snow fun

we have had some fun with the snow in japan over the last week.

after going up to the frozen waterfall in daigo last weekend on the first day of snow in mito, this weekend we went to niigata to visit matt at gala and also do a bit of skiing and snowboarding ourselves.

we got to yuzawa at 8pm by bus. the bus just stopped at the side of the freeway and we had no idea where to go next. matt had said do we want a taxi, but i had looked at the bus stop on a map and it had looked close. but when there is over 4 metres of snow all around you, it is not that easy.

after a crazy cab ride, i am sure the driver thought he was a rally car champion, we got to the hotel and matt arrived to see us.

we met up with another friend from ibaraki and then had dinner. the next day was to be a big one so it was an early night.

tom had tried snowboarding last time at buller with no luck, so this time we went for skiing. i put the skis back on my feet after a rest of 6 years. it was a funny feeling. i had forgoten most of it but it came back fast enough.

the snow was amazing. as i said, 4 metres all around. it was snowing pretty hard all day on the saturday and it was powder heaven.

it was so soft that at one point i had to rescue tom from the side of a run. i got myself caught too, up to my waist and when he got out he had to pull me out too.

my friend aurelien decided it would be a good idea to go dressed to the snow as a cow. literally a cow. he had a cow costume on which had a tail and even ears. he had quiet a few funny looks and a few people pulling his tail.

that night we went to dinner at an izakaya and then drinks at an aussie bar

the next day, the weather was amazing. blue skies and warm. the snow was still soft and there were less people on the mountain. japanese people like to ski on saturadys. 6000 of them. only 4000 on sundays.

i snowboarded on saturday and left tom on the beginer run to go out and try a few tricks with matty. i have now learnt the 360. but at one point i ended up on my butt and matt ran straight into me. i think that hurt more than the original fall.

we left the mountain after lunch for a quick japanese bath and then a long train ride back to mito. our train was cancelled due to the snow, but lucky for us we were able to get on the shinkansen for the price of a local train. we saved over 1 hour doing this and got home in only 4 hours.

today i am pretty stuffed. got a few bruises and sore muscles, but i think we will go back again in march cause you get a free lift ticket on your birthday. matty and warick might also come down to mito to visit some day soon.

i am an alien in japan

photos

photos from vietnam! sorry it took so long

let it snow

its snowing here

a little bit of australia in ibaraki

i think i have managed to convince my office to let me run my australian movie seminar/festival in march.

we have gotten past the problems with the copyrights and they actually seem to like the idea. i bet its the fact that it will only cost them about $70 to run the event for 4 weeks that sealed the deal.

i am planning to show
- the dish
- strictly ballroom
- rabbit proof fence
- babe

they all have funny titles in japanese though. here are the direct translations
- the sheep of the moon
- dancing hero
- 1500 miles barefoot
- babe (the only normal one)

if you are in ibaraki in march, keep your sunday mornings free for a day at the flicks.

good morning vietnam

well in fact it was afternoon by the time i got there on the 5th, but it felt like the morning rush hour. but then again, i think it is rush hour 24 hours a day in Ho chi minh city (HCMC).

its amazing that my taxi to pham ngu lao, the back packers district, didnt crash into anything. in fact i only saw one accident the whole time i was there. the traffic is like organised chaos. people and ducking and swerving all over the place, they toot their horn, not to tell people to move, but more to say i am here!

just crossing the road is a trial. but i figured out the best way to do it is just step out and hope for the best. they bikes go around you, its only the busses you need to worry about. there are not that many cars at all.

i checked into my hotel. only $12 a night! with breakfast! and set off to explore the town by night. the area i was staying in was full to the brim of foriengers. i think half of australia was in HCMC that week too.

some things i noticed:

you can carry the following things on a motorbike
- 4 people
- 5 slabs of beer
- 6 mattresses
- a pot plant
- soup
- two computers

you can buy the following things from people in the street who come up to you while you are sitting at a resturant
- gum
- books
- tiger balm
- hammocks
- sunglasses

there is no such thing as refrigeration at a market. meat just sits out on the table

it is legitimate to have your 2 y.o. son out at 11pm if it helps you sell on of the above items

the vietnamese food in australia is better than the vietnamese food in vietnam

people try to steal your bags when they ride past you on a bike

the drive on the other side of the road (most of the time)

there are no road rules

beer is extremely cheap here

the list could go on..

on my first full day i spent the day exploring HCMC. I went to the market, the war museum, the reunification palace, the notre dam cathederal, the post office etc. all the big sights in HCMC. by the end of the day my feet were falling off.

in the evening i went to a bar to try and make friends. it is actually pretty hard to do this i found. most people on holdiay were either their with their partners or close friends. its hard to be on the outside of a group. i finally found another 2 women from australia who were travelling by themselves and we partied the night away

on the next day i set off for a 3 day trip of the mekong delta. the prices here for tours are uneblievable. $26 USD for 3 days, all busses, boats and accom. all we had to pay for was food.

i dont know if i can remember all the places we visited along the way, but we spent a lot of time on boats cruising along the mekong river and its canals.

the river is huge. i think he said 3km at its widest point. but i found it more interesting along the narrower cannals where we could see the banks and the lives of the people along the way.

the tour showed us lots of the industry along the canals. mainly rice related, but some fruit and construction. we say how to make rice paper, coconut candy, vermicilli noodles, bricks, fish farming, insence, weaving, bonsai trees, floating markets, boat builing etc

it was really interesting and we also got a lot of time to wander through the villages and interact with the people there. its amazing how poor they are, yet how happy they are. it really brings you back to earth and shows you that you dont need all the things that we think we do. ipods, computers, fancy cars etc. they live with so little, their houses are so small and unstable, but they have the biggest smiles i have ever seen.

the tour brought us back to HCMC in the evening of the 9th and i was able to catch up with some of the JETs from Ibaraki who were also travelling in Vietnam at the same time.

My last day i visited the Cu Chi Tunnels on a tour which cost all of $4. It is another amazing place. we were able to crawl through the real tunnels to see what it was like for the people who built them during the war. I only went through 30 metres of it but i could have gone for 90 metres. The tunnels are only 1.2m high and 70 cm wide. it is very very tight in there and i didnt have a torch. after 30 metres i knew what it felt like and decided it wasnt worth doing another 60...

Our tour guide was a veteran from the South Vietnamese side and had lots of stories to tell. It is a must see for anyone visiting HCMC.

There was a very sad thing that we found out on the tour however. 5 days earlier a korean man had commited suicide at the shooting range next to the tunnels. normally on this tour you get to go to the range to shoot real machine guns and he turned one on himself. so naturally the raneg was closed until investigations could be completed. i didnt want to go there anyway, but it is very sad that this kind of thing could happen.

at the end of my last day i went back to the market to ofload all the vietnamese dong and USD i had left in my wallet. i am not a very good bargainer so i went through it pretty quickly. but i am happy with my purchases. i always feel too sorry for the people trying to sell me things and i dont push them to lower their prices. but what i bought i would have bought in japan anyway and it was still cheaper.

i came out with some winter coats, some beads, new sunnies, some t-shirts for tom, some vietnamese coffee, some pants for me and a t-shirt for me. i am pretty happy with them all.

i got back to japan at 7am on wednesday and i was stuffed. my flight hadnt left HCMC till midnight so i had to kill a lot of hours between going to the market and the airport. i spent it at the pub reading a book and till a found some people to talk to. my taxi driver to the airport was hilarious. he loved karaoke and he even had a list of the songs he wanted to sing with him to share. i sang a few to fill in the 30 min drive with him.

now i am back at work and have lots to do to get my australian movie seminar off the ground. i have spent the day trawling through copyright laws to find out if i can even show these movies. i think i can get away with it under the heading of education. anyways i am going to try.

i will put up some photos of the vietnam trip in the next few days so keep you eyes peeled.

part 2 of the chirstmas holdiays

i spent christmas eve at tom's mums place. then christmas lunch was at my aunty's house and dinner was at mum and dads. I stopped by to visit tom's dad's family for a little while during the day and then he came to our dinner.

boxing day was of course a trip to the sales. i now had too many clothes to fit back into the 2 small bags i had brought back from japan with me.

the original plan was to swap those two small bags for my pack so when i went back through vietnam. life owuld be easier.

however, as all things in life, it didnt go to plan. because i hadnt told anyone i was coming back, i also didnt know that matt had taken my pack with him to japan in decemeber. so i had to buy a new one. this one is better anyway. its red, easy to find on the baggage carousel at the airport and lockable - a very important tool when you are travelling in south east asia these days.

the 27th we headed into the city for a picnic lunch with mum and dad and josh and em at the fitzroy gardens. it was mum and dad's 30th wedding anniversay so they were staying in town. i bought some flowers on the way in and delivered them to their hotel to surprise them.

after lunch it was down to the beach to stay at tom's dad's family's beach house.

the 28th was a great day. after a round of golf in the morning, we headed to the new peninsular hot springs resort for an onsen and massage. This was part of my christmas present from tom. i gave him a coffee maker which he cant get till he comes back to japan. a ploy to make sure he came back :)

i had never had a massage before and this was very very cool at the resort. after you go to the public bath, you get your own private bath for about 30 mins. then into the massage room. they hold 3 scents under your nose so you can pick your massage oil. they dont tell you what the scents are till after and what they do. apparently you body can decide the right one for itself.

tom chose the "relax you have too much on your mind" oil and i chose "detox", appropriate seeing i had not had one day since i arrived in oz on the 22nd without a glass of wine in my hand.

the massage was soo relaxing. i didnt fall asleep but tom did. at the end they told me to keep my fluids up so when we got back to the beach house we cracked out some more wine...

after another day at the beach we headed back to melbourne and i caught up with all the uni girls for dinner. had dinner at a nice little cafe on bridge rd and then off to brooke's for drinks.

next day was a bit of a relaxer. and then the day after, new years eve, we headed back down to the beach. it apparently got to 46 degrees that day in melbourne. i dont think it was that bad down at rye, but it was pretty hot. new years eve for us was pretty quiet but we walked down to the beach in time to watch the illegal fireworks from the pier.

next day was a lot cooler than the 46 degree belter. we rode down to sorrento on what i would call antique road bikes for breaky. then off to the golf course to play with some of toms friends. sadly but the time we got to the 2nd hole, the rain came down. and did it come down. it was so wet we had to abandon the game and head for the pub.

the next day we went up to tom's mums for dinner with my folks too and then the day after was a picnic at badger creek in healsville with the danish exchange student's parents who were over.

that night i had all my friends over for drinks and the n the next day was getting ready for the trip to vietnam. i had soo much trouble fitting everything into my pack. it was never going to fit. i dont know why i brought so much stuff back from japan with me. but i guess with melbourne weather, you never know what it is going to do. the 46 to 17 degree drop in 1 day stands to show that..

on the last night we went to indochine at box hill for a taste of the vietnamese food i had to look forward to. soo yummy.

and then i left at 10am the next day, jan 5th, for HCMC .

the curse of the zipper

before i continue my story on australia and vietnam, i just have to say that even though i left the country for 3 weeks i did not manage to shed the curse of the zipper

yesterday when i was just about to leave for work, i started to put my boots on.

and the zipper broke!!!

how could this happen again? this is the 4th broken zipper in as many weeks.

something strange is happening in my house.

around the world again

well i have been gone for a long time.

i left my house in japan at 5.00am on the 21st of decemeber and i finally set foot back in it again at 11am on the 11th of january.

it felt like a whole year had passed since i had been here, i guess that is true cause it is now 2006, but it was a real funny feeling coming back after being in OZ for 2 weeeks and then vietnam for another 1 week

so i will start at the start of my trip, cause that would be logical.

on the 21st i left japan. i hadnt really thought too much about how i was getting back to oz. i booked a flight on vietnam airlines way back a few months before and didnt really pay attention to the schedule. apparently i had a 5 hour stop over in HCMC and i didnt even realise! now thats a long time in any airport, but HCMC is really the pits. one restaurant and about 5 duty free shops to fill in the time. then we found out the plane was delayed another 3 hours! i was travelling with another JET from melbourne and we filled the time making friends with other travellers, a few who decided to make their own fun by turning the airport into their own private disco. the boogied all over the terminal listening to their ipods.

finally i got to melbourne. i was supposed to get in at 9am but it was almost 1pm by the time i left the baggage claim and found tom waiting paitently. i had called his house to say i would be late from HCMC but the message didnt get to him cause his dad forgot to tell him...

my parents didnt know i was coming home. in fact noone apart from tom, and a few people he had accidently told knew. i had set up with mum that tom would come for lunch with her at around midday. but i was late so this threw a spanner in the works. tom handled it by calling and saying he was going to be late cause he was christmas shopping at eastland. he had to say something like that cause the airport noise was very loud in the background and he didnt want her to catch on.

finally we got back to my house. i rang the doorbell and hid behind the door when she looked out the window to see who was there. when she opened the door she almost cried. she had no idea at all i was coming home. she had been complainig that noone was going to be home for christmas only a few days before. i had been worried that she might have caught on cause i had been very vauge about my holiday plans and one of toms friends had let something slip at charlotte's 1st birthday. but she had no idea.

so next to surprise was dad. he was still at work and he was supposed to come home for lunch with tom but cause he was running late he didnt bother. so mum kept calling him all day asking when he was coming back and trying to ocnvince him to leave early cause it was his last day before the holdiays. in the end he didnt get back till 6pm! i shocked him by just walking out into the kitchen after he came in and said "hi dad, how was your day?"

then i got my brother and emily. mum called them to ask them over for dinner for no particular reason, but they were going to em's house so they said they would drop by before hand. that worked out well and they were suitibaly surprised.

the rest of the family i didnt get to shock much because i called grandma to tell her and then she told everyone else before i got a chance. but it was still good.

i will continue the story soon, but for now it is lunch time here in japan. back to the old cafeteria food that i havent had for 3 weeks. well at least i will be eating healthy again. in oz i had all the food that i had been missing over the last 6 months - souvlaki, pizza, fish and chips, pies etc - all soo good for me...