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travelling-trooper-blog · 7 years ago

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By the time Trevor and I reached Takayama, it was already 9:30. We bought our bus tickets to Shirakawago and got in the gigantic line. As we got closer to the front, I noticed a poster on a pole that promoted a tour of Shirakawago and Gokayama. I asked a woman walking by if there were any tickets available left for the tour. She went inside and confirmed that there were. The bus left in fifteen minutes, and there were only three tickets left, so we had made it just in time.

Gokayama and Shirakawago are tiny little rural villages inhabited by silk farmers. The villages are lined with traditional thatched roof houses called gassho-zukuri. The most impressive thing about these houses is that they are built without a single nail; they use nothing but wood from the massive trees that grow here, straw rope, wedges, and sapling.

The 60 degree roofs are meant to prevent snow from piling up, but as you can see, the system isn’t perfect.

The roofs have to be replaced every 30-40 years, though it used to be every 40-50 years before people started using electricity to heat their homes rather than relying solely on the fire place. The re-thatching is done in the spring using kariyasu grass that was harvested in the Fall. Despite the huge size of these roofs, they are usually re-thatched in a single day thanks to an amazing collaborative effort requiring 100-200 villagers. The re-thatching method is passed on from one generation to the next.

Walking towards the village.

Gokayama

At some point, I must have smudged my lens with my finger. I didn’t notice it until now. Looking back, a lot of my recent photos had smudges on them in the same spot. Lesson learned: Always put the lens back on your lens when you’re not using it, no matter how annoying it is.

I bet even the snow in Japan tastes better.

They were that really beautiful fat, fluffy type of snowflakes.

Safety first.

Of course, the downside to large organized tours like this is that you can’t take your sweet time. That meant that I didn’t have time to check out the gun powder museum. On the other hand, I got to visit both Gokayama and Shirakawago, which I didn’t think I’d be able to do. So, on we went to Shirakawago after an all-too brief stop in Gokayama.

First, though, it was time for lunch. Considering how much the tour costs, I was happy that lunch was provided. I was seated across from a Spanish girl and her mother, which gave me the rare opportunity to practice my Spanish. I don’t remember where in Spain they were from, but their accents were really difficult to understand. All of the words kind of slurred together. Sometimes I was just nodding and smiling.

Shirakawago is down there somewhere behind me.

We were given 90 minutes to explore Shirakawago, but alas, a car had gotten stuck in front of us on our way to Shirakwago and we couldn’t pass it. This cut our time by twenty minutes.

With those twenty minutes gone, I didn’t have time to explore the open-air museum, where you could actually walk through the houses.

Nonetheless, it was a beautiful little Winter Wonderland. It was well worth the trip.

This impressive little bell tower took a whopping 1425 people to build.

I also ventured into a temple. There was a bunch of machinery and tools on the second and third floors. I had no idea what they might be for. Upon reading my brochure later, I learned that these attic spaces were often used for silkworm cultivation and farming.

Before I knew it, it was already 3:02; we had eight minutes to run back to the bus. Crap!

We started hustling as quickly as we could, making sure not to slip on the slippery snow. The guide had said we would leave at 3:10 SHARP because some people had to catch their trains from Takayama Station. Every second counted at this point. We weaved my way past slowly-walking families, hurdled over children, and stiff-armed grandmothers who couldn’t get out of our way. We had to catch that bus. I’d missed a bus once before in San Francisco after losing track of time as I enjoyed the greatest portabella mushroom and blue cheese burger of my life, and I didn’t want to repeat that mistake. God knows how much a taxi back to Takayama would run me.

Then I saw ice cream.

Don’t judge me; it was ice cream coated with green tea powder. I know it sounds weird, but that stuff was deeee-lish!

We made it back to the bus in the nick of time. As we walked towards our seat at the very back of the bus, everybody flashed us a friendly laugh or smile. I could just imagine how my hair must have looked after running through that thick and fluffy snowfall. It must have glistened. I must have glowed like an angel.

Once back at Takayama, we hopped on a bus back to the hotel.

The plan for the evening was to grab a quick dinner, and get in some blogging before I completely ran out of energy.

The previous night we’d gone left from the hotel to a nearby restaurant, so tonight we went right to a place called Ken Ken. The first thing that jumped out at me from the menu was beef innards. I figured I’d try it just because it was different. It wasn’t bad. The beef and noodles were delicious, sopped in some juicy sauce.

The server typed “Country” into her phone to ask where I was from just a one of the young guys in the room behind us came out. I replied that I was from Canada, and the young guy jumped right in. “Canada? Toronto?”

“Yeah!” I replied.

“Raptors! DeRozan slam dunk!”

“Yeah, that’s right!” I laughed. He sat down and we started talking sports.

He asked me what my favourite sport was and I said I liked American football, expecting that he wouldn’t know anything about the NFL.

Wrong.

“NFL?” he asked.

“Yeah!” I shouted, probably louder than necessary.

“I like Adrian Peterson. What is your favourite team?”

“I like the Green Bay Packers.”

“Aaron Rodgers. He is a machine!” He made a throwing gesture as he said machine.

I cannot express how much I loved this guy at this point.

At this point, his friends came down and joined us. Turns out they worked at the hotel where I was staying. One of them even greeted me that morning, but I didn’t recognize him. He was from Tokyo and spoke the best English of the three of them. They were all working there working for a few months. “I’ve never heard him talk about the Packers before,” he chuckled.

The Peterson fan stepped in and asked me who I thought was the best Packer of all time. I answered with Rodgers, but he had his own opinion. “Rodgers is a machine, but Brett Favre…” At this point, he thumped his chest before finishing, “Brett Favre had heart.” He explained that he started watching football because of Brett Favre.

This guy was officially the coolest Japanese person I’d met.

He was from some small town that, by the sounds of it, had more animals than people living in it. He was quite proud of it, though. He kept bringing it up in conversation throughout the night. I think the place was called Tokushima or something. He’d say things like “Tokushima number one! Best ramen in Japan!” The others laughed at his level of delusion, which made me laugh even more.

The guy from Tokyo was 36 and a travel enthusiast with some Couch Surfing experience. His name was Yuta. He and I spent most of the night talking about this and that.

The girl was 24, and since she didn’t speak much English, she just sat back with her sake and enjoyed the show. All that I learned about her was that she loves her sake. In fact, I think Yuta said she enjoyed sake more than the guys.

I had so much fun with those guys. Before I knew it, I was 5 beers and 3 sake shots in, and it was time for bed. Trevor and I had to be up at 5:45 tomorrow to catch the train back to Hiroshima.

We walked back to the hotel, and the trio escorted me right to my door. We took a selfie, I went inside, and lay down, promising myself that I’d only be down for a couple minutes. I still wanted to hit the onsen one last time before saying goodbye.

I never made it. I must have passed out in 30 seconds.

Kompai, guys. Thanks for a great unexpected night.

The Travelling Trooper Tours The Traditional Villages Of Shirakawago and Gokayama By the time Trevor and I reached Takayama, it was already 9:30. We bought our bus tickets to Shirakawago and got in the gigantic line.

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johnbutlersbuzz · 7 years ago

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BREAD PUDDING CHRISTMAS ON A COLD DRIZZLY DAY

Modern day nomadic tribes are in nearly every American city and town I’ve traveled through this year. From Maine to California, they are at intersections holding brown cardboard signs with forlorn scribbles. They are sleeping in the doorways of buildings, under bridges. They lurk outside of stores asking for spare change. Wandering rootless vagrants. Languishing, distressed and discarded on cold dirty sidewalks. The homeless.

As I walk in a historic area of downtown Seattle, I turn the corner and end up in the midst of a scrappy assembly of street people. I look up to the sign on the brown brick building. It's the Union Gospel Mission.

I feel very uneasy. They stare at me, but I say hello to one, then another. By the front doorway is a bright-faced Irish girl. She tells me her name is Nicole. I ask her to tell me about her life.

“I’ve seen Hell,” Nicole says.

It’s almost dinner time and she is waiting to go inside for a free meal.

“I’ve seen violence … I’ve seen shootings … I’ve seen ….” She lets out a sigh and looks away as scenes of violence flash through her mind.

She sits on a box of her clothing and her other belongings on the sidewalk guarding them.

“I was raped and almost killed.” Nikole punctuates her sentences with nervous smiles. “It’s been hard.”

Her light blue eyes do not reflect the barbarity of street life, but she has seen it. “From New York to Seattle,” she tells me, “for nine years.. But Nicole still holds herself with an air of dignity. Her reddish blonde hair is brushed back, falling slightly over the left shoulder of her clean blue hooded pullover. Her new hoody and clothing were gifts from churches and social agencies.

As I talk to Nicole, I am aware of more and more people around me in front of the Union Gospel Mission. Most have a laminated badge attached to a cord around their neck. It shows they are approved for entry when the front door opens to the hot meal about to be served inside.

Whiskey fumes and cigarette smoke drift through the air from several men standing nearby. The fray of rough-looking castaways increase. I’m uncomfortable. I’ve been forewarned to be careful. Many are felons, some violent multiple offenders.

A skinny African American man sheathed in a foreboding dark aura stands next to a tall emaciated pock-marked white woman at the edge of the street curb. Both staring at me intently like bobcats. The once attractive girl has the look I’ve seen in photos showing the human ravages of advanced meth addiction.

She grins at me as she swirls in place like there is a tornado twisting inside her; repeating over and over, “I’m a bad ass … I’m a bad ass….” Her eyes are inviting me over. The man stands guard next to her, looking at me with cold black vacant eyes. A look that says he could easily kill me if I come too close.

My heart beats faster. I try to look totally at ease and unworried midst this group. I’m not.

A young African American man is watching me from down the sidewalk. He’s crouched, leaning against the brick wall near the front door wearing a pullover wool cap and a hooded fleece under an oversized heavy-weather jacket. He smiles as he is talking -- to either me or the air. I’m not sure which.

I walk over and ask him to tell me his story. His name is Troy. “I’ve been on the streets between five and seven years,” he tells me.

“There is one word that explains it all,” he says as he rambles, drawing in smoke from the nub remaining of his cigarette pinched between his fingers. He repeats a word several times, but I have difficulty understanding him. And he wants me to understand.

“It’s in the ten-million word dictionary,” he says. “It’s the only one that has the word and it costs a lot of money to get it.” Trying to grasp the word he is telling me, I ask him to spell it. His language is rough.

“Ya know what … it’s like … J … S … K … M-I-A … ah … O-M-R-Y.”

The word I think he is trying to tell me is “Jakari.” It is the only one I can find in any dictionary close to what I think he was saying. It did fit with life on the streets he was describing to me.

Jakari, as defined in the Urban dictionary: “One who is a key component in the African America culture and continuously dumps trash cans upon people’s head and body.” Jakari.

I ask him, “What’s the worst thing that has happened to you on the streets?”

“I’ve been robbed,” he says. “I’ve been shot at. I’ve been stabbed. I’ve been murdered. I just say give it to me … give it to me … know what I mean.”

I think I do. We talk more, Troy has an odd acceptance about his situation. A strange sense of peace he finds in this word he repeats: Ja-ka-ri.

“I ain’t gonna to say I’m not scared of s#@%,” he says, “but I ain’t gonna let nothin’ bother me where I can’t go do what I think I want to do when I want to do it.”

Further down the sidewalk a 46-year-old white male, wiry in build, sporting a ball cap and mustache, is watching me intently. He walks across the sidewalk, right up to me, smiling off and on. Trevor is his name. He tells me he came to Seattle from California. Heard about the place from a relative.

“I’ve been on the streets … since I was 16 … I lost four members of my family and my mom,” Trevor says.

Each person I talk to volunteered they had used drugs and all of them tell me how long they have been clean with a certainty in their voice, but lingering eye contact to see if I believe them. I was never convinced of the last part.

“I started using methamphetamines at the age of 24,” Trevor continued. “At the time it was a drug I liked … but I always told myself I had a problem.”

Nicole, Troy, and Trevor are just three of the roughly 5,000 people living on the streets in the Seattle area. Another 12,000-plus use homeless emergency and temporary shelters in various parts of King County, according to the Seattle Times.

National estimates for homeless in emergency or transitional housing during the course of a year are in the million and a half range. The number under bridges, in doorways, and elsewhere on the streets of cities across the nation is undetermined.

“New York is not half as bad as the violence we see here,” Nicole tells me with a big belly laugh. “… That’s because we are getting everybody from New York.”

Nicole is from New York. She came originally to work on a fishing boat, but she says, “I was duped … it didn’t work out … the guy didn’t even have a boat.”

“I’ve been clean almost a year and a half,” she tells me. She lives in a tent under a bridge. The Mission sold her a new zero-degree sleeping bag for only $10. She said it has saved her life. She is hoping to get into the program providing tiny houses to the homeless someday.

Throughout America and around the world homeless flock to different cities for various reasons. Rumors circulate among them about the best cities with the best accommodations and the big lure: free stuff.

Some Seattle politicians proclaim their town to be a “sanctuary city.” One of the workers told me it has sent an unintended message to the homeless in other cities. They hear from newly arrived homeless, the nickname for Seattle is “Free-attle.” I confirm this with people I talk to on the street.

“Everything is free in Seattle for the homeless,” the rumor goes. “Free-attle is the place that will take care of you.”

It’s not quite that way of course. Rumors of finding nirvana never quite live up to the imagination after you arrive. But the thought of it is enough. In this case, hundreds of homeless make their way every year, to the mecca of Free-attle in the Northwest of America.

So many come that the city and the county declared a “homelessness emergency.” But that was several years ago and not much has been done about the situation critics say.

They keep coming and a growing number stay in Seattle till they die. Overdose, suicide, and murder is not uncommon. There is even a community group dedicated to remembering the homeless people who die in the city. Seattle’s Homeless Remembrance Project members meet downtown at the city court to hold memorial services for each who pass away on the streets.

“There are a number of resources for the homeless who want help,” says one of the workers at the Union Gospel Mission. “But they have to decide they want out of the homeless lifestyle. A majority of them refuse shelter beds and help, preferring to live life on their own terms. But there is always food for them. They come to the Mission for the meals.”

Solution? Obviously the first thought that comes to mind, and I see other soft hearted people doing this all the time, is to give them a little cash. A few dollars. But the ugly truth is that doesn’t help. It usually, unfortunately, only enables another day of meth, or heroin or whatever drug is available that day.

Now I am in Salt Lake City, Utah. The population seems even larger than it was in Seattle.

“Please don’t support panhandling,” Salt Lake City posted signs say. “Turn spare change into real change. Give a hand up, not a hand out. Giving to agencies is more likely to provide hot meals, medical assistance, clothing, and substance abuse help.”

I believe the sign, but my bleeding-heart side is prodding me at this moment as I walk out of a downtown store. I am holding a boxed bread pudding I just bought in a cafe on this cold drizzly day. My eye locks onto a straggly gray-bearded old man sitting next to the curb with his back against the city light pole. A faded turquoise blanket is draped over his head and body. He stares down at the curb. Without thinking, I walk over and say, “You like bread pudding?”

He looks startled. I hand him the boxed bread pudding. “Ah … I haven’t had bread pudding in years … ah … thank you sir,” He places the box on the cement in front of him and protectively covers it with the corner of his blanket. I walk on.

I think it helped him. But I know for sure, in a stupid selfish way, it helped me.

As I count my many blessings this Christmas season, I pause to remember the less fortunate among us in America living on the streets. The verse in the Good Book is surely true, “…whatever you do unto the least of these you do unto me.”

Merry Christmas to one and all.

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