{"id":1596,"date":"2023-08-13T10:23:27","date_gmt":"2023-08-13T17:23:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/?p=1596"},"modified":"2023-09-02T10:30:56","modified_gmt":"2023-09-02T17:30:56","slug":"japan-day-1-the-planinating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/?p=1596","title":{"rendered":"Japan, Day -1: The Planinating"},"content":{"rendered":"

Regular readers of this blog (hi mom!) may remember that it originally started as a TRAVEL blog, that we updated every couple of years when we went somewhere interesting.\u00a0 When we started documenting our international cooking project, it seemed more logical to add it here rather than starting a whole \u2018nother WordPress instance.\u00a0 (Also less work.\u00a0 WordPress is useful, but irritating.)<\/span><\/p>\n

But given that we\u2019ve now cooked upwards of seventy meals, and it\u2019s been nearly half a decade since our last international trip, it\u2019s great to be able to finally talk about travel again.\u00a0 And this one\u2019s gonna be a doozy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Leigh had a paper accepted to the biannual (not that biannual, the other one) International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition in Tokyo, so we decided to make a vacation of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have attempted to travel trans-Pacific twice.\u00a0 When I was in high school, I was a member of the Maryland Youth Orchestra, which planned a concert tour of China. In the summer.\u00a0 In 1989.<\/span><\/p>\n

So yeah, that didn\u2019t happen.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thirty years later, Leigh and I decided that we wanted to officiate the largest roller derby tournament in Australia.\u00a0 We booked tickets. We made hotel reservations. We got halfway through our goddamn SCUBA DIVING certification. In 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

So yeah, that didn\u2019t happen either.<\/span><\/p>\n

But given that I am typing this entry while going 200 km\/hr on a Shinkansen, it looks like this one finally worked out.<\/span><\/p>\n

We spent a solid three months or more planning.\u00a0 After two solid years of DuoLingo Chinese, we stomped on the brakes and switched to Japanese.\u00a0 We watched an ABSURD number of YouTube videos, and developed a creepy parasocial relationship with Chris Broad.\u00a0 (Chris, if you\u2019re reading this, we love your stuff.\u00a0 Call us!) We canvassed all our friends for suggestions.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the one hand, did this take some of the mystery out of the process?\u00a0 Yes, it did.\u00a0 On the other hand, I\u2019m perfectly happy NOT to be confronted with the ineffable variability of life\u2019s rich pageant while attempting to work out where to shove my Japan Rail pass into a ticket gate.<\/span><\/p>\n

Plus, there were some things we HAD to do in advance, and not just the obvious stuff like hotel reservations.\u00a0 The aforementioned Japan Rail pass, for example, must be purchased before entering the country, and you have to receive a physical voucher that you bring to Japan with you and exchange for the pass at the airport.\u00a0 Studio Ghibli museum tickets go on sale one day a month. (And when we logged onto the website at the hour of truth, there were 2,500 people ahead of us in line.\u00a0 We did manage to snag tickets, so stay tuned for details!)<\/span><\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean we wanted to work out a minute-by-minute itinerary, but we didn\u2019t want to waste time sitting in our hotel room trying to work out possibilities once we were there.<\/span><\/p>\n

And Tokyo\u2019s the most populous city in the world.\u00a0 We wanted to be ready.\u00a0 Were we?\u00a0 We\u2019ll find out\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Regular readers of this blog (hi mom!) may remember that it originally started as a TRAVEL blog, that we updated every couple of years when we went somewhere interesting.\u00a0 When we started documenting our international cooking project, it seemed more … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-japan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1598,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596\/revisions\/1598"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}