Showing posts with label plans. Show all posts

12 September 2011

summer snapshots


... all from my cell phone, because I am lazy that way. This summer was spent in LA, the East Bay and Seattle - though mostly LA, where I worked odd jobs and hung out with my dad. Though it was a bit sad being away from Iain for so long, I was never lonely for long with all my family and friends around:


The grandparents...


...my best best friend Lauren...


...even Teiko was in town! 



There are many things to love about being in California, but the food is definitely high on the list.


above: Maggie and Dad vie for the last of the salad. 


Weekends were spent waitressing at a Vietnamese restaurant. Free pho + getting to talk about Vietnamese food all day long = awesome. 


Also I love Venice Beach :) 




In mid-August, I went up to Seattle to meet up with my mom and see most of the extended Tokuda family. 


Manhole covers like the ones in Japan! 


Cleaning out my grandmother's basement yielded some strange finds. Big League Liniment! No medicine cabinet is complete without it. 


And then Iain finally arrived! Not on a giant slide, as this photo might lead you to believe, but heroically nonetheless on an airplane. Hooray for Iain! 


After Iain got here, we spent a whirlwind few days in LA saying hello and goodbye to family before flying up to the Bay Area...
 


You have to love a city where Howard Zinn is painted on the walls.


Graffiti in the S.F. Mission district.



In San Francisco, we rang in my sister's birthday with a sophisticated and contemplative night of pizza, beer, and Deep Blue Sea. That's Samuel L. Jackson getting eaten, above, obviously. (Happy birthday, Maggie!)


All in all, it was a great summer (especially since, thanks to Hanoi's weather, it felt like it started ages ago, back in April!) I loved getting to spend so much time with my family and reconnecting with life in California while getting excited and gearing up for this: 


Which - finally - brings this very belated blog back into real time, because we leave for Peru on Wednesday. We'll be volunteering for just short of three months at an NGO in the Andes, so the next update will hopefully be from South America. 

leave a comment
27 March 2011

24 hours to go...


I don't have any relevant photos for this post, so instead you get this: kangaroos having a sissy fight! 

I'm waiting for Iain to finish showering so we can go to our official goodbye party - though there've been all manner of goodbye festivities with various classes and friends over the last couple of days, making this one seriously sad week. If all goes well, we will be on a shinkansen speeding towards Osaka this time tomorrow night so we can catch our early morning flight to Ho Chi Minh City on Tuesday. We spent all day today frantically cleaning our apartment - the next teachers to take our job will live elsewhere, so there's ten years worth of detritus to sift through - and now that the place is scrubbed clean and less cluttered, it looks and feels just like it did when we arrived a year ago.

Anyway, I want to post more about Numazu and Japan and the people we were lucky enough to know while we were here, which I hopefully will - right now we are so insanely disgustingly busy and overwhelmed that all the the things I try to do have completely fallen by the wayside. But, three days from now, we'll be sitting on a beach, having arrived in much-loved, much-missed Vietnam exactly two years to the day after leaving it, tracing the same route backwards from Ho Chi Minh to Phu Quoc to Hanoi. So, more from Vietnam, soon, hopefully...

leave a comment
08 January 2011

happy 2011!


Happy 2011! We are back in Numazu after a whirlwind visit to California; it was beyond wonderful to see my family and friends, and I felt very lucky to have had the chance to spend some time with them all, however briefly. 2010 was a great year: we were so lucky to have gotten our jobs and to have spent so much time in Japan, in this beautiful part of the country by the mountains and the beach. Though I'm not a hundred percent sure exactly where we'll geographically find ourselves throughout the year to come, I am still crazy excited for the things I know 2011 holds, particularly returning to Hanoi and spending more time at home with my family.

We arrived back here on Tuesday, about 24.5 hours after waking up at 3:40 at my dad's house to catch our cab to LAX, and immediately plunged back into work and - more excitingly - a visit from my old New York roommate, Kate. Things should be slowing down a bit more now, so, more updates to follow, hopefully. In the meantime, happy year of the rabbit!

leave a comment
07 April 2010

green!



Today, I taught a class of pre-schoolers who kept shouting unko! (poo!) every time I tried to make them say hello. More excitingly, in the stretch of downtime before our morning and evening shifts at work, Iain and I tore up our backyard and started working in earnest on our garden. I love my twice-weekly nursery school shifts, but even a roomful of cute little kids shouting bathroom words is no competition for the awesomeness that is digging giant holes and getting covered in dirt in the first backyard I've ever had in my adult life.


To clarify, when I say garden, I'm referring to the extremely finite little patch of dirt that makes up most of our patio, which we share with the rest of the building (if you look at the first photo, 'our' patch of garden extends to the decaying wooden mystery platform, whose purpose remains unclear) which doesn't get very much sunlight. But, the last teachers who lived here were able to grow tomatoes and rosemary, and the marigolds I haphazardly planted last week in a fit of new-garden-inspired glee seem to be doing okay, so I'm hopeful.


Unfortunately, because the planting instructions are all in kanji, and we're still not entirely familiar with the conditions of the backyard, we both had to admit that this first batch of plants is very much a test run. Any plants that seem to be thriving, we'll plant more of, particularly if we need to replace ones that don't do so well. 


Above: Mmm... mojitos. 


When we moved in, the garden as a large tangle of rocks and weeds. While I haven't been able to sucessfully convince Iain that weeds are pretty and should be allowed to make the garden at least look green (since everything we well-meaningly planted could very well die), we did agree to reroute the rocky areas so that they make nice little borders around the plants, instead of remaining in random rocky patches. Jury's still out on the fate of the weeds in the un-gardened portions of the yard. 


So, at the moment, we have: tomatoes, strawberries, green onions, two wan-looking pea plants, parsley, mint, and a smattering of flowers, including some marigolds and nasturtiums, which accounts for all the sunny spots of the yard, and about half the patio in general. I'm trying not to get too emotionally attached, but I love looking out our bedroom window and seeing our little garden - it's definitely my favorite part of the new apartment, and probably my favorite thing about life in Numazu in general.

1 comment
23 March 2010

izu-bound!



Above: wall art in Kichijoji

All packed up and waiting in our empty, scrubbed clean, tiny little room for the landlords to come and pick up the keys. Home for the last few weeks has been a shared, seven-bedroom, one-bathroom house in Kichijoji, where fortunately we lucked out in terms of cool, chill roommates and relatively comprehensible waste management laws. As much as I've liked Kichijoji, though, I'm mostly just excited to get to Numazu in the Izu Peninsula, where - after a week of staying in a hotel while the other teachers clear out of the apartment - we can finally unpack our suitcases, maybe stick a photo or two up on the walls, and settle down for a full year, which will be the longest I've been settled anywhere in the two-plus years I've been traveling. Anyway, updates from Numazu to follow - for now, keep your fingers crossed for us that the landlord thinks the room is as clean as we do and gives us back all our security deposit money. 

leave a comment
07 December 2009

long overdue update

DSC_0226


Exactly one more week of work to go, and I am getting way too sentimental at the thought of saying goodbye to my students, all of whom are amazing and who are by far the single best thing about this job. I've gotten so used to seeing most of them so often throughout the week (some of them every single day!) that I'm really dreading saying goodbye. I'm doubly lucky they're so amazing because the pre-ordained lesson plans for this last week of teaching are painfully awful, and fortunately I can at least count of students who will be sweet and funny and good-natured, and who can usually be counted on to be irreverant enough to make the worst canned lesson entertaining. Today's lesson on performing! skits! (because that's a skill I think we can agree everyone needs) included improvised tales of woe ranging from murder to being buried alive to two-timing to, my personal favorite, an inexplicably tiny man who steals women's underwear.

At any rate;  I know I've slacked off quite a bit with this blog lately; part of this is because I've been trying to set up an actual website with the fairly massive collection of photos I've been sitting on for the last three years (edited, don't worry), and part is because this schedule, as I may have whined before, is absolutely brutal in terms of having free time,  and I'm generally pretty embarrassed by just how exhausted I am all the time. I'm hoping, very very much, that this won't be a problem next year when we're back, because (hooray!) we just accepted job offers in nearby Numazu, which is about an hour and a half away from Tokyo by Shikansen. I don't know too much yet except that it's a small school (Iain and I are the only full-time English teachers) and I'm going to have to learn to drive on the wrong side of the road. So: more plans (and more updates in general; I swear, about ninjas and that bike ride that amounts to the most exercise I got the whole time I was here, and talking to ALL THE HALLS on Skype) to follow, but for now, sleeping. 



1 comment
02 May 2009

VIP moss, 日本語を and other california things




A break from the never-ending photos of the Northern mountains to post a few of Kyoto that I never got around to posting last year, because endless photos of beautiful mountain views get monotonous, and reading and thinking endlessly about Japan has made me even more easily distracted than usual. All of these are from my massive day of shin-splint-inducing temple hopping last February, though I can't remember which temple was which anymore.




The sign (in English) says: Special Moss, like VIP! Do not touch.

I don't have any photos of being home yet, mostly because my camera and lens are both at the camera hospital, being cleaned (the camera) and massively repaired (the much-abused lens) after more than a year of being rattled all over South East Asia, and because they served put up with so much abuse at my hands, I am trying not to resent them for the horrific cost of the repairs and resign myself to being a grown-up by taking care of my nice things. At any rate, being here means mostly looking for work and studying Japanese, with varying levels of success; not many of the larger schools are willing to accommodate couples looking for work together, which has been frustrating, as we want to live if not work together - but we have a few leads and also some backup plans if those should fall through.



Branches reflected in a pond.


It is weird how distant Hanoi feels after only a month away, even if I still feel like I know the roads there better than the roads here; still, it's been guiltily easy to settle into a routine of whiling away every afternoon in a cafe (we rotate so that no one gets too mad at us for ordering one cup of tea and as much hot water as it takes to get through three hours of studying). My spoken Japanese is still pretty hopeless, though I can read both the kana alphabets now and am picking up a little kanji. So that's here, and what our plans are, for the moment; once we have our Japan plans settled, we'll hopefully do a little travelling (and I will hopefully get better at driving freeways, to make said travelling possible); more photos of the Vietnamese mountains to follow and maybe some of home, when I get my delinquent camera back. 

leave a comment
16 December 2007

Ireland, Part One



Upper lake, Glendalough




Left: a grave in Trim; right: ivy growing in Laragh


leave a comment
11 December 2007

Last day



Back in London, where I have about 30 more hours before heading back home; with the endpoint to this whole trip so close in sight, I am so tired and ready to be back in Brooklyn that I'm only a little sad at the thought of saying goodbye to this entire trip. On my last day in Spain, I took the rickety, improbable bus up into the Albacin neighborhood in Granada to take in one last look at the Sierra Nevadas from the Plaza San Nicholas amidst dreadlocked tourists with their 40s and small dogs, flamenco guitar players and necklace vendors (who can shut down shop and scatter in a matter of minutes when the police come). None of my tour books mentioned that bus service, but anyone who ever visits Granada should take it through the Albacin at least once, if only to see for yourself how a wide bus is somehow manage to trundle through narrow, winding, steep cobbled streets without killing anyone. The view doesn't suck either.

1 comment
12 September 2007

tickets!


so: hopefully this will be where I can write about my travels and not just my plans (which, at the moment, include a lot of trains, hostels, castles and raingear). for now, please enjoy this screenshot from expedia.

leave a comment
Powered by Blogger.
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...