Venice Beach Bike Path
Today my daughter and I drove down to Venice Beach, CA to bike on our favorite bike path.
Beach parking at Venice or Santa Monica can be expensive. The price changes according to season. In the summer, it can be as high as $14, but if you get there before 9:00 am, it is half price. Today we got there at 8:55 and paid $6.00. We like to park at Venice Blvd., leave the bikes in the car, and go eat breakfast at the Sidewalk Cafe. Then we walk across the beach to the water and sit contemplating the waves for a bit before we get the bikes out. Today the surf was pretty rough.
The boardwalk between Venice Blvd. and Rose Avenue is basically street carnival all day. Hucksters are selling jewelry, bikinis, suntan lotion, paintings, tattoos, sunglasses, hemp products, medical marijuana, doodads, t-shirts, toys, refrigerator magnets, dolls, fortunes, CDs, and anything else imaginable. Street musicians and other performers play for tips. Tourists from all over the world stroll back and forth. On this day, there were lots of French for some reason. On other days, there were lots of Germans. I don’t have any pictures of the boardwalk at the moment, in part because for all these street characters, this is their gig, and if you take a picture they want a tip. That is perfectly legitimate, in my view, but I wasn’t in the mood for all of that interaction and negotiation.
I love the boardwalk, though. It is cheap, sassy, desperate, and real.
Today we went north, toward Santa Monica. We like to stop at a particular life guard station and roll the bikes to the beach, where we take a breather and contemplate the waves a bit more. Here are the bikes, with my lovely daughter on a rock in the back:
Here’s a shot of the life guard station, with the bike in the front. Note my new white and silver Bell Triton helmet. My daughter was wiser in her choice of helmets from the beginning, selecting a white Giro (on the red bike).
The bike path is great, except that, as noted in a previous post, it is full of non-bikers. Pedestrians cross the path without looking either way. People allow tiny little girls to sit on the path and play. Groups of friends stand in the middle of the path to converse, blocking traffic either way. Folks, there are bicyclists going 20-30 miles per hour both ways, and this is what the path is for. The speeding bicyclists are in the right, and if you get hurt, it’s your fault.
We discovered today that it is easy to stop at both Mitsuwa (Japanese grocery items) on Centinella and Trader Joe’s on Sepulveda on the way back to the freeway. This satisfies nearly all of our grocery needs and makes a biking trip to Venice Beach existentially efficient!
Puddingstone Reservoir
This morning I drove out to the Frank G. Bonelli Regional Park in San Dimas, CA to try out a bike route I had found online. I had gotten the impression from the site (Bike Paths of Los Angeles) that there was a path completely around the reservoir. Actually, you have to go in and out of the park to go completely around, and much of the way you are quite far from the lake. When I ended up at the fairgrounds, I thought I had gone completely wrong, but in fact I was on track. I turned around and headed back for the park. Next time I will pay a bit more attention to the map before starting out.
To get there, I took the 10 freeway west and got off at Via Verde, just at the top of Kellogg Hill. I took Via Verde away from the Forest Lawn cemetery. There is a Park and Ride lot just before the entrance to the 57 freeway. It is best to park there to avoid paying $8.00 to enter the park. They don’t charge bicyclists or pedestrians an entrance fee.
The park is full of roads and paths, with lots of picnic tables and other amenities. I biked along Via Verde, exited the park at Fairplex, and as noted above ended up at the fairgrounds, all without seeing the lake. I turned back, and as I re-entered the park a couple of women taking breaks from their touring bikes commented on my Dahon folder, so I stopped and asked how to get to the lake. As directed, I went back up the hill, coasted downhill at great speed, and turned right at the bottom. I soon found the lake. Here are a couple of pictures:
Another shot:
Bonelli Park is good place for biking, and there were lots of bicyclists. There are some hills that were a bit tough for my seven speed. I got half way up the worst one in first gear and then I had to walk. That might have been because I could be in better shape. I find that biking once a week is not enough to improve endurance significantly. I probably need to supplement my weekend activity with some time on the stationary bicycle.
The Dahon Speed D7 folding bike is working out very well. I don’t have to worry about putting a rack on my car, and I don’t have to struggle to put a full-size bike in the back of an SUV. It fits in the trunk of my 2003 Civic. People in full biking regalia on bigger, more expensive bikes with more gears routinely fly by me, but that’s fine with me. I am having a fine time.
I did recently buy a new helmet, however. When I first started, I bought a black Bell Triton Fusion, which was comfortable and fit well. It was fine when the weather was cool, but black is the wrong color to wear in the heat. It leads to baked head syndrome. So I bought another Bell Triton, in white and silver. It makes a big difference. Now I have a cool-weather helmet and a hot-weather one.
Biking is a great pastime. You get out in the world, exploring, meeting people, and getting exercise. As Bill and Ted would say, it is “most excellent!”
Los Angeles River Bike Path
I have been trying to go biking at least once every weekend. Venice Beach is the best experience so far, but parking is expensive ($14 on the weekend in the summer!). Today I tried the bike path the runs along the L.A. River. I started from the John Ferraro Athletic Field located near the L.A. Zoo. Going north on the 5 freeway, get off at Zoo Drive, but instead of turning right to go to the zoo, turn left. There is a free parking lot right across from the gate to the bike path.
The Los Angeles river is a concrete flood control channel for its entire length, at least the part you can see from the bike path. However, water is flowing in the middle of the channel, and there are willows and other water-loving plants in and around the water. There are lots of waterbirds too–ducks, cranes, herons, swans, and many others. I have heard that much of the water in the river is recycled waste water, but this doesn’t seem to bother the birds. Here is a picture:
I headed south toward Atwater Village. For the most part the path is flat and in good condition. At one point it goes up a bridge over a road, and there are a couple of places it goes under roads. For most of the way the river is on one side and the freeway on the other. The river is pleasant, the freeway not so much. There is noise, and car exhaust, but even so, I enjoyed the ride. Here are some pictures from near the southern end of the path:
And another:
Note the power lines, which are above the path most of the way.
There were numerous other bikers, although the path was not crowded. I got there about 10:00 am. I think that it would have been better earlier. Not a bad ride at all. It’s cheaper and more convenient than Venice Beach or Santa Monica. I’ll probably try it again, but I will try Puddingstone Reservoir first.
Brazilian Jazz
Last night my daughter and I went to a benefit concert put on by my daughter’s high school friend, Carrah Flahive, to support the Pueri Cantores Children’s Choir. Carrah was trained to be an opera singer, but got into jazz. Six months ago she went to Brazil to study Brazilian music. She returned speaking Portuguese well enough to fool a Brazilian and singing bossa nova standards.
The concert was at the Sacred Heart Church in Covina, where the choir, directed by Carrah’s father, practices, so it was one of those events where everyone knows everyone else and one feels like one is in the middle of a huge extended family. The atmosphere was warm, friendly and comfortable. The acoustics were surprisingly good, probably because the hall had been built with choir practice in mind.
It was a pickup band, and Carrah had arranged a lot of the material herself, so beginnings and endings were sometimes a little ragged. Carrah was amazing, however. She sang in Portuguese and English with confidence and skill. She taught us about Brazilian music, and made us love it the way she does. It was hard to believe that she had only been thinking Brazilian for six months.
She sang both Brazilian standards and American jazz standards that she had arranged into a samba style, even an interesting version of “Over the Rainbow.”
The musicians, pickup band that they were, were clearly having a good time. I don’t think they expected Carrah to be so good. For me, part of the enjoyment was hearing them play familiar tunes in unfamiliar arrangements, making it work by attending closely to each other and following Carrah’s lead. In such circumstances, there are some narrow escapes, but also magical moments.
Unfortunately, Carrah doesn’t have any more gigs scheduled before she returns to Brazil. She did say she was working on a CD.
ERWC Leadership Symposium
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: reading pedagogy, teaching reading
Leave a Comment On Tuesday I went to a “Leadership Symposium” for the Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC) at the L.A. Crowne Plaza hotel near LAX. I chaired the California State University task force that developed this course, so I was delighted to see the amazing things that so many high school teachers and CSU faculty were doing with it.
Back in 2002, CSU had developed something called the “Early Assessment Program,” which involved giving a subset of our placement tests in English and math to students in the eleventh grade. CSU trustees were strongly interested in “reducing the need for remediation,” and David Spence, the Vice-Chancellor at the time, argued that “If they do it in high school it is not remedial.” The idea was that if student in the eleventh grade knew that they would probably not pass our placement tests and thus end up in remedial courses, they would do something to improve themselves. But what would they do?
I was on the Executive Committee of CSU English Council at the time. We went to the Chancellor’s Office twice to argue, “Early assessment without intervention is useless.” Finally David Spence said, “What do you mean by intervention?”
We told them that they needed a year-long course. They told us to develop the course. We told them that we couldn’t because it would be a high school course, and we didn’t have any credibility with high school teachers and administrators. They said fine, create a task force, work with high school teachers.
After that meeting, as I was driving one of my colleagues to the airport, we were thinking that we couldn’t turn this opportunity down because it had the potential to change the way English was taught in the whole state. It turned out to do exactly that, and more.
I wrote a proposal, they funded it, and we had our first meeting in August, 2003. At that meeting, I described my plan. I said that we would take the best writing assignments from all of the developmental English courses in the CSU system and package them for high school teachers to teach. I thought we would be done in nine months. The high school teachers immediately said, “No, that won’t work. First, the problem is more about reading than writing. And second, we can’t touch anything unless it is aligned with the California English Language Arts Standards.”
When we started, the CSU folks and the high school folks were miles apart. We quickly got a real education in what high school teachers were facing. One of the most important factors in the success of this project has been extensive dialogue and collaboration between CSU and high school faculty. We are now much closer together, and have a great deal of respect for one another.
In the first year the task force created an assignment template and nine teaching modules. The template includes pre-reading, reading, and post-reading activities, a discussion of integrating material from sources into student writing and documenting it in MLA style, and writing activities that could culminate in a college essay, a letter to the editor, a book review, or a research paper. This template can be used to create lesson plans for teaching almost any appropriate text.
In subsequent years, more modules were written for a total of 14. The course received approval from the University of California system to count as senior English. Thousands of teachers were trained to teach it, in hundreds of schools throughout the state. The program is still growing.
The assignment template and a list of the modules can be seen on the Chancellor’s Office ERWC website.
Why is the ERWC so popular? In part, I think it has to do with the following principles that we derived from it after we had created it:
- The integration of interactive reading and writing processes;
- A rhetorical approach to texts that fosters critical thinking;
- Materials and themes that engage student interest and provide a foundation for principled debate and argument;
- Classroom activities designed to model and foster successful practices of fluent readers and writers;
- Research-based methodologies with a consistent relationship between theory and practice;
- Built-in flexibility to allow teachers to respond to varied students’ needs and instructional contexts; and
- Alignment with English-Language Arts Content Standards.
Another factor is unprecedented collaboration between CSU, the California Department of Education (CDE), County Offices of Education, local school districts, and many others. Still another is the way the original task force worked together, and the talent and energy of subsequent members. However, the biggest factor of all is that teachers and students like the materials. Teachers like the flexibility, and the balance between structure and choice; students like the topics, the discussions, the opportunity to disagree with assigned texts, and the rhetorical and analytical strategies they learn. There is a lot of grassroots buy-in.
Now we are six years down this road. The leadership conference had sessions on adopting the course at a school site, using the materials in pre-service education courses, online materials and activities to be integrated with the course, and orientation sessions for new workshop leaders. However, the most interesting to me was a session put on by teachers who had gotten a California Academic Partnership Program (CAPP) grant to develop materials and assessments at their particular schools. They were not only teaching the course, but they were developing pre and post tests, mid-course assessments, new assignments and ancillary materials. The most amazing thing, however, was that they were gathering statistical data from many sources and using their assessments to analyze the needs of their students and designing activities to meet those needs. They were teacher-researcher-curriculum designers, working in environments where the official effort often demands absolute fidelity to some mass produced teacher-proof curriculum that doesn’t excite or engage anybody. And they could prove that the ERWC with their adjustments was more effective than the expensive curricular tome from the huge publishing conglomerate.
This made my heart sing. Of course, no one knows if any of this will survive the current budget mess. However, in many districts the expensive tomes are due for replacement and the ERWC is way cheaper. Perhaps there is hope.
What Do Faculty Do?
Apparently, California State University is facing a 20% budget cut in 2009-10, about $583 million dollars. As campuses make plans for cuts, some people have begun to ask, “Why do we need all of those professors, who only teach 12 hours a week anyway?”
I have read a couple of op-ed pieces which said that even if the state fired every single state employee, including all of the professors, it wouldn’t even begin to solve the budget problem. It is not possible to close the budget gap with cuts only, yet some in the legislature are still trying to do that. It would seem that most of the so-called leaders in state government are more interested in ideological posturing than problem solving or good government. However, this post is not about that.
Professors are evaluated through a process that on my campus is called “Retention, Tenure, and Promotion” or “RTP.” The three main categories of evaluation are teaching, scholarship, and service. Different types of institutions have different priorities for faculty. At a community college, the emphasis is on good teaching, and lots of it. A community college professor could easily see 150 students a week in five courses. At a “Research 1″ university such as a University of California campus like Berkeley, the emphasis is on scholarship. At a comprehensive university such as a typical CSU, teaching and scholarship are weighted more equally.
University service is a wild card. Service means serving on university and college committees, running programs, presenting at campus events, coordinating activities, advising clubs, etc. Service is strongly encouraged, but often not rewarded.
Traditionally, scholarship means creating new knowledge through experimentation, analysis, and study using whatever methods and practices are appropriate to the discipline, and publishing the results in a peer-reviewed journal. In recent times, the definition of scholarship and publishing has expanded a bit to include such things as curriculum and program development and publishing online, although some of these things are still controversial. In the sciences and increasingly in other fields, scholarship cannot even begin without grant funding, so writing grant proposals is a major component of faculty workload.
Faculty have a required teaching load. My campus is on quarters, so the load is 3-3-3, or three classes in each of three quarters. A typical semester load is 4-4. Faculty do generally have summer off, but their contracts are for nine months, and nine months pay is stretched out over 12 months. Summer is typically when much of the grant writing and article writing is done. Without research and writing, new faculty will not be retained by the campus, and tenured faculty will not be promoted. Every year, probationary faculty must submit an RTP packet with a description of everything they are working on, all publications, student evaluations, and a plan for improvement. This packet, which sometimes fills two three-ring binders, must be approved by the department, the college, and the university.
So, do faculty work only 12 hours per week, nine months a year? Let’s look a little more closely at those 12 hours. If one has a three course load, one will indeed be in class about 12 hours. However, if you were going to stand in front of a class of 30-40 or even 100 students expecting you to be a font of wisdom and insight for 100 minutes, wouldn’t you want to be prepared? In my experience, even if one has taught the same course many times, one still needs to re-read the materials, go over one’s notes, and update information. If the course is a new preparation, the professor will spend hours reading the books and figuring out how to teach them.
Designing a new course, or a new way to teach a course, involves knowing what to teach and how to teach it. One needs to read new textbooks, consider the goals and desired outcomes of a course and the students who will take it, design and sequence assignments, write quizzes and other assessments, and generally imagine the conceptual and intellectual progress of the students. Last spring I taught a seminar called “Pedagogies of Reading” that I had not taught before. I spent much of the summer reading books that might possibly be assigned in the course. After choosing the books, I read them again, writing reading and discussion questions, creating assignments, and making notes for lectures.
In addition to preparation time, faculty must interact with students outside of class. Office hours are required, but email has actually increased the amount of contact that faculty have with students dramatically. Many of the emails say something like, “Hey Professor, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to class, did I miss anything important?” However, we also get legitimate questions about the assignments and the course content, advisement questions about the program, career guidance questions, and requests for letters of recommendation.
I have found that the better I teach, the more students contact me. Thus, the harder I work, the more work I have to do. However, interacting with students is the most rewarding part of the job.
The part of the job that becomes a real grind after a while is grading papers, exams, quizzes, and other assignments. It is hard to evaluate real knowledge and understanding with a multiple choice scantron test, although scantrons can be useful. Evaluating written work takes so much time, and involves so many potential problems, including the possibility of plagiarism. Many students have trouble expressing themselves in English. If a student gets something wrong, is it because of their expression of a concept in English, or because they don’t understand the concept? And there are so many ways to get something wrong. Written work is hard to evaluate and grade, and requires feedback from the instructor. However, multiple choice tests often simply hide a lack of understanding. In most disciplines, the harder way is the better way.
Any time that is left over after all of the above activities will be spent keeping up with the field by reading journals and books, participating in discussion lists, and attending conferences.
Are there tenured faculty who slack off? Of course there are. There are professors who just stand in front of the class and read the textbook to them. There are some who are still reading from 20 year old lecture notes. However, in my experience these are the rare exception, not the rule. Most faculty became professors because they had a passion for their field of study and most remain passionate and interested in helping students throughout their careers.
Writing For Busy People
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: faculty development, time management
Comments (4) Today I facilitated a workshop for faculty called “Writing for Busy People,” otherwise known as the “Professional Writing Institute.” We had ten participants: three people from the library, one from kineseology, one from computer science, one from education, one linguist, two engineers, and the Director of the Faculty Center. It turns out that we all have the same problems. We all have a need and/or a desire to write, but not enough time.
We started by reading a piece by Kim Stafford, Director of the Northwest Writing Institute in Oregon. Stafford describes adjusting the spark plug gap on the Chevy Malibu he owned in the 80s, the “hot, perfect blue” spark representing the leap of creative insight or inspiration. He then describes his father’s practice of getting up at 3:00 or 4:00 every morning to fill a blank page with writing, starting with prose and then leaping into poetry. From 1950-1993, Stafford’s father generated 20,000 pages following this routine.
The routine is the key. A writer needs a routine that makes a place for writing in daily life. Otherwise, other tasks, responsibilities and activities will fill the time. Our families, jobs and friendships have an almost irresistible pull. Now that the computer is our writing tool, we even struggle against the myriad distractions that it provides–email, texting, chat, websurfing–all displayed in the margins of the writing surface. The page is never quite blank.
The routine is not the same for every writer. Nick Schenk, an unknown writer who wrote the screenplay for Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, wrote after work in a bar called “Grumpy’s” in Minneapolis. Haruki Murakami suddenly thought of writing a novel one afternoon at a baseball game, wrote the novel and sent the only copy of the manuscript off to a writing contest, which he won. He also wrote in a bar, a jazz bar he happened to own. When he decided to write full time, he sold the bar, but needed another routine, so he started running.
Anthony Trollope, author of Barchester Towers and 47 other novels, wrote on the train on his way to work at the post office. He kept close track of how many words he wrote every day, and one morning when he finished a novel, he still had some time left so he started another one. When Hemingway was in Cuba, he wrote standing on the skin of an antelope with the paper on top of a book case, from the early morning until noon, whereupon he went fishing.
However, the fishing was undoubtedly part of the writing. Even for academic writers writing journal articles, reading, thinking, teaching, talking, researching, and even driving on the freeway are all part of the writing process. We must not mistake the act of inscription for writing, as if we could sit down and have words pour out of us on command. Our insights come from living in a way open to learning and discovery, and our disciplines help us focus and communicate those insights in meaningful ways. Our lives don’t get in the way of writing. They are the substance and purpose of our writing.
Robert Boice’s Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing, which we gave to the participants, basically takes the Trollope approach. Boice recommends making writing a regular, habitual activity, and motivating oneself by setting writing goals, tracking progress, and employing devices such as writing a check to an organization one hates, to be sent if the goals are not met. This works for many people.
Jack Fong, a sociology professor with a recently published book who came to speak to our group, reported a process very different from that recommended by Boice. Fong thinks deeply about the material for a period of weeks, and then writes in marathon sessions. What is important is finding a process that works for the writer.
For academic writers, there are so many potential pitfalls. There is always one more book or article to read. When does one know enough to have authority on this topic? How does one write in the appropriate style for a particular journal when one is more comfortable in another style? How does one deal with harsh criticism from reviewers? What does one do if one knows that the reviewers are wrong?
For writers in technical fields, does the data speak for itself? Do I need anecdotes and examples to make the concepts clear? Will that seem unscientific? What if my readers are a little out of my specific field? Will they understand?
These last questions are about audience. Developing a good sense of audience is perhaps the most important and difficult aspect of writing. Knowing one’s readers is crucial to knowing what one needs to say and do to help them understand. Writing is more about communicating ideas than expressing one’s self. Writing is a social process. And that is where workshops like this one come into play. We all need to share our writing and get constructive feedback from people we respect. We all have similar difficulties. We can help each other.
Lake Biwa
We left Kyoto to spend two days in Otsu on the shore of Lake Biwa, the biggest lake in Japan. Otsu is only two stops away from Kyoto Station, about a 20 minute ride, but it is very different. Kyoto is a big city, crowded, sophisticated, and full of tourists. Otsu is a resort town. We stayed at the Otsu Prince hotel. Here is the view from our window:
The morning after we arrived we rented bicycles from the hotel for 200 yen an hour. We went to the left on the bike path along the lake about a mile, then reversed course and went to the right across the bridge in the picture and along the other side of the lake. By the time we got back it had been about two and a half hours. It was delightful. There is nothing quite like biking along a good bike path, out of traffic, and in a beautiful area.
The Otsu Prince Hotel is mostly frequented by Japanese tour groups visiting the lake. Our room was designed for two, but had two long long couches and a table for people to sit and drink and talk. It is a resort hotel more than a business hotel. There was no internet access, at least in our room. I chose this hotel after considering many others. There are many ryokan in the area, traditional Japanese inns that offer Japanese style rooms, elaborate meals, and lots of ambiance. Ryokan also tend to be very expensive. I finally decided that we needed a Western-style hotel. Prince hotels are part of a large chain, originally associated with the Imperial family. The service was good, although not quite equal to the Keio Plaza in Shinjuku or the Kyoto Granvia.
The Otsu Prince has a free shuttle bus that runs from Otsu Station to the hotel. This is very convenient.
At this point in the trip we just wanted to relax. We biked, walked, and looked at the lake. We didn’t go to any temples, shrines, museums, or on any site-seeing boats. To tell the truth, there wasn’t much of interest in this line. Still, it was a nice place to relax. After two nights, we went back to Kyoto Station, and took the shinkansen back to Shin-Yokohama. We reunited with our family in Japan and had a very nice Italian dinner near Kannai in Yokohama, complete with an amazing magic show. The next day, we were on our way home.
Kyoto and Nara
Our time in Yokohama went well. We are now in Kyoto, and the Granvia Hotel, which is actually part of Kyoto Station. Here is the view from our window:
The shinkansen (bullet train) tracks are right below us. We hear trains all night, but the sound is muffled, so it is actually pleasant. My daughter’s Japanese is improving, but still not up to complex negotiations, so when we came down here from Yokohama on the shinkansen, she accidentally bought the most expensive tickets possible, reserved seats on a nozomi super-express. The nozomi is the newest, fastest train with a long shovel-like nose. We arrived in Kyoto in a little over two hours, after enjoying boxed lunches we bought in Shin-Yokohama Station.
Trains are an integral part of Japanese culture. In Los Angeles we build slow trains to nowhere and wonder why people don’t ride them. In Japan, life revolves around train stations, which contain shops, department stores, and most necessities of life. The trains are fast, reliable, and easy to use. One does not need a car for most purposes.
Yesterday we took a train to Kamo Station in Nara, and then a bus up to Gansenji Temple. I wanted to revisit a hiking course that my wife and I had taken 22 years ago, from Gansenji to Joruriji Temple. Along the way there are a large number of images of Buddha carved into various boulders. We bought some mochi (pounded rice with red bean paste inside) from a lady at Gansenji, who could have easily been the same lady who sold rice balls to my wife and me on the earlier trip. When my wife and I had come, it was a cold, drizzling winter day. This time in the spring the landscape was lush and green, the sky was blue, and birds were everywhere. Some things were the same, and some had changed. The trail was well marked, at least if you could read hiragana, and we made it to Joruriji in good time. Here is a picture of Joruriji:
There are nine images of Buddha in this small temple. After visiting Joruriji, we happened upon a bus that was going back to Kamo Station, so we had time to go to Nara Deer Park and Todaiji Temple as well. The deer wander freely among the temples, and bow to passersby to beg for food. Visitors can buy deer food from carts, but if you have other snacks, such as a roasted sweet potato, the deer can become annoyingly persistent. Here is a typical resident of the Deer Park:
Today we will move to Otsu, near Lake Biwa. Our family says that it will be boring, but we are hoping that that means relaxing.
Japan: First Day
My daughter and I are at the Keio Plaza Hotel in Shinjuku. When one flies to Tokyo, one actually lands in Narita, about 90 minutes away from Tokyo by bus. As usual for our first day when we come to Japan, we are up at 4:00 am. Jet lag is a mysterious but predictable phenomenon. For this reason, we like to take the airport limousine to a nice hotel for the first night before we move on to Yokohama to visit family.
Japan seems to be very focused on the dangers of swine flu. When we landed, we had to wait for about 20 minutes while a team of masked quarantine officers in disposable coveralls checked everyone for symptoms. You were supposed to raise your hand if you felt sick. Every passenger had to fill out a form about where they had been, where they were going, and what symptoms they had or didn’t have. There was even a device set up that was supposed to monitor your temperature as you went through the line. The hotel made us fill out more forms about our health. I don’t really see how this could help.
When we first started coming to Japan 22 years ago, we would wake up before the rest of the household and walk to the Denny’s in Honomoku. This Denny’s is better than any Denny’s in the U.S. We started going there because we needed coffee, and Denny’s has coffee refills, what they call “Another Cup” service. The restaurant has parking underneath, like many in Japan, so it is above the hustle and bustle of the street, and is in fact, an oasis of American serenity (perhaps a contradiction in terms, I know). Both American-style and Japanese-style food is available, and I have never been disappointed in either. For some reason, they always have excellent papaya.
Since our first-day routine has shifted to Shinjuku we have other favorites. Last night we ate at a noodle shop with handmade udon (a thick noodle) about two blocks from the hotel. My wife and daughter had eaten there last time they were here. The food was excellent and reasonable. I don’t know the name of the restaurant, however, because there was no Romanji, only Japanese. I had kitsune udon, which has fried tofu on top.
(Actually, we went by this morning. It was closed, but the steel door said “Udon Sangokuichi”)
Today we will look for a sandwich and coffee shop in Shinjuku Station my wife and I visited last time we were here together. And then we will be on to Yokohama, perhaps after visiting Meiji Jingu shrine.
Note: We found the sandwich shop, which is called “Natural Beat Eat Cafe.” Here’s a picture:
