Last night Kuniko and I traveled to Sakai city in the south part of the greater metropolitan area of Osaka, to meet the wife of an old friend from India.

Ashika and her friend Geeta were wrapping up a week-long tour of Japan with a group, and had decided to stay an extra day to explore some of Japan at their own pace. We met them in Sakai near their hotel and took them to a nearby restaurant to eat traditional Japanese food and talk about their trip, their family, and their experiences in India as well as other places – they were both quite well-traveled.

I first met Ashika’s husband Vishnu 27 years ago when I moved to Fresno to prepare to attend courses for my bachelor’s degree in enology (winemaking). I had arrived before the start of the semester to settle in and get to know the area. Since it was between terms there weren’t many students around. The university had one dormitory open to house people that wanted to stay during the holiday break, and so I got a room there rather than spending too much on a hotel.  The dormitory housed a handful of students, including international students who didn’t plan on flying all the way back to their home countries.

Vishnu was living  just down the hall from my room, and it turned out that he was also part of the winemaking program so we already had a starting basis for our friendship. I soon discovered that there wasn’t a lot going on in Fresno, and thanks to Vishnu I was introduced to other members of the enology program and had a chance to see more than I would have otherwise.

Since he was ahead of me in the program he graduated ahead of me and went back to India, and since this was sometime in the early 90’s it was a little hard to keep in touch. But Vishnu managed it, calling me all the way from India to wish me a happy birthday, and he even sent me a picture of him and his new wife dressed in traditional Indian clothing at their wedding.

With the advent of Facebook communication was much easier, and it was through that medium that Kuniko and I organized a trip to India to visit Vishnu in 2011. Vishnu and his wife Ashika hosted us at their home in Bangalore for a few days and showed us around their rapidly growing city. We met their kids for the first time and really enjoyed our stay thanks to them.

So it was with great pleasure that we could sort of return the favor, at least a little, by having dinner with Ashika before she flew home. I was getting over a cold so I wasn’t at the top of my game but we still had good conversations and they were brave enough to try some foods that even we don’t normally eat very often. Ashika had brought a handmade bag filled with masala for our cooking, and we sent them back with a little box of goodies made in Akashi, where we live.

As I write this Ashika and Geeta are flying back home via Malaysia with their bags packed with souvenirs from the trip. We really enjoyed seeing Ashika again and we’re hoping that we can also get Vishnu to Japan sometime soon. We’re thinking how fun it would be to visit them again in India, or maybe meet them in another country nearby and travel together.

There I was, standing in front of the local import food store’s better-than-average selection of olive oils, feeling a little intimidated. Thanks to my education and work background I am perfectly comfortable in front of wine bottles lined up on shelves, but olive oils are a completely different thing. I am perusing the extra virgin olive oils, but even within that category you can select oils from Italy or Spain, and then you must sort through terms like “cold extracted”, “press filtered”, “fruttato” and “dolce”, words that are apparently used somewhat loosely throughout the semi-regulated olive oil industry. The prices also add to the feeling of risk – with some oils costing over $40 a liter. It is probably not a sign of rational thinking to blow that much money on a little bottle of olive oil, right?

If I allow my gaze to drop to the lower shelves, much cheaper options beckon. There, extra virgin olive oil is sold in larger plastic containers, and the prices here are at a much more palatable $6-7 per liter – about one fifth the price of the top shelf oils. There are even lower priced options as well, if you are prepared to abandon the olive and get your oil from another source.

The weird part of this story is that the only reason I am even looking at that top shelf of premium olive oils is because of what I’m wearing on my feet while I shop – a comfortable pair of black leather business shoes.

Rewind to fifteen years ago, when I moved to Japan from California with a big suitcase of clothes to get me through a year of teaching English overseas. As that year stretched into a longer and longer stay in a foreign country, it meant that I needed to do my clothes shopping locally. Shirts, slacks, jeans, underwear – all of it was easily available, even for my larger than (Japanese) average body. The challenge was finding shoes in my size. I wear a size 13 in the US (size 30 in Japan) and the fact was that shoes in Japan (even made by foreign companies) maxed out at about a size 9 (roughly a 27 in Japan size).

Obviously shoes are an essential item, and I needed a reliable source, pronto. Any time I visited another country, I’d buy a bunch of shoes in my size, and bring them back to Japan to wear in my daily life. I got into a cycle of bringing back a bunch of cheap shoes that would wear out pretty quickly (especially in the hot, wet Japanese summers) and then I’d need to buy more. I didn’t go overseas often and I wanted to maximize my opportunities with as many shoes as possible and that meant buying shoes at reasonable prices. It just made sense to look for a great price because I figured I’d always be a high volume shoe buyer. I expected the shoes I’d buy to break down soon because my whole life I’d been buying cheap shoes and the idea of a shoe lasting longer than a year was completely (a-hem) foreign to me.

But a few years ago I found a pair of business shoes in Japan that happened to be my size. My wife and I were shopping at an outlet center (outlet shopping has become a very successful import from America) and found some size 30 leather business shoes, stashed in a pile of other boxes in a dusty corner of a shop. Clearly they were not selling in Japan and had been sent off to the outlets to try to get rid of them. After trying them on I bought them and started wearing them to work the next day.

After the first week or so of loosening up the shoes were quite comfortable, and so I stopped thinking about them. For more than a year. And the year after that. It was only after several years that I noticed the soles of the shoes were wearing down, but every other part of the shoe was still in great shape. I took them in to a shoe shop and had them resoled for about $15 and they gave me another year of comfortable wear. They finally had to be retired after more than three years of almost daily use.  

Obviously this turned the way I thought about shoes on its head. I searched in vain for another pair of leather shoes at the outlets, but Japanese people’s feet hadn’t grown significantly since my last visit and there remained little demand for the size 30’s I wear. However I put in an order with my parents and had them send out three pairs of leather shoes from America, and by rotating these I’ve been able to move beyond shoe-related worries and to think about why I had continued to self-import all those suitcases of cheap shoes over the years. Maybe, in fact, cheaper is not always better.

One of the cool things about living in another country is that it is an opportunity to see some cultural points that are hard to notice when viewed from inside the bubble of life in your own country. Now I could see how saving money and getting a good deal were so hard-wired into my way of thinking in America. Of course that isn’t a bad thing and many times that kind of thinking will serve you well, especially over the long term. But by stumbling upon this forgotten pair of size 30 shoes I had also stumbled on a blind spot in my thinking – sometimes it is fine to spend more money to get good quality.

Naturally this revelation made me think more deeply about other things that I cared about. Was there some other area in my life that I’d been low-balling that could be improved with a slightly larger infusion of money? Of course, the first thing I thought about was food. We buy it almost every day, there are lots choices out there, and it is one of the things that gives us the most happiness every day.

I started small – by buying some quality fruit now and then (previously I considered all fruit in Japan to be overpriced and therefore a waste of money). Fruit in Japan is consistently very high quality, and almost unnaturally beautiful. Where does all the asymmetrical or bruised fruit go? Only rows and rows of bright, fresh, colorful (and expensive) fruit line the shelves. The question was whether the enjoyment I got out of the fruit was worth the extra thousand yen ($10) a week I was spending. After enjoying a bulging orange “decopon”, an enormous human head-sized pomelo, and mangoes, papayas and dragonfruit, the answer was yes – it was totally worth it.

Recently I read a book about a couple who bought a house in Spain and started growing their own olives, which led me to think more deeply about olive oil, which in turn led me to standing in front of the premium olive oil section that I described at the beginning of this story. I selected a small bottle of Italian olive oil labeled as “fruttato”, took it home, and poured a healthy dose of the golden liquid into a spoon and tasted it straight. And I realized I’ve been missing out on what olive oil could truly be. We always buy the big jug of cheap olive oil for cooking (and still do) but using a little premium olive oil to have with bread, to top a salad or use on popcorn instead of butter – it was a whole new way for us to enjoy food.

The lesson here was not to go spend more money on everything. The lesson for me was that I need to rethink some of the views that have been ingrained in me and see where I might make some small improvements. A little more money has made a huge difference for my feet and for our dinner table. I’ll try to keep my eyes open for other areas to improve.

The seasons are starting to change and we’re starting to think about cherry blossoms and new students. April brings with it some very different weather, more time outdoors, and unfortunately for some people, hay fever. Luckily Kuniko and I seem to have avoided it so far, and hopefully we can keep that streak going.

This weekend we’ll have two days off together, for the first time in a long time. I’m not sure exactly what we’ll be doing, but if the weather complies we’ll probably do some gardening outdoors. Last year I kind of let things run their course outside and this year I want to get things in shape. A few weeks ago I cleaned out the old crap laying around outside our house and pulled out a couple of uninteresting and unproductive plants that weren’t really doing anything for us. I also cut back the monster bush of rosemary that was getting ready to knock on our door and move in.

We’ll be planting herbs (cilantro, thyme, dill, oregano, mint) and hopefully some of those will be able to stick around for a few years. The cilantro is a one season only project, but we certainly eat enough of it that it would pay off to grow it ourselves. This will be a learning experience and I don’t expect that everything will make it, but if even half of the herbs survive I’ll be happy. Hopefully we can turn our black thumbs green this year.

Something new – a guest post from my mom! Recently she mentioned that I hadn’t blogged in a while so I offered her a chance to write a guest blog, and she did a great job! Here is her post:

In June of 2003, Ray and I went to Los Angeles airport and saw Bryan off on what we thought would be a three year job/adventure teaching and living in Japan.  He left belongings in storage and in our attic.  Little did we know that he would find the love of his life and decide to make his home permanently there in Japan.

When he was first in Japan, we had limited ways to communicate with him. Not knowing what he was doing, how he was feeling, was he sick or well, happy or homesick was a real challenge for a mom to deal with.  We finally found a long distance phone plan that wasn’t too expensive.  The first month our phone bill was over $200 when the plan didn’t kick in right away.  After some time, we were able to figure out the time differences and managed to talk once a week if he was home when we called.  I don’t remember what his phone situation was at the time, but we didn’t want to run up a big long distance bill on his phone, so we tried to call.

The other way we got news from Bryan was his decision to keep up a blog every day.  This was something new for us, but since day one of his blogging, I have been so grateful to him for writing almost every day, for his writing skills, and for his desire to have a written record of his time in Japan.  The blog has kept us informed, kept me from worrying so much about what was or was not happening to him, and did provide so much insight into his life there.  The blog was where we also first heard about Kuniko.  In 2005, Kuniko became our daughter-in-law and we first visited Japan.  

Over the years, we have become resigned to the fact that they will always make their home in Japan.  We have been lucky enough to be able to visit them, meet a lot of their friends and family, and to make new friends ourselves.  Knowing how much they love each other, we are grateful that he has such a loving wife to share his life. They have a wonderful circle of people to give them love and support.

Now, after he has spent almost 16 years in Japan, I have to say that I am so grateful for the amount of changes made in the technology and communications industry.  Instead of waiting for one day a week to talk to Bryan and Kuniko, if I think of something I want to tell them or a question for them, maybe a book or movie recommendation, news about a friend, I just text on my cell phone (trying to always be aware of the time difference) and I get an answer right away.  The immediacy of that answer is so reassuring.  It has made a world of difference when there have been earthquakes and other disasters to be able tohear right away that they are alright. Blogging, texting and messaging, talking on the cell phones, facetime, skyping, even sending pictures back and forth…all have made the world a smaller place for me.  For this technology I am very very grateful.

For one reason or another, we have eaten a lot of oysters this season. We often went to Akashi and bought oysters from the fish market there, as a reward for walking all the way to Akashi. The oysters this year were especially delicious, and recently over dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant we told Mamiko and Yoshi all about our oyster addiction. They turned out to be pretty big oyster lovers themselves (who isn’t?), and they wanted to get in on the oyster mania – we figured we could squeeze one more oyster party in before the end of the season. We arranged a date to drive out to the coast west of Himeji and buy a bunch of oysters to bring home and cook up at their house.

Yoshi and Mamiko came by car on Saturday morning and picked us up. The weather was beautiful and unseasonably warm, and we packed a few bottles of cold prosecco along with some craft cheese we had shipped in from Okinawa into the back of their car to enjoy later at their house. Then it was a matter of making the hour or so drive to get the oysters. We were delayed by a bit of traffic we finally got to the Tatsuno area, and then drove south over the hill to a beautiful coastline. Previously we had been out to Ako which is a little farther west, and it had a similar feel. We drove past several small isolated fishing villages that seemed to be based on the oyster industry – it made me wonder what everyone does during the off season. I think it might be fun to spend an evening in one of these villages, grilling oysters with the ocean in the background and maybe visiting a few local pubs. I don’t know about the hotel situation, but one of these days I’d like to come back and spend some more time in a place like this.

Yoshi drove us a bit farther along the coast to a shop that they had visited before. We parked the car and went inside to look around. There was a funny moment when Kuniko noticed that Mamiko and I were wearing the exact same colors – an unintentional wardrobe match.

The oyster place was a combination of store, restaurant, and a to-go food stand that had an old lady busy frying oysters for people to eat right away. Around back was a wharf area that looked like it is much busier in the morning. We walked a little around the wharf area and then went back to do our shopping. Inside we ended up buying five kilograms of oysters, ten big scallops, and a small bag of medium-sized clams. The oysters were surprisingly cheap at 900 yen per kilogram, and the size of the oysters was pretty big – bigger than ones that we had earlier in the year.

Once we had loaded our shellfish into the car we drove on down the coast, to another tourist shop selling local vegetables, seafood and snacks. Because it was around lunchtime there were a lot of customers and it was some sort of miracle that we could find a parking spot across the street. Inside we lined up to buy some tofu, some manju, and a few other snacks that we could have as side dishes for our lunch.

From there it was back home on the highway, and luckily there wasn’t any traffic for the return trip. We talked together on the ride home, and Kuniko and I were in a pretty good mood with oysters and prosecco on the menu. We giggled and laughed at each other’s jokes on the ride home, and it made the time fly by.

Back in Tarumi we unloaded our goods and fired up the hot plate, and then got the party started. As usual Mamiko had prepared lots of delicious side dishes – chopped onions, lemon juice, ponzu sauce, soy milk, and a smoked salmon salad that was refreshing. We also broke out some of the Okinawan cheese and introduced it to them for the first time. Once the food and wine was flowing, we really started to relax and enjoy the afternoon.

It was interesting to see the way they cooked the oysters – we often put our oysters directly on the grill and let them pop open, but they put their oysters on the hot plate, and steam them with a cover to get them to open up. Some of the oysters were a little shy, but once we got them open they were really big! As usual the oysters were best without any special toppings – straight off the grill on the half-shell. They were probably the best oysters we’ve had this season, and I was glad we could enjoy them with good friends.

After a while Akira came home from his school club activities, and joined us in this sort of hedonistic ritual of oyster eating. He was just as interested in the cheese, and I think it was a hit with him. We hadn’t seen Akira for a long time, and he was looking more and more like a young adult. He was a little more talkative this time, and so it was fun talking with him a bit.

In the early evening we started to slow down – having eaten enough shellfish to feed an army – and so in the end we had Mamiko call us a taxi and we went back to the station to get a train home to Okubo. It was a really nice lunch/dinner and during the evening we decided to get together at our house in the near future. Yoshi, Mamiko and Akira are a lot of fun to hang out with and we’re looking forward to eating and drinking together again soon.

In the middle of our Christmas holiday in Florida, we hopped on a Southwest flight to Havana for a few days on our own. Cuba is one of those countries that I had been interested in visiting but was low on my priority list because it seemed to be geographically and politically out of reach. A few years ago relations between Cuba and Washington DC seemed to warm up under the Obama administration, but chilled right back down again once Trump became president. Since we were going to be in Florida anyway, we looked into how we could go there, and found a minor loophole that could be used to pull off a trip. By going on the trip and declaring that we were “Supporting the Cuban People”, developing an itinerary and keeping our receipts as proof of our support activities, we could theoretically get back into the USA after our trip. Kuniko and I discussed the risks, booked a flight and a hotel, and we were all set.

Southwest flies direct from Tampa airport to Havana several times a week, and it was pretty simple to line up and check-in. Just before check-in there is a counter where you can pick up your Cuban visa (ours cost $50 a person which we paid for online before the trip). Then we checked a solitary suitcase (which I don’t recommend for short trips – as you’ll see later).

Flights to Cuba left from the domestic terminal so it was just like any other destination, and we had a little breakfast before taking off. It was just an hour in the air – up and down – and most of the other passengers seemed to be speaking Spanish. I spotted a few white folks probably exploiting the same loophole we were, but Kuniko was the only Japanese person on board. It was a little exciting to be on a plane bound for a new country – we were both pretty excited.

It was a bright sunny morning when we arrived and we watched out the airplane windows to see what we could see, but unfortunately the plane had approached the outskirts on Havana from the south so we didn’t fly over the city. The Havana airport was tiny – one of the smallest airports we’ve ever visited, and once the plane doors opened we just walked down the steps and across to the arrival doors. No guards, no guides, just follow the person in front of you. I saw only two or three other planes there, and very few ground vehicles.

Once inside we lined up for immigration. At check-in back in the USA they had given us several forms to fill out, and Kuniko and I had filled them in carefully with lots of information. We wanted to be sure not to screw anything up but in the end, the Cuban authorities didn’t really seem to care that much. They spoke English at immigration, and let us in to the country without much interest. Then we lined up to go through a security checkpoint after immigration (which was new to me), and after that we were free to pick up our suitcase from the carousel and leave.

This was the first incident where we felt like we were in a developing country. There were two carousels for the whole airport, Carousel A and Carousel B. Around the carousels were crowds of people – way more than had arrived on our plane. Lots of baggage was piled around the carousels haphazardly, and it looked like a scene from a war movie. There were no signs but I recognized a few people from our plane at Carousel A so we waited there. Big packages wrapped in plastic were being thrown out a hatch onto the carousel, and after waiting for about 15 minutes there were still no suitcases (ours or anyone else’s). It turns out that bringing things to Cuba is a big deal (and probably profitable for some people) and so our little suitcase was the least of anyone’s worries. Huge bundles kept coming and coming, and Carousel B was just as packed as A. It was a total mess, and we could have saved a lot of time by not bringing a suitcase at all. After even more time waiting we got smart and Kuniko went to watch the other carousel – it seemed like baggage from our flight was going to both carousels. Finally Kuniko retrieved our bag, we gave our customs forms to two ladies who could have cared less (it seemed to be optional) and then we went to find our driver.

I had arranged a driver with our hotel to avoid any stress with negotiation and being ripped off, and he was waiting for us right outside the airport. We changed some money to Cuban pesos, and then got in our driver’s classic car for a ride to the hotel. The car was in pretty good shape, it had an after-market air conditioner installed inside (which was nice as it was a pretty hot morning in Havana) and we sat in the back grinning and enjoying the seatbelt-free ride.  Roads in Havana turned out to be pretty disorganized, and so the drive was full of interesting things to see. At first we mainly passed farms, then factories, and then finally into the bigger neighborhoods of the city. The driver pulled into the narrow streets of Old Havana and pulled up in front of our hotel address, which was just a door leading into a building. The hotel name wasn’t written anywhere but there was a sign for a hairdresser that was also in the building and that ended up being the visual cue for me the rest of our stay.

The driver knocked on the hotel door and then waved to us and left, and we entered to find a nice boutique style entrance, with three women who introduced themselves very politely in English. We had arrived early in the morning and the room wasn’t quite ready, but they took us up some stairs to a landing inside the building that was open air and designed for meals and entertaining. We sat and the ladies prepared a welcome drink – two Cuba Libres for the foreign guests. It seemed like a nice enough hotel, clean and friendly with no communication problems. We left our suitcase at the hotel desk and then went outside to explore Old Havana.

I didn’t have any sort of expectations coming to Havana, and so we walked around with an open mind and just took it all in. The first thing that made an impact was the beautiful classical architecture. We’ve been to a lot of cities and Havana’s old buildings were beautiful, old and dying slowly. It was haphazard how some buildings looked well-maintained and others seemed to be falling apart. Some of Old Havana’s narrow streets were broken, and there was construction here and there but in no organized fashion. This area was dominated by tourism and the locals taking advantage of it, but it didn’t feel touristy, exactly. Not so many shops aimed at tourists, some restaurants and coffee shops were open, and at nearly every corner was some form of live music. Cubans know that their music is one of the drawing points for tourism and they are taking full advantage of it. I think I heard “Chan Chan” – the famous song from Buena Vista Social Club – being played six or seven times during our visit. They were also pretty quick with the collection hat – if you stopped and listened for more than five or ten seconds someone was tapping your shoulder and asking you to support the Cuban people – exactly the reason that we had declared to the US government.

The Cuban people we met were all friendly, and even the ones selling something weren’t too pushy or aggressive. They seemed genuinely happy and willing to talk with visitors. It felt safe, and the streets were filled with tourists from frequent cruise ship visits, Canadians, Europeans and even a few Asian groups. We understood that we were in a touristy area and it wasn’t representative of the entire country, but we were still pleasantly surprised.

Around Old Havana there are four major squares, built near cathedrals, and by visiting each of these squares you start to get an overall feel for the area. We visited several before getting hungry and looking for a lunch place. By chance we were able to get a table for two at one of the restaurants recommended online called Paladera Dona Eutimina. After sitting down we watched the staff start turning everyone else away, so our timing was perfect.

We started with frozen mojitos, and had a nice lunch of ropa vieja made with lamb, roasted pork, and plenty of rice and beans on the side. The ropa vieja was a revelation – I didn’t expect such a dramatically tasty dish at the first lunch place we visited. The food on this trip was uniformly good and although the menus tended to be similar and based around the same set of dishes, the local chefs seemed to be open to creativity and some flourishes of flavor. Ropa vieja is usually made of beef, and later we tried the beef version, but the lamb version on that first day really turned us on.

For the next few days we took things slow, walking around town, eating great food and drinking a lot of rum drinks (Ron Collins, mojitos, Cuba Libres, daiquiris – I was loving all variations). Some areas had more restaurants and the less popular restaurants hired guys to try to steer you to their place promising free WiFi and food made by their own mother. We soon learned that the best thing to do was to rub your stomach and say that you “just ate” and they would respond with “maybe later” and let you go.

Our hotel turned out to be a nice enough room. The one feature that got our attention was that there was a toilet in the shower. Or maybe there was a shower in the toilet room. Either way, we had to take off my clothes to use the toilet as the shower room was wet (especially after our morning showers) and it made for some interesting situations. The breakfast at the hotel was nice too – a grilled ham and cheese sandwich made by one of the ladies, plenty of cafe con leche and fresh fruits, along with a choice of juices (beetroot, pineapple or papaya). The juices were a little unusual and it was fun to try them but I don’t think I’ll be a beetroot juice fan for life.

One night while I was fast asleep Kuniko said that she could clearly hear the sound of loud lovemaking from another room in the hotel. I guess the walls were not that thin, but the staff recognized the problem quickly and solved it by walking through the hotel singing a song loudly. The amorous couple got the message and quieted down, and as usual I slept through all the late night hotel excitement.

On our second day in Havana we arranged through the hotel for a taxi ride to Fusterlandia, which is an artist compound 30 minutes’ drive west of Old Havana along the coastline. Our taxi driver was a cheerful friendly sort who put up with my rusty Spanish and was flexible about our plans. The drive to get to the compound was memorable because it was our first time really outside of Old Havana and we could see some other parts of the city. There were some slightly more modern buildings, but most were old, and some seemed to be either under construction or under de-construction – we weren’t sure which. We drove along the oceanfront on a major road that had two lanes going each direction, with a wide promenade for pedestrians and trees in the center. Along the roadside we spotted embassies of countries that have formal relationships with Cuba and these buildings were slightly better maintained and had heavier security.

We knew we had arrived at Fusterlandia because the buildings in the neighborhood had been almost entirely covered with colorful broken tiles. The tiles formed artwork that evoked the work of Gaudi in Spain, and apparently his work was what had inspired Mr. Fuster, the founder of the area. His own tilework at his house had spread to the surrounding houses, then the whole neighborhood, and now there was a steady stream of tourists coming out to see it. My brother had recommended this visit, and we were really glad that we followed his advice to see it.

Although a whole neighborhood is decorated, it didn’t take too long to see everything we wanted to see. The tiles are the main attraction but other artists had set up shop, and we briefly looked through their work. We bought a souvenir tile for Mark and Susan from the Fuster house, and then wrapped up our visit. It was a unique destination and a good change of pace for us.

We asked our driver (who looked just like our buddy Mark from Switzerland) to drop us off at the Capitolio – the Capitol building of Havana. It was under renovation at the time but was still striking and beautiful – a dead ringer for the US Capitol building.

The rest of our stay was about knocking out small things we wanted to do. We sipped rum at the Havana Club rum museum (their premium bottle of “Maestro” was really good), we shopped through artist markets looking for souvenirs for the family, and we tried to eat as many different kinds of foods as possible. Just sitting and watching the traffic pass by was interesting – there was quite a blend of modern cars, classic cars, little football helmet cars that served as tuk-tuk taxis, and even horse drawn wagons.

At one point we stumbled on a “mercado” – the closest thing to a supermarket that we could find during our stay. Here they mainly served the locals, and the selection of foods available was pretty sparse. I could really feel the difference here between living in a developed country and living in one that is more isolated. It seemed like there weren’t many local products – candies and chocolates came from various South American countries, and the market dealt in a different currency for the locals (CUPs) which was much weaker than the CUCs that we were carrying. Through all of this the locals we met continued to be friendly and helpful, and their attitude about visitors really left a positive impression on us.

On our last day in Havana we had time to get lunch, and ended up back at the great restaurant that we started our trip with – Dona Eutimina. We got the last available table (once again), and this time sat outside and watched people coming up and getting turned down. The surrounding restaurant’s had touts who happily led customers to the booked up Dona Eutimina, and then waited patiently until they were given the bad news before leading them to their own restaurants. It was a busy afternoon and it took a long time to get our food, but a few rum drinks helped out a lot. The food the second time around was also great, and this time we had some fried dishes along with a spicy chickpea dish that was really good.

We had just a little Cuban cash left in our wallet and thought it might be fun to pay a guy to drive us around in a classic car for a little while. Our flight was coming up in the early evening and we didn’t really want to spend a whole hour on a tour, which is the usual rental arrangement for the classic car drivers. We found a car that we liked, and a guy nearby helped explain the requirements to us, even though it wasn’t his car. “My car is the pink convertible over there” he kept repeating, every time we asked him about some more details of the rental. We weren’t interested in the pink convertible, but he was nice enough to keep talking with us. In the end it seemed that nobody wanted to be bothered by driving us around for a short ride, so we left on good terms with the drivers and killed time walking around on our own.

Back at the hotel we walked up to the door to get our suitcase, check out and leave but strangely the door was locked. We rang the bell and then the door opened, and the three hotel staff ladies looked at us guiltily – I guess we had caught them all taking a chatting break. We checked out and arranged a taxi ride to the airport, and after just a few minutes the taxi driver showed up and led us outside.

Wow – he was driving a classic car! The car was very similar to the car we had been trying to negotiate a ride in, and so it was like fate was on our side that day. The driver was very cheerful and didn’t mind us taking pictures of his ride before we left. We got in and the driver started backing down the one-way street to get out of the neighborhood. While backing up he suddenly did a double take and saw a street vendor just outside the car window selling sunglasses, so he apologized to us as he bought a new pair of shades from his driver’s seat.  

It was a short ride to the airport and we had our driver take one last picture before we left. He was a really cool guy about it. From there it was pretty easy to check in to our flight and go through immigration and security. Our flight ended up being delayed about a half hour or so, but in the end it showed up and we could be back on our way to the USA.

The flight was quite short but we did get a look out the window and saw Key West as we flew west of it – it was a very bright area in an otherwise black night flight. Soon we landed at Tampa airport, and then deplaned and went to go through immigration and re-enter the United States.

We approached the immigration area and I was a little nervous. Everything I had read on the internet said that nobody really cared why we had gone to Cuba, and nobody had ever been interviewed in detail about their visit. We had prepared our itinerary and had a small clump of receipts that would show our activities in Havana, so I felt as prepared as we could be. We managed to get into the same immigration line and approached the officer together, just in case.  The officer was pretty laid back, and asked us what the purpose of our visit was to Cuba. “Support for the Cuban people”, I stated clearly, and he responded with, “What does that mean, really?” I wasn’t expecting a philosophical discussion at this point so I was struggling for what to say. I think what came out was something like, “Well we want to help, uh, Cubans, uh, human helping, uh…” Kuniko looked at me and was probably wondering if I was truly a native English speaker or not.

The immigration guy took it in stride and marked a little note on his sheet. “Now that we’ve got that formality out of the way, why did you really go to Cuba?” He said it with a tilt of the head and a chummy smile like we were old friends. Luckily I sensed the trap and told him that yes, we did in fact go to support the Cuban people. He kind of gave up and finished processing our passports, and we chatted about traveling in general. He apparently travels quite a bit and so we had something in common. It was with slightly shaking hands that we proceeded to pick up our suitcase and come back to America safely.

With the somewhat exciting re-entry into America the trip turned out to a memorable experience. Once again we found that when we actually visited a country that we had previously thought of as “risky” it was quite different from what we had expected. The trip served as an enjoyable view into a completely different culture, and in the end that is all that we are really hoping for when we travel.

It has been a couple of months since my last blog post. Generally things have been moving along smoothly, but as usual the number of events tends to pick up at the end of the year.

On Monday night we had a chance to meet up with Jason Brenner and his wife Sandra in Osaka. It has been years (20? 30?) since I’ve seen Jason, and thanks to Facebook we were able to reconnect and meet up on the other side of the world in Japan. Jason and his wife were traveling a bit through Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka and we caught them on their last night in town before flying back to California.

It was a little surreal to sit across from them and catch up on all the old stories and memories from growing up together in Glen Ellen and Sonoma. Then we caught each other up on what we’ve been doing since high school graduation, and there were some interesting similarities. Like me, Jason had studied winemaking (me at Fresno, him at UC Davis), like him I had worked for a stint in Silicon Valley in the tech business, and it turned out that we both shared an intense love for the Japanese 7-11 convenience store egg salad sandwiches. Unreal!

We talked over a dinner of okonomiyaki, beef skewers and grilled edamame, and then we headed to Grand Front to have some drinks at a bar. We had a great time with them, and I certainly hope they’ll be back in the future, maybe next time with their entire family.

Talking to old friends seemed to initiate for me a sort of mental time machine, and the past few days I’ve been remembering various stages of my life and realizing how I’ve been so lucky with each one. It also makes me wonder what I’ll think of my current life stage once I get older. Will I think about it as a sort of settling down? The calm before the storm? I’ll just have to wait and see.

We are nearing the end of November, and that means that the weather is cooling down, the electric blankets come out, the year end parties get started, the Christmas tree should go up, packing for our trip to America in a few weeks, last minute Christmas shopping, and of course, we need to celebrate our 13th wedding anniversary.

This year we’re celebrating on Thursday the 22nd of November because the next day is a national holiday and we can go out after work and enjoy some good food and wine and not worry too much about the repercussions. We’ll try a new place this year, and we continue our quest for.the “best restaurant in Kobe”.

With all the excitement next month it may be tough to write updates, but I’ll try to be better about that so someday I’ll be able to look back at these posts and not have to wonder what the hell I did in big two month gaps…

Recently I wrote down a list of all the places I’ve lived. It worked out to about 15 different homes – sometimes with family, sometimes on my own, but the number was larger than I had expected. Once I moved to Japan, the rate of increase slowed down considerably, and for the most part our life has been pretty settled for the past ten years or so.

I think that all that change in my background created a streak of flexibility in my character, and that paid off especially when I taught English here in Japan through an agency. I would show up at some factory, be directed to some stale smelling meeting room, and then be expected to teach a small group of exhausted staff a couple of evenings a month.

But having worked at Kawasaki for the past six or seven years I’ve been lucky to be set up in my own classroom. On the fourth floor of a reasonably modern office building, I could enjoy the comforts of air conditioning during the summers, plenty of mobile office furniture to push around into whatever arrangement fit the day’s teaching situation, and as a side benefit get a great deal of privacy as the classroom also served as my office.

So recently I was informed that due to some departmental shifts at our company I’d need to relocate, and it was an odd sort of feeling inside that seemed to say, “Well, that hasn’t happened in a long time…”

Yesterday I watched a small crew of very strong men come in and move everything down one floor to another classroom/office, and I’ve spent most of today unpacking and settling in.

I like the new space. The room is roughly the same size as my old classroom, however the separate room that I used to have dedicated to group lessons will now be scheduled and shared with other staff on this floor, so it is not entirely under my control. One very nice point was that during the move I could choose the furniture and equipment that I wanted to take, and simply point at old junky furniture that I had been stuck with years ago and have that delivered to someone else who will be stuck with it.

My new floor is completely different in that there is a huge office that takes up the center of the building, serving as a separation between me and all the usual amenities like the toilet, office kitchen, a clean water source, and the rest. On my previous floor I only had to walk down a hallway with all the workers behind closed doors to get whatever I needed, but now my stroll to the john can be observed by more than a hundred people. It is an odd feeling now – but I’m sure it will feel less odd in the future.

From next week I’ll start with new students, new classes, and in a new space. I’m looking forward to the change, and that it will also serve to shake up my lesson plans and teaching ideas as well.

Last week we had a pretty strong typhoon come through our area in the middle of the night. We knew it was coming, and my company was nice enough to let everyone go home early before the trains shut down so we could prepare the house.

It was a sleepless night as the winds banged away at our windows and sometimes you could feel the entire house shake from the gusts. In the end the typhoon passed, and we could get a couple hours of sleep before going to work. There was some minor damage around the neighborhood, but we counted ourselves lucky.

Yesterday, another typhoon came through. This is number 21 for the season, and it was forecast to pass through our area in the middle of the day. Once again, both my company and Kuniko’s company gave us time off to avoid a stressful and possibly dangerous commute. We both had the whole day off.

The night before I did some shopping to make sure we had enough food and alcohol to get us through – and as it turned out the typhoon wasn’t quite as strong as the previous one. There were occasional gusts of wind and some diagonal rain, but to be honest it was a bit anti-climatic.

But as we learned from the earthquakes in Japan, just because it wasn’t a big one for you doesn’t mean it wasn’t bigger somewhere else.

We were shocked to see some of the news afterwards, with images of a runaway tanker that slammed into the road and rail links to Kansai International Airport. The airport was also flooded and experienced some loss of power, stranding some poor people there while flights were grounded. It seems like it will be out of action at least a couple of days. The typhoon caused problems in other parts of western Japan, and we were really lucky to have missed the brunt of it.

I’m back at work this morning, and the train system is starting to recover. I think it will be a stressful commute for a lot of people today, and things won’t be back to normal for a little while yet.

We dodged a bullet this time, but September is usually typhoon season in Japan, and there are sure to be more coming later this month.

A few years back we took our first trip to Eastern Europe, and it was one of my favorite trips. We started in Croatia, traveled on to Slovenia, Hungary, Austria, and ended the journey in the Czech Republic after two weeks of fairly ambitious travel.  I remember when planning out that trip that I would have loved to stretch out the end point and finish in Warsaw, Poland, because I have always wanted to visit there. Unfortunately there just wasn’t enough time.

That near miss, with Kuniko’s interest in visiting the Baltic States, and the availability of a direct flight to Helsinki, Finland, combined to end up being the trip we took this summer. It started in Helsinki, and then we traveled by ferry across the gulf of Finland to Tallinn in Estonia, from there by bus to Riga, Latvia, by plane to Vilnius, Lithuania, by plane again to Minsk, Belarus, and then another hop in a plane to Warsaw, Poland. Minsk ended up in there because of a unique visa situation, so we found ourselves visiting six countries in two weeks. But unlike previous trips, the amount of sightseeing was less – these are for the most part small cities in small countries, not really on the main tourist track. This could be a good thing or bad thing depending what your expectations are for the trip, but we were looking to relax more this time and I think we met that goal nicely.

It was a great trip, and I’ll describe what we did in the following blog posts as a kind of memory aid for me – I often like to look back at the trips and using a combination of photos and this journal, things come back remarkably clearly. Enjoy the journal!

Pictures from our trip:

Helsinki, Finland

Tallinn, Estonia

Riga, Latvia

Vilnius, Lithuania

Minsk, Belarus

Warsaw, Poland

It is days like this that being able to get up early really pays off. Alarm at 4:30 am, get dressed, check out of the hotel and then on to the train station. The first train to the airport was at 6 am so we had time to relax a bit and drink some coffee at a station café. The train station was a little confusing – our train was coming in on track four but they also number the platforms – platform four has no relationship to track four. Eventually we figured it out, and it was an easy train ride. The first time of the whole trip a conductor came by and checked our tickets. We showed him the ticket but he said that we had to have it stamped by a machine – so Kuniko went with him and had it stamped. He seemed frustrated that we didn’t know about it, but if you want to check tickets why not put in ticket gates? It is weird that in Europe sometimes they check tickets and sometimes they don’t.

We arrived at Warsaw Chopin airport with some leeway, and checked in at the counter. Our tickets were on AirBaltic from Warsaw to Riga, then with only 55 minutes between flights we’d fly on AirBaltic again to Helsinki. I was a little worried about that 55 minutes – if our flight was delayed at all we might miss that flight which would mean a missed flight from Helsinki to Japan. The staff at the check-in counter just smiled and said that she was sure we’d make the flight.

With lots of time we decided to get a proper breakfast, and we ate at a French restaurant in the airport called “Paul”. It is really more of a bakery, but they served omelets and quiche as well as champagne so we were happy to eat there regardless of the early hours. That was how we spent the time waiting for our flight – enjoying quiche and champagne as the sun rose through the windows of the airport.

The flight on AirBaltic left on time, so we arrived with plenty of time in Riga airport, which we knew quite well having been through it on our way to Vilnius. Then it was another short hop to Helsinki – each flight was around 40 minutes so there wasn’t much time in the air. No problem on connections, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

The last time we were in Helsinki airport two weeks ago it was quiet – almost dead. It couldn’t have been any more different this time. We checked in to our flight (self-check in and even the luggage check-in was automated) and there were a lot of people in the airport waiting in line. Security took a long time, and the hallways of the airport were full of people, especially Asian people.

We escaped from the crowds at an airport bar and had lunch – a pulled pork burger, a crayfish open-faced sandwich, and several local beers made the waiting go by easier. Then we got in line for the automated passport check. The line was out of control – stretching down the hallway and causing stress and confusion for the passengers (especially the ones who had flights leaving soon). Our flight was still three hours away and we had several beers in us so it was not stressful for us at all.

Eventually we made it through immigration, and then we were on to the gate. At self check-in we discovered that our seats were not together (since I didn’t bother to choose our seats 36 hours before the flight) and so we tried to get them closer together. A nice gentleman at the gate made some changes and we got closer, but still not next to each other. Lesson learned – I need to be more organized next time to reserve the seat locations. But this unfortunate situation improved a little when I saw my seat – it had no seat in front of it, so I could stretch my legs out and recline for most of the 9-hour trip back to Osaka.

So the flight was smooth on the way home, and we did the usual bus ride back to Sannomiya, and a taxi ride back from Nishi Akashi station to our home. The place looked good and the weather was actually pretty cool for Japanese summer – so it wasn’t so tough coming back.

Once again, we thought it turned out to be a great trip. It was a lot more relaxing, plenty of great food, and we could see six countries that we hadn’t seen before. We always have fun in Europe and this time was no exception. There were a lot of great memories, and I ended up taking around 1,700 pictures so we’ll have a pretty extensive visual record of the trip. Now to think about where to go next!

We got up at our regular time and went back to Nero Green Café a few blocks from our hotel. The previous day we had seen a beautifully made quiche in the food case and so we wanted to go back and get some. Once it arrived we realized that we had in fact bought lasagna. It was delicious, but not the breakfast egg that I was hoping for.

Since today was not a holiday, we easily found an open supermarket to do some shopping. After getting some goodies we lined up at the register, and the poor cashier tried to explain the price to me in broken English. I always anticipate these awkward situations by giving them big bills and avoiding counting our change, but cashiers in Europe like to press you for smaller bills or coins, which leads to another level of interaction in the local language that makes things even more difficult. Today’s cashier just kept repeating the same thing, “Two zlotsky, two zlotsky, two zlotsky”. It took me way too long to remember that zlotsky is the name of the Polish currency. At least she didn’t roll her eyes so much.

While shopping in various markets I came to realize that during this trip most of the beer we had seen in stores came in 500 mL glass bottles. It seemed to be the standard size, and we rarely saw cans of beer anywhere (except Helsinki). There are a lot of advantages of standardizing beer size for retail, and the lineup for local craft beers was quite impressive.

Near our hotel we saw some window washers cleaning the windows of 40-floor skyscrapers, hanging only from a rope. I imagined that it would be safer to use a platform or something, but these guys were just rappelling down the side of the building. I guess if you do it every week the scary part of it goes away.

In the center of Warsaw is the Palace of Culture and Science. It is the tallest building in Poland, and makes for a striking skyline with an art deco style. It contains museums, movie theaters, and an observation platform on the 30th floor for visitors. We lined up for the elevators just in time to be one of the first groups to go to the top. There were two elevators, each with an old lady sitting in the corner pushing the buttons – going up and down all day long. The view from the platform was pretty dramatic – it was fun to pick out all the sights that we had seen yesterday.

We made our way back to Old Town to have a drink in the market square. We chose a restaurant at random and found a table adequately shaded by umbrellas, and ordered two proseccos to sip while we people watched. However, it was less people watching and more bird watching. There were a tremendous amount of sparrows and pigeons, and the sparrows in particular were able to fly underneath and around the umbrellas and try to get bits of food from restaurant customers. One old guy a few tables down from us had ordered bread and was tearing it apart and throwing it towards the birds, who were standing on his table enjoying the feast. Restaurant staff had the unfortunate job of walking around the area scrubbing bird poop off the tables, chairs and light fixtures. Our attractive young blonde waitress was really nice to us, however, and she gave us two free shots of cherry liqueur on the house, and wrote a big “Thank You!” on the bill, so I think she was hoping for a big tip from the foreigners.

The previous day we had seen that St. Anne’s Cathedral was sponsoring concerts of Chopin’s music on the church organ and Kuniko wanted to go check it out. Unfortunately when we arrived there was a guy dressed in a historical outfit with a big white wig on his head selling tickets to enter. We had thought that since it was a church it would be free, but not in this touristy part of town. Being uncertain of the duration of the concert (and worried about the cheesy costume of the tout in front of the church) we decided that we could probably skip it and go get some bubbles instead.

And so the next stop was at “Bubbles”, a wine bar dedicated to sparkling wine of all kinds. I had researched the restaurant a long time ago in anticipation that we’d be sick of beer by the end of the two weeks. The atmosphere was a bit pretentious, the staff was entirely without a sense of humor, and the wine and food were really good. We did some comparisons between champagne, prosecco and cava, and for food we had a plate of cured beef on a bed of truffle cream, a salad of avocado and goat cheese, and a cheese plate with some really tasty Polish cheeses. It seemed like the staff expected us to order a salad, two main courses, maybe a dessert, but we instead ordered small plates and shared everything which is more our style.

On the way back towards our hotel we stopped in at a café that served a chocolate cake that Kuniko wanted to try. The cake is called “wuztka” – a layered chocolate cake that went well with a tall glass of milk that I ordered. The café was nicely decorated and had some interesting old pictures, including one of Warren Beatty for some reason. They were also running their air conditioning, and it was nice to cool down after walking. The temperature had slowly inched higher as we traveled south during this trip – Warsaw was as far south as we were going to go this time.

After a short break at our hotel we went out for our last dinner in Warsaw. Our theme the last couple of days has been dumplings, so we went to a place that specialized in pierogis (Polish dumplings). The restaurant was a chain called “Zapiecek”. We found a (slight cramped) table outside on a very busy street. The curtains of the restaurant featured dumplings embroidered into them, so we knew it was the right place. We ordered a combination plate of many kinds of dumplings – it was fun to taste each one and try to identify the filling. There was cheese, mushroom, lentil, cheesy bacon, pork and chicken, and some others we couldn’t identify. We also had a really delicious pan of meaty sauerkraut that went well with all the beer we were drinking. It was a great restaurant to finish the trip with.

Our last stop of the night was a final visit to the big Carrefour Market near our hotel. We weren’t the only ones doing last minute shopping – I had the distinct feeling that everyone was getting ready to go home soon. After a short time shopping we went back to the hotel to repack our suitcase and get everything ready for the long trip home tomorrow.

On Wednesday morning, as we were getting ready to leave the hotel room and do some sightseeing, we noticed on Google that today was a national holiday in Poland. It was called Assumption Day, but it also had something to do with the Armed Forces, as later we saw quite a few soldiers marching around town.

Our destination for the morning was into the Old Town area of Warsaw. Although we had seen plenty of Old Towns in previous countries, we had heard that the historic Old Town of Warsaw was worth a closer look. There were plenty of churches and cathedrals in the area – the Holy Cross Church (home of Chopin’s heart), St. Anne’s Church (sponsoring Chopin concerts daily at noon), and St. John’s with beautiful vaulted ceilings and stained glass. In addition to the churches, just regular buildings in the area were also colorfully decorated and eye-catching. We walked from block to block with me snapping pictures like crazy.

The market square is at the center of the Old Town, and it looked much like the ones we had seen before, although a little more compact and with a lot more pigeons and birds. This early all the restaurants were closed, but I made a mental note to come back later at least to have a drink and see it when it is more lively. Quite close to the market square is the Barbican, the red stone outer walls that still stand on the border of Old Town.

As we left the Old Town we passed a church with lots of security and reporters outside, and it turned out that the Polish president was inside for a service on the holiday. Just around the corner were squads of troops marching with flags, and police and plainclothes security were watching each corner. I put the camera away, just in case.

By this time shops were starting to open, and we stopped in at the “Nero Green Café”, one of a chain of fast food cafes around town. This one was right outside an office building next to a TGIFridays, but the key point for us was that they had an outdoor patio with umbrellas to block the sun, so we sat outside with our coffees and relaxed for a while. There was just one other couple sitting outside, speaking English to each other, but when Kuniko and I spoke English they both looked over at us and became a lot more quiet. Mysterious…

After a pit stop back at our hotel we made our way across town to Lazienki Park, a huge park filled with walking paths, streams and a big lake with a palace sitting on it. Lazienki Palace was a beautiful spot, and we arrived before most of the tourists arrived so it wasn’t so crowded. The palace architecture was similar to Versailles and Schonbrunn – but much smaller in scale. The location on the lake in the center of a huge park made it that much more attractive, and they had tourist boats floating along in slow circles around the small lake.

Once we had our fill of relaxing in the park, it was time to eat. I had heard of an interesting Food Hall nearby, so we visited Hala Koszyki for lunch. The interior was urban modern, clean and stylish, with a centrally located bar that looked like it would be fun to visit in the evening. The hall was just opening as we arrived, but the place was full of restaurants of all types. We found a place that looked good that advertised itself as a Polish Grill, so we ate there. Kuniko ordered some Polish sausage, I had a big pastrami sandwich, and we also shared some dumplings topped with caramelized onions that hit the spot. Can’t get enough of those dumplings! The restaurant also featured many local beers in the bottle, and I asked the staff to recommend two beers for us to try – they were both good but Kuniko’s milky IPA was really delicious.

After lunch we spent some time trying to find some major supermarkets to do some souvenir shopping, but everything was closed for the holiday. We ended up postponing our shopping until the next day. After some downtime at our hotel we were back out on the streets walking and looking for a wine bar. We’d had a lot of beer on this trip and we were craving wine – luckily there are a lot of wine bars in a big city like Warsaw. I chose one on the internet that looked good and we made our way to “Bar Superiore”, not far from the food hall where we ate lunch. We sat outside on the street, and had a couple glasses of prosecco to begin. Later I had a glass of Polish red wine – it was a bit expensive compared to the imported wines on their list, but I really wanted to try wine from Poland. It turned out to be quite good – they served it from a Coravin.

We ordered a mixture of five different tapas. The slightly nervous young waitress explained that we could choose any five we liked from the list, and so we picked some out that sounded good. We chose one that we had no idea about, listed in the menu as “Tunisian Brik”. It turned out to be a big fried wonton wrapped with spinach and little cheese inside.

The service at this restaurant wasn’t very professional, however, and we decided to leave after the tapas and try to find some wine somewhere else. The bill was also a little more expensive than we expected, and either they made a mistake adding up our bill or the Polish wine I ordered was a lot more expensive than the menu said. This restaurant turned out to be the only less-than great experience during the entire two-week trip.

Since we were craving wine and our hotel just happened to have a wine bar on the ground floor we decided to give it a shot. The place was called “Winestone”, and they even had outdoor dining which is a bonus on warm summer evenings. We sat outside and ordered a couple of glasses of wine and a plate of Polish cheeses. The highlight of the cheese plate was a semi-hard goat cheese – I wanted to go find it in a supermarket somewhere and sneak it home. There was also a jam on the plate that was orange and more salty than sweet – interesting!

Before returning to our hotel room, we did a little shopping at the local Carrefour Express, and there was a little drama as we walked in. One female customer was busy insulting a male customer, and in English she told him to “take your shit and get the fuck out of here”. He apparently did, because after that all was calm in Carrefour.

There were a lot of steps today – 32,000 – this is a very big city. We went to bed with plans to do our souvenir shopping and to celebrate the end of the trip with some bubbles tomorrow.

We managed to sleep in until almost eight in the morning, and took the morning nice and slow so we were ready to check-out of the hotel around 9:30. From there we walked down to the bus station with our suitcase rolling along faithfully behind us. Crossing the street meant going up and down steps, but we found at least one elevator to make things easier. The (very) public elevator was dark, smelly, and creaked as it traveled up and down – I’d hate to get stuck in there.

The previous day we had walked through the bus station and did a practice run to see how it would work to catch a bus to the airport. As it turned out, the actual process was quite easy. We had to gesture and mime our way through a conversation with the ticket office staff, but at the end of it we had two tickets and we knew where the bus was going to pull up. Once the little bus arrived, I threw our suitcase into the back and walked around to start to board. As I was walking a woman asked me a question in what I think was Russian. I just shrugged and smiled, and then another guy asked me another question in another language and I realized that they thought I was the driver. Sorry guys…

We sat a while and waited as more passengers boarded the tiny bus. A Japanese guy got on and asked me in English if it was the bus to the airport. I said it was, although I will admit that I wasn’t absolutely, positively certain of the fact. If we showed up somewhere else now it was on me.

Soon enough the bus driver came by and we started out of town. The bus drove past the Belarusian National Library and the Japanese guy tried to line up a picture from the window of the bus, but when he snapped his picture a tree had blocked the building view. Luckily he was quick enough to take another snapshot. The bus was playing radio tunes, and we heard an interesting Belarusian tune that sounded a lot like Y.M.C.A. except it was a female singer, the chorus was D.I.S.C.O., and they also mixed in a lot of heavy metal guitars. Awesome!

As we approached within a mile or two of the airport I noticed that there were a lot of private cars pulled over on the expressway, with the drivers just waiting around. It was as if they all broke down at the same time and pulled over. After thinking about it, I guessed that it was maybe the local version of Uber, and they were waiting for a summons from their smartphone to pick up people at the airport.

Once the bus dropped us off, we still had some time to kill so we went inside to a restaurant and ate more dumplings and potato pancakes, along with two beers each to celebrate the end of our stay in Belarus. Everything was going smoothly until we reached the front of the LOT Polish Airlines check-in line. The lady checked us in but said that we had to pay an extra fee for our suitcase. I had been warned when buying our plane tickets that some airlines may charge a fee, so it was not totally unexpected, but it was a wake-up call and I was glad we still had plenty of time. The lady said that we should walk down the hall to a special window, pay by credit card, and then bring the receipt back, and to go ahead and skip the long check-in line. No problem!

We found the window at the end of the hall easily enough, and there were two people in front of us already so we had to wait a bit. Lining up behind us there was a British couple that I recognized from the same line we just came from. Evidently they had the same problem we did, but they were far more stressed about it. They loudly talked over the chances of missing the flight or losing their luggage and they kept inching closer and closer into us as we stood in front of – as if that would speed up the process. I smiled at the wife and told her to take a deep breath and relax – I wanted to share a little of our travel zen feeling with her, and to a certain extent it helped. But I think they were just the kind of people that stress easily.

Anyway, we got the bag paid for and we then went through security and immigration. The immigration check on exit was pretty strict, actually – it felt more strict than when we entered. Eventually everything was worked out and we could head to the gate. The design of the airport was interesting – to get to your boarding gate you had to walk through so many duty-free shops. Not walk by the shops – you walked through the shops because there was no other way to go. It was kind of like IKEA – they want you to see everything and they leave you little choice in the matter.

Near the gate we bought some ice cream and water while we waited a bit longer, and then we were boarding the LOT Airlines flight to Warsaw. It was an easy flight, a little under an hour, but one of the flight attendants seemed a little stressed. During the drink service they offered only two choices to speed things up – Pepsi or water. The stressed flight attendant asked the lady in front of us, “Pepsi or water?” and the lady started to ask about what kinds of juice they have, and the harried attendant cut her off with a sharp, “Pepsi or water?” The lady still didn’t get it and tried to order orange juice and this time the flight attendant said it again, with a look that could have cut paper – and the words “Pepsi or water?” actually sounded more like “Are you an idiot lady?” The slightly oblivious lady finally got the hint and chose Pepsi, the attendant moved on, but it was an odd customer service moment that I won’t forget.

Landing in Warsaw meant a return to the EU zone, and immigration was really simple. We caught a train for a 20-minute ride from the airport to the center of Warsaw and emerged in the shadow of the Palace of Culture and Science – an enormous landmark building at the center of the city. Our hotel was not far from there, so we walked through a busy city square. There were so many people out and enjoying the day, especially young people. We walked past a 24-hour kebab shop, but mainly the square held art installations, trees, sidewalks and fountains.

It turned out that our hotel was just a few minutes’ walk from the Palace of Culture and Science, and we checked in to the Mercure Warsaw Centrum. I could see that Kuniko had chosen well – there was a wine bar/restaurant in the hotel called Winestone, and the room itself was clean, spacious and had a big comfortable bed. We’d be in Warsaw longer than any of the other cities, so it looked like a comfortable place to settle in. The hotel maintenance staff were repairing two of the three elevators (they kind of panicked when Kuniko peeked into one of the elevators under repair) but by the evening everything was back in order.

We took a stroll across town to visit my first choice restaurant for dinner, a place called Kameralna. It was in a really old building and everything felt historic inside. We sat outside, on a back patio, and it was easy to get a seat as we had arrived well before the usual dinner hour. The friendly, attractive blonde-haired waitress spoke great English, and we kicked off an eating marathon. It started off with pork and chicken dumplings served fried on a griddle, Kuniko had duck with apple (served with beet salad and gloriously roasted potatoes), and I ate some goulash with potato bread dumplings (with beet salad and pickled cabbage). We also had a couple of big beers – we drank one liter each, so we were stuffed by the end of it. The duck was especially good – it wasn’t just a little piece of duck but one half of a whole duck, with a crispy roasted outside and perfectly cooked inside. Yum!

Since we had eaten so much we did a little walking around the area, getting a feel for the neighborhood and seeing the shops and stores that were lining the streets. We saw a store called “T.K. Maxx” renamed from T.J. Maxx because of a copyright conflict in Europe. Most of what we saw we made little mental notes to get to it later. Warsaw is a major city and there were lots of things to see, and we had only visited one tiny corner of it.

Back towards our hotel we stopped in at a grocery store inside the train station and bought a few yogurt drinks to serve as our breakfast the next day, and then we went back to our hotel room and got ready to head to bed. We have two full days after this to enjoy this city – can’t wait!

Thanks to Google we were able to find a caf̩ that was open at 7:30 in the morning, so we walked a couple of blocks (10 minutes) and arrived just after they opened. The caf̩ was strategically placed right in front of a university, but apparently school was out because we were the only customers. The caf̩ had a nice interior Рkind of antique/historic, and a pretty young blonde-haired woman was doing homework when we came in and it turned out she worked there. We ordered our cappuccino and latte, and although the ordering was slightly more complex here we were able to successfully get our coffees and sit outside on a street patio. Some people walked by now and then and they looked surprised that people would sit outside and drink coffee in the morning.

We ordered another two coffees to go, and then went back to our room. Since Lithuania we had been carrying around a small Lithuanian “tree cake” that we had found in a supermarket, and so it was nice to open it up and make it our breakfast. I’m glad we had coffee with it – it was a little dry, but still quite delicious.

Our main mission of the day was the challenge the Minsk subway system, and to go see the architectural oddity that is the Belarusian National Library. It was more than six kilometers from our hotel and we didn’t want to spend the entire day walking, so it was off to the subway. The subway system was similar to the Cairo subway – you pay one price for a token and you use it once to go anywhere. There were no automated machines (that we could find) so we bought two tokens from a kind clerk who took my money and counted back the change to me carefully so I understood the price. The subway was really cheap, and it was fun to ride, too. There was no air conditioning – they just open the tops of the windows, so it was a little windy. People boarded the train just like they do in China, Cairo and India – not lining up but moving in a crowd towards the door. I’m always impressed how orderly they line up in Japan.

Kuniko did a great job leading us through the train system to the stop next to the library – she’s talented at navigating public transportation. When we emerged from the subway station the library wasn’t far off, and it was standing completely alone, a block or so away from some very modern apartment buildings. Also nearby was a big shopping mall, which we explored later on.

The library itself is shaped like a die from Dungeons and Dragons, and it very awkwardly Soviet in style. We took some pictures from various angles, and after a little bit of paperwork and a small payment we had the chance to walk through the bottom few floors, too. It was pretty empty of library patrons but there were plenty of librarians there working hard in a very quiet atmosphere.

The supermarket in the big shopping center nearby was huge. It reminded me of a Wal-Mart or Carrefour, with plenty to see. We spent a long time walking the aisles and wondering what everything was. The meats and wines were very reasonably priced, and the deli was full of dramatic, colorful and appetizing foods – if only we had the time (and stomach space) to try everything.

We took the subway part of the way back into town but got off and explored another area of town that we had missed before, including an obelisk square surrounded by giant metal wreaths (with another hidden wreath underground directly beneath – looking more like a monster donut), and also the Isle of Tears, which was a pretty dramatic (and depressing) monument to the Soviet soldiers from Belarus who died in Afghanistan. We also walked by an impressively Soviet KFC with a giant icon above the restaurant depicting the workers in solidarity in front of a hammer and sickle. Not the kind of artwork you usually see associated with Colonel Sanders.

We were back near our hotel and pretty tired from all the walking so we decided to go hit a sidewalk restaurant across the street called O.D.I. It was an Italian restaurant, and we were there mainly for the prosecco. The restaurant was quite stylish, but not so expensive. The staff were dressed nice enough that I was a little self-conscious about wearing our touring clothes. However, they were pretty laid back and it was fine.

Since we were sitting at one of their best tables and only ordering drinks we thought we ought to buy a little food to go with it, so we got some bruschetta with truffle sauce, and we split a beet salad with goat cheese. When the prosecco glasses came out we were a little taken aback – they were big glasses! The truffle sauce on the bruschetta made me very happy, and the salad was refreshing after all the heavy food we’ve been eating. We ordered another couple glasses of prosecco and the switch was officially on! The only down moment was when an old lady walked by the windows begging – it was the first time to see that during the whole trip. The maître d’ saw it immediately and ran over to send the lady off, but the old lady came back pleading and babbling something and headed right to Kuniko who was not so happy about being accosted in a strange country. The maître d’ did her best to chat us up and make sure we were OK after the old lady was thrown out, but it was an odd moment.

Back in our hotel we killed off some other leftovers that we had been carrying around – some salty braided cheese, and we worked on a bottle of raspberry juice. They make lots of unusual kinds of juice in Europe – I wonder when Japan will catch on.

After a short nap we made our way to our restaurant for the night – a touristy traditional place that was supposed to be famous for dumplings. We walked quite a ways to get there, and were more than a little shocked when we couldn’t find any dumplings on the menu. It turned out they only had some potato dumplings, so we ordered those with a small baked mushroom dish to go with our beers. The beers were big and they quenched our thirst after the long walk, but we were craving dumplings and we got shut out!

The place was called “Kamrhnya” but I don’t think I could recommend it. It was a bit too touristy, although the service was nice enough. We really liked one of the servers, a younger teenager who was tall, gawky and had a great sense of humor about the strange music they were playing. It sounded like Japanese rock and heavy metal, and she said it was “traditional Belarusian” while laughing.

Since we were craving “real” dumplings Kuniko found a place that was pretty popular and closer to our hotel called Vasilki. We stopped there on the way back and it was perfect. We slid into one of the last remaining sidewalk tables, and there were two entire pages of the menu dedicated to dumplings – yes! They even had Belarusian wine by the glass which I was eager to try. We ended up ordering two types of pork and chicken dumplings – one order cooked in broth and served with sour cream, and another boiled with a melted butter on top. The wine was decent but not amazing – we had a merlot and a chardonnay – and I was just surprised that they could make wine here.

It was a rare case for us to still be awake and active after dark, so we walked around town and took some pictures, sat on some benches to watch the people walking by until the streetlights came on, which turned out to be 9:15 pm. The temperatures were very comfortable here even at night, and the city felt very safe even after dark. We kept seeing young women walking the streets alone so it seemed like crime wasn’t a big problem.

Eventually we made our way back to our hotel and to bed. We planned on trying to sleep in as much as possible, since our flight to Warsaw, Poland wasn’t until the early afternoon.