(NOTE: This came about 12 hours before I headed about 3 hours/200 miles south, from northern New Jersey to the "Charm City", Baltimore, Maryland, for this long weekend... I know that's not Japan, but at this point, having waited through the mega disaster that was wrought upon Japan in March 2011 to finally visit that incredibly futuristic country... Not even New York City, which I've visited dozens of times now, although I guess living only about 10 miles west of there certainly overinflated those figures, or Montréal, which I've visited about a 1/2 dozen times, & which inspired me to take a bunch of school years' worth of French-language classes, are as special to me anymore as Japan is, although I'll most likely end up catching both the mid-Manhattan Christmas displays, perhaps even with a few of my fellow Japan 2014 peeps, & more NHL/international hockey in downtown Montréal, before I end up returning to Japan, most likely with a few family members/relatives along with me! But I digress... here's part 2 of our journey, this time on the way to, & finally in, Hiroshima!)
"Today we spent our time traveling from Osaka to Hiroshima. This was a loonngg bus ride but we stopped at two separate towns to explore. We stopped at Himeji Castle and a small canal town called Kurashiki. I want to start off by saying that Japan has french fries for breakfast, at ALL of our hotels. I found that to be strange, a long with the small hotdogs they had and loved."
*Japan, not Rome... But yes, the toilets over there are incredibly futuristic, unlike our totally old toilets! The squat toilets, however; if I was forced to either use 1 of those pieces of **** or risk getting fined for indecent exposure, I'd much rather take the fine in that case! For the Western-style toilets over there, however, the risk is not so much getting stuck to the seat as it is timing your use of all the little buttons correctly to avoid getting burned by the surprisingly hot water that usually gets squirted from the nozzles & everything else inside the toilets!
Long bus rides... small towns... Come to think of it, I can relate to both of those situations:
- there's this bus service throughout northern N.J. that does business as "Spanish Transportation, Inc.", but calls its service either "Express Service" (for buses heading into N.Y.C.), or "Airport Service", depending on where you're looking to go on any given day... Now, the bus ride from here to Times Square should be only about 20 minutes to a 1/2 hour, but 99+% of the time, that somehow ends up becoming an hour-long trip, with everybody boarding at wherever, & also leaving at wherever, with no concern whatsoever for anybody else's potential time constraints! D***it, people; you were given these wonderful things normally referred to as "legs" for a reason; now, just use them already instead of pestering the rest of us just looking to enjoy an afternoon &/or evening in Manhattan!
- I usually avoid small towns wherever I go, but put 1 of those next to a canal or river or some other body of water, & suddenly, I'm all for whichever small town is closest to said body of water! (see: Lake Placid, N.Y.; New Hope, PA; Bar Harbor, ME; Moses Lake, WA; Manhattan Beach, CA; so on & so forth)
"Himeji Castle was beautiful but sadly it rained all day. We only got to tour the outer gate of the castle because the inside was under construction. The hallways lead us through the entire castle and it was filled with a lot of rooms, windows, and small bedrooms. Here we encountered our first incident where small children were in love with seeing us and kept yelling "hello!" to us. It was our first taste of this strange concept of D-list celebrity status because we are white and have different hair and eye colors."
the D-list? please... The castle itself was a bit of hike for being accessible only by road, but for those of us used to hiking more local trails to other castles, or for myself, used to walking multiple miles' worth practically every time I end up getting dropped somewhere in Manhattan, that hike was nothing... The design of the building is mostly homage to the Edo/Meiji eras, when Japan was still regularly invaded by other east Asian armies, & as such, it contains many circle/triangle/square shaped windows which were originally used to lob weapons at their enemies; that is, if said enemies weren't so intimidated by the uneven terrain leading up to the castle that they simply fled & looked for something that they thought would be easier to invade, only to encounter the exact same terrain at every other castle!
"Here's some history on Himeji Castle:
-it is one of 12 castles in Japan
-During the Meiji restoration castles were a sign of the old order so many were destroyed. Instead of it being demolished it was put up for auction. A man bought it and wanted to harvest it for its clay tiles but he found the tiles were too big for houses. Instead he just decided to restore it.
-A tower was damaged by a bomb in WWII"
...aside from the fact that it is 1 out of 12 current castles - there was a time where there were hundreds - everything above is not only historically correct, but also (especially that last point, about the WWII "carpet bombing" campaign) quite terrifying to those of us opposed to such unrestrained acts of war!
"On to Kurashiki. It was a small town but really beautiful. There were canals and weeping willows everywhere. We saw some swans and it was perfectly Japan. The live action movie of Rurouni Kenshin was filmed here because it looks like it did hundreds of years ago. In the Edo time it was used to store rice. The Shogun took 60% of the rice as tax."
As I mentioned earlier, put a small town near some body of water, & I'll gladly visit it... Such was the case in Kurashiki, which was (mostly) split by the aforementioned canals between restaurants & souvenir shops; while I'm not sure why Japan is so intent on keeping its historic places almost entirely intact instead of allowing them to slowly modernize themselves in order to serve tourists better, I am glad that they are able to use them as filming locations for films set in some long-ago historical eras, instead of having to use stages & other fake environments to fill in for those locations!
"When we arrived in Hiroshima we immediately were released into the downtown area. Once again there was a giant indoor/outdoor mall. For dinner we ate like a pro at this yummy ramen shop. It's strange because you pick and pay for your food through a machine. You look at the picture, choose your food, pay, and take the ticket to the cooks. It was pretty interesting."
Downtown Hiroshima, Japan... what ended up being just the beginning of what I would later find out was a full-on Frozen obsession over there!
I didn't take their suggestion the 1st night; instead, I ended up visiting that city's equivalent of Best Buy/P.C. Richard & Son (an N.Y.C.-area electronics retailer, most famous for its 5-note "whistle" sound that has been all over its TV/radio advertising throughout my life!)/etc.:
I know that picture is of the Shinjuku/Tokyo location instead of the Hiroshima location, but my overall point still stands - it's easy to get lost in there, & especially if you repeat my mistake of going in there with no time-keeping devices whatsoever, leaving me occasionally checking some sort of screen somewhere for the time in order to be able to catch up with everybody else on schedule! In the end, however, I did end up meeting everybody else on time, & even better: that took place in front of this little dog shop, with all these puppies & (fittingly enough) this Shiba Inu in the back of the store! The hotel, even, was miles ahead of the hotel I struggled until 1 A.M. to find in Osaka; wi-fi which actually worked throughout the building - something we wouldn't find again until Tokyo - a mini convenience store downstairs in the lobby, which sure served my Haagen-Dazs cravings (which, mind you, lasted the entire trip) well, as well as my other craving - Orangina orange soda, which, naturally, I 1st tried back in middle school, not in Montréal, but in 1 of my many French classes, since my teacher back then had too much time on her hands to be collecting various French beverage/non-alcoholic liquor containers!
"Here is when I noticed that a lot of people actually speak English and understand what you're saying even if you don't speak Japanese. Hand movements are the best and very universal. Although there can be a small language barrier, they don't mind and try hard to convey the right message to you. They don't look at you harshly if you don't understand them, they are flattered when you attempt to speak Japanese, and don't really care. They just want everything to be okay and you to be happy. SOOO different than in America. You don't speak English? FUCK YOU. Naw, bro, it's chill in Japan. Although a lot of signs are in Japanese and it's hard to find subtitles on the Japanese remotes and hotel's don't tell you how to find them."
That's what makes me so frustrated with Jersey, in particular, when it comes to simple stuff such as, I dunno, helping others... You'd probably think, normally, that more rural locations would be more "closed-minded" than the Garden State, but you wouldn't know it with how "far behind" my home state has been with most recent cultural phenomena... There's times where I think some of my fellow "Garden Staters" act more like Cuban or North Korean citizens instead of Americans when it comes to "being current"... Back to the main topic, though: we take the English language so seriously, that I think a large part of our population would fit in more with the "Office Quèbècois de la langue Française" (uuuugggghhhh...) than in our more multicultural, multilingual cities... Over there, however, if they're fluent in English, thankfully, they have no reservations whatsoever of making that known, & if they don't, they might haggle you a bit, but they eventually recognize, thankfully, that they're there to serve, not bother!
"Our hotel was beautiful. It was really fancy and right on the bay. It wasn't around any public transportation but it didn't matter. Either way I had jet lag and ended up going to bed at 9pm. Japanese hotels are so nice! They give you everything you could ever need in the bathrooms. They give you funny PJ's or cute yukatas to wear. Even slippers! They are so detailed oriented it's insane."
While everybody who still had a bit of jet lag slept off their sluggishness, the rest of us had a few "bonding moments" elsewhere on the 10th floor of our hotel, where all of our rooms were located... While getting booted from that single room shortly after 1 A.M. was certainly a "party pooper", the girls in the group mostly "crashed" after sorting out the mess that everybody made, while most of the guys did the same thing, but instead of "crashing", a few of us decided to check out some of the pickup soccer action taking place just outside our hotel, & needless to say, had it not been 1 A.M., & had most of us not been somewhere between buzzed & just plain wasted, I certainly would've tried to school some of those amateurs who were actually playing instead of just watching, as we all were!
"Oh, and all "western" toilets are all smart toilets with a lot of buttons and flushing noises. I tried the toilets that were on the ground and they weren't bad. Most girls refused to use them but hey, when in Rome!"
"Thank you for reading!" Yes... stay tuned for part 3, live from Baltimore sometime this weekend, but if you thought I'd let you get away without seeing this 1st, you're mistaken...
Whereas last time, I presented you people with the Latin American Spanish soundtrack - the 1 that us TV viewers viewing that movie will encounter from now on - that's its European Spanish counterpart!
As you can tell, the Spaniards took the "Let It Go" title translation significantly more literally than their Latin@ counterparts, but the rest of the titles are just totally different from what we know here... Heck, they even kept the Argentine Martina Stoessel in the end credits over there, instead of finding somebody to record their own "pop" rendition, but then again, Spanish audiences are probably better off for it, since I find that rendition to have just sucked all the soul out of the lyrics... Instead of being both pivotal to the plot as the 1st rendition is, as well as brilliant all on its own, it just sounds like any other "top 40" song you hear on whichever FM stations happen to serve your area... As I hinted at in part 1 of this dual Japan 2014/Frozen "miniseries", however, at least they didn't make the same mistake the French-language staff did in finalizing the soundtrack over there:
This is probably just my frequent-Montréal-visiting "alter ego" side revealing itself here, but what the ****, France & Quèbec!? I find it bad enough that the European Spanish soundtrack kept something originally recorded by an Argentine in the end credits, but this? Also, what the **** is with that other title translation of "Let It Go"... This ain't the ******* French Revolution anymore, you *****! ............... This is my only response to that ****:
(the "they are what we thought they were" press conference... who knew I would feel the same way about the French after seeing how they butchered their Frozen soundtrack titles?)
Upcoming in part 3: Kyoto, & some other international Frozen soundtrack that hasn't been ruined by its own creators!
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