Lost in Translation

What a day..toll on our feet is all I can say. Today, we decided to explore the town that we are staying in -- Kashiwa City. Elgin saw on a Kashiwa tour map that there is a park with cherry blossoms, a tea garden, a temple, and a mountain all within walking distance of each other. Of course on a map, Elgin seemed to think kilometers seems much easier to walk than miles. And in saving transportation money, we decided to walk from Kashiwa station to Akebonoyama Agricultural Park. We walked from the house to Kashiwa station which is about 1 mile and then to the park. After mapping it on google maps just now, we walked about 14.6 km all day, which totals to approximately 9.3 miles. Yes, our feet and legs are very tired. A budget vacation is really the best way to diet and exercise --> extra small bites and a lot of walking :) Let's see how this diet plan works!

In regards to my title of this blog "Lost in Translation" -- it starts like this:
1st Encounter:
What do you get when you have *a guy that speaks English, understands but does not speak Tagalog, **a girl that speaks English and Cantonese, and ***another guy that speaks Tagalog, a little English and a little Japanese? Yes, the answer is Lost in Translation.

*Elgin
**June
***Innocent Phillipino bystander that got stopped by 2 tourists

I am still laughing just thinking about it actually. So Elgin and I are carrying around this handy dandy Japan book that is a Point and Speak book with pictures that Adrienne let us borrow. Fantastic book to travel with! We stop this man on the street and we start asking him "doko deska Akebonoyama?" (where is Aekebonoyama?) He looked at us, spoke a couple words of Japanese and he looked like he didn't know how to explain it to us, and then Elgin says "wait a minute..are you Filipino?!" Elgin's thinking there is no way this guy is Japanese with that strong of a filipino accent. Hah! I'm on standby trying to see where this guy is pointing and seeing if Elgin really understands what he's saying. You have Elgin's choppy Tagalog, this guy's choppy English, and me just on standby. We have results, he said to take a taxi or bus. End result -- walk that for a looong time.

2nd Encounter:
After we walked about a mile and just wanted to check that we were heading the right direction. We stopped a nice grandma on the street. "doko deska Akebonoyama?" We think she told us to take the bus or taxi too because it was still far. I said we were walking "ayuke" and I asked her how far. We think she said it would be at least 40km?! no idea... we moved on.

3rd Encounter:
We bumped into 3 school boys. "Sumimasen (excuse me), doko deska Akebonoyama?" They were able to help us point out the road we were on and pointed us to the right direction. Yay! we were going the right way and I think we had another few miles to go. Yes, we were truly saving money here.

4th Encounter: Lunch time at a Hokkaido Noodle house
We saw this picture on their menu that said 100 yen for pork noodles, 100 yen for egg noodles, and 100 yen for 5 dumpling noodles. So we go in, sit down, point on the menu, and the first waitress was saying something that didn't seem right. The second waitress pointed it out so that we understood that we couldn't order like that because those were extra sides on your noodles. Crap?! It wasn't a good deal for noodles, those were sides! Ok fine, we will share 1 bowl of noodles and that's it. We're on a budget you know. So we told the waitress 1 bowl of the pork noodles and that we were going to share. We didn't grab a book to say anything, we just used our fingers to show that we were sharing 1 bowl. She took one finger on one hand and one finger from the other hand and put them together.. yes that means share right?! I guess we'll find out. When the waitress came back with 2 bowls..we didn't know how to say no..so that was it, our last meal for the day.

5th Encounter: We arrived at the park and wanted to see how we could get back by bus.
We went into the local grocery store to ask the lady where the closest bus stop was. She kept on saying "moto" and we didn't understand at all. Elgin translated it to be that we needed to walk back to our car to drive to the bus station because it's very very far from here. There's no way we walked from the bus station to the park!

Pictures of the park:







there was a HUGE kids playground that June couldn't help but play on

6th Encounter:
As we walked back the same way we came, we saw a couple of bus stops but the arrival times didn't look right. They were hours away from the time we were there. We stopped a lady on her bike and we believe she said that the bus would not be here anytime soon and that we were screwed. I think she said it was too bad we didn't have bikes like her.

7th Encounter: 7-Eleven snack
We bought a big green tea to satisfy our thirst from the long walk and Elgin decided to get a snack. Instead of the hot dogs and nachos, this place had tofu, fish cakes, steamed buns, and noodles. Elgin pointed to eat this fish cake wrapped sausage looking thing that came with a clear broth. It was quite tasty and we think the broth was full of MSG.



8th Encounter: We made it home safely to have dinner with the family.
Keisei's mom who we call "Mama" speaks Mandarin, a Shanghai dialect, and very little Japanese. Keisei's husband, Shu, speaks Japanese and is learning Mandarin and English. And lil Yuki, who only speaks Japanese. Can you imagine this dinner conversation? I can understand a little more Mandarin than Shu, and can't communicate that well with Mama. Shu actually speaks and understands English more than he thinks. We had a wonderful dinner and entertaining conversation describing our day. For dinner we had traditional Japanese cuisine - pickled daikon, pickled radish and carrots, cold pumpkin dish with salted egg, spinach with a sesame/sugar/soy sauce grind, udon with pork, and soy sauce rice with mushrooms. Yummmy!