HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY BLOG

This blog is officially one year old!!! That means we have survived our first year in Japan in one piece. Hurray for us!!! Please join me in bowing deeply in front of the computer to celebrate. (Note: If there is some one else next to you please remember to bow even deeper than them, in order to show respect.) All this time my little blog that could has developed it's own little following. It has received around 3797 hits in one year, that means that about 316 people take the time to check it our each month. Of those 316 people about 160 of them are returning visitors (I have my tricks) from all over the world as you can see below:
Who knew our so-called Japanese life could be so interesting? I mainly write it for myself in order to keep track of everything we have seen and done. Recently I went back to first entries of this blog and laughed my $%# off. I remember how I could not even figure out how to use the appliances around the house, I barely bought anything because all the consumer goods and food around here are extremely expensive and every day I used to go up and down the same street because I was afraid of getting lost!!! It was even a challenge to change the air conditioning to heater and back to air conditioning during the changes of seasons!!! Now I'm getting mentally prepared for my family's visit next week and I'm going to be the one telling them how to work the microwave and giving directions. I think their visit will let me see how much I have really learned in one year. Wish me luck!!!

Natural Disasters

As you all might all ready know (unless your living under a rock) there was a big earthquake in Japan on Monday. The earthquake was in the northwest part of Japan (indicated by the red area in the map below) and did not affect the Hiroshima area at all.
The earthquake had a magnitude of 6.6 in the Richter scale. There where 7 people killed, more than 830 where injured and 500 houses where destroyed. The powerful quake caused transportation to grind to a halt and several blackouts were reported. Expressways were shut down for safety checks after landslides hit several roads.

(reference: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070717a1.html)

Orlando and I did not feel the earthquake at all. We did not even know that there was an earthquake. We where golfing with some friends (Monday was a Ocean day, a national holiday in Japan) and had no idea until Orlando saw destroyed houses on the club house's TV. On the way back home he kept saying "I think there was an earthquake". Once we got home I checked the computer I realized what had happened. It's really sad to see all the destruction being reported on the local TV channels all day, non stop. We have no idea what the reporter is saying but a picture speaks a thousand words. My heart really goes out to all the people affected.

I realized we have been very lucky this weekend. A typhoon was supposed to hit the southern part of Japan on Sunday. Luckily it just kept turning toward the east and never actually hit us. We even had a typhoon party at the neighbors house and at one point everyone came outside to see where the typhoon was and guess what there was not even one drop of rain!!! Nothing, Nada Zilch!!! Hey I'm not complaining I've been through many hurricanes back home and I don't wish them upon anyone.
I would really like to thank everyone who worried about us and left messages on facebook, called or e-mailed us to check if we where OK. I'm happy to report that we are both fine.

Girls trip to Kyoto and Osaka

As you can see from the title of this posting a few friends and I left our poor husbands at home with the kids (in Orlando's case with the PlayStation 3) and went off to Kyoto (the historical center of Japan) for a short trip. This was the second time I went to Kyoto (refer to the posts in August of 2006) and I was amazed at all the new places and little corners of the town that we discovered in only one day. My friends and had only one plan - no plan, we would just end up where ever our sense of direction (or lack of) would take us. If there was a side street that looked interesting we would take it and if there was something interesting going on we would just check it out, as simple as that. This strategy turned out to be the absolute best!!! Here are the girls and I in the Shirakara canal which we found by absolute accident.
There where a series of small shrines (Shinto religion) all over Kyoto. Here is one of them:
We wondered around the Gion district which still has many old-style Japanese houses called ochaya, which roughly translated means "teahouses." These are traditional establishments where the geisha have entertained their very exclusive customers (not me) for a long time. Sadly, I have to report that I failed in my second attempt to find a real geisha, but I'm not giving up yet.

There was allot of activity along the Kamogawa river walk. People of all shapes and sizes where walking and hanging out so we spend some time there just people watching and taking in the scenery.

We where very serious about capturing every moment as you can see:
Everyone had huge high tech cameras, all I had was my trusty little Canon:
This proves once again that the size is not the most important thing. I managed to post all the pictures I took in Kytot with my tiny camera, go to the following page to check them out:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=8677&l=a4f23&id=608576026

We had a chance to visit the Fushimi Inari Shrine, which is about twenty-minutes to the south of Kyoto. Dedicated to Inari, the Japanese fox goddess, Fushimi-Inari-taisha is the head shrine (taisha) for 40,000 Inari shrines across Japan. Stretching 230 meters up the hill behind it are hundreds of bright red torii gates. (reference: http://www.wikitravel.org/)We walked through the torii gates up a one of the hillsides and almost got bitten alive by mosquitoes!!! Note to self: don't go a shrine in the middle of the forest late in the afternoon. This shrine was really beautiful and different from the ones I had previously visited I definitely recommend it. Here are more pictures:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=8679&l=affc0&id=608576026

The next day we went to Osaka (the second largest city in Japan) and explored the downtown area for the afternoon. There was literally endless streets of shops and restaurant all over the place. My senses where on overload the whole time we where there, as you can see:

To see more pictures of Osaka go to:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=8798&l=928bf&id=608576026

Cultural Exchange in Japanese Middle School

On 6/23/07 (yes I've been slacking) Orlando and I joined a group of English teachers in a cultural exchange activity in a Japanese Middle School. The English teachers are contracted by the Japanese government to teach English at the public schools for at least one year (some of them were going on their third year here) and in exchange they get cheap housing and a decent salary. Hey sounds like a good deal to me?!?! If your looking for some adventure after college why not come to Japan for a few years? As you can see from the pictures we played a little baseball with the kids (13-15 years old). Here we are in our gear.

The afternoon consisted of trying to relate to the kids by playing sports and trying to talk to them in English so that they would practice what they have been learning. I found that allot of kids once they got over the curiosity of staring at all the foreigners (only 2% of the population in Japan is foreign) they where eager to try to talk to you and ask questions. I tried to answer them back as best I could in Japanese so that they see that learning any language is hard and that making a mistake is OK. The funny part was that a bunch of them would consult what to say and ask each other if anyone knew the word in English and after 5 minutes of group discussion they would come up with a question. This is a very common trait in this culture, to always consult and obtain consensus as a group. Once the chatting was over it was time for...DODGE BALL!!!

As a reminder to everyone who has not played Dodge ball in for ever like myself, it actually hurts more than what you remember!!! I made some friends while playing as you can see in the picture below.

I asked them who was their best friend (BFF) and they said all of them because they are all in the basketball team together... even though none of them was over 4 feet 6 inches tall but that's OK it's the fighting spirit that counts. All the kids where super cute and nice, I really think I learned more from them than they did from me.

Okonomiyaki

Ok so what is an okonomiyaki anyways (see picture above)? It is a pan-fried Japanese dish cooked with various ingredients. Okonomi means "what you like" or "what you want", and yaki means "grilled" or "cooked"; thus, the name of this dish means "cook what you like, the way you like". In Japan, okonomiyaki is usually associated with the Kansai or Hiroshima areas. In Hiroshima, the ingredients are layered rather than mixed together. The layers are typically batter, cabbage, pork, optional items (squid, octopus, cheese, etc.), noodles topped with a fried egg and a generous dollop of okonomiyaki sauce. In town there are various (by that I mean 1 million or more it's pathetic really) restaurants who specialize in this dish.

I was lucky enough to be invited to a work party in an okonomiyaki restaurant. I say lucky because now that one of my superioir left I'm officially the only foreigner left in the office so I did not expect to be invited. I guess all my effort in trying to say something (always grammatically wrong) payed off. Another cool part about the restaurant was their unique way of serving beer for ten people (see picture below):

Now isn't this effective or what? Please proceed to pour your own beer please!!! Overall I had a really good time with everyone and tried my best to fit in...including doing a karaoke song in Spanish after dinner. Hey what not? I have no idea what they are singing anyways so why not reverse it once in a while?

Back in the day in an island in the Caribbean Sea

I recently joined the Facebook networking service (http://www.facebook.com/) which lets you connect (in some cases re-connect) to your friends. Facebook is nothing new. I had previously rejected invitations to join but I recently received an e-mail from a high school friend letting me know that a 10 year reunion is in the works so I joined. To my extreme surprise everybody and their mother, father and cousins has joined this service and we are now all connected in the cyber world. If my high school classmates could find me in the Japan, I am convinced they can find ANYONE. It's only a matter of time before they get you too!!!
I am very glad to see how everyone's lives have turned out so far. Many people are moms, dads, married, lawyers, doctor, studying for their Masters or PHDs and/or working in companies all around the island or in the US. It's really crazy to think how we all started in the same place and ended up scattered all around the globe. As a result of all this reminiscing I began to look through my old pictures and found this one when I was Nicole Richie skinny in 1997:
This picture was taken in a amusement park the summer after High School when I went to visit Orlando in California. Check out the Wayne's World car in the background (Wayne's World...party time...excellent !!! Note: you can proceed to bob your head up and down now, if your too young to remember these movies please look it up in wikipedia.org). Then it lead me to ask myself (after receiving 10,000 e-mails from old friends asking me the same questions) how in the world did we end up A) Married to our High School sweetheart and B) in Japan? I don't really have a concrete answer for that. It can simply be explained by 2 one-way tickets, one from Puerto Rico to Michigan and the other 4 years later from Michigan to Japan. I guess your just going to have to meet up with me sometime when our paths cross again to fill in the blanks. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, they already have.

Beer Garden

Orlando and I got the opportunity to go to one of the beer gardens that have opened up for the summer around Hiroshima. Basically they take the top of the department stores and put some some tables and chairs outside and serve some beer and everyone is happy. This seems pretty normal except nothing is normal around here!!! We decided to go to this particular Beer Garden because it had a big Budweiser sign on the first floor. Hey it's Budweiser, how can you go wrong? Actually many thing can go wrong. First of all the menu was completely in Japanese so I just started blurting out random food (chicken, french fries, beef) and the waitress would tell us if they had it or not. After a while we started noticing that they would bring food to the other tables and for some reason (this will remain a life long mystery) started singing and dancing after they placed the food on the table. So as the nosy foreigners that we are we started to point at the table next to us and order the same thing in order to figure out the big mystery. These are the things that we discovered:

1. If you order french fries they bring them in a brown and proceed to sing and dance while shaking the bag.

2. If you order some sake they will come and do another song while squeezing a lemon (for your drink).

3. If you order an egg (boiled) they would sing and dance again but at the end they would break the egg open on your head. Since you are now "hurt" by this malignant egg they place a band aid on your four head.

Needless to say I have never laughed harder in my life. No wonder I was only able to take 2 pictures. Every time I would try the "head Budweiser girl" would come along and tell us that taking pictures was not permitted. Hey I would not want anyone to have proof of these "interesting entertainment" either.

Secondly they had Budweiser girls wearing the same lack of attire they wear in the US except these chicks where so skinny they could not fill them in!!! They are basically spandex with a Budweiser logo on. Hello those outfits are skin tight and they still had space to wiggle around!!!

Last but not least they had this guy singing karaoke songs with the Budweiser girls "dancing" (at least they thought they where dancing" to the music. I really think the kids in the elementary school in front of our apartment building could have done a better job. The picture is blurry because of the movement but you get the idea.
All I can say is that this was truly a ONLY IN JAPAN experience.

Tokasan Festival

This weekend Hiroshima held their annual Tokasan Festival. People put on their Yukatas (summer kimonos) in order to go downtown and enjoy food, parades, summer bon dancing and games. It was very similar to "Las fiestas patronales" in Puerto Rico, except they served all kids of weird food!!! Yes they had my favorite: octopus!!! love it!!! Not!!! What ever happened to good old hamburgers?
People line up at the Tokasan (Enryuji) Temple, a mixed Buddhist and Shinto temple/shrine, which is adorned with red lanterns to pray for good luck by throwing a money offering into the shrine's coin box and clapping their hands.
Here are some people praying inside the temple.

On Saturday night we went to hang out and check out the festival. Along the way we found some of our friends in the middle of the mob of people. Now look carefully at the picture because this is how you properly wear a Yukata.
On Sunday I decided to join my neighbors in the fun and get dressed up. This is my best attempt at wearing a Yukata. Please feel free to laugh because I had no idea how to put this on, so my neighbor's mom (who is 100% Japanese) fixed it up before we left.
Here I am with the kids. Arent they the cutest (besides your own children) you have ever seen?
The kids had a blast and so did I!!! Everything was new and fun to them. We even had a chance to join in the bon dancing, here is a video:


I can't take a video of myself so your just going to have to imagine how "well" I followed the steps. I did find out one thing in the process, that the steps are simple because the yukatas are so tightly wrapped that you can bearly move!!! I guess I'll have better luck next year.

Bicycle Ride in Japan

First of all I apologize for slacking on my blog posts but we have been readjusting to our so-called Japanese life. My Japanese teacher says I forgot my Japanese in the two weeks that we where gone. I told her that I was till switching back from Spanish to English, let alone remember Japanese!!! The way I see it, since I don't know much I should be able to remember it soon!!!

On 5/19/07 Orlando and I joined a group of bicycle riding adventurers. The group headed east of Hiroshima to ride around a few small islands in the Seto inland sea. Since I have no idea what the islands are called I will refer to them as "Mystery Islands". Here is a map of our route:

In order to get to the islands we took a cute little boat ride as you can see:

Check out the view from the boat below. Japan or La Parguera in Puerto Rico? I guess it really is true when people say: "different island, same thing" (once again this is a family friendly blog), even if it is half way around the world.

I thought it was going to be a leisurely bike ride around the small islands, but it turned out to be a 25 mile bicycling route!!! The worst part was that in order to go from one island to the other you had to cross super high suspension bridges!!! HAAAAA the Horror!!!! Here are some of the bridges we took:
The picture above shows the Hakata Oshima bridge.

Here we are with our bikes (you could rent them there, my actual bike is only for carrying groceries) in the Tatara Ohashi Bridge.
Here is the Kurushima Kaikyo bridge which is the longest suspension bridge in the world. This was the last bridge in our route. At this point I could not feel any part of my lower body and my legs felt like jello!!! We stopped at a fresh fish BBQ restaurant right next to the bridge for some lunch. The interesting thing about this place is that they would literally kill the fish, sell it and place it on top of a small BBQ grill until it was cooked. The fish was sooooooooooo fresh that it was still moving!!! Yes the octopus tentacles where still moving in the plate!!! I took video of it to prove it:

For the record I did not eat this!!! It was in my friend's plate!!! The worst pat is that the tentacle was still moving on top of the BBQ!!! AHHHHHHHHHH This is one of the reasons I will always remember this day. The other reason is that I could not sit correctly for the next 3 days!!! So the moral of the story is: "Find out what your getting yourself into before signing up!!!".

Ponce, Puerto Rico

We spend our last few days in Puerto Rico in Ponce (1 hour south of the San Juan) in the Reyes' Family vacation home. Orlando's mom (pictured above) flew in from California to hang out with us for the week. We where able to play a little golf while we where there as you can see below:

Yes the 18th hole overlooks the Caribbean Sea (http://www.costacaribe-resort.com/). You could literally jump into the water (if your crazy enough) after finishing a round of golf.

My family came to stay with us for the weekend. Here I am with mom, dad and my little sister Vicky, oh yeah and that guy who does not leave me alone (I think he is a stalker, the problem is how do you say that in Japanese?).

We invited some of our good old friends to visit on Saturday. Here we are with Javier, Ydalmi, Valerie and Ydalmi's sister. Valerie was simply huge!!! Last time I saw her when was only 2 weeks old, now she is crawling around grabbing everything within reach!!!

We also had a chance to hang out with our super friends Jey,Liz, Melody and Ludwig. Jey was actually the best man and Melody was our flower girl at our wedding 3.5 years ago (see picture below).

I love this picture of the kids rolling around in the grass. Luckily we found our Valerie is not allergic to grass the old fashion way trying it out.

We had an absolutely great time with everyone and we really appreciate everyone efforts to come and see us!!!!I hope to see everyone again soon, probably in Christmas time.

Home Sweet Home

I finally arrived in my home town of Mayaguez (a 2 hour drive from the capital city of San Juan) on Monday!!! Here is a nice picture of my parent's normal cement house in the suburbs of the city.

For those of you who are wondering, yes that is my old Toyota 4Runner in the right corner of the picture. My little sister, Vicky still uses that car to go to collage, that car is 12 years old!!! I was just surprised to see it moving!!!

The next day Orlando and I went to our old stomping ground UPR-Mayaguez better know as "El Colegio". We did not find much had changed. People still hanged out in the same spots, no one eat at the cafeteria and there are still zero parking spots available. Here is the library.

To all the people who sent there, please feel free to begin reminiscing, you can thank me later.

Once I get home my little sister Vicky showed me her new hairdo.
The streak in her hair looks black in but it's actually a mixture between blue and purple...ok, apparently I did not get the memo stating that this is normal. I was actually too distracted her pink bowed skulled earrings to notice the color. So I asked what's up with the hair and she said it's all part of the "Emo" look. Beuler? What? As a result I researched what Emo is and found out that it is a genre of rock music that emphasises the emotions of people. I soon realized that I'm old, but hey if I thought flannel shirts and army boots where cool back in the 90's I guess some hair color is not going to kill anyone. These crazy kids!!!

Puerto Rico Scenery

Puerto Rican Food

Puerto Rico

After not sleeping on Saturday night we proceeded to go home to our beautiful island of Puerto Rico. Luckily since we have earned a trigillion miles going back and forth from Japan we got a free upgrade to first class, all right!!!!!
Our first stop was Orlando's grandmother's house where a good bunch of the Reyes Family members where waiting for us. Here they are holding up their best Japanese pose.

One very interesting thing happened while we where there, it turns out that one of Orlando's cousins is dating a girl names Iria. Isn't that weird? My mom's name is Ilia and off course I'm Iddya and now I met Iria so I came to the conclusion that you can form a name just by following this formula:

I + random consonant + ia = unique name which no one will ever be able to pronounce

Here is Orlando with his grandma who looks good after raising 8 kids!!!
The next day we went to Villalba to hang out with the Ortiz Family (Orlando's mom's side). As you can see we really know the meaning of extended family. Most of them are actually neighbors so all I had to do was walk outside and imitate Bob Barker from The Price is Right by asking them to "Come on down" for a picture.

Once we where there we answered all the typical "Oh my Gosh you live in Japan" questions and showed them an album I made (hey it's not a fancy scrapbook but it go the point across) to illustrate our adventures. Everyone was really glad to see us and vice versa.