Out and About

This past week was sick week! Eli, Mikki and I all went down with the flu, leaving Jeremy as nursemaid/medical translator/healthcare advocate. For details on that experience, check out his post. But as icky as that experience was, I think that the hardest part of the week was the final days, after the fevers went down and symptoms subsided and we were all feeling better, but were still contagious enough to have to stay trapped inside. School policy required that the kids stay home all week. Further complicating matters was the fact that I went back to work this week. My “transition to Japan” vacation ended, and the email inbox I had happily been ignoring for two weeks required opening. So we spent a good portion of the week huddled around our kotatsu (a low table,with a heater underneath), the kids enjoying ridiculous amounts of screen time while I started to unravel the specifics of how, exactly, I am going to get my US-based job done with a 14-hour time difference between me and the colleagues with whom I work most closely.

Needless to say, this week wasn't exactly a winner.

But yesterday and today (Friday and Saturday), with a little cooperation from Mother Nature, we FINALLY shook off the last remnants of the flu, shut down the screens, and got ourselves out there for a weekend of tourist fun. We are BACK! We were active. And we had fun.

Aquarium
Friday's destination was the Osaka Aquarium, right near Osaka harbor. Check out the requisite pre-entry family selfie!

Two great things about this activity. One, all Japanese school-age children were in school, so the crowds weren’t bad at all. For another, the design of the building is fantastic. No pictures (too busy staring at fish!) but here’s how it worked:

You enter the building and immediately head up the escalator to about the 3rd floor. They you start down a sloped path with tanks on either side (think “Guggenheim”, only with fish tanks instead of art). So on the 3rd floor, at various junctures, you get to see the seals and penguins dive from their little rocks into the water. Fun, right? But it gets better after you complete one lap of the slope and find yourself on the 2nd floor, only looking at the same tank. Here, you get to see the penguins AFTER they’ve jumped into the water. In fact, you can look up and see shapes of people from the 3rd floor looking down into the water as you look up. This whole thing continues, as you keep heading down the slope and end up in the basement, where you see what’s happening at the very bottom of those tanks that have been entertaining you all the way down.

Now, I’m no Aquarium connoisseur, so maybe this is par for the course these days? Hell, maybe Osaka borrowed this idea from Chicago and I have no idea! And, after five days of being trapped inside the house with restless children, I imagine that staring at a goldfish for an hour would have been inspiring. But all disclaimers aside, I thought it was cool. I love good design, no matter where in the world I am.

Osaka Castle
Saturday was even more beautiful out, so our adventure led us outdoors to Osaka Castle. This was the castle of one of the three generals who managed to unify Japan after that pesky Warring States period (16th century, give or take). As the story goes, after years of fighting and various warlords making plays for power, these three generals got things under control. But they each had a different style. The first one, it was said, killed the cuckoo bird if it didn't sing. The second one beat the cuckoo bird to get it to sing. And the third one waited for the cuckoo bird to sing on its own. Well, I know the suspense is killing you, but guess which one was successful and led Japan through the delightfully unified and flourishing Edo period? That’s right! The third one.


Well, now that you know that story, I hope it doesn’t disappoint you to know that the castle we saw was actually of the second guy, the cuckoo beater. Jerk.

Anyway, it’s a beautiful building within huge castle walls, situated in a lovely park in the middle of the city. So we had lunch outside, and the kids played in the castle-themed playground right next door, and then we explored the castle and went all the way up to the top.

Now I will say that the inside of the castle has been completely redone into a museum, to the extent that you really don't get a sense of how it was inhabited at the time. Both of the kids were disappointed about that, as was I. But some of the exhibits showed scrolls and screens from the time, and since Jeremy teaches courses on the merging of word and image in pre-modern literature, it was actually fun to point out some of the details to the kids. Suffice it to say, they had more patience for looking at scrolls than I ever would have guessed.

There. I just jinxed our next attempt at a museum visit.

Dotomburi
Everyone still had energy to burn after the castle adventure, so back on the train we went, landing in one of Osaka’s major shopping districts: Dotomburi.

I had been here once before, but briefly, and years ago. However, everything still looked familiar because much of the imagery is iconic, and widely photographed. The Glico man. The huge crab on the store front. It is an incredibly vibrant, active, animated section of the city, with high end retail, next to street food stands, next to edgy urban shops.

We walked around for a bit, battling the crowds. Mikki just about died when we strolled past the Hello Kitty store—three floors, count ‘em THREE, of just about every piece of Hello Kitty merchandise you could ever want. Eli was patient (by which I mean, not at all patient) while Mikki looked around, but don’t worry, he got his own time in when we walked another block and stumbled upon a game center. 100 yen got the kids 3 attempts at the drumming game, which they caught on to surprisingly quickly (or, maybe not too surprisingly, given the amount of screen time those kids have had in the past month…).

A further stroll down some side streets led us to a small temple. (There are some small temples and shrines in our neighborhood, too. I pass them on my running route...boasts she, who has been running ONCE since having arrived. But the kids have been surprisingly intrigued with them...just wait until we take 'em to Kyoto.)

And then out we went to dinner for yakiniku, literally, “roasted meat”, but really sort of like Korean BBQ where you get to cook your own meat and vegetables on a bbq at your own table. I don't care where you live. I don't care what country you're from. I don't think there's a parent on the planet who doesn't want to jump for joy when she's found a meal that every single person at the table relishes. Family dinners just don't get better than that.

All in all, it was a PACKED couple of days full of quintessential Japan activities. The kids ate it up…we ALL did. It was wonderful to be out of the house, and away from email, and reveling in this wonderful big city that we are fortunate enough to call home, if only for a little while.