are a couple photos of the event. I will work on posting a video as it gives a much better idea of the show.



Throughout the park there were "Paradise" stands. Tents that had been set up by a cigarette company to attract smokers to come and sample some of their new products in the company of beautiful young girls dressed in outfits that made them look like something Captain James T Kirk would have shagged. Only in Japan....

Learning English

Since snowmobiling has wrapped up Shawn has been keeping busy by teaching English a couple times a week. He was reluctant at first, but teaching english is one of the only jobs that pays decently, has flexible hours and can be held by those of us with limited Japanese. A bit of a stretch initially for a guy who doesn't love the classroom setting and prefers to spend his time with tools rather than books. He has been getting help from a friend who has been teaching here for 10 years. Our friend even shared access to his online teaching resources, check out the link on the right (Anthony's english site) or click here to check it out.

One of the classes he teaches is a drop-in type group at the university. They had a party on Saturday night and invited us to join them. The food was delicious and afterwards we went for drinks with a few of the students. They are a really interesting group of people and it was fun to hear their backgrounds Here is a photo of Shawn addressing his students after the dinner and a shot of the group.



He is teaching everyone from kids to retired folks and has now hit a stride and enjoys it. It is strange how hard it is to teach english when you are a native speaker. We really don't understand grammar rules very fully, and have a hard time answering questions about why this is plural in this case and singular in another. In a lot of ways we learn the language along with the students. Who knew we would come to Japan and end up learing english!

Hokudai-sai

Every year the university that I am at hosts a sort of open house weekend. Well, more of a long weekend. The university gives all of the undergraduate students Thursday and Friday off for the event and many of the faculties open their doors to the public to show off what they do.

The main attraction of the event if the food fair. Student groups are encouraged to set up a tent where they can sell any type of food or drink they want, so long as it is non-alcoholic. The party used to involve drinking, but a couple of years ago a couple of students overindulged and died as a result so since then it has been prohibited. They block off the main street on campus and set up tents and generators for the young entrepreneurs to use. One end of the street is dedicated for Japanese students and the other is for the foreign students to use to showcase their native cuisine. The food in the Japanese end was the same kind of typical fare you find in any festival, so we have spent most of our time sampling delicious food from elsewhere.

My faculty (Environmental Science) also set up interactive displays and opened up for public tours on Saturday and Sunday. I only found out when I was leaving work on Friday and there were movers bringing large display boards into our foyer and hanging a slide show screen from the ceiling. One of the professors who was there putting up posters told me all about it. I was a bit sad to only hear about our faculty's participation so late because it would have been fun to take part and put together an intertidal touch tank.

Here are some photos of the fun - the crowded street on Saturday and the American Cookie booth. The international food was incredibly delicious and we ate way too much because you just can't walk past your friend's booth without buying something, and all of the foreigners know each other here....

Daylight Savings

The cliché "you don't know what you have until it’s gone" doesn't readily conjure thoughts of setting the ol’ clock back, that is, until you have lived in a northern region that doesn’t. I had never really considered what summer days would be like if William Willett hadn’t come up with the genius of rolling back the clock in the spring to take advantage of the early sunlight hours. In addition, here in Hokkaido, not only are we the farthest north in Japan but we are also hanging out slightly to the east.

Now, I am sure that some of you are thinking “really, so what? How much difference can it make?”. The result is that already, in late May, in order to greet the rising sun, we have to roll out of bed at 3:45 a.m. On weekdays, when we try to “get up early” and get outside for a walk or a run in the morning before work, the sun is already high in the sky. It also means that we don’t get those lovely warm nights after work is over. Again, I can imagine that you are thinking “just shift your schedule and hour earlier and it will be fine”. Not so easy, this country is the land of the night-owls. When we leave the house at 7:30 in the morning on a week day the streets are still quiet. People like to sleep late and work late here; even the coffee shops don’t open until 9:30 or 10:00. So shifting my schedule would definitely be fighting a losing battle.

Strange to think that this is one of the things that I miss about home.... More efficient use of sunlight.