My Lame Non-existent Travel Blog

I've been traveling in Japan for the past week, so I've got a few good bad English shirts for you. The shop was crowded, and my rental cell phone refused any attempts to set the camera shutter sound to silent. This meant my photo opportunities were quite limited. I suppose this is great practice for our new reality, though. After all, Stow is four now, so soon, there will be no one to carry on the good bad English tradition for me. Once he learns to read, the probability of me getting a kid to wear one of my bad English acquisitions out of the house drops down to zero. I hope you enjoy these. They might be your last!

I hear a voice of the delight.

Wildly peaceful mind...It's your turn to shine. Futuristic.

Chain stitch. The world sea is lucky luck.

Good round pace step...

The English is okay, but that's way too optimistic for this early in the morning.

I don't know. You tell me.

Alpaca!

A rational and ritzy kid.

These pants are a party in the front, and...

...a party in the back. I'm so happy lucky!

Since our good bad English time is limited, I've been toying with the idea of showing you actual pictures from my trips. If I did that, they'd include things like this:

Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto

Or, this...

Kyoto skyline...

Or, even this....

Leaves changing at Kodai Temple

But, the thought of putting together a travel blog of the famous sites of Kyoto or Tokyo bores me. Besides, I hate throngs of tourists and all the famous stuff shows up in travel guides, anyway.

So, instead, here's a little glimpse of how I spend my kid-free time in Japan. 

Mostly, I go to books stores. Lots and lots of bookstores. 

But, I also have some favorite places to hang out and window shop. In Kyoto, it's Nishiki Market, a traditional marketplace that has been running in one form or another for 400 years. Here are some of the sights I saw as I walked through this morning. 

A fabric shop selling fabric for obi.

Tamago-yaki (rolled egg) shop.

The only place to go for all your fried fish cake needs.

Knife shop that's popular with tourist because they engrave their high quality knives with any name you choose. It's popular with me because it's been around for over 400 years, and they claim to have made knives back before the samurai were tamed.

Tourists getting their knives carved.

Fish flakes.

All of these shops are pretty cool, but none of them have my heart like the pickle shop does. If I could figure out a way to keep them refrigerated for the long trip home, I'd have a whole suitcase full of these:

Unfortunately, I can't take any pickles back with me. No worries, though! I spent most of my morning sampling. Mmmmm... 

October 2014 Japan Trip, Postscript

Just when you thought I was done photo dumping....Well, I am. Kind of. I just had a couple of more things I wanted to share with you.

First, the eki bento (a.k.a. ekiben). Ekiben are boxed lunches sold in train stations to folks preparing to board the bullet train. I bought mine at a shop like this right before I set out from Kyoto to Tokyo.

As you can imagine from this picture, there seems to be an infinite number of possibilities when it comes to ekiben. Most stations sell station specific ekiben as well as a wide array of seasonal and old favorites. 

Traveling by shinkansen is much more pleasant and enjoyable than any kind of train transportation available in the United States. The cars are clean and quiet, and the ride is incredibly smooth. The seats recline, there is plenty of legroom as well as adequate tray space for a good-sized ekiben and drink.

Of course, none of this matters if you are traveling with small children because then you are holding at least one of them on your lap while also trying to balance your boxed lunch and manipulate chopsticks in such as way as to force your toddler to take a bite of the salmon already. Traveling on a quiet and clean bullet train with kids is worse than flying with them because there's no ambient engine noise to drown out their poorly-timed observations or high-pitched protestations. Plus, the aisles are so darn wide, they can actually race each other down them (not that I would know from personal experience or anything; though I can say with a degree of certainty that you might be asked to keep your children quiet even when that's quite impossible given the excitement-provoking double whammy of TRAINS! and first-time views of majestic Mt. Fuji).

Pink shows Stow Mt. Fuji for the first time (back in June).

But, I digress. Back to ekiben...There was a time in my life, when I was a conservative ekiben consumer, but that time seems to have passed. Last week, before starting my marathon journey from Kyoto back to Tokyo just in time for a 12+ hour flight back to the US, I purchased this makunouchi ekiben.

 Check this out:

The only real surprise was the baby octopus in the bottom middle slot. I'm also not a huge fan of clams (top left). The other stuff was heavenly, though. I especially liked the tofu and pumpkin (sharing space with that darned octopus).

Anyway, the moral of this long-winded story about ekiben is that you should go to Japan and eat one, preferably without small children on your lap.

And now, I promise, the last of my interesting English pictures from this trip.

This is a souvenir shop in Kyoto Station. I looked. The store did not have a single heart, human or otherwise. Talk about false advertising!

This sign hung on the wall just above the toilet paper dispenser in my hotel room taunting me every time I used the toilet. Even now, I can't make sense of it (reading the Japanese doesn't help, either). If I don't need the whole roll, it seems wasteful to finish it, no?

Epic Bad English Photo Dump

On my last day in Kyoto, I found my favorite kids' clothing store on the 5th floor of the Yodobashi Camera. Score!

Nishimatsuya is still the best place to find a seemingly endless supply of bad English clothing, though I think I can now argue that Aeon wins the prize for highest concentration of obscene children's clothing.

The thing is, my kids have enough clothes. Stow needed a couple of long sleeve shirts and they could all use underwear that fits, so I bought those. The rest, though, I photographed at the store. I generally try to avoid this because on top of wanting to fully support the bad English industry, I also don't want to be thrown out of a store (after all, I'd like to think my stupid foreigner days are behind me***). Unfortunately, we just don't have closets big enough to house all of the insane English out there, so I decided to break my own rule just this once.

I MAY have gone a tad overboard. Brace yourselves.

First, the slightly odd:

You just heart to believe if you want to take off.

Clank! It is success.

Huh?

Sometimes I just can't get enough of those positive donkey feelings.

Wait, what? Universal beating around the back and edge?

Take the high ground and wistfully Boom Out!

The world ties the hand that made me happy. (And, frankly, that makes me very unhappy.)

I'm not sure what to do with all the mixed messages:

You! Just follow your dream, OR ELSE!!

Wait a minute...

Just follow your dream, as long as you're going MY way.

Decisive decide.

No, really, decide already. 

If you don't have BRAVERY, what's the point?:

Now, what I like to call The Warble Trilogy:

My Hot Time--I can't think of a worse tagline for a kid's shirt, but all the awesome SAT words makes it better somehow, especially on a faithful boy.

Raggle taggle you pithy high-spirited kids!

Fly high, you jocund amusing fair boy.

Man, if I had a dollar for every time one of these said jocund I could buy more shirts.

Mirthful? Feeling sanguine? These shirts should help.

I actually bought this one. No bad English, but super tacky and with trains.

Win win.

Last, but not least, these might be my new favorites--t-shirts brimming with grammatically perfect but totally unnecessary English. It's like some overachieving English-speaking genius got a job at the T-shirt factory and didn't know what to do with all that skill.

Such good and pointless English.

As American as apple pie and coveting your neighbor's apples.

This is my FAVORITE. Perfect English in the form of a conversation about playing together after school with a particular focus on making sure they do their jobs well at cleaning time. Unfortunately, these were toddler shirts, so I didn't get one for Stow (who according to size tags is the same size as a Japanese 7 y.o.).

Phew. That's all for now. I just hope the person who proofread those last three shirts doesn't set a new trend. I'm not sure I will survive without a steady supply of bad English children's clothing!


***We have to know each other a lot better before I start to tell you THOSE stories.