The Gucciones in Aizu-Wakamatsu

On the flight Zach happened to be seated next to seated bext to a 4 year-old Japanese boy coming back from Disneyland (he wore his mouse ears through most of the flight).  It made the flight go easier and even kept people in the immediate vicinity amused.  We had two interesting run-is with Japanese toilets, one ancient and one hyper-modern.  I won’t elaborate on this (though Diane confesses to liking the heated toilet seats).  But we got in late, tried (unsuccessfully) to eat dinner, then slept for a few hours.  Zach has been up since 2:00 a.m. watching Japanese baseball on the TV (?) and practicing his football kicks (with a small stuffed footnball toy) and Sarah has been up almost as long.  While Mom slept for a few more hours, we sought out food in vending machines until the 7:00 a.m. breakfast at the hotel opens.  It’s going to be a few rainy days here in Tokyo, but Wednesday should be sunny.  We’re off to breakfast and seeing the town.

I see that Peter Payne’s J-list Side Blog is gone today.  I hope it returns soon.  It has been a great source of information for us.  I also ran across eki-ben, or box lunches on trains and in train stations.  Some pictures of eki-bens are making me hungry!  In preparation for the trip, we also gave our poodle, Poochie, a good clipping for the summer.  He looks more like a little lamb than a dog.

The first question everyone seems to ask (even some native Japanese) is “Where is Aizu-Wakamatsu?”. Well, it’s about 200 km due north of Tokyo on the shore of Lake Inawasiroko. It is a fairly rural area and the city has a population of about 130,000. For you Google Earth types, that’s: Longitude:  139.98334, Latitude: 37.55.

Ran across this webcam for the Aizu-Wakamatsu train station.  A good way to check the weather from here.

Also found this really good software called the Japanese Learning Suite.  I need to give it a bit more of a look, but the hiragana / katakana / romaji / kanji lookup is just what I’ve been looking for.

In spite of everything going on around here right now, I decided to try and learn at least a little of the language.  So I went off and bought The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Conversational Japanese and Japanese Phrases for Dummies.  I also picked up an interactive CD on basic Japanese that the kids are enjoying.  A small foray into getting Japanese business cards printed got me started on learning the alphabets (Wiki has some good pages on katakana, hiragana, romaji and even kanji.  And a very good page on Japanese names.

From various web pages, I could see that I had Japanese fonts installed but wasn’t able to figure out how to enter them on my PC.  After much reading on keyboards and exotic 3rd part software, I was just about to give up, figuring I needed a Japanese version of Windows XP or maybe some special software.  But then I ran across this most excellent page by Greggman called Windows XP Japanese Input.

In a few minutes (and with a little help from my friend Shinichi Morita — thanks Shinichi!) I was typing in 日本語. (That’s “Japanese” in Japanese).  It’s actually kinda fun …

Got the new laptop set up.  It takes the better part of a day to get rid of all the trial-ware and put on the stuff I use (OpenOffice, Skype, MP3, etc).  Also took the plunge and called the Villa Fontaine Shiodome after wrestling with thie web-based registration for the better part of a hour.

But I did find a good restaurant site called Bento.com.  Looks like lots of good eatin’ around the Shiodome and Ginza.  Also ran across another good Japan blog by a guy who calls himself Greggman.  Especially enjoyed the bit about the izakaya.  Have to give those a look.

My goal is to write a little something every day, and when we get to Japan, post a photo or two.  Right now we are just racing to get all the final preparations made for the trip.  We have plane tickets and the house and pets more or less taken care of.  I bought a laptop for Diane today and will try to book a hotel in Tokyo.  We decided to stay there a few nights when we arrive to get over jet lag and look around a bit.  We were originally going to stay in the Shinjuku area, but found this interesting hotel named the Villa Fontaine in the Shiodome area.  I started to link to the Villa Fontaine page, but see their site requests that it not be linked to without permission.  Whatever they say …

Welcome to the Gucciones in Aizu-Wakamatsu!  In late January 2006 I received an invitation to be a visiting researcher at the University of Aizu in Japan.  After much (perhaps too much) discussion, we decided to go as a family for the summer of 2006.  This blog is to keep in touch with friends and family through the summer and to keep a record of our stay in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan.