Today found out that Japan had it hottest summer since 1946. Japanese summers are usually unbearably hot, mainly due to the humidity. As I write up this entry, it is past 10pm, the sun went down hours ago and yet the temperature remains just over 30 degrees and the humidity it just about up to 100%. Its foul and in a few hours it’ll be September. After several warnings about how stifling the summers were here, I decided to spend as much time as I could in California, as I might as well since I was going so far. And so I spent 3 weeks of my summer vacation in The Golden State.
It was my turn to cross an Ocean and visit an old friend of mine, called Cortney, who I met in London through the Libertines in 2005. I also arranged to meet Kevin my old friend from University and former flatmate, out there.
Originally there were grand plans about hiring big American cars and driving up and down the West Coast all the way from Canada to Mexico but the vast majority of my three weeks was spent in San Francisco, where Cortney has lived for the last 5 years. Nonetheless we did get up to enough around the Bay Area including a trip up to the wine region, a days canoeing around Bodega Bay and a trip out to the university town of Berkeley. We also got up to our fair share around San Francisco. I had visited once before in 2006 but I cycled over the Golden Gate Bridge, volunteered at a soup kitchen for the homeless and hiked around Presidio National Park for the first time on this trip.
The biggest adventure outside the city took place on my first weekend there, when we hired a car and headed to LA for the weekend. I had a great time but still have very mixed feelings about the city. On the one hand the climate was fabulous and most of the people I met were very friendly, on the other, the city seems to be one big sprawling traffic jam and reflects some of American consumer societies’ most vulgar sights. The highlights would have to be cycling along Venice beach and Santa Monica, strutting around like James Dean at the Griffith Observatory and visiting the Getty Museum, which was a stunning and vast and a side to LA that I wasn’t expecting.
I have to say that having to leave such good company, climate, and Mexican cuisine to return to humid, hot, expensive Japan, in the rainiest season of the year, where I would have to start work immediately, I was a little bit downhearted. There was also a feeling that I was halfway home somehow, by spending so much time in an English speaking country. It was as if it would be regressing to be going back, rather than on wards to Europe. However, I shouldn’t dwell on such things. I had a fantastic summer and will remember it fondly for years to come.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Wednesday, 11 August 2010
The Holidays Have Finally Arrived
My first week off from school has been pretty jam-packed. The week started with a couple of nights in Tokyo, being reunited with old friends, from my week of training and darting about Tokyo exploiting my rail pass as much as I could. Two of the highlights of time here so far followed, as I climbed Japan’s highest peak and most iconic monument, Mount Fuji ,then went on to a weekend at Summer Sonic, one of Japan’s largest music festivals.
Climbing Fuji was probably my most epic excursion to date. I’ve never done any mountain climbing before, only rambling over the Peak District, so I tried to gather as much information about the climb as possible. Reports weren’t good. One group of friends were soaked through on the ascent, suffered badly from altitude sickness and found little help from the lodges that positioned along the way, another endured freezing -5 degree wind chill factor in insufficient clothes. In comparison we were lucky, low wind, no rain and not too unbearable temperatures.
Fuji is the most climbed mountain in the world and it is traditionally climbed at night, allowing you to watch the dawn rise. You also need to climb at night because it would be almost impossible to bring enough water to climb up and down in the heat of daylight. I brought up about 3 litres and drank half a litre on the way up, in the dark and about 2 and a half litres on the way down in the baking sun. There are several courses up Fuji, none of which are lit, so we all had to wear headlights to guide our way up. It was quite stunning to see the queues of people walking up with these on their heads, making a zigzag of lights down the mountain, as you ascended over the moonlit mountain, with wafts of clouds below.
There were five of us in our team of climbers. Vicky, an ALT friend who lives near Fuji and who’s Birthday we were celebrating, Chris, her mate who was visiting for the week, Rus, who lives in Nagano and like Vicky is an ALT I met through orientation and Dom, an ALT from Hokkaido. We also bumped into a couple of Newcastle student who were on holiday in Japan for the Uni holidays, making us a group of 7 Brits.
There was so much hype about how strenuous the climb up Fuji would be, how bad altitude sickness is and how the trip was anything but a walk in the park. After preparing for the worst physically and mentally I have to say that the climb up, I found relatively easy. It was almost 6 hours of continual ascent, some of which was almost vertical but after the huge build up it was fine. We reached the summit at around 3am and so had a long wait in the cold for the dawn to rise but it was definitely worth the wait. We were so lucky with the weather, as I said, so visibility was more or less perfect. You could see the Kanto plain, urbanised and stretching out for miles and the intensity of the lights increasing around Tokyo. You could just about make out the bay and a row of lights that would be the coast of Chiba. You could just about make out where Kamakura was and just about make out the Landmark Tower in Yokohama but most importantly there was a really clear and beautiful view of the dawn rising above it all on the horizon, which gradually gave colour and detail to the valley below that shrouded in patchy cloud. It was an amazing experience that I’ll never forget.
A couple of days after Fuji I went to my first Japanese music festival. Summer Sonic, is probably best compared to the Reading and Leeds festivals, in that it attracts a similar number and calibre of bands and operates in the two main regions of the country Kanto (Tokyo) and Kasai (Osaka). Unlike the Reading and Leeds festival I arrived to Summer Sonic to find that most of it is air-conditioned, there are no porter loos and no screaming 16 year olds. One of the best things about the festival was the ability to get right up to the front at the last minute with no trouble at all. I just walked straight to the front of the stage for the Pixies, the Smashing Pumpkins and the Drums and with half of the stages being inside they really felt a lot more intimate, which I think is one of my biggest problems with festivals compared to concerts.
Some old friends from Hertfordshire happened to be playing on the Sunday and they managed to get me and my friend Sam a guest pass. So, the second day I was able to explore the hospitality guest area, where the Drums were having a photo-shoot, Sum41 were playing table tennis and me and Sam were mistaken for artist and asked to sign their wall. Needless to say we complied and I scrawled a tag just above A Tribe Called Quest. Strangely enough I also bumped into an old London acquaintance there, that I hadn't seen for years. Ed, the Art Brut tour manager, who I met through supporting Art Brut and various other London shindigs was there acting as tour manager for a really young band from Florida called Surfer Blood.
Now however, I’m in San Francisco California with darling Cortney and Kevin having a welcome break from sweltering, cramped and expensive Tokyo. I’ll get back with details once I’ve done a little more. Heading to LA tomorrow and can’t wait.
Climbing Fuji was probably my most epic excursion to date. I’ve never done any mountain climbing before, only rambling over the Peak District, so I tried to gather as much information about the climb as possible. Reports weren’t good. One group of friends were soaked through on the ascent, suffered badly from altitude sickness and found little help from the lodges that positioned along the way, another endured freezing -5 degree wind chill factor in insufficient clothes. In comparison we were lucky, low wind, no rain and not too unbearable temperatures.
Fuji is the most climbed mountain in the world and it is traditionally climbed at night, allowing you to watch the dawn rise. You also need to climb at night because it would be almost impossible to bring enough water to climb up and down in the heat of daylight. I brought up about 3 litres and drank half a litre on the way up, in the dark and about 2 and a half litres on the way down in the baking sun. There are several courses up Fuji, none of which are lit, so we all had to wear headlights to guide our way up. It was quite stunning to see the queues of people walking up with these on their heads, making a zigzag of lights down the mountain, as you ascended over the moonlit mountain, with wafts of clouds below.
There were five of us in our team of climbers. Vicky, an ALT friend who lives near Fuji and who’s Birthday we were celebrating, Chris, her mate who was visiting for the week, Rus, who lives in Nagano and like Vicky is an ALT I met through orientation and Dom, an ALT from Hokkaido. We also bumped into a couple of Newcastle student who were on holiday in Japan for the Uni holidays, making us a group of 7 Brits.
There was so much hype about how strenuous the climb up Fuji would be, how bad altitude sickness is and how the trip was anything but a walk in the park. After preparing for the worst physically and mentally I have to say that the climb up, I found relatively easy. It was almost 6 hours of continual ascent, some of which was almost vertical but after the huge build up it was fine. We reached the summit at around 3am and so had a long wait in the cold for the dawn to rise but it was definitely worth the wait. We were so lucky with the weather, as I said, so visibility was more or less perfect. You could see the Kanto plain, urbanised and stretching out for miles and the intensity of the lights increasing around Tokyo. You could just about make out the bay and a row of lights that would be the coast of Chiba. You could just about make out where Kamakura was and just about make out the Landmark Tower in Yokohama but most importantly there was a really clear and beautiful view of the dawn rising above it all on the horizon, which gradually gave colour and detail to the valley below that shrouded in patchy cloud. It was an amazing experience that I’ll never forget.
A couple of days after Fuji I went to my first Japanese music festival. Summer Sonic, is probably best compared to the Reading and Leeds festivals, in that it attracts a similar number and calibre of bands and operates in the two main regions of the country Kanto (Tokyo) and Kasai (Osaka). Unlike the Reading and Leeds festival I arrived to Summer Sonic to find that most of it is air-conditioned, there are no porter loos and no screaming 16 year olds. One of the best things about the festival was the ability to get right up to the front at the last minute with no trouble at all. I just walked straight to the front of the stage for the Pixies, the Smashing Pumpkins and the Drums and with half of the stages being inside they really felt a lot more intimate, which I think is one of my biggest problems with festivals compared to concerts.
Some old friends from Hertfordshire happened to be playing on the Sunday and they managed to get me and my friend Sam a guest pass. So, the second day I was able to explore the hospitality guest area, where the Drums were having a photo-shoot, Sum41 were playing table tennis and me and Sam were mistaken for artist and asked to sign their wall. Needless to say we complied and I scrawled a tag just above A Tribe Called Quest. Strangely enough I also bumped into an old London acquaintance there, that I hadn't seen for years. Ed, the Art Brut tour manager, who I met through supporting Art Brut and various other London shindigs was there acting as tour manager for a really young band from Florida called Surfer Blood.
Now however, I’m in San Francisco California with darling Cortney and Kevin having a welcome break from sweltering, cramped and expensive Tokyo. I’ll get back with details once I’ve done a little more. Heading to LA tomorrow and can’t wait.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
