Who'd Have Thought It?

This is the next post of our trip post Japan.  It took place in September but I only managed to write these notes a couple of months later.  For contemporaneous reports, take a look at Track My Tour -- a brilliant app that I used to ... well, track our tour.  Here is the link.

The real reason for coming to Louisiana was for our friends' wedding in New Orleans.  Mark and Kerri had met here so they wanted to tie the knot here too.  Nice.

I hadn't been to NO for 20+ years and hadn't really been that impressed last time I came.  I thought it dirty and pretty sleazy and for the most part if you stay on Bourbon Street, that is exactly what it is like still.  However there is plenty to like about the place too and this time we found it.

What is it about guys with guns?

By chance our Kiwi friends Bruce and Linda were also here!  Small world, eh?  We'd been emailing about something random and Bruce had mentioned he'd be in NO some time in September between a golf trip, holiday and some meetings.  What date, Bruce?  Well this date.  Whoa, same as us.  Where are you staying?  At the Ritz.  Whoa, same as us!  

First thing was to avoid the water!  Brings it home to you how low lying NO really is.  On the way down the highway from White Castle, we drove over a seemingly endless causeway over a lake or swamp, I think a bit of both.  The road itself wasn't that much above the surface of the water so anything like a storm (don't mention the 'K' word around here) would simply wash everything away and of course that is actually what did happen…

This was where the canal walls broke and let the water in during Katrina.  Pretty low lying!

OK then

So don't drink the water then.  Fine.  The Ritz provided bottled water for everyone.  It must have cost them a fortune as we went through 20 a day… they were little bottles though.

So the architecture.  Yup, very French or rather vieux carre as they say here in NO!  If you keep on Bourbon Street, about the middle of the grid layout going the length of the old town, you'd find endless bars, restaurants and really weird gift shop type stuff.  OK Halloween was a month away here but I think it would be a place to avoid at that time as some of the people emerging at night time were really off the wall.

Typical vieux carre architecture

With Linda and Bruce we did a self guided tour, a bus tour and visit to the really good National WWII museum in the newer part of town.

Everybody had their opinions which way to walk.  You should have heard the yapping...

OK so I have to mention the 'K' word… Katrina. There I said it.  It swamped the city with some parts, the poorer ones of course, one in particular called District 9 still under renovation 10 years later.  It is happening but slowly.  At its height, population was 490,000 but after the storm it fell to 390,000 with many people never coming back.  It has crept back up to 430,000 now as people move in to pick up bargains.

An abandoned home in District 9.  They put red crosses on the doors to signify when a home is unoccupied

There's a district called Treme, just outside District 9 and just outside the downtown core even in the old days.  It was a residential district … for mistresses and Haitians who fled to NO after the sale of Louisiana to the USA in 1804.  Apparently if you were white and wealthy and fancied a mistress, you went to a certain hotel on several special occasions during the year where single black and mulatto girls went to congregate with their mothers.  If you fancied a particular girl, you made a deal with Mum for a specified period of time during which you had to take care of the girl in her own place (in Treme of course) and pay for everything including any children of the liaison.  Should this happen, the deal became permanent.  

An ex-brothel

So Treme is a curious mixture of nice houses and brothels for the girls once their contract terminated banded together to stay in the business, as it were, rather than move back in with Mum.

The guide books don't talk about this!  Isn't history fascinating?

It always pays to do a tour with a local guide.  They know their stuff and the interesting little stories and snippets that make it all worthwhile. Take the famed above ground cemeteries.  The land here is so low lying you simply cannot dig a hole in the ground so it has to be above ground.  Many are truly works of art, even the multi-unit dwellings which operated much as a condo would today.

A condo in the cemetery

The really interesting bit though is in the understanding how and why they don't run out of space as with cemeteries, well there's only much space and coffins take up a huge amount of space so there's only so many you can cram into one mausoleum, right?  Well, actually wrong.  You've forgotten about the temperature down here.  

I am assuming here that the knowledge we have now wasn't always the case so there was a certain amount of trial and error in the past.  Bodies are not buried or rather entombed in coffins, they are placed in shrouds for the entombment and the mausoleum sealed up.  The combination of hot and humid combined with the sealed mausoleum equates to a slow roast in an oven and it has been found that over the course of a year, the body decomposes completely down to ash.  This can then be brushed to the back of the mausoleum down a purposely built chute that fertilizes the ground below and readies the mausoleum for the next one.

A local law is therefore in place whereby once sealed you cannot unseal a mausoleum more than once in any one year … and that is only for a new entrant.  Very practical indeed.  This doesn't work where temperature conditions and humidity levels are different so don't try this at home!

The WWII museum was brilliant though although we did lose Bruce and Linda who didn't want to stop and read every caption, view every exhibit…

Who doesn't remember scribbling this on school walls with chalk?  Oh yes, young people.  Right.

My dad flew one of these P-51 Mustangs and said it was even better than his beloved Spitfire

The wedding was very nice though with the happy couple's triplets looking very cute.  Afterwards they had organized a walk around town (very local apparently, used in festivals and funerals too) which Mark later told me thought would be just down Canal Street which was outside the hotel, then turn left at the street beyond Bourbon and back.  Something like 20 minutes in all with a marching band and police outriders clearing the way.  However it lasted nearly an hour which was due to road works so the cops took us the long way around!  It was great though.

Stu, Mark, Shane and some old geezer

N'Awlins was a lot of fun!

The happy couple!

Kyoto Day 3-4 -- No More Temples... please!!

This is the next post of our Japan trip.  It took place in September but I only managed to write these notes a couple of months later.  For contemporaneous reports, take a look at Track My Tour -- a brilliant app that I used to ... well, track our tour.  Here is the link.

Today's schedule was another action packed one:

1. Taxi to Ginkakuji (silver temple)
2. Walk to Honen-In
3. Follow philosopher's walk (30 mins)
4. Nanzen-Ji (famous zen temple)
5. Shoren-In
6. Chion-In (last samurai)
7. Walk through Maruyama-Kuen Park to Yasaka-Jinja Shrine
8. Kodai-Ji (bamboo temple)
9. Through Higashiyama
10. Kiyomizu-Dera (view, wooden platform, spring water)

We hadn't managed the full slate on any day so far but today looked a real toughie as Cat's focus had been to hit all the main sites, many of which (quite possibly most actually) were shrines or temples... and I still hadn't really got the difference between the two as shrines in Japan aren't mausoleums, but places of worship rather like the temples.  But the Japanese are a subtle race and I suspect that the difference between the two like them is rather too subtle for a duffer like me to appreciate.

Somehow we only managed a slow start before catching the bus down the main drag in Gion through Higashiyama to Kiyomizu-Dera, number 10 on the above list (we'd taken a quick look at the map earlier and figured that a slightly different order would be more appropriate!) which you reached by wandering through some charming little side streets where there were endless shopping opportunities for crafts, tea and the immense love of the Japanese, namely sweets.  

Overall I think by a factor of 2 or 3 to 1, there are more sweet shops than any other food alternative shop in Japan.  Strange thing is to this gaijin is that the sweets themselves were pretty much the same -- a sort of gooey, spongey sweet mess covered with a variety of toppings ranging from savoury to much, much sweeter.  Like Chinese sweets, personally I don't much care for them but really you had to try.

Kiyomizu is another lovely wooden structure of course on top of a hill amid some lovely mature forest.  Sad to report though by this time and after quite a few temples/shrines already under our belts, quite what made this one special eludes me.  It was very pretty and had all the usual things in it: buddhas, indulgence stalls, incense, bells, crowds, gift shop.  But I think it was around about now that collectively we started thinking that a break from temples/shrines for a short while was called for.  Certainly I did.

The gardens really are real life willow pattern stuff.  Just beautiful.  I wish I knew how to do it for home but then expect it takes ages to do and keep up.

However the next temple, Kodai-Ji, was a little different in that it had all the usual stuff but also a natural spring which was meant to bring good luck, long life and health, love and happiness provided you drank from the stream.  Well of course after a build up like that you just had to partake, didn't you!

Kodai-Ji was in the Higashiyama (Geisha) district and was a real step back experience in that the streets and houses were built in a way that you would have thought they would have been hundreds of years ago.  Lots of small wooden houses crammed together.  

Sorry ladies, I hope I wasn't being rude taking this picture of you.  Looking lovely though!  Geishas these days are much in demand as there's so few remaining fully trained one.

It's a place where you can be a Geisha (OK I know, this is Kyoto so I should be saying Geiko but if I did nobody would know what I mean.  Geishas are from Tokyo) for a day (or longer if you want) as there are plenty of places who will help you do a makeover.  However you wouldn't be able to hide the fact that you'd not be a real Geisha because you wouldn't have your faces made up with very white cream.  This is a sign of a real Geisha apparently (trainee too or rather a Maiko) and came about because in the old days, there was no decent lighting other than candles so to see someone's face, they needed to be illuminated, hence the white cream and heavy make-up.

Indy walked around all day with his Go-Pro on a stick sticking out of his backpack!  He must have hours of people's heads recorded.

We were heading towards the Yasaka-Jinja shrine but came across another place, Ryozen-Kwan-On which was a modern shrine to the unknown soldier of WWII.  It didn't have much red or orange in it like the older temples/shrines and wasn't made out of wood so will likely last a while longer than the others...

It turned out to be our final temple/shrine of the day as we were feeling somewhat jaded (I hope it didn't come through too much in the last bit of writing.  I know I was a bit flippant about the non-wood and non-orange/redness of the last shrine but well... you know).  

Viv and I decided that lunch, retail therapy and a darned good cocktail would put the world back on even keel so we headed to a district called Ponto-Cho which essentially is the road by the river where there are around a billion different restaurants and bars.  

A few of the billion eateries and drinkeries in Ponto-Cho

It proved to be a great place to start and with something of a surprise we discovered that this side of the river (as opposed to the old bit that was Gion where we were staying) was downtown!  It had lots and lots of retail opportunities but the real target for us was a department store called Dimaru which Viv had known and loved from Hong Kong days, there being quite a few Japanese department stores there.

Dimaru equals Harrods.

Dumpling stand in Dimaru.  It was packed.

I'll stop there and just say that it was huge and happily had an immense food basement (just like Harrods) which was jam packed for the hours we spent pleasantly trolling around nibbling on this and that before we realised with a start that something was missing but we couldn't quite remember what it was.

So reviewing things from our hit list: 1) Lunch -- tick.  2) Retail therapy -- tick.  3) Cocktails -- ah, that was it.  Cocktails.

Fortunately there was a Ritz Carlton only a $7 cab fare away and we found that the cocktails there were very fine indeed!

Armed with knowledge of a good restaurant location and restored to vigor by the Ritz' finest, we rejoined the party in fine fettle and made it back to Ponto-Cho for a whisky bar, lamb chop shop... a slight digression here.  Every place in Japan seems to be a specialist eatery or drinkery.  There's none of that 'Japanese' restaurant stuff we have.  If you want whisky, you go there.  If its lamb chops, its there, etc.

But the final delight would be a traditional yakitori that Indy had been droning on about for ages.  We found the perfect spot late in the evening: hole in the wall, 6 seats by the counter, grilled everything and anything, beer and sake.  

I don't think the day could have ended any better than grilled gizzards and sake and happily I had my sake partner with me (Cat) to help finish the day off properly!

The final day's itinerary was studiously ignored in its entirety so Indy and I slid off for some ramen noodles and Gonzu dumplings for breakfast before we headed off to the station for our shinkansen trip to Hakone, our next stop in the Japanese Alps.

Thanks Kyoto.  Just fantastic!

Tweeners

You can't always have action packed days like the last few in Saddlebrook. There are always in between times like the last few.  We had to get to Miami in time to watch the Sony Ericsson tournament taking place in Crandon Park on Key Biscayne, one of the bigger islands off the Florida coast near Miami but we had a couple of days in which to cover the 500 or so miles.  So we stopped off in Naples for the night.

The drive down I75 is pretty dull it has to be said only livened up by annoyingly not picking up all the articles we'd bought in Dick's Sporting Goods and having to turn around and get them when we realized what had happened.  (Memo to self: Always check what's in your shopping bag before leaving the store!).  But the GPS worked just fine and enabled us to reach the Ritz in Naples without much difficulty.

What a nice hotel and what an efficient bunch of people that run it.

We'd stayed in the Ritz on 7-Mile Beach on Cayman before so were looking forward to a pleasant if brief stay.  I'd been keen to stay somewhere on the Gulf Coast as I'd never put foot in it before so as soon as we dumped our things we went for a swim (reluctant on my part as the sea was cold!) and walk along the beach.

The Gulf Coast

First thing to say is that the sea was quite wavy.  The staff said this was unusual but it was also a little windy which didn't help much either. Mind you the beach was enormously long in both directions towards who know where.  It sort of reminded me of 7-Mile Beach except that the sand whilst white was also grubby in parts and the architecture of the buildings was very similar to that on 7-Mile Beach except surprisingly there was not so much of it.

Quite some beach!  This is headed north.  South is just the same.

Now under-developing isn't a trait I usually attach to Americans.  Normally I would have said if they start building something, they build a lot of it.  And there was certainly no shortage of available land along the gulf coast there.  I suspect it must have been the protected mangrove habitat along the shoreline that stopped them.

Isolated clumps of development along the gulf coast waterline

In Cayman, the planners had allowed building right down to the beach.  I don't know if there were mangroves before but there are none now.  The result of this is that there is constant beach erosion along 7-Mile Beach.  In Naples there was a mangrove line that I think prevented some if not all of this.  Wise move although it does mean that there is wetland between the hotel or other buildings along the beach that I am sure houses bugs a-plenty in the humid summer months.

Another great trait of the Ritz is that they have great beds!  Just what the doctor ordered after a few days exertion!

It's only a 2 hour drive to Miami from Naples along the part of I75 that borders the Everglades to the north.  Every so often there were lay-bys where people put their boats into the water and presumably head off into the 'glades to go gator hunting or whatever.

We stopped at one and actually ran into at least one gator that was both awake and interested in what we were doing enough to swim over and greet us.  Reminded me a little of Alice in Wonderland.

How Doth The Little Crocodile
Lewis Carroll

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spread his claws,
And welcome little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!   

After dropping the car off in Miami and dumping our gear at the apartment Viv had organized for us right downtown off Brickell, we went for a stroll to remind ourselves of the layout of the city and came across a group of Peruvian street vendors serving stone crabs and ceviche and chowed down immediately.

Very lovely but very fishy so we had to immediately change flavors at our favorite Japanese ramen noodle shop, Moni Ramen (see website here), where mine host offered us a new sake he was looking to import from Japan.  Unusually it comes in a can (he said it is sold in dispensers like Coke here!) and is served cold as opposed to warmed to a temperature of 98.4 degrees fahrenheit as James Bond states in You Only Live Twice -- see here.

007 would NOT have approved!

Tennis starts tomorrow but this time we are watchers not players.

The view from our apartment!  Not too shabby.