Traitor!!!!!!

It only took one day for my HTB (husband-to-be) to be seduced by SF and to now proclaims it ... his favorite city in the US! While I am still reeling from the shock, I have to admit that I can see the attraction – the city is buzzing but at the same time laid back, there is a huge focus on an outdoorsy lifestyle and generally having a good time, the weather (at least while we were there) was near perfect with balmy sunshine and a light breeze, the bay is right there ready for you to go windsurfing or running and cycling along the shoreline, the architecture where is survived the big earthquake and fire of 1906 is amazing, it's streets are filled with quirky cafes, bar and restaurants all serving locally grown food – a real SF craze by all accounts! Last minute planners that we are, we ended up only having a single full day in SF which does not do the city justice but we still had an amazing time.
I, for once, got up early and went on a walking tour of Victorian homes. We wandered around a neighborhood called Prospect Heights admiring this amazing houses and learning what a “painted lady” is ... NO, not that kind of painted lady, you people with dirty minds!!!! A SF painted lady is a Victorian house in which the redwood of which the house has been build has been painted in at least three different colors. Originally the wood was painted gray, white or brown to fool neighbors into thinking that you were able to afford the much more expensive stone to build your home ... entertaining considering that your neighbors were doing that same, thinking they were fooling you :) Anyway, since then however the owners have done away with wanting pretend that there houses are made of stone and they now just go crazy with the paint pots ... so you have houses that are white, with purple cornicing, pink window frames and gold gingerbread which is that lattice work that decorates the houses – that looked amazing!!!!! I then met my HTB for a cycle tour but was so taken by these little go-carts that you can rent that I bullied the poor chap into renting those and zipping around in them instead ... BOY, was I foolish!!!!!While he was loving every minute of it, I was scared within an inch of my life and at two stages had to even get out of the little thing to push it up the hill because it was too steep and the little soapbox's engine to weak to make it up alone. That said ... going down SF's famous Lombard Street was amazing and I am sure much more exciting in our soapbox than in a car – please see video!
In the evening we meet my old NY friend Ryan and his partner Rhonda for dinner in a bar called 21 Amendment – geeks may like to know that the 21 Amendment was the amendment that lifted prohibition. After a very tasty meal made with the afore-mentioned locally produced ingredients (the menu even told you which farm the beef came from!!!!!), the HTB and I went on a little pub crawl ending up at the rather swanky W Hotel and few G&T's rounded off what was a perfect day in SF!!!
Having said all that ... NY is still my favorite city in the US and so I am super excited about getting on the plane and visiting this fabulous city!!!!!!!

Mendocino to Santa Cruz

Mendocino is where East of Eden was filmed. It's a small, 19th century settlement of sun-baked wooden houses, complete with whitewashed picket fences and flowery gardens.
We spent an hour there, breaking our drive south on the California 1 highway.
Until Hollywood abandoned it a decade or so ago, the town was the setting for Murder She Wrote and dozens of other films. The inhabitants now are mainly kind-faced coastal folk who make their living selling tea cakes and - as this is the West Coast - cultivating marijuana.
Back on the road, we passed clifftops and hairpins on our way to San Francisco (without flowers in our hair), and crossed the Golden Gate bridge around 8pm as the sun was setting. This meant we had completed our overland journey from Vancouver with a couple of days in hand, so we carried on to a motel in Santa Cruz.
A word on American motels. These places are brilliant - cheap, all with internet, big rooms, no nonsense reception, and if you're a fan of cheesy films about outlaws on the run, strangely familiar. I loved them.
The main attraction in Santa Cruz is the boardwalk, where you can ride ancient rollercoasters, eat colourful junkfood and shop in Momo's beach shack. We stayed two nights in our motel, walking around the town and beach and visiting the world famous Mystery Spot, a brilliant outfit that turns a garden shed into an international tourist attraction by building it on a slope. Apparently, it is situated above pieces of space metal planted years ago by alien visitors, and the normal rules of physics don't apply. Mysterious indeed!
Next morning, with my sense of balance honed by the space metal, I took a surf lesson. Thanks to a timely shove from John, my professional surfing coach (now there's a job), I managed to stand up and ride half a dozen little waves into shore, along with about a hundred other learners, mostly aged 12 or below. I finished utterly exhausted but feeling ready for Hawaii. C, who had been waiting patiently on the beach, suggested we go to San Fran first, so that's the next stop.
G

Northern California

We found where they filmed (bits of) Jurassic Park; no, not the side of California Highway 1, but in Redstone National Park.
We arrived in the park after leaving Oregon and spent most of the day there, driving and walking through the prehistoric forest. Redstone trees really are staggeringly, neck-achingly big. Stands of them line the roads and even the small ones are enormous.
The trunks are as wide as a house and 350 feet tall; anyone walking by immediately looks like a toy and feels like an insignificant little blip.
According to the blurb they used to grow all over America and Europe, but the mists of Northern California suit them very well and they are still here (apart from the thousands that were cut by loggers during the gold rush). I was fascinated and awed; these trees inspire respect.
So, like good tourists we paid $4 to drive through one with a road carved in the middle, and then took turns photographing each other shrinking into the giant forest. On the ranger's advice, we also drove down a dark, steepish track lined with ferns and Redwood stumps, half-expecting a dinosaur at each bend, to Fern Canyon, a spooky high-sided river bed with ferns lining the walls and strewn with fallen logs. It's highly atmospheric, though now best known as a setting from Jurassic Park. Movie buffs might like to know that some Star Wars scenes were shot nearby too.
After dark, C bravely drove us along the Redstone-lined Avenue of the Giants and we spent the night, after too many hours driving, collapsing into a very retro motel at Laytonville.
G

Interesting, Oregon

Douglas Adams and John Lloyd would have loved Oregon, as it is full of silly place names. Their book "The Meaning of Liff" matches place names with things that have no word in the English Language, such as "FARNHAM (n.) The feeling you get about four o'clock in the afternoon when you haven't got enough done; PAPPLE (vb.) To do what babies do to soup with their spoons; and EMSWORTH (n.) Measure of time and noiselessness defined as the moment between the doors of a lift closing and it beginning to move."

In Oregon, home of Yankton and Sitkum, they would not need to be so imaginative. Sunny Valley, Pleasant Valley, Gold Hill, Sweet Home and Happy Camp give a fair idea of the Oregon state of mind (as long as you don't visit Hemlock).

There are plenty of websites listing silly place names but here are some that jumped off the map as we got into day two of our big drive (Seattle to San Francisco). Damascus, St Paul's and Lebanon; Goose Nest, Remote, Finn Rock, Swisshome, Denmark and Norway; my favourites Goble, Lookingglass (not to be confused with north Oregon's Looking Glass), Wagontire and Whisky Peak. Just spare a thought for the people who live in Boring.

We've passed the Oregon Dunes, a field of 500ft high sand dunes stretching 3 kms inland, and stopped for a walk around Eugene, a classic sprawling town of clapboard suburbs and downtown businesses where it would be impossible to live without a car (or a thai-dye t-shirt, if the local market is any guide). After about 400 miles we're now in a motel in Bandon, less than three hours to the California border.
G

Birthday birthday girl

Apparently, if you travel across the International Dateline on your birthday then you don't grow any older. But if you go across it backwards - as C did last week - you get two birthdays!
C insists that she is only one year older than before, but somehow still argued for two presents and two parties. So we spent the first part of our 36 hour long Sunday in Tokyo lunching with Chani, Dani and Figgi; the second on board a Japan Airlines plane (no upgrade, before you ask); and the last part on the beach at Vancouver with Mark and Ling and a serious case of jetlag.
It was great to see M&L, nearly two years after the left London. They are now living the good life close to the beach, blending in with lycra-locals and claiming to be completely used to the alarming chirpiness of west coast Canadians. They've just opened a funky gaming store (www.cheekymonkeygames.ca) but still found time to take C handbag shopping and indulge me in a little beach-side "frisbeer".
The surprise birthday present for C was a half-hour seaplane flight across the water to Victoria BC followed by a whale watching trip. I think I'm still in credit for that one. We followed two Orca killer whales dipping in and out of the water for an hour, spotted an eagle and heard the story of lucky Thomas Argyle, a favourite story among the locals.
Argyle was the lighthouse keeper at Race Rocks in the late 1800s and so poor he had to swim for abalone and mussels in the freezing water to feed his six children. Then one day he started buying supplies from the mainland with gold coins. When he died he still had not spent all the treasure he'd found from the wrecks around the rock (bit of a conflict of interest if you ask me).
After that we visited my old Windlesham and Salamanca friend, Andrew Trinder, his wife Lara and baby rugby-player, Julian, before flying home for a pub quiz with M&L and a spot more jetlag.
We're now in Seattle, highlights so far: having our picture taken outside the original Starbucks (hmm, perhaps we spent too long in Japan); seeing fresh fish being caught at Pike Market (they throw each fish sold across the store front) and watching a honky tonk piano man busking in the sunshine.
Next stop - the SOUTH
G

All that dancing makes you hungry!

Weird and wonderful Tokyo!

I ended the last blog entry with a profound comment on the contradictory nature of Japan ... our last few days in Tokyo were a perfect example of just that!
Friday, we did manage to get up early – well Dani and I did, G was somewhat engrossed in his new hero's book, “Cityboy”, and had to be dragged from bed – and make our way to Tsukiji fish market where we spent a few hours wander around arming the weird and wonderful wares the fishermen were selling. This “dawn raid” was followed by super fresh and highly delicious sushi eaten from a counter right in the market ... usually I am more of a “baked goods for a breakfast" gal, but fatty tuna rolls are certainly something I could get used to. After a short visit to the mm office, the three of us wandered through the rainy backstreets of Shibuya and Omotosando, looking in on some weird and wonderful shops and admiring the trendiness of Japan. While I do not always necessary “get” Japanese style – Little Boo Peep anyone? School-uniform? High-heeled wellies? - there is no denying that Japanese people have plenty of it and are not scared about expressing their own, individual style, something that fascinates me over and over again. The slavish dedication to one style you see in the streets of London is something you will never see in Japan; pretty much every person has their own style.
Saturday, we set off by super punctual and immaculately clean train to a sea side amusement park where Fat Boy Slim was playing at a Sunday afternoon rave for crowd of excited but extremely well behaved Japanese ravers (with a few gaijin mixed in for good measure). We had a fantastic day, dancing away to old tunes and jumping around like crazy, all in the semi-sunshine. A odyssey-like journey , during which we must have used every train line possible, got us back to Tokyo where we stuffed our faces in a very interesting Chinese restaurant in Rappongi ... I can not mention what the place was decorated with for fear of having our site x-rated. The last two days were a pretty perfect end to a great time in Tokyo and has certainly helped me change me my mind about the “land of the rising sun”. Thank you VERY much to Dani and Figgy for letting us stay in their “flat of awesomenesss” - it truly was awesome!
Next stop ...Vancouver!
Love C and G xxxx

Geisha gone wild!

Konichiwa from Tokyo!

Before saying anything we'd both like to say a big THANK YOU for all the kind messages, it's so nice to hear from so many people we care about.

We arrived in Tokyo on Friday afternoon and started of our Japanese sojourn with celebratory drinks at Dani and Figgy's “flat of awesomeness”. We hit Tokyo nightlife with dinner at a traditional Japanese Isakaya and then Dani and I entertained our men with karaoke performances of “Moskau” and “Gen Gen Genghis Khan” ... the less said the better I think :) (but the video's on flikr for any masochists out there).

After a weekend of gallivanting around Tokyo, meeting friends and generally spreading the news of OUR ENGAGMENT (we still have both have huge grins on our faces and I only just mange to control the urge to hug strangers in the street), we had an early start (shock horror!) on Monday and boarded Japan's famous bullet train Shinkansen bound for Kyoto.

Kyoto is home to 17 Unesco World heritage sites - observant readers will have noticed that we seem to be visiting only Unesco World heritage sites – so in the time-honoured tradition of our sabbatical we once again went templing. The temples we saw were once again very different from anything we saw in either India, Cambodia or China. The best way of describing them is to say that they are incredibly elegant and formal – low storied and made entirely of wood and rice paper, they sit in manicured gardens with rocks, ponds and small trees and shrubs inviting you to sit down and have a Zen moment ... which we did until all the seriousness became too much to bare and we felt the need to re-enact scenes of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, which was in fact filmed in a bamboo groove by one of the temples – please see exhibit A.

We are now back in Tokyo and have happily fallen back into our routine of eating delicious food, drinking local brews, staying up late chatting too friends and sleeping away most of our time. However, tomorrow we will be getting up super early and hitting Tsukiji Fish Market to see the tuna auction and breakfast on fresh sushi ... Dani and G, you both promised it!

As you can see, we continue to have a great time!

This must be my eighth trip to Japan but as on every other one, I am once again struck by the many contrasts of this place – it's a country of incredible refinement and elegance yet at the same time it is loud and brash. It's the place where you can see a traditionally clad geisha hurrying to an appointment in one of the many old tea houses that line the streets of Gion in Kyoto and twenty-something women dressed up as Little Boo Peep carrying a stuffed sheep in the streets of Harajuku in Tokyo - please see exhibit B.

It's the country of the most delicious sushi you can possibly imagine as well as the most horrendous junk food you can think of. Recycling is part of the national psyche here and heaven forbid if you throw burnable waste in the non-burnable waste bin, yet everything you buy is wrapped into five layers of plastic. It's ok to pass out stone cold in the streets of Rappongi after a heavy night of drinking with your colleagues but heaven help you if you blow your nose in public. It's just as famous for anime as it is for the traditional art of wood block printing ... I am sure you follow my drift.

As some of you know, Japan and I have never been the “bestest of friends” but on this visit, without the strain of work, I think we have come a little closer - it is hard not to like a country that is so wonderfully weird and pink!

Sayonara
Cxx