Hi Mom,
Thank you for reading my blog for these two great years in Tokyo. As you probably know, the Noodlelastic family has moved to the USA.
We're so sad to leave our loved ones in Tokyo and the beautiful, inspiring country of Japan. But we're also excited about what's next for us.
We will start a new blog soon where you can check out the adventures we're having, adjusting to things like giant cokes, tipping, and driving a car again (woah!).
Love,
Noodle
7/25/2008
4/14/2008
Mmmmmm
I posted about all the delicious food we tried in Hong Kong, so here's a post to make my kitchen at home feel more loved.
These are our two favorite dinners to prepare in Tokyo: broiled salmon with rice & salad, and yakisoba with tofu! yum....
2/29/2008
Captain of the Enterprise to boldly hand out degrees
When we were in Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post was delivered to the hotel room every morning. On Tuesday, January 8, the City section featured the following headline:
Captain of the Enterprise to boldly hand out degrees
Hilarious and enticing, surely this is newspaper writing at its peak. I adore all things Star Trek and chief among them, all things Picard. As it turns out, the article was a brief but entertaining society-page blurb about Patrick Stewart's visit to Hong Kong, where he would hand out degrees in a local graduation ceremony.
I brought the paper back home, where I clipped it, ironed it, and framed it. Now as I work on my thesis I can feel inspired by the fantasy of Captain Picard showing up at the ceremony and calling me "Doctor." Aaaahhhhhhhh....
Click here to send a Patrick Steward postcard to a friend, courtesy of the fan club Patrick Stewart Network
2/26/2008
Finishing Video
You can see me cross the finish line at this website:
http://www.ntv.co.jp/tokyomarathon/goalmovie/
Most of the web page is in Japanese, but it's easy to watch the video:
1) Look for a box labeled "SEARCH" and enter my bib number there (email me for the number).
2) Two buttons labeled "PLAY" will appear. Click the "PLAY" button on the RIGHT.
Each button corresponds to a different finishing gate, left or right. When you click "PLAY", a video will appear under the right-hand gate. Watch carefully and you'll see me arrive, about 10 seconds after the movie starts.
I come in on the far left of the frame. I'm wearing a gray jacket with a red stripe, and a thick gray headband, kind of bandana-style. Doesn't stand out much, but a friend of mine who showed me the video said "there were two foreign ladies, and I thought maybe this one was you". Right on!
They create these videos using our finishing times. There is an official recording of the time when I crossed the finish line, which they get using a microchip tied to my shoe. When you enter my bib number on the website, they just pull up the video corresponding to a 30-second window around my finish time. And voila! I will appear running through the right-hand gate.
http://www.ntv.co.jp/tokyomarathon/goalmovie/
Most of the web page is in Japanese, but it's easy to watch the video:
1) Look for a box labeled "SEARCH" and enter my bib number there (email me for the number).
2) Two buttons labeled "PLAY" will appear. Click the "PLAY" button on the RIGHT.
Each button corresponds to a different finishing gate, left or right. When you click "PLAY", a video will appear under the right-hand gate. Watch carefully and you'll see me arrive, about 10 seconds after the movie starts.
I come in on the far left of the frame. I'm wearing a gray jacket with a red stripe, and a thick gray headband, kind of bandana-style. Doesn't stand out much, but a friend of mine who showed me the video said "there were two foreign ladies, and I thought maybe this one was you". Right on!
They create these videos using our finishing times. There is an official recording of the time when I crossed the finish line, which they get using a microchip tied to my shoe. When you enter my bib number on the website, they just pull up the video corresponding to a 30-second window around my finish time. And voila! I will appear running through the right-hand gate.
Tokyo Marathon
My sweet reward- a finisher's medal! (That's a breathe-right strip on my nose.)
The day of the Tokyo Marathon finally came on Sunday February 17th! We had a really good time, the weather was perfect and the crowds were unbelievable, I guess that's part of the experience here in Tokyo.
My time was an unremarkable 4:54:07. I did a little too much sightseeing in the first 5K, picked up speed between 10K-30K, and hit a wall around 38-40K. But I think I can improve on that next time around (Fall marathon, anybody?).
Some things about the race were remarkable - everything was very well organized. They had timing gates every 5K that recorded our splits and displayed them in real time on the web, in both regular and mobile-phone-browser formats!
My husband and I planned a series of cheering spots along the route, and after he dropped me off at the start line, he continued along the race course using the subway. Thanks to the live updates on the website, he could easily see where I was in the race and whether I had already passed by his current location. Even my mom tracked my progress from North Carolina, although she had to go to bed before the end of the race since it was midnight, NC time (Scottie, if you're reading this: "Stop! Nevada time...").
At the end of the race I received a finisher's medal - yay! I also got a free bottle of a mysterious product called "Air Salonpass". Directly behind the guys handing out the bottles was a large seating area, where runners plopped down, opened their samples, and sprayed every possible body part with Air Salonpass. Turns out it is a cooling muscle balm - aaaaahhhhhh, that was nice.
Tokyo Big Sight was just big enough for the marathon finish. Post-race, I picked up my race bag and headed through a series of changing rooms/halls out to the entrance of the convention center. My husband was there, waiting for me to victoriously emerge! We made our way home sloooooowly, since at that point my ability to walk was fading away thanks to fatigue plus cold temperatures. But after a couple of days' rest I was good as new and the medal is now enjoying a prominent position in the foyer, next to our collection of cute-neice-and-nephew photos.
2/14/2008
Tokyo Bloopers II
Many of the funny mistakes I've made have to do with eating something that packed a punch or surprise. Like the seemingly harmless "okra" sushi. It really was okra, but it was crammed so full of the stuff that I was chewing for the next 20 minutes while toro, salmon, hamachi, mirugai, and other yummy things were served to and downed by my dining partners.
I also make a lot of mistakes at the grocery store. Even something simple like buying a bag of rice becomes complicated when you have severely limited reading skills. I can decipher a lot of things that are written on labels, but only after I've brought the thing home, prepared it, seen the look on my husband's face when he eats it, and then spent an hour scouring the label for something that explains the look. The answer: it was diet rice. After looking more carefully I found that "Calorie off!" is happily proclaimed in pink on the front of the bag.
Similarly, readers of hiragana will spot something interesting about this box of tissue:
In a land where the toilet paper gives off a faint scent of roses, I was still surprised when I pulled a kleenex from this box and felt a tingling/burning sensation in my nose. Upon closer inspection, I found the word "Menthol" clearly written in gold, right under "Lotion Tissue".
I also make a lot of mistakes at the grocery store. Even something simple like buying a bag of rice becomes complicated when you have severely limited reading skills. I can decipher a lot of things that are written on labels, but only after I've brought the thing home, prepared it, seen the look on my husband's face when he eats it, and then spent an hour scouring the label for something that explains the look. The answer: it was diet rice. After looking more carefully I found that "Calorie off!" is happily proclaimed in pink on the front of the bag.
Similarly, readers of hiragana will spot something interesting about this box of tissue:
In a land where the toilet paper gives off a faint scent of roses, I was still surprised when I pulled a kleenex from this box and felt a tingling/burning sensation in my nose. Upon closer inspection, I found the word "Menthol" clearly written in gold, right under "Lotion Tissue".
Tokyo Bloopers
I haven't really shared enough of the silly, silly things that we've done since we came here. I'm talking about foreigner bloopers - mistakes we've made because we can't or aren't patient enough to understand things. Well here is one to get us started, and I'm sure there will be plenty more.
Like the time when two ladies from Australia stopped us in the subway and asked us how to buy a ticket. They were a sweet old pair of retired teachers, and sisters. We were so excited about our role as helpful local experts that we walked them over to the ticket machine and suggested they could buy two each - one for the trip across town, and one for the way back, since we wouldn't be there to help again.
Hah! People who are familiar with the Tokyo metro may already be laughing at this time. What they know, and what we didn't know although we pretended to know it and freely mis-informed others as well, is this: the single-ride ticket is not a free pass to go a certain number of stops. It is a ticket from station x to station y, and these are printed right there on the ticket.
We discovered this when we foolishly tried taking our own advice. I bought two tickets on the way into the metro and so did my husband. On the way back we breezed past the ticket machine with our "return" tickets and stuck them into the automatic gate on the way to the platform. The gates quickly shut in my expertly astonished face, as red lights started flashing and a siren went off. At this time I looked, really looked, at my ticket (which had been spewed back out at me by the machine, apparently in disgust). Sure enough, the ticket plainly stated that it was valid for one ride from the station where I bought it to the station where I was standing at that moment. Very helpful in case I wanted to jog across town and ride the metro back. At the time, not helpful at all.
The flashing lights and the siren may seem appalling but I'm quite used to it by now, having set them off many times before and since, and not just in the metro (the bathrooms have their own lights and their own sirens). More shameful to me was the thought that this same thing was happening, or was going to happen soon, somewhere far across town, to those two old ladies who had clung to my pale face and native accent like a life raft, only to find it leaks.
Well the old ladies were no doubt stopped by the metro gates, as well, and then by the metro guard who is always nearby, and then let through anyway since the guard is usually polite and has dealt with lost foreigners before.
Personally I learned that not "helping" people anymore is really the kindest favor I can do for them.
Like the time when two ladies from Australia stopped us in the subway and asked us how to buy a ticket. They were a sweet old pair of retired teachers, and sisters. We were so excited about our role as helpful local experts that we walked them over to the ticket machine and suggested they could buy two each - one for the trip across town, and one for the way back, since we wouldn't be there to help again.
Hah! People who are familiar with the Tokyo metro may already be laughing at this time. What they know, and what we didn't know although we pretended to know it and freely mis-informed others as well, is this: the single-ride ticket is not a free pass to go a certain number of stops. It is a ticket from station x to station y, and these are printed right there on the ticket.
We discovered this when we foolishly tried taking our own advice. I bought two tickets on the way into the metro and so did my husband. On the way back we breezed past the ticket machine with our "return" tickets and stuck them into the automatic gate on the way to the platform. The gates quickly shut in my expertly astonished face, as red lights started flashing and a siren went off. At this time I looked, really looked, at my ticket (which had been spewed back out at me by the machine, apparently in disgust). Sure enough, the ticket plainly stated that it was valid for one ride from the station where I bought it to the station where I was standing at that moment. Very helpful in case I wanted to jog across town and ride the metro back. At the time, not helpful at all.
The flashing lights and the siren may seem appalling but I'm quite used to it by now, having set them off many times before and since, and not just in the metro (the bathrooms have their own lights and their own sirens). More shameful to me was the thought that this same thing was happening, or was going to happen soon, somewhere far across town, to those two old ladies who had clung to my pale face and native accent like a life raft, only to find it leaks.
Well the old ladies were no doubt stopped by the metro gates, as well, and then by the metro guard who is always nearby, and then let through anyway since the guard is usually polite and has dealt with lost foreigners before.
Personally I learned that not "helping" people anymore is really the kindest favor I can do for them.
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