huuuummmmmm ....is this thing on?

It occurred to me today that I used to have a blog.  I also spent a lot of time rereading posts today, and sort of like the creative things I used to do.  Does anyone still have an alert that will tell them this is still a thing?



Bueller?

The Project for Awesome

The Project for Awesome is in it's sixth year, and is raising money for charities using YouTube videos as a way to get the word out.  Videos begin going live on Dec. 17th at noon, Eastern time.  Please check out the posted videos, vote for the ones you like the most, and the five vote winners will share the donated money.  Also, the Vlogbrothers are donating a penny for every comment that gets left for all the videos, so tell the video creators what you think!  Most importantly, consider donating to the fund at whatever level you can.  More information can be found at the links above.  Happy holidays, everyone.

One of my new neighbors

The view from my office.
 I'm taking suggestions for names.  I'm into alliteration. 

Guam weather

All in the span of an hour or so. This is the view from my desk that I'll be losing in just a few days.  I'll miss it.  I love how the presence of the sun brings so much color to the world. 

 

Kabuki theater and sumo wrestling

Our biggest cultural event in Tokyo was our foray into kabuki theater.  We saw an early evening show, but it was a 3.5 hour affair.  Apparently when the Japanese do theater, they do theater. We heard about the performance from another random traveler in our ryokan and got a foreigner's discount on tickets.  It was probably the highlight of my trip, and not just because we got to sit still for a long time in a controlled climate after walking almost constantly for two and a half days.

Shimbashi Enbujo Theatre

The matinee was completely different than the evening show, so the troupe performed four plays that day!  Each event was a double feature; individual plays were about an hour and a half apiece with a 30-40 minute intermission. This poster provides an image from all four performances.

The seats really filled up before the show, but we snapped these shots early.  In the first picture, you can see a long wooden walkway that is part of the stage and is used for entrances and exits throughout the performances.  We rented earphone receivers, so before the show and during intermission we got to hear about the history and art of kabuki.  During the plays the commentary described what was going on in the plot, what the characters had said, or gave the historical background for the story itself.

The demographic of theater-goers seemed to be middle-aged to elderly women, some of whom dressed up in traditional kimonos.  We may have been some of the youngest people in the building, and the female to male ratio was likely 10:1.  This is really strange to me since kabuki has for centuries (since the 1630s) been performed by all-male troupes.  However, it started out as an all-women's performance before some Japanese head honcho thought that women should be neither seen nor heard.  The most renowned kabuki actors are those who have refined their art of playing a wide range of female characters. 

Kabuki is all about the actors, not the plot, so the pace is really slow.  Once I got over that, I really enjoyed myself and the over-the-top histrionics.  Apparently most plays are legends or historical accounts and are well-known by the audience, so there's not usually an issue of not knowing what's going to happen.  Kabuki also doesn't care about reproducing or representing reality on stage, so the costumes and the feats performed are unbelievable.  There were some great musical and drumming segments as well, and the musicians are a part of the staged performance, not hidden away in a pit as in Western-style musical theater. 

Kabuki is also a career you are born into, so if your father was an actor, you get to be one too.  The highest praise for an actor is to yell out his name, or even better, his father's name during a particularly impressive moment of his performance.  These posters are of the lead actors from our two performances, and both were amazing.

On the left is a picture of Mitsuhide, a soldier (true story) who was beaten and humiliated by his lord for very little reason (at least from a present day perspective), and who spends almost the entire play being loyal, grinning and bearing it.  After the jerko lord Harunaga pushes things just a bit too far, Mitsuhide decides to overthrow him and start a rebellion.  The moment when you know he's been pushed past his breaking point was amazing.  None of the battle is actually staged, however.  Remember, not about plot, just about giving the actor a chance to emote. 

On the right is the main female character from the second play, which specifically highlighted this actor's dancing abilities.  There were several amazing costume changes as the woman performed for the dedication of a new temple bell, dancing the many aspects of a woman in love.  She was, unbeknownst to the monks, the spirit of the woman who had caused the old bell to fall because she was separated from her lover, and she eventually turned into a serpent-like demon before being felled by the hero. The program claimed that this was the most famous of all kabuki dances and was considered to be the pinnacle of the art of the female role specialist actor. 

The sumo wrestling museum was next door to the very impressive Edo-Tokyo Museum.  Though we ventured to that part of the city for the one-room sumo museum, we did the whole place in about 20 minutes after spending several hours in the Edo.  Unfortunately, we just missed the yearly sumo tournament by one weekend.  The schedules for bouts (matches?) were up at the arena and there were ads all over the place.

The mural was outside the museum/arena, but the excellent cutout, starring an angry K, was outside a nearby restaurant that we initially thought might be the museum.  Maybe the guy holding the fish should have given it away.

Ryokan Sawanoya

Our stay in Tokyo was in a traditional Japanese inn, or ryokan.  The Sawanoya was fantastic, and I'd recommend it to anyone, though there might be other places a tiny bit better located for public transit.  The staff were very helpful and accommodating, we had no language issues, and it was clean and reasonably priced.  Breakfast (though Western style) was hearty, yummy and about 300-400 yen (~$4.50).

Our room was very small, and you can see its entirety in these two shots.  The door on the left in K's picture leads to an entryway as long as the width of the room and just wide enough for a sink and shoe rack.   

The futons we slept on over tatami mats were less cushion-y than my camping thermarest, and only after the first two nights did we realize there were extras in the closet.  However, with a double-decker bed on the third night I slept well and didn't wake up because some part of my body or other had fallen asleep, as happened on night two.

Can you see these tiny cranes on the pillows above?

The best part of this place, though also the least convenient, was the onsen, which means hot spring in Japanese.  This word is also used to refer to the bathing facilities and lodgings around the springs.  I'm not positive there was a true spring associated with our ryokan, but the bathing facility was great.  The two rooms on the ground floor were shared by all guests, so that meant waiting for the "occupied" signs to flip to "vacant" on a few occasions.

To take the photo above, I stood in an entry room with a sink and some shelving for your things.  Through a glass wall/door was a showerhead on a very cool timer, a small stool and wash basin, and a large pool of hot water.  This is a pool for soaking and relaxing, not with bubbly massaging jets, and was excellent for rejuvenating tired muscles after walking all day.

While ryokans are hard to come by in big cities these days, I'm glad K exerted her will and convinced me to go this route for our first visit to Japan.  This was a great home base for our trip.

B and K pics in Tokyo

B on Electric Street

K with her new Rainbow Bear washcloth and camera

On our way through the park to the Meiji Shrine

The double bridge leading to the Imperial Palace

That white building is not the palace itself, but the public can't get anywhere close to the palace itself.  The gardens were also closed the day we ventured to that neighborhood.  The grounds here seem to be a favorite destination for lunchtime runners, and this is the most photographed spot in Tokyo.  I'm so glad we could do the most touristy thing possible during our short visit.

The last miscellaneous factoid I wanted to share was this little video I caught in a pet store.

Don't you want one?

We're moving to the zeach

Well, we lost the pink beach apartment.  So we're moving to the zeach instead.  The beach-front apartment adjacent to the zoo that I was a bit wary of several weeks ago.  It actually turns out the word I thought I coined to describe the strange placement of my new home is already a snowboarding term, formed from the compression of Zach Leach's names.  I wonder how often that happens to people?  There are only so many combinations of letters in our alphabet, after all, and no, I am NOT going to attempt that math. 

After much anxiety over the decision to live next to a hotbed of perceived tropical diseases just waiting to jump from monkey to human over the fence outside our window, and much anticipation over whether or not we were selected to move in over several other potentially interested people, we will very soon be proud residents of the Blue Lagoon condos. While I don't expect any visits from Brooke Shields, we aren't all that far from a Hooters, and several other points of interest, namely a yummy sushi joint, the largest K-Mart in the world (supposedly, though Wikipedia's source for that factoid is a Guam tourism portal), and a high school I've been wanting to go scout out. 

I'm not really excited about packing, as previously noted, but at least we don't have to schlep things too far.  We only need to move from point A to point B, or about 1.4 miles.  

I was also initially worried about living on the beach, what with typhoons and tsunamis being real things here, but we've got a little heft to the building, no thatched roofs or anything, so I'm starting to get excited.  We sort of figured, if we're going to live on an island, we should feel like we're living on an island. This place does just that.  Here's our beach, and a view of our building.  All those trees are hiding the zoo.

These are the southwest and northeast views of Tumon Bay.

The best things about this place are that Ripley is going to get tons more exercise, and K and I are hopefully going to spend more time outside our house.  Since we'll be that much closer to the busy hotel row with its shops and restaurants, and "winter" is on its way (so the temperature might drop down to the low 80s more regularly), I hope this will mean more time outside and more exercise for us too. Indoor photos forthcoming once we move sometime at the end of October.

Japanese art: wood block printing

One of the most amazing things I saw in the Edo-Tokyo Museum (which I would highly recommend if you make it to Tokyo) was a display about the art of wood block printing.  A lot of the exhibits were in several languages, including English, but this one was particularly interesting because of all the visuals that really helped to drive home the process more than a few paragraphs could.

What you see here is the entire display.  The final print is in the upper left, while the first is in the upper right.  The top row of prints is the composite produced after layering on each individual print with each different pattern and color.  The middle row shows what new piece is added to the picture, and the bottom row is the carved wood block itself.  Sorry the images are a bit dark and/or blurry.  I couldn't use a flash in the museum.

click on any image to enlarge for details

Here's a smaller section to give you a better idea.

Here's a wood block and what it would print:

Here's the before and after for the block shown above.

This is the final image, with a total of 14 blocks/prints needed to make this picture.  It was roughly 12"x16" or so.

Note that the Japanese characters in the scroll were also carved, as a mirror image mind you, in a wood block.  Really amazing.

We hope we're moving here

I know what you're thinking.  "Bethany, you just moved to Guam.  For heaven's sake, why are you moving again?"

As sane people, you ask very astute questions.  Why, indeed, would we want to move again?  I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.  And all of the people on the internet.  Suffice it to say our lease is up at our current place so the band is breaking up.  The good news is we'll be moving into a more private place, and hopefully this will help Ripley's separation anxiety since there will be fewer people for her to separate from on a daily basis.

K and I have been hunting for a new place for a couple weeks, and have gotten really close to sealing a deal on some new digs.  We've been able to work out a less than one-year lease, have negotiated having a dog, and have offered $500/mo under the listed price for the place.  The owner seems amenable to all these conditions.  The place has a new kitchen, lots of open space, and has a great view.  I'm wondering what's wrong with it that no one's snapped it up before now, but I guess we'll find out.  We should be moving in a month or so.

In the meantime, the only thing I can do to minimize the pain of packing and unpacking again is to focus on the view from our new living room/balcony.  The light wasn't great at this time of day to get the best shots, but I think you get the idea.  I wish I could fit them altogether in one panorama to give you the full effect.  It's pretty awesome. 

Left

Middle

Right

Sooo, it's a three bedroom place.  Any takers?  Free lodging, tropical island...

We decided to NOT go with the place that was directly ON the beach since it overlooked the zoo.  Not kidding.  We could hear monkeys and stuff from the balcony.  OOG.

This is the view from the WiFi enabled cafe that's right across the street from our hopefully new place.  You can actually see the cafe in the left shot and right on the left edge of the middle shot above. 

Tu Re Cafe porch

And finally, these pics are just for funsies.  My iPhone camera decided to go on an acid trip for two days, right before I wanted to take pictures of the view.  I had to go back and retake them to give you realistic images.  In case you're worried, my camera has come down now after hanging out in a safe room and not doing anything stupid.

Hooray for Apple forums.