Tokyo part 2

We had a beautiful day yesterday hanging out with my high school buddy, Sue B., who has been living in Japan for about 8 years now.  On the itinerary was walking, the Imperial Palace,

more walking,getting lost in the insanely huge Tokyo station

(which meant more walking - searching for the underground Ramen Road for a lunch of noodles),

more walking to get back to the fountain park where we sat for a long while eating dessert, talking

and watching the neighboring couple freak out at the sight of a ginormous orange-headed bee-thing (this thing was literally an inch and a half long - one of our yellow jackets would fit in its abdomen).

We ended the day back in one of Sue's favorite parts of the city, Sensoji Temple in Asakusa.

Perfect end to a perfect day!  Arigato!

Sumire House, Japan

I'm sorry to see that it's been a year since my last posting - sad state of affairs, eh? But at least I've got a good reason for posting now - a report from Tokyo!

After leaving on October 1st and a long and thankfully uneventful flight we landed at Narita airport on the afternoon of October 2nd. The international date line always bends my brain...

Our humble abode for the next few days is Sumire House, a tiny house that survived WWII, amazingly so considering how much of Tokyo burned.  It's also amazing that the house has survived given the single strand knob and tube wiring mounted against the original wooden ceiling beams - not in use any longer; unlike another house we know that had knob and tube wiring used until 2005.

I don't have so much of an issue, but Resident Spouse needs to watch the beams at key junctions.

Sokcho not in the cloud

Been in a bit of internet limbo now that we've moved to the condos where all the competitors are staying. The internet cafe gets me online for about a dollar for 30 minutes but the stinking browsers are all in Korean with no options for translation. Oy! Even Google is in Korean...but I finally got logged into gmail and from there to Blogger...so here I am. Anyway, it's been a fantastic two days here. We got a little beach time, a little time in town, a little history time (the latter at a little town that has about the only original traditional architecture around because everything else was bombed flat during the Korean War). Apparently this little town was saved because it is nestled in a valley between a couple, three small ranges and nobody could see it to know to bomb it. The beach was nice - we were at a small pocket beach near town. This was different from some of the other beaches we've seen because there's no barbed wire blocking access. The watchtowers were in evidence though, apparently keeping an eye out for the stray North Korean invasion... Yesterday us non-archers stopped by the arena to check things out before going on our merry way and it's always so interesting to watch the people and horses, with each acting out in their own ways. There are times the machismo is as thick as the sticky rice we've gotten for lunch.

Sokcho Day 2

I've got the iPad set to local time and it always reminds me that we lost a day flying west.  It's October 1st here, but back home it is still September.  We sent the two girls from our host family off to school today in their uniforms with Oregon key chains that illustrate where we live.  Hard to understand what we each understand with our very scattered Korean and their slightly less scattered English.  The word of the day is tsogun or sogun, for towel, having mastered "hello" and "thank you."  I don't know if it would be polite to ask what the word is for leech...

Resident Kid thinks it's funny when I end up in a bowing contest with someone for lack of anything else to say but hello and thank you...

Sokcho 2013

Took the slow van from Seoul to Sokcho - scary slow -the driver would go 40 in the fast lane on a 60 mph highway.  Then he'd slow down even more when he got a phone call.   But the drive was worth it with Ruth and Boaz's (their English names) home at the end of the little paved trails through the rice paddies.  

A little walk yielded a beautiful heron taking off and a close up of some local invertebrates...I was looking at what I first thought was a worm on wet pavement..."Why did the leech cross the road?"

Anyway, it didn't affect our appetite for the amazing spread that Ruth and her friends put together for the huge crew.

Seoul 2013

Headed to Seoul this year to take Resident Kid and Resident Spouse to the World Horse Archery Federation championship. Huge opportunity to see another part of the world that I wouldn't normally have chosen.  First night spent at the Hotel Sky, first morning spent groaning from sore muscles and the total head crushing caffeine withdrawal headache.  First meal was a cool local barbecue joint where the customers are trusted with piping hot charcoal in the middle of the tables to use for cooking.  

Speak your mind ... but ...

Resident Kid has a mug that I've borrowed on occasion, most times resulting in great complaints and chastisement, but the thing that I love about this mug is that it is GIANT and it has a picture of a bucking horse (and yes, with a view of the back side) that says, "Speak your mind ... but ride a fast horse."

I realize now what my problem has been in my life.  Being a marginally fast runner, I tend to speak my mind and endure the wrath or enjoy the giggles of the audience.  A few encounters with audiences of the former ilk have impressed upon me there are times when it can pay to not speak my mind, mostly on the topics of politics or religion.  While this tactic leaves a broad range of other worldly topics that are ripe for the picking, it is sometimes an indictment of public discourse practices in our society.

Vitriol that mutes writers is disturbing and violates my sense of what should make up our right to freedom of speech but this and other events made me curious enough about the varying dynamics behind public discourse to try an experiment during and just after the recent election period.

I decided upon certain situations where I would remain deliberately silent about my opinions on who the best candidates for the jobs at stake were and came up with some surprising, at least to me, outcomes.  What I thought was most interesting were the assumptions that people would make that, if I didn't disagree, I must agree.  My assumption going into this process was that others would assume that I was silent because I was following the maxim of, "If you can't find something nice to say, don't say anything at all," that corollary of, "Silence is golden."

I suppose I should be heartened by this in that others were fully expecting that they would be engaged in a lively debate of diverging opinions if the opportunity arose.  And in fact, I found it difficult, if not impossible, to remain silent if the lively debate was couched in questions that sought to identify the realms of possibility amongst the options.

My silence was not at all difficult to maintain when I was confronted by loud statements of opinion that were presented as fact that could not possibly be impugned.  What surprised me about my own reaction in these cases was that it was not the tendency towards being loud and overbearing that turned me away.  In essence, my response of silence meant that I, the listener, gave up on the speaker as a lost cause.