Let's just start with OMG! I am doing a terrible job of staying on top of this....
Then on to the exciting stuff: namely, how I ended up in Japan and what I did there
I feel so fortunate to have been invited by the Graduate School of Asian and African Studies (ASAFAS) at the University of Kyoto to give a lecture about ecosystems and agroforestry in Hawaii (and a little bit about Bali too). And to have my travel application approved for the Fulbright Regional Travel Program. And it was doubly (triply?) great because I was also able to combine it with a visit with Forest TEAM graduate, Mika Hozawa, who obtained her Ph.D. at University of Kyoto and is now teaching at University of Kobe.
It started off really crazy (can I blame my lack of posting on that?). Kekai was here in June/July and I had a comfortable window of about a week between his departure for Hawaii and mine (planned but not purchased) for Japan. I had intended to fly from Bali to Kansai and travel directly to Kyoto for the talk and then visit Mika afterwards. But Fulbright asked me, with two weeks notice (everything is last minute here in Indonesia), if I would be willing to help with the interviews for Indonesian applicants for the Ph.D. student Fulbright program. Of course I wanted to help with that, but the interviews were for three days in Jakarta (on Java) starting the day after Kekai flew home and ending just a week before my scheduled lecture in Kyoto. With tourist season hitting full stride in Bali, my 1-2 hour drive from home to the airport is now 2-3 hours and the thought of having to go back and forth from Kekai's flight to my flight and again to my flight seemed like way too much driving in Bali-insanity traffic. I was able to switch everything around so that I stayed the night in Denpasar after Kekai left, flew out on the next day, did the interviews in Jakarta (at a really, really nice hotel, I might add), then flew to Kansai from Jakarta rather than returning to Bali. I switched my Japan travel around and visited Mika first, then flew back to Bali (not Jakarta) two days after the talk. Oh yeah, and Tim came with me too. Whoa! Logistics!
The first thing to be said is that it is a l.o.n.g. way from Indonesia to Japan. We flew through Thailand on the way out and Singapore on the way back. But timing was such that it was very late night in Thailand and very early morning in Singapore, so we didn't even have much to explore on the airport layovers -- everything was closed. Tim did have a chance to have a chat with the cleaning robot in Thailand who politely let him know he was blocking its way:
Once in Japan, the line for the women's toilet was endless. But at least there were instructions for how to use it once you got in :-)
Because we came nearly a week ahead of schedule, Mika was busy when we arrived. So we took the train to Osaka and stayed in a hotel (that she helped us find) that was really near the train station and allowed us to explore far and wide using the train and metro lines.
The first thing we noticed was the differences between a street in Japan (left) and a street in Indonesia (right):
Where are all the people? They are on their bikes and on foot!
And Japan has done such a good job with city planning (at least compared to Indonesia and the U.S.). There are city parks all over the place which are calm and peaceful and full of big trees and birds
On our two days in Osaka we went to the Palace (and great palace gardens/forest one day and tried to go to the aquarium the other. But we stood in a long line to get tickets and when we finally got to the front and I was ready to pay for them, we found out that they were timed entrances and our entrance was not going to be for nearly 3 hours. It was hot and we didn't want to stand in the sun for that long so we skipped the tickets. But, it turned out the line for the Ferris Wheel was much shorter (as long as you didn't want to ride in the special carriages with glass floors -- that line was long-- and there is no way I'm going that high in the air with a glass floor. Just being in a Ferris Wheel is a lot of bravery for me.
Japanese sense of fashion and design is really fun:
After two and a half days on our own in Osaka we went to Kobe to visit Mika. It was great to see her in her own country and to hear about her teaching, etc.
And did I mention how delicious everything was?
From Ashiya with Mika, it was on to Kyoto on the train. Mika took us to the station on her way to work and we took a train to the north. We were met by Mika's colleague Ryosuke at the train station and spent the first night in campus housing and the second in a very modern hotel near the station. We went on a campus tour with Ryosuke on the first day, then he picked us up early in the morning for a bus ride to the forest just above campus where we went for a walk, and visited a temple on the way back down. That afternoon I gave my lecture, then the next night we took the train back to Kansai and flew back to Denpasar.
Japan was pretty amazing for how efficient it was (especially coming from Indonesia, I think), but it was also affordable, beautiful and interesting. A week was too short a time to be there, I hope I am able to go back for longer before too long.
Japan was pretty amazing for how efficient it was (especially coming from Indonesia, I think), but it was also affordable, beautiful and interesting. A week was too short a time to be there, I hope I am able to go back for longer before too long.