I subscribe to an important international American newspaper. I have even written for them. However, in the past couple of weeks they have run some questionable articles on the triste affaire of not one single Canadian team being in the Stanley Cup playoffs this year.

We’re talking hockey here, of course, and it’s a scandal.

The seven Canada-based teams in the National Hockey League are (in alphabetical order): Toronto Maple Leafs, Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers, Montreal Canadiens, Ottawa Senators, Vancouver Canucks, and the Winnipeg Jets.

It’s not my fault that I’m a Maple Leafs fan. I came of hockey-awareness age in the 1960s in southern Ontario, and Hockey Night in Canada was a Saturday evening ritual of intense physical and emotional pleasure.

Those winter evenings are firmly and forever engraved in my mind. Our father, the village minister, having finished his sermon preparations customarily went over to Simpkins General Store and brought home a 6-bottle cardboard case of soda pop. One tiny little glass bottle each.

After Saturday supper, we then bathed, arranged our hair in rollers or pin curls, put on our flannel pyjamas, and opened the doors of the arborite-encased black and white TV.

We followed our favourite team with fervour. Our father’s repeated expression “The ref must be blind!” was incomprehensible, but we all shouted it with gusto whenever one of our team got sent to the penalty box.

We learned to spot an off-side; knew all about icing, tripping, boarding and checking; and suffered nail-biting agonies during a power-play by the enemy.

The players were mostly helmetless, and had no front teeth.  The goalies had faces full of scars. We loved them all.

The great challenge was to try to make your soda pop last through the whole game. Or at least the first period. This was almost impossible, and with the thick green glass clinking against our front teeth the lukewarm dredges at the bottom usually disappeared before the first goal.

During the school-week hockey was kept alive with hockey coins (in packages of chips) and hockey cards (in bubble gum envelopes). There was Red Kelly, a Toronto MP when not on the ice and, thus, forgiven for being a wimp and wearing a helmet; Tim Horton, of doughnut fame; and the goal-rich Frank Mahovlich.

Indoor recesses (when the weather was too cold and icy to go out) revolved around tossing hockey coins against the wall.  I once possessed a most coveted and the very rare goalie coin (Johnny Bower) and enjoyed great popularity with the boys for a brief period of time until the inevitable happened.

My inner hockey-player was conceived during those exciting times and was born when the Leafs won their third successive Stanley Cup in 1964.

And, so, important international American paper, just shove that mouth protector back in and go sit in the penalty box for a few months.

I’ve got much better things to do than read your snarky hockey articles or waste my time watching trivial games played by unimportant teams.  I’m going to Niagara Falls.

 

 

 

 

I’m thinking of getting a fish. Browsing through the complex set of rules that define life here at the International House in Tokyo, I see that the only pet that we are allowed to keep is one that does not soil the room or disturb neighbours. A fish in an aquarium is suggested. This plan also matches both the food and the weather.

However, underneath this heavy rule-filled binder I’ve come across a 50-page brochure entitled Disaster Survival Manual. It was printed in 2009, and is in pristine condition.

It is an entirely altruistic document with a foreword by the Mayor of Meguro and written in perfect English. Following an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor scare of 2008, its aim is to support the elderly, disabled, infants and foreign residents to evacuate. Like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, in case of catastrophe we will all be depending greatly on the kindness of strangers.

There are four Tokyo earthquakes that demand attention.

• The first is the Tokyo Inland Earthquake. This is called “unsettling” as no prediction is possible.
• The second is the Tokai trench-type earthquake and will only reach a magnitude of 5 in Tokyo, so is unimportant.
• The third is the Kanagawa Quake which is of great concern.
• And the fourth is the Kanto Earthquake which destroyed the city in 1923, so is presumably over and done with.

But I am now seriously worried, as I see that I am not prepared at all.

According to instructions, the bathtub should be filled with water at all times. A crowbar, shovel, saw and automobile jack should all be to hand. Food (alfa rice and sea biscuits) and bottled water for three days should be prepared. First aid kit, helmets, cotton work gloves, flashlights and candles should be at the ready. And a portable toilet and a stock of toilet paper, heating stove, portable gas stove are all essential.

On a more whimsical note a sewing kit, waterless shampoo and writing materials should also be in the backpack at the door and ready to go. Well, not exactly go. If there is a serious tremor, you should stay inside under a table with a cushion on your head. (Note: there are no cushions.)

To take away the shock factor of an earthquake arriving out of the blue, there exists a Mobile Earthquake Simulation Truck (called GRUUTT) which visits the locality.  This, I imagine, is similar to the simulator for space travel.  You enter perky, keen, and cracking jokes. You exit confused, nauseous, and possibly injured. There is also a local smoke simulation house which you can also visit. These two earthquake-related events should probably not be undertaken on the same day.

You must help everyone around you in case of disaster and also prepare your pet for possible catastrophe.

I’m off to the 100-Yen shop to see what I can pick up—perhaps a pencil, a candle, a toilet roll and a small package of sea biscuits. I’ve crossed the fish off the list.

 

 

Pets in Japan are taken very seriously indeed. Just this morning my neighbour across the road took her medium-sized dog for a walk. I only saw this after he had been arranged in an old-fashioned child’s perambulator and covered in blankets.

It only dawned on me that the contents of the buggy were canine when the occupant sat up and barked with wild abandon when two small dogs on different length and coloured leashes crossed its path. The pram-guy did not try to jump out and run an attack on the two nattily-clad poofters (which for me would have been an entirely natural reaction) but barked them out of his field of vision. His pram-pusher did not break her stride, spoke not a word, and quietly carried on.

Now I don’t know. Perhaps the chap in the pram was old and lame, was the quadriplegic victim of a train accident, or a retired Robo-Dog who had worn his paws off digging for people in natural disasters. But upon examining several similar conveyances I have reached he shocking conclusion that there are more dogs than babies in prams. (Human babies are carried in pouches on the fronts of their mothers.)

The pram-dogs are inevitably being pushed about by women of a certain age and have been seen visiting and rubbing noses with other dog-friends. It is not a cause of hilarity, mockery or distain. It is a cultural conundrum, perhaps a Tokyo suburban equivalent of swimming with the dolphins.

The wilder set of dogs that are not installed in prams spend a lot of time at the beauty parlour (the one in the neighbourhood is called Pet Paradise) and come out looking shockingly like brand-new stuffed toys. At their very finest (right after their shampoo and blow-dry session) and if the weather is propitious (neither rainy nor cold) they are allowed to walk proudly naked in all their furry glory.

On all those other days, they wear clothes – raincoats, felt jackets, colour-co-ordinated sweaters and scarves. As it’s cherry blossom season, there is a lot of pink about.

These small orderly pets pee in a very restrained dog-like manner on the ubiquitous electricity poles and their human-slave squirts the spot with a water sprayer. They poop politely on bits of earth between the sidewalk and a tree and one of their staff-members picks up the product in a little plastic bag and squirrels it out of sight.

I don’t know how this works with the pram-dogs, and am looking into the possibility of dog-diapers alongside the Poopy Pickers and the dried-fish Pet Kisses over at the Peacock Department Store.

There is a Glory Church on either side of a large and luxurious hotel on the island of Okinawa.   Both white and gleaming churches look like they are made of plastic and icing sugar and attract a continuous stream of well-heeled clientele for fake weddings.

Like the Ancient Mariner, I stood outside a church anxious to catch a wedding guest with my glittering eye to tell him about my latest very bad trip, the albatross around my neck, and my new appreciation for slimy things from the sea, but there was nothing doing. I think the fake bride and groom and all their family and friends get into the church via a tunnel from the hotel and crawl up through a trap door.

This is Japanese discretion at its very best. Wedding dinners also take place in private rooms and the regular hotel guests were not at all disturbed by raucous speeches and bridal youth and beauty.

Now I have nothing against wedding celebrations. I recall my own fondly—Toronto Town Hall, followed by some beers with Injun Joe at Grossman’s Tavern and then dinner at The Three Little Rooms. It was lovely. Four people were involved (not counting Joe) and the town hall man got my husband’s name wrong. After forty years, we still discuss this legal loop-hole with vigour from time to time.

But what I seriously object to are public weddings that suddenly spring up in the middle of a hotel beach and your favourite spot is cordoned off and a wedding platform erected. Tinkling bells. Flower chains. Soppy mindfulness vows. Lovely clothes (compared to your state of splotchy sunburn and irritating sand-rash and unflattering bathing costume and sunhat.) All of it as fake as fake can be.

Today I have just learned that you can have a tourist wedding at an old Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto—the 500-year-old Shunko-in. This strikes me as much more culturally deserving. The young deputy abbot-monk was born inside the temple complex but is American-educated (and married to an American). He is turning his temple into a business as the roof needs fixing. He gives meditation courses which focus on entrepreneurialism, breathing, and Zen updates.

You can order a friendship marriage, gay, lesbian, transgender marriage, and even a normal one. Most of them are fake, of course. You can even stay at the guesthouse, but have to head into the fleshpots of town for food and entertainment (much like in the temple heydays of old Kyoto.)

So, if you are in the market for a useful fake marriage, try Kyoto’s kirk upon the hill, Myoshin-ji Hanazono, and look out for a gentle-faced Buddha-clone called Takafumi Kawakami.

For a price, he can fix you up.

Before I begin, let me make it completely clear, that nothing on this earth can beat the finest and freshest of Japanese food. An artistic sushi with the rice just-so; rigorous rectangles of tuna sashimi on freshly grated radish; the most delicate of green teas. These things are gifts of the gods.

However, to alleviate boredom-due-to-deliciousness, the Japanese have invented some other foods that make one sit up and take notice.

Until he came across Shirako my husband had prided himself on eating anything that Japanese cuisine could throw at him – Hoya (sea pineapple), Namako (sea cucumber), Uni (roe or gonads from sea urchins) were all as nothing. He thrilled to Fugu, (potentially poisonous puffer fish), Sazae (horned turban sea snail) and Kegani (horsehair crab).

Out for a company dinner a few nights back, he met a dish which he thought could have been either intestines or brains. Nothing so pedestrian. It turns out to have been a popular snack or starter called Shirako which means “white children”. It is fish sperm in its original long and windy sack.

Well, I suppose one could combine a dollop of Shirako with a blob of Mentaiko (marinated cod roe), wait a while, and come up with Shirouo no oodorigui (small dancing fish) that one eats exactly as a whale would–alive.

So, before going out for a regional sake-tasting evening yesterday, I looked up some exotic tasty treats that I thought might make a surprise appearance amongst the sake glasses. On the way there I craftily asked husband’s Japanese colleague if HE ate them, and I am extremely pleased to report that there are some culinary challenges that even the most seasoned of all Japanese diners avoid.

Husband’s colleague is a sprightly older gentleman and no wimp. He quite loves sea cucumber and fermented shrimps; however, he draws the line at Skiokara (salted and fermented fish guts that is served as a heaving smelly orange slime). When questioned about Nankosu (breaded and deep-fried chicken bone cartilage) he said you needed very strong teeth. And he was very firm that Funasushi (made of carp fermented for up to 4 years) was a real stinker.

Well, it turns out I had nothing to fear but fear itself. The sake restaurant menu had pictures of the most pleasant of foods—vegetable tempura, minced chicken grilled on sticks, a slice of pork. For a walk on the wild side we also had a plate full of wieners. And we all know what healthy goodness is inside them.

My sister suggests I never leave the house without a boiled potato in my pocket. That way I can casually whip it out and put it on the plate with the Fugu ovaries pickled in rice bran paste or beside the Tobino (flying fish), spear it with my chopsticks, and ignore all the rest.

We are heading to the island of Okinawa imminently. There, we have been told, the gastronomic specialties include Rafute (pork belly), Mimiga (pig’s ear), Umibudo (seaweed in the shape of grapes) and Yagi Sashimi (raw goat meat).

I have a pan of potatoes on the stove.

I’ve just been to a Singapore dentist. I sure hope my Geneva dentist is not reading this as I’m hoping to surprise and impress him with my new improved tooth-brushing techniques.

Anyway, it wasn’t my fault that I ended up in a totally foreign dental chair; others are entirely to blame.

The first seed was germinated by a Malaysian friend of a friend who airily declared some years back that she always goes to Singapore to have her teeth seen to. I found this quite sophisticated—a bit like flying to New York for the weekend to go to the opera, getting over to the camel auction in Abu Dhabi, or attending the fall ice-cream weekend in Palermo.

Then there’s my husband who travels regularly and hasn’t seen a Geneva dentist for decades – Bangkok is his normal root-canal/scraping and polishing destination-of-choice; but when in Singapore…

Then there’s my “new” dentist himself, who, after my former (real) one retired, declared that all my nice shiny silver fillings needed to be changed into boring white ones.

What’s a girl to do?

Let me be perfectly clear about this. I hate dentists. I hate the smell, the gloves, the mirrors, the chair, the little metal picks, the drill, the needle, the blue mouth rinse, the blue flame, the bib, the essence of cloves, the x-rays, the spit extractor, the grand-father clock in the waiting room. All of it. No. That’s not true: there is the excellent bit of actually staggering out – light-headed, sore-mouthed, dry-lipped.

Dental tourism is big in Singapore. You get an appointment the same or the next day at clinics cheerfully called Toofdoctor, Glittzsmile, or Tooth Angels. After a morning’s visit to the Bird Park where we saw a mighty American eagle land on a skinny girl’s wrist and parrots fly through increasingly smaller hoops until they reached the grand finale of their show which involved counting to ten in Chinese and singing Happy Birthday in English, we made our way to the All Smiles Dental Clinic.

The tiny hole-in-the-wall clinic was in the midst of a densely Chinese section of town. Normal dentist smells were not an issue as the scents of the orient wafted in and out of the door. In our fish-bowl holding tank we were a bit of a local attraction and even an old grey-faced man in a wheel chair puffing on an oxygen bottle stopped to consider us. His look was possibly that of pity.

The dentist didn’t want to change my last two old mercury-fillings as he said they were way stronger than the fragile white ones (ephemeral and surely dissolved within three years) that he could easily replace them with. This is toothily confusing. The Geneva line is that the new-fangled resin fillings are greatly superior to their old grey grandparents.

Sigh. In my next life I would like to be a toucan, a horn-bill or even a vulture. And as I whistle and sing songs and rip dead hyenas apart I will revel in the complete happiness of having not one single solitary tooth in my bird-brained head to worry about.

In theory, the perpetual tourist business sounds great: out and about, on the move, seeing the world foot loose and fancy free.

In reality, I’m sure that it is a state perched precariously in one of Dante’s lower levels of the Inferno.

My sister has helpfully passed along her husband’s 3-P rule for travel: Passport, Pills, and Plastic (money). All the rest can be dismissed as “just fluff”. There is a certain truth in this, of course, until you find yourself, having forgotten your underwear and the one pair of black slacks that goes with everything else in your suitcase in a country full of skinny child-sized people.

Generalized anxiety is the default tourist state. Even waiting for a plane that has a 5-hour delay, you are worried that it will somehow sneakily materialize and silently leave without you. Suitcases and possessions take on lives of their own and mentally locating each item of your paraphernalia fills many hours. This results in the ultimate tourist worry-state which is that worry is actually curtailing the good time that you should be having.

Your self-respect also takes a constant beating. Dignity is impossible as you jump onto and crawl off of a bobbing outrigger in the local harbour (even other tourists, who seem to have transport that has taken them to sedate steps, regard your unlovely contortions with expressions of dismay and disgust); climb the concrete stairs through the crowd of garrulous young men in front of the empty ATM machine; or mistake the price for vanilla pods in the market by a factor of a thousand. You are a sitting tourist duck.

My theory is that most of the above is brought about by a state of acute sleep deprivation. Jet lag takes its toll, but your room (inevitably located in the vicinity of an elevator or a garbage chute) allows jolly laughter and animated conversation to leak under your door at 3 a.m. These other tourists (who are somehow managing to have a rollicking good time) rouse you out of your fitful sleep in your too hot/too cold room on your too hard/too soft bed and you go back to a few fruitless hours of trying to think where your finger-nail file (that you haven’t seen for the past two days) could possibly be.

Add to this the terror of having a taxi driver with the DT’s, a map in Chinese of possibly the wrong city, a mysterious rash on your stomach, curiously stained foot soles, and the threat of a black hairy crab dinner followed by a Chinese Chopstick Massage, then you have to pull yourself together to keep visions of death at bay.
So, you look up at the unusually blue sky and forget about your finger-nail file for a moment. You consider the nameless tropical trees and their flowering canopies and their parasite orchids and their miniscule birds. You plan a trip down the road to the 7/11 for a bucket of green tea ice cream.

And then you start worrying about where the folder could possibly be that contains details of your flight back home. You haven’t seen it for days.

I find myself on the Indonesian island of Flores. There is an airport here, but its only flights are to and from Bali and everything is at an ashy standstill due to the eruption of Mt Rinjani’s baby mountain in Lombok.

Here at the Blue Parrot in Labuan Bajo we are busy killing time and waiting. Well, the ones who are left are.

Brice (the Frenchman who runs the lounge bar and restaurant down the road) left yesterday on the 36-hour ferry to Denpasar. Angela (the lady who owns the B&B where we’re staying) has left the country for a couple of months to admire the autumn leaves in Canada. Thomas (the man-about-the-house to whom we are to pay our rent) has not been seen since we arrived. And Enid, the breakfast cook and bed-maker, spends her spare time in affectionate encounters with her boyfriend in the breakfast room. (She is also Suspect #1 in yesterday’s beer crisis.)

All the rest of us are struggling on, being greeted with endless “Selamat pagis” and wicked sunny smiles. We are also being constantly bombarded with offers of land or sea transport—any destination, any duration—to take our minds off the closed airport.

The health spa is also doing a roaring trade. I, foolishly, tried a foot reflexology session which revealed several sore points and activated the kidney foot button with predictable results. If things don’t smarten up, candle waxing is next on my list.

We have even been to visit the local field office of Swiss Connect (SECO) run through a partnership with the Swiss Foreign Affairs Department. A nice young Swiss-German woman there is in charge of trying to reduce the amount of plastic used on the island. In essence, this garbage-strewn town of stinking fires, rotting fish-guts, dead rats, shiny-black liquid grunge, and squished frogs is as organic as the Garden of Eden. The attempt to wipe out all vestiges of ugly modern times is a highly romantic and very clean Swiss mission.

Stop the presses! A rumour has it that a plane is landing. We’re almost saved, and our worries are over. We can finally relax and let life get back to normal.

I’m off! We perpetual tourists (PTs, as we like to call ourselves) sometimes even leave home. Mozart balls in my pocket (don’t ask) we’re going to Sicily, and I’m completely prepared.

I have read entire books on Palermo and Syracuse; I have toured the island with Laurence Durrell; I have taken short courses on Greek history with Edith Hall and Norman Douglas. I have made notes. I am classically red-hot.

I have learned about sieges and marshes and malaria. I have been captivated by invasions and conquests and tyrants. I know about boat battles in harbors and cavalry attacks and looting and pillage and ruin. I have learned of the double wall of Syracuse built by the attacking Athenians to keep the enemy in.

I know that Constans II was killed with a soap dish in his bathtub by Andrew in 668 and that Cicero means chickpea. I have read of Santa Lucia and Santa Rosa and their miracles and bones and catacombs and caves.

Solidus of the bearded Constans II
I have been told that Palermo is named after a purple dye made from mollusk shells, and that “harena” is the Latin word for sand as it was used to soak up the blood at the public Roman games. “Odeon,” more cheerfully, means song house.

I have found The Book of Roger (1154) with maps of the world-as-it-was-known-then with Sicily right smack in the middle. I know about Frederick and falconry and Goths and Vandals and Punic Wars and Saracens and Marsala.

I know that earthquakes destroyed everything many times and Baroque was built.

In fact, I am factually full up and completely exhausted. My brain is melting into Byzantine butter. I fear that I am losing threads fast, and historical holes are popping up all over the place.

A hospital-sized (2 glasses a day) bottle of Marsala.

Fortunately, my husband has bought an illustrated pop-up guide to the whole island. The “must see” items are clearly listed, illustrated, and explained. We will take that slim volume with us, and all will be well.