A nice walk yesterday through a big, wooded park and a coffee break!
#Keukenhof …
This gallery contains 17 photos.
A Spring Day in #Holland…
A trip to #Leiden…
We went to Leiden today. Another beautiful city, only fifteen minutes away by train…
Fields awash with colour as seen from the train…tulip field in full bloom…
Leiden is a beautiful city that used to be walled and many windmills still stand in their original places at the edges of the old city…
Also home to Rembrandt, you might accidentally stumble on his childhood home…
Tutus and old lanes…
It’s really difficult to take a bad photo here…
Many buildings are decorated with poetry…
More tulip fields in the sunset on the way home…
Hannie Schaft and the Bleomendaal #Dutch Honorary Cemetery…
Yesterday we went for a long walk back to the Dunes to find the Dutch Honorary Cemetery and visit the grave of Hannie Schaft and the other WWII resistance fighters who lost their lives to the Nazis.
Hannie Schaft has sort of become the representative figure for these resistance fighters and her life story is very interesting. There is a memorial statue to her in Haarlem and apparently you can visit her house, too.
Walking through the remote and empty dunes it is hard not to imagine what it would have felt like to be marched through the hills unceremoniously to your untimely death. Apart from birds and wind the dunes are silent and cold.
I can’t imagine being that brave at 24 years old or now, and it brought up a lot of questions about what we could or would do to save another. I am glad we got a chance to visit so I could learn more about this history…
Vegan Energy Balls
Ingredients:
- 1/2 c. almonds-skin on, soaked for an hour or two
- 1/4 c. cashews-dry, not soaked
- approx. 15 dates-pitted, also soaked for an hour or two
- approx. 10 dried apricots
- 1 tbsp. carob powder
- 2 tbsp. ground whole hemp seeds (plus extra for rolling)-thanks L!
- 1 tbsp. peanut butter
- 2 tbsp. ground flax
Method:
Put almonds, dates and apricots in a food processor and mix on low until fully broken up into small pieces.
This recipe is one of my most popular posts, lately! :)
A Spring Birthday in #Holland…
May 9th was M’s birthday. We had a lovely day in Amsterdam and Haarlem…
First I will show you the view from our rented room…Spring has sprung in Haarlem since we were last here and everything is so fresh, green and beautiful!
We are staying near a huge cemetery with a lovely pond and many cherry trees…I didn’t think I would be seeing cherry blossoms again this year!
There was a fair in the big square in the centre of the city…this ride looks terrifying…
We arrived back in the breathtaking city of Amsterdam and we walked and walked…
This is some kind of hop on hop off mobile bar complete with keg…you have to cycle to your next destination…
We walked to Westerpark after stopping at a bakery…
…and had some delicious birthday desserts!
Spring is everywhere…
There was some kind of festival in the park and there were soooo many people and food stalls…
…we decided to head to dinner…
…walking through the Jordaan…
Authentic Italian pizza…they bring the buffalo mozzarella in from Italy twice a week…
Rose *AND* lemonade together? My dream…
…more post dinner walking…
…the most crooked bar I’ve ever seen..
It was a beautiful day!
A Last Trip Out of the City…Enoshima…
The other day we went to Enoshima: a trip I was planning on taking during Golden Week before I knew we were leaving. We have been here many times and have also taken visiting friends and family here, but it’s been about six years. I wanted to make sure I got a chance to see it before we left. Enoshima is an island connected by a bridge to the mainland about 90-120 minutes outside central Tokyo.
It was kind of a crazy idea to come here during Golden Week, but what choice did we have? The crowds were insane and at one point the people were crammed to a stop…
The nice thing is, people in Japan do not push or get angry (usually!) so everyone just patiently waited to get through…
The crazy crowds from above…
There are so many steps at Enoshima. If you want you can buy a ticket which allows you to take a series of escalators all the way to the top. I’ve never done this, though. The climb is part of the fun and makes the rewarding views all the better…
…napping Kitty…
Corn on the cob: charcoal grilled wtih soya sauce….
Random girl…
Tidal Pools…
Wouldn’t want to live here during a big earthquake…it’s already crumbling…
Heading back to beautiful Haarlem again, on our way home…
Children’s Day and Crazy Happenings… #tokyo #travel #backpacking
May 5th is Children’s Day in Japan. This holiday is part of Golden Week, a week long smattering of holidays which have been kind of connected together so that a few, very fortunate Japanese people get more time off work in succession. Many people have to work off and on during this holiday but most people do get today (Friday) and Monday off. Children’s Day used to be called Boy’s Day. Girls’ Day is another holiday (not within Golden Week) called Hina Matsuri, but the government changed the name of the holiday to celebrate the personalities and futures of all children, regardless of gender. The main symbol of this holiday is the koi or carp, who, struggling upstream can be thought of all children in their perseverance as they make their way up the challenging upstream of life and growing up.
Hardly comparable, my life as a foreigner in Japan is quite easy. Japanese people don’t expect as much from me. I am not expected to understand formal customs and rules (despite the sometimes raised eyebrows if we sometimes cannot meet those expectations), but I can’t help but feel that we have been swimming upstream the past couple months with this past week having it all come to a dramatic head.
Minding my own business and enjoying my Golden Week, I decided to head to immigration to find out what the hold up is on our Certificate of Eligibility. This is the piece of ridiculously redundant paperwork we require in order to change from a Temporary Visitor Visa to a working visa, (and a dependent visa for my self employed artist husband). We need this piece of paper to apply for the change of status which allows us to stay here.
The whole process of application was predictably horrible. Immigration authorities in any country are less than pleasant, usually and while the Japanese staff here are quite friendly if you get the right person, they are unable to think outside the box and our situation threw them for quite the loop. Not a lot of people change from a tourist visa to a work visa within the country. They weren’t sure what paperwork we needed and it required about four visits before they stopped contradicting themselves and we had everything they asked for both from ourselves and my company.
But since our Temporary Visitor Visa (Tourist Visa) would be running out on May 13th and since we had a return flight booked back to Europe for May 7th because when we first came here you needed to have a return ticket to enter as a tourist, we were starting to get a bit nervous, particularly since Golden Week was coming and we knew the office would be closed for many of the days and there would be no mail as well.
To make an even longer more convoluted story short, I finally talked to someone who could find my application, still on a desk somewhere, who told me that there was only a 50/50 chance it would be completed on time, before our Visitor Visa expired. With incredulous disbelief, I asked them what I was supposed to do. I had completed all their many trips to immigration and requests, I had photocopied and got official stamps and been there many times-in effect: I had done my job, why can’t they do theirs? They just told me it wasn’t completed yet and they had received many applications in February and March and there was no guarantee it would be done in time. If it wasn’t done before May 13th, and our Change of Status applications weren’t in before then, we would have to leave the country.
Despite my arguing (I have no idea why I always ask questions and argue my point at Japanese immigration-I always know at the time that it’s totally pointless), despite the fact that they have my application sitting there, there was nothing they could do. They recommended I go back to my own country, wait for the document to be sent to my employer who could then send it to me in my country, which I then take to the Canadian Embassy and apply for the visa before reentering. They recommended that I get my ticket in order to return home. I sort of had a feeling that there was something else going on here, like they knew I would be rejected or that something was wrong with my application, but maybe that’s just my paranoia. It is likely just under a stack of other applications, in an unalterable order and that’s just the way it is.
However, upon returning home, it started to become clearer and clearer to me that we had to make some very quick decisions and in saying that, we sort of realized we didn’t have many options. We phoned the airline to see if we could bump back our ticket another week with the hopes that the paperwork might arrive. There was nothing available in our class during the dates we needed and an upgrade would cost about $1500-$1600. Even if we did that, we’d still only have a 50/50 chance it would come on time.
We started to realize that we were leaving Japan. A huge wave of shock and sick to my stomach-ness came over me. What the hell, man? We were just getting settled. I was meeting up with friends, buying furniture, getting comfortable. Admittedly, there was always a small niggling feeling in the back of my head that the documents wouldn’t come in time, a part of me was kinda like, “Nah, they’ll see on our applications we are running out of time and they’ll just hurry up and do it!” There was also a part of me that thought we might get our applications rejected for some reason, but until the prospect of having to leave was right here in my face, it was a lot easier to put it out of my mind. Before Golden Week, my boss asked me about the application, as did one of my coworkers and I told them that I still haven’t heard anything, despite it being a month and I was getting really nervous and stressed out about it. That is when we agreed that the best thing to do was to go to immigration and find out.
(my garden which I won’t be here to see grow…)
So in a day or two, our lives have been turned upside down. With no alternative but to head back to Canada for another summer, we have to take that return ticket. We are now scrambling to ship things home, cancel housing (for which we just paid a months rent), tell my boss, say goodbye to friends and buy some last minute omiyage (souvenirs for friends). It has been emotional and shocking. As most of you all know, I hold no particular allegiance to Canada and I was really looking forward to coming here in a lot of ways. Far from perfect, I prefer it to my own country in many ways. I was happy with the break from it and didn’t have any plans to return for a while. Teaching English has never been my passion but it afforded us the luxury of being abroad.
We try to tell ourselves all the cliches: everything happens for a reason, it’s not permanent, we can come back etc. But it’s still really hard. I feel so grateful for the time I’m able to spend abroad. I am so fortunate. I said to M the other day: “I just leave my home country because I feel like it. I have that luxury. There are people going through various immigration processes everywhere that are trying to escape terrible, horrible situations or people that have no legal recourse or escape. My country isn’t under attack, my people are not being persecuted (unless you count the fascist regime of our current government who is doing their damnedest to destroy our country-but that’s another story-Ahem). I get to spend a lot of my time travelling and visiting other countries for fun because of the lifestyle we have chosen and the choices we have made. That doesn’t mean things always go smoothly. We’ve had similar situations travelling in SE Asia where visas can’t be extended and we’ve had to leave unexpectedly. It just feels a bit different because we were hoping to settle here for at least a year.
So what now? We are scrambling to buy connecting tickets (outrageously expensive on such short notice) and we currently only have a ticket from here back to Amsterdam. M, joyously, gets to spend his birthday in Amsterdam and we’ll do our best to celebrate our crazy lives before we head back to his hometown for another summer of saving money and then we shall see what adventures are next for us. There are many reasons why it probably isn’t going to work to come back here right away but they are too boring and extensive to get into for you, my already far too patient audience. For now, we are trying our best not to be sad and mope (though I have the odd meltdown here and there) and celebrate our last few days here with gratitude and happiness. We don’t know what is next for us, but we will embrace it head on, with curiosity.
Thanks for reading.
xo
A Saturday in #Tokyo: Part 1
Yesterday was a busy day…
I started off in Shibuya where I had a private lesson and then I wandered around a bit while I waited for M to meet me. Shibuya is great. I love it. But it gets super crowded on the weekends. It started to rain after a while, so the crowds weren’t as bad as normal. Shopping in this area is super, but the only shopping I did was at the 100 yen store!
There are so many amazing sweets at the convenience stores here. Yes those are take-away macarons!
Daft Punk truck…
This guy is awesome…
Then we walked from Shibuya to Yoyogi Koen for the Earth Day Festival…
This thing was huge…there was no way to cover it all in the bit of time we had and I believe it is every month or so in the Spring and Summer. It was great…
They freaking love MJ here. Last weekend we saw a whole store just dedicated to MJ memorabilia and now the Earth Day Festival had a whole tent with MJ impersonators (which we missed) and an MJ choir!
This is a shit photo, but I just wanted to show where we ate lunch. Loving Hut is an international chain of vegetarian restaurants overseen by the religious/spiritual dogma of some weird lady. I dunno about all that, but their food is great, usually! We had veggie meat skewers and Vegan Ramen! At this point it started to rain harder so we figured we had better leave if we still wanted to get to the Wisteria Festival which was another train ride away. I should rephrase that to “if *I* still wanted to get to the Wisteria Festival….M was just humouring me and coming along for company. He was such a trooper in the freezing cold rain when I’m sure he would have done many other things than gone to see some flowers half way across the city.
The flowers were at a very old shrine first commemorated in the 1600′s. Some of the trees are said to be around 300 years old. Despite the rain, the scene was beautiful…
Rainy Sky Tree Tower…this was not yet built when we lived here before. It’s kind of an eyesore but looks better at night…
A lovely Saturday despite the rain!
Expat Tip: Yoyomarket Delivers Costco Stuff to Your Door so You Don’t Have to Carry 100 Pounds of Food on the Local Train
by Mike Oakland
When Costco came to Japan, it was big news for foreigners, especially on learning that Japan locations would stock more or less the exact same things as their American counterparts, which meant expats could finally get their hands on 10 gallons of Chunky Monkey ice cream and a 5 pound bag of Cheetos (to chow down on while watching The Wire on Hulu America, which, being the clever TokyoDesu regular you are, …
Yay! I love this.
