FRESHMAN FAMILY ON THE ROAD
Fun in Tokyo
On the road there is always this battle to enjoy the moment or record the moment. Like right now Glenn and I are sitting having coffee at six-thirty am on the Chao Phraya River. Should I sit here and just watch and absorb or do I now have to talk about everything as it’s happening?
But many people are writing in and asking about the trip, which is odd as I have spent my life travelling and no one ever has before, but clearly between the blog and Facebook, updates are now the name of the game.
This is my seventh trip to Thailand and probably my twentieth to the East– I guess it’s time to start blogging.
We got here three days ago after forty-eight hours in Tokyo. We weren’t even supposed to go to Tokyo- we were originally stopping in Paris, but the world’s greatest travel agent Ben Shubitz pulled one out of the hat when he was able to move our tickets around to avoid a forty hour return flight home – I know, it sounds like the Wright Brothers are flying us, but we will be in Da Nang, Viet Nam and have to get back to New York, that takes serious time.
Since there are four of us we fly using miles and maneuvering four business class tickets using miles at the holiday is not an easy feat, but Ben does it every year and he did it again this time.
So blessedly we found ourselves at The Peninsula in Tokyo instead of The Pont Royal in Paris. Now the Peninsula is a great hotel if only for the toilets alone. I kid you not- if you are FB friends with Lucy ask her about her favorite part of the trip thus far and she will tell you the toilets in her room at the Peninsula. That’s what I love about kids, you drag them around and show them the world and their favorite memory is a toilet.
If my mother were speaking to us all, she would write in about my first trip to Europe over thirty years ago where she showed me an a brilliant time and I took to collecting toilet paper. Foreign really was foreign up until about twenty years ago and the Brits had “loo paper” which was more like squeezing the sandpaper than the Charmin. Having never seen anything like it, I took to saving pieces (clean, of course) wherever I went and was making a collection to show my class. Then one day during a private lunch my mother (leave it to my mother) arranged at The House of Lords, my samples from the various bathrooms in the Parliament fell all over the floor causing me to explain my “collection.”
Anyway, aside from killer views, great service and fabulous rooms, the toilets at the Peninsula do things to your ass you can’t believe. There is a little control panel next to the toilet, and with the push of a button you can have it watered down, squirted up, massaged or hot air dried. Lucy could not believe this and took to torturing both her sister and myself by barging in during inopportune moments and pressing the squirt up your ass one. This would send her into gales of laughter, and elicit shouts of anger from her sister and threats of no more street donuts from me.
Weirdly, I think these are the things one remembers from a trip. Of course the sights are a big deal and partially why you come, but it’s the people and experiences and how they affect you. It’s why travel is my favorite thing in the world after my work and my family – this I inherited from my mother (travel comes first for her) and my grandmother- a great gene I carry and think I have passed on to my girls.
Aside from the toilets the Peninsula in Tokyo gets five stars from me and I am a total hotel snob.
Glenn didn’t like it as much since he likes a lobby and it is lobbiless place. Glenn like all good Jews wants a lobby (an old Jackie Mason joke) so he can sit and judge people and smoke cigars. And he always makes tons of friends doing this. Every year in India he heads off to the lobby bar in whatever Oberoi or Taj we are in, Cohiba in hand and inevitably I find him talking to either a gorgeous girl or a major industrialist – sometimes both!
I’m not going to bore everyone with meal by meal sight by sight – but the vibrancy of Asia captured my heart from the first moments I saw it decades ago and continues to astound and delight me to thirty years later.
I was asking Glenn yesterday, why Asia? Why do we like it so much more than Europe? He said “Because Asia looks forward and is moving in that direction while Europe looks backwards and stands still.” He’s so smart.
So the chance to share with my girls the throbbing center of Tokyo, see Lucy’s face when she first saw lights of the Ginza that make Broadway look like a small time theatre marquee is as exciting to me as the first time I saw it. Taking them both to Harajuku to see the kids all dressed up like a cross between Amy Winehouse and Hello Kitty, and pushing through the throngs of people out for their weekend consummation, something we all love to take part in will remain a great moment in time for us all. And seeing it through their eyes changes your own perspective each and every day.
And then the food. Good travel is synonymous with eating.
In Harajuku, the East Village of Tokyo, much of the food looks like Hello Kitty is in the kitchen. After a ramen lunch, (Lucy could not believe there was a city where thousands of restaurants made “Top Ramen” the main course) we stopped at a little pink donut shop with a line down the block that make tiny iced donuts on the spot and then dipped them in multi-colored sprinkles. Kiddy-kitty food at its best. And they were served up in little pink boxes covered with those tiny cartoon creatures the Japanese love so much.
Taylor was on the search for “bubble tea”– something I have never heard of, but apparently is sold in Boston. It took her about ten minutes to find a place. For those of you like me who have never had it, “Bubble Tea” is a really sweet tea or coffee that tastes a lot like milk and sugar that has all these little tapioca balls floating at the bottom. In Japan it’s served in cartoon-covered yellow cups with straws the size of fat noodles. When you suck on the tea your mouth gets full of these little tapioca balls, it’s quite a sensation, but clearly as popular with the Japanese as the baby donuts as everyone seemed to be carrying a cup– that or Starbucks!
The first time Glenn and I were in Japan together we had dinner at a Tempura bar in the Ginza. For us it has become one of those watershed meals in our shared lives. I never knew if it was because of the magical tempura or the magic of our first being together and in love. But from time to time we will say, “Remember that tempura place in the Sony building? The crab claw was the best thing ever.” So our first night we went traipsing off to find out if it was still there and if our memory was real. Blessedly it was there. We were thrilled, thrilled it was there, thrilled to share it with the girls and even more thrilled to find it was as good as we remembered. Ten years later it was still the best crab we have ever eaten.
And there at the bar the beginning of one of those threads of jokes that families create on holidays began. We all have our peccadillos and each one gets teased for something. Glenn gets teased for always looking for a porter, blowing his nose after he eats and this goofy voce the girls use to imitate him. I am teased mercilessly for my airport personality that has only appeared once thus far when at three am the car was not at the airport. Call me a princess, I can take it. Taylor when we left said she would eat EVERYTHING put in front of her on this trip. We all made a bet that by the time we got to Cambodia she would refuse the fried grasshopper they apparently love. Well, that night in our tempura bar the first thing the tempura master put in front of her was the fried tail of the prawn, you’d think he had served her our Chihuahua Lola lightly fried with a dipping sauce. We are now placing bets on the fried grasshopper.
Those of you who have been to Tokyo know there is nothing to rival their department stores, and their food courts! The last hour of our trip was spent trolling the basement of Mitsoshuku and the amazing food courts. Everything from the pastries to the mountains of seaweed salad makes you want to dive in head first and eat yourself to death. After tasting the most delicious pound cake served in giant tubs we realized we could not schlep through for the next two weeks, we bought a small bag of cookies that lasted us one block.
On the way out Taylor and I could not resist buying the most perfect sets of makeup brushes I have ever seen, and I do intense studies of things like make-up brushes.
Now we didn’t just eat and shop. We saw Temples, about three and went to the top of Tokyo Tower which is like the Eiffel Tower but thinner and taller and from which you can see Mt. Fuji as well as all of Tokyo. AMAZING! We did a morning fish market, not the big one, but the smaller one. And we spent hours searching for the oldest neighborhood in Tokyo. It is the only one that remained intact after the war. I saw it years ago with my mother and her friend the great artist Yasu Eguchi. I wanted my family to see it, it was a Tokyo that no longer exists and on this trip it did not exist for us.
I had a landmark, the oldest paper store in Tokyo. I had a neighborhood and a Temple it was near, that was all the info the guidebook gave me. And by the end of the morning we had gone through four cab drivers and five different pieces of paper where kind people had translated into Japanese what the crazy American lady was looking for.
We drove in circles. We passed the same Temple five times, going in once. We walked miles, asked cops, hotel guards and housewives.
One impatient driver who was convinced I was conning him threw us out of his cab.
Lucy finally pointed out it was a neighborhood, like saying The Upper East Side; I needed to be more specific. I told her if I spoke Japanese and could remember where I was 20 years ago in a city I don’t understand I might be able to do that.
The only real landmark was this paper store, the oldest one in Tokyo. Finally after I kept pointing to that little detail to the driver he spotted a paper store, and screeched to halt, he nodded we had made it. I was thrilled, we all piled out of the car, me bellowing you see I knew it was here, perseverance. I didn’t bother to look around and take note that this was nowhere near the oldest neighborhood in Japan. I went bounding into the paper store, which Lucy announced seemed really mod. Taylor, who had given up on this excursion hours before, was outside snapping the photos she does so well. Glenn had found a hip pottery store next door. We were in Tokyo’s version of Nolita and the Japanese version of Kate’s Paperie….even I know when to give up. We found another cab and I chucked the crumbled papers, gave up on showing my family the oldest standing houses in Tokyo.
If there was little traffic Lucy still had time to blow some more hot air on her butt and we would make our flight to Bangkok.
To see Taylor’s brilliant photos – log onto to her blog at http://taylortempleton.tumblr.com/
Posted in Freshman Mom
