Meg Said Yes

On December 31st, 2008.

Christmas in Tejas

We enjoyed Christmas at home in Houston this year, after having to stay in Tokyo last year. It was great to be with family and see lots of my friends. Meg and I even took a road trip one day through the Brenham and Sealy areas. Two days before we returned to Tokyo, I popped the question to Meg and ...

Weddings, Yukatas, Hurricanes & Bankruptcy

A whole lot has happened in the last half of '08, let's review. My friends John & Sarah are expecting their first baby around Thanksgiving and my cousins Jason and Patrick each welcomed new additions to their families; went to the beach a lot in July and August until I got an inner-ear infection which somehow busted my right eardrum; started a little band with some friends; a yukata party; the wedding of friends Saori & Julian; Hurricane Ike barreled through the Texas gulf coast, leaving friends and family without power for up to two weeks; financial system chaos and the Lehman bankruptcy; saw Radiohead play Tokyo; then got a small fracture on my left ankle playing futsal (soccer on a small court); trekking (though not for me) and seeing the leaves change in Kamikochi; and America electing its first black president.

Whew.

Hurricane Ike hit Texas the same weekend that my company went bankrupt, man what a great weekend. The frustrating part of Lehman going under was that the Asia region was still profitable, but the dealings in the US and Europe caused the whole company to collapse. And of course the Treasury secretary decided to let us fail while saving others, I'm sure there were some backroom deals made, but hey it's done now. Luckily, we (Asia and then Europe and then India) were bought out by a domestic Japanese investment bank called Nomura Securities, so at least we have our paycheck for now, though of course there's still a lot of uncertainty on what the future holds. The transition process is painfully slow, mostly because Lehman was a global company in every sense of the word and our infrastructure heavily relies on the US, which of course is now owned by another company, Barclays. Commence legal nightmare time.

But I digress, life goes on. I was happy to know that all my family and friends in Houston were safe after the hurricane, albeit in the dark for a while. Below are various links for photos I've taken since July (click on them for more photos, Gran, he he).

Obama is big news here. Whether or not you voted for him, living abroad gives you an entirely different vantage point, and the way people see the US has changed again. There's a noticeable difference already in the number of times I'm haggled by Brits, Aussies, whoever, on being American. Most of the foreigners I've encountered in my three years in Tokyo have had a sense of defeatism, fickleness, short-sightedness, and basically no optimism about the US. The president-elect has not been proven yet, but the fact that the US can go out and do a complete 180 has reminded everyone just what we're all about.

So, pics now. Here are some from Culture Day last week at Meiji Shrine in Tokyo. There are archers on horseback, a Japanese tradition for the past 1,000 years. Even the saddles are old and traditional, but sadly there are none of these saddle craftsmen left in Japan so they choose to reuse the same ones over and over.

Kamikochi is a Japanese national park with beautiful trees this time of year. I went with Meg, her mother and sister for the weekend and we stayed in one of the nicest ryokans I've been at in Japan. My ankle was fractured so I couldn't do much trekking but I waddled around the flat parts and took some photos, including some of a monkey that nearly scare me to death when it appeared out of nowhere. They get threatened when you stare them in the eye, so I had to divert my attention in another direction while aiming the camera to take photos of it.

My friend Jeff has that video game Rock Band, which inspired my friend Andy to start playing drums, which inspired him to find these sound studios to practice on real drums, which inspired me to join him after discovering you can also rent Stratocasters and Les Pauls for super cheap and play on Marshall stacks, which inspired us to start our own little awesomely corny band called Motor Azabu. Rock.

Summertime, especially July and August, is a time for matsuri (festivals) held in neighborhoods all over Japan. People wear lightweight linen or cotton kimonos called yukata. My friends Kaori & Sebastien threw a yukata party at their house in August.

Finally, here are some random pics taken for our beach excursions to Isshiki kaigan (beach) on the weekends in July and August. It's about an hour and a half ride on train/bus from Tokyo. Really worth it just to get out of the city for a while. We also ran into a French bartender we knew from a place near our office who has a little bar on the beach during the summertime. It was really funny, he looks like a pirate now.

I look forward to seeing everyone in Houston over Christmas and New Year's!

Oze

Hiking in Oze, a Japanese National Park, with Meg, her mother, and sister.

Thailand '08

Meg and I took a trip to Thailand last week for vacation. Our trip started with a little adventure when our flight on Friday was diverted to Hong Kong due to small fire in the airplane's cargo system. The captain announced that "there was a small fire in the cargo system but, don't worry, it's been put out now, but I've made the decision to head to Hong Kong for safety reasons". We were somewhere over the East China Sea and you could see on the in-flight map that we did a 90 degree turn toward Hong Kong. When we landed, firetrucks and ambulances pulled up to our airplane, I guess to be super cautious, but it was a little disconcerting. We exited the plane and waited around for a couple hours before they put everyone up in the airport hotel for the night. We weren't sure when our final flight to Bangkok would be so the next day we had to wait around in the airport and couldn't go visit the city or anything. Eventually our flight left at 3pm on Saturday, same airplane model, same seats for everyone. We landed in Bangkok at 5pm.

So we lost one day in Bangkok, but we didn't have much planned anyway except for shopping and checking out a few of the sights. The first night we ate at a nice little Thai restaurant that was located in the middle of a strange dark street behind a gate. Once inside it was very quiet with many trees and plants. We sat outside on a wooden porch area. The warm weather was a nice break from the cold in Tokyo. On Sunday, we took the Skytrain to a shopping area and went to a tailor referred to me by a friend. I ended up buying two suits and two shirts and Meg had a dress made for her birthday party coming up in mid-May. The tailor shop was run by an Indian guy and his son who've lived in Thailand most of the their life. After shopping a bit more and walking around, we visited a temple known as the Golden Mount. We climbed to the top of it but reached the top just as it was closing. Oh well, still had a good view of the city.

Monday we went directly to the Grand Palace, where a few temples are located along with the royal palace of the Thai king Rama XI. The palace grounds were beautiful and we spent a while seeing all the different buildings and temples. After that, we walked to the river nearby and took an one hour boat ride along the river and through some of the canals on the west side of the river bank, opposite from the Bangkok side. Most of the houses along the canals were pretty decrepit, but it was very interesting to see and a relaxing ride.

Then on Tuesday morning we caught our flight to Phuket bright and early at 7am and we stayed there the rest of the time until returning back to Tokyo on Sunday. Our hotel was very nice and quiet, not in the more lively clubby areas. Pretty much everyday except one, we went to the beach or to the pool and laid out in the sun and read and ate fresh fruit (the mango was so good) and swam in the ocean. On Friday we visited the Similan Islands by taking a speedboat tour. It took two hours to get to the islands from Phuket but was well worth it, the water was very beautiful and the islands did not have many people, as they're designated national parks. I even got to see a sea turtle up close and hold onto (gently).

After the first day in Hong Kong, we had a nice relaxing time, ate a lot of good food, and got some sun.  

Niseko

Here are some photos from another ski trip I took with some friends to Niseko in Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan. The snow was good until the end of our second day when it began storming. A few of us found ourselves on the wrong side of the mountain and unable to get to our hotel, so we had to wait in line for a shuttle bus and got back to our hotel two hours later. The next day, because of the storm and high winds, they closed the mountain, so we took our time having breakfast and going to onsen, then decided to try to leave early to try to catch an earlier flight back to Tokyo.

We arrived to the nearby train station only to find out that the trains were not running, so we went back to our hotel to wait for our original bus to Sapporo. We got to the airport to discover that all flights out of Sapporo were delayed and some were canceled. The airport was packed full of people, many laying on the floors sleeping or preparing to stay the night. Some people were trying to get back to international destinations, like Australia, but were stuck there at the airport. Then we heard an announcement that our flight to Tokyo was canceled, so we began preparing our own little sleeping area for all fourteen of us, grabbing blankets, snacks, etc. But then a few of my friends spent a while haggling with the airline to get us back to Tokyo and eventually were able to get all fourteen of us on a flight with a different airline. We arrived back to Tokyo around midnight, tired and stressed, but glad to be home.

Hakkoda

I went skiing with a group of fourteen friends last weekend in Hakkoda, which is near the city of Aomori on the northern point of Honshu, the main island of Japan. The snow was absolutely amazing, loads of powder everywhere. Even better, on Sunday, our third day, the blue sky revealed itself and I was able to take a bunch of photos seen by clicking the one above.

January '08

My friend Ayako's birthday is Jan 5, so we had a joint birthday party on Jan 12, a week after hers and a week before mine. It also happened to be a long weekend, so many of our friends were out of town, but we ended up having a group of 14 or so gather for dinner at a French restaurant and then for some drinks and cigars. We rented out the whole restaurant and played bingo, complete with prizes everywhere from lunch-for-two to a giant bag of snack food. We both kind of felt sick, too, from the cold. Just a unfortunate time of the year to have a birthday, I guess. But still, we had fun. I gave web cams to my parents and sister for Christmas so that we can keep in touch by seeing each other more often. On my birthday, I got to chat with my sister and her husband, Grant, and my Dad, who's stranded in Wyoming for one month on a business trip, and my Mom and bunch of other family, who were all having a surprise birthday party at my parents' house for my aunt Jann's 50th birthday. Whew. Meg bought me a new digital camera that is smaller than my current one so I can take it skiing and around the town a little easier. When my parents got me my last camera, I remember that 1GB of memory was about $200. Amazingly, now you can get 1GB for about $40 and 2GB for $50. The largest size I've seen is 32GB for $400. That is 9 times the size of the memory I had on my desktop computer in college. So I've been playing with my new camera a bunch, as you can see by clicking the one above.

Hakuba Christmas

This weekend I went skiboarding (some skiing, some snowboarding) with Meg and some friends in the Hakuba area of Nagano, Japan, the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. The snow wasn't very good the first couple days, really hard and wet, and the second day it got reeeally hot outside, I was sweating like crazy, it was so bizarre (global warming). But the last day we finally got some fresh snow and to make it even more fun, you could get a free lift pass if you dressed up like Santa. So Ayako, Vince, and I dressed up like Santa and Andy dressed up in a full reindeer outfit complete with a little well-placed tail. Even though the snow wasn't amazing each day, we still had a good time and, as always, enjoyed the onsen at the end of each day. We got back into Tokyo last night and today I'm spending Christmas with Meg who is running around like crazy trying to cook a special meal.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

*<|:)

T Day in Tokyo

For an American, not being at home in the US for Thanksgiving is pretty depressing. Nonetheless, this year a bunch of my friends got together, both American and non-American, for a pot-luck style meal to celebrate Thanksgiving. I even got to teach some of my friends the story of Thanksgiving. Twelve of us gathered at my friend Vince's place, who was in charge of the turkey, gravy, and dressing. I prepared the mashed potatoes (with hidden bits of jalapeno) and Meg's made my Mom's pecan pie and some tasty guacamole. I also took a raspberry chipotle sauce that my Mom gave me when I was home in July and everyone commented how good it was, for most of them it was a completely new taste and smell. I didn't have to work too hard for that one! :) My friend Vince's oven has a built-in rotisserie which he used to prepare the turkey, it came out really good and everyone gobbled it up. Sebastien and Kaori made an amazing tiramisu dessert. Haruko and Florent brought some various appetizers and awesome green beans. Jeff and Emi brought some tasty lasagna and persimmon. Ayako brought a mind-blowing cheesecake. Andy brought some snazzy mulled wine. And Rob supplied some saucy cranberry sauce. We totally stuffed ourselves and everyone started falling asleep, it was the closest to being home without being home.

I won't be home for Christmas either, I've already blown all of my vacation days for the year and I have to be in Tokyo for support because my manager will be home in Australia. Well, I have one day vacation left, but it's not enough to combine into any trip to the US. Really bummed about that, but there's not much I can do. Luckily some of my friends will be staying around for Christmas, too, and of course Meg will be here so I can hang out with her and her family and then get in some skiing and snowboarding. I bought skis for the first time and my friend Andy gave me his old snowboard so I'm totally going to rip it up.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!