Harajuku in Tokyo, is where teenagers go and hang out on Sundays.  It’s a heaving mass of crispy hairspray, dayglo netting, skinny ties and precarious stack heels.  The narrow lanes sell every kind of clothing from manga maid outfits in gothic colours to glasses with no glass in them and pastel cartoon character wigs.  It’s very Tokyo.

Once you are muck free, you lower yourselves, squealing, into the wooden bath full to the brim with scalding water, gradually getting deeper and deeper until only your head is unsubmerged.  Then you soak until your muscles turn to jelly and the aches of a day spent walking around Tokyo have evaporated with the steam.  Well, except for Dickon, he’s not a fan of cleanliness at the best of times, and he has no wish to be cooked like a pea. Once you can take the heat no more, you leap out and ladle freezing water from the waiting bucket onto your pink skin until it tingles, then you get back in and start all over again.  And apart from the whole three squealing children in the bathroom at the same time as you thing, it’s really very relaxing.

Japanese loos are less relaxing, but the children are just as enamoured.  Most loos have a little dashboard at the side with enticing buttons, labelled only in Japanese.  The children disappear into cubicles in restaurants to try them out amidst much giggling, then re-emerge, whispering about washing bottoms and blasts of air.  I find heated loo seats rather disconcerting, but I think the button which makes a fake flushing sound to cover any other potentially embarrassing sounds is rather sweet, and very Japanese.  God forbid anyone should hear you wee.

And after three months in South East Asia, the children are finally, properly clean.

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For reasons of decency, there are no photos accompanying this post.

On our first afternoon in Tokyo, I remember being quite disappointed.  It all seemed rather, well, normal.  I was expecting Japan to be different.  But the closer we looked, the more different things became, and there were very many times we had to ask for sign language explanations of what we were seeing.  Some things simply remained mysterious.

One of the things I liked most about Japan was the order in everything.  Shop displays, gardens, railway stations, even forests, were incredibly neat and tidy and laid out with minute attention to detail.  The repetitive rhythms made for interesting photos.

So can you guess what the photos are of?  To make it more interesting, I’m going to give a prize to the first person who gets them all right.  Yes, you heard me, a prize.  I haven’t decided what yet.  Maybe a packet of wotsits.  So get guessing.

This post is for the Gallery who’s prompt this week is ‘Can you see what it is yet?‘

I was introduced to sushi at quite a young age by my Japan-loving father.  In 1970′s London it was something of a novelty.  I wasn’t sure at first, but at some point in my teenage years, grew to love it.  When I learnt about Tsukiji Market during my research for our trip to Japan 10 years ago, I knew we had to visit.

To describe Tsukiji as a temple to raw fish, would be understating it’s size and significance.  It is like a small city with roads, vehicles, traffic police, an auction house, restaurants, shops selling all manner of fish accoutrements and of course stall after stall after stall of raw fish.  Whole fish bought at the 5am auction are processed by the many small outfits, like the one pictured, before being sent to restaurants around the world.

It’s an atmospheric place to visit, even if you have to get up before the crack of dawn.  Everyone scurries purposefully around you, hurrying on their fishy business.  The bare lightbulbs and dark corners, huddles of men doing deals worth hundreds of thousands of yen, boxes heaped high with octopus and sea urchins, trolleys of valuable frozen tuna pulled by harried porters.   And it doesn’t smell of fish.  We shall be going back.

This post was written for Photo Friday at Delicious Baby.  For more travel pics, head on over.

It wasn’t a huge surprise when I found out that despite the European image that they project, they are actually Japanese.  Somewhere near Mount Fuji, there is a Sylvanian Families theme park, with lifesize characters.  This will either be completely brilliant or more than a bit scary.  We are going to find out.

I quite often photograph the Sylvanians, at the eight year old’s request.  She has plans to make a stop motion animation with them during the summer holidays.  Storyboards are being drawn up as we speak.  She set up this tableau entitled ‘Bath Time’.

But I wasn’t sure whether a tableau really counts as a still life, so I took this one too.  I like it’s macabre qualities.  I might ask the eight year old to make up a story to go with it.

This post was written for The Gallery at Sticky Fingers.  This week’s prompt was ‘still life’.

My interest was further fueled by my parents, who visited in 1973, and have talked about it ever since.  Add in a local toyshop that sold Hello Kitty notepads and regular childhood trips to Japanese restaurants, and an obsession was born.

And now I’m going!  Three weeks in the land of sushi and Hello Kitty is mine!  Thanks to a cheap flight spotted in the newspaper, we are flying to Tokyo tomorrow afternoon.

Just the small matter of packing to sort out.  I’ve been really really busy getting things finished at work, so I’ve left it until the last minute.  No matter, We don’t need to take much, and I’m looking forward to buying new clothes there.

OK, packing done, tickets, yup, Japan rail passes, yup, passports, I’ll just get them from the drawer…

OK, they must be here, check again.  Crap.  Where the hell could they be?  Check again, they’ve GOT to be here.  I remember putting them away myself.

Saliva starts flooding my mouth, heart pounds in my chest, breathing quickens as hot  panic rises through my body.  I frantically search every possible location for our missing passports.  Where are they?  Where the hell are they?  If they’re not in the draw, they could be in that blue folder… No.  Crap.  What am I going to do?

Crap, crap, crap.  Where the crap are they?  I couldn’t have recycled them could I?  Could I?  Fuck.

Steve walks in the door “Hello Sweetheart, we’re on holiday! Did you get everything finished at work?  Are we almost ready?”  “Oh my God, I can’t find our passports anywhere, what are we going to do?”  “Don’t worry, we’ll look again”.

I’ve wanted to go to Japan for 20 years.  I’ve been planning this trip for six months.  Six months of dreaming and waiting and dealing with crap at work all for the promise of this trip.  I’ve never wanted a holiday so badly before.  Now it is about to be snatched from my grasp, it’s loss it a physical pain.  A tightening in my chest, nausea.  Why did I dare to want something so much?  Especially something as trivial as a holiday.  Wanting just leads to disappointment.  I will never want anything this badly again.

What can we do?  Can we get new passports?  My father would know… Yes and no.  We can queue at the passport office tomorrow morning, but our chances of catching our flight are slim.  Can we change our flight?  Maybe. No, they were cheap tickets.  Japan is slipping out of my grasp.  Tears of loss and disappointment run down my cheeks.

“What CAN have happened to them?” Steve asks.  “I think I must have recycled them when I was doing that big clear out”.  “Let’s pull the filing cabinet apart, just to make sure”.  Out comes the drawer where the passports should be kept.  Out comes every piece of paper.  What do we find?

Our passports.

It takes me the rest of the evening to calm down.  I resolve never to want something so badly again, particularly a holiday.  I’m not sure that I’ve kept to that one.

This week, Josie at Sleep is for the Weak asked “When was the last time you really, really wanted something”

What’s the point in taking such young children travelling around the world?  They won’t understand what they are seeing and they won’t really remember it when they’re older.  Why don’t you just stay at home?

Mostly, when we tell people about our travel plans they are overwhelmingly positive, Eve’s teacher’s initial reaction was “What an education!”.  But occasionally someone will not understand.

So what is the point? And what can we do to prepare them for such a big change in their little lives?

Because they are so young, I think they have trouble differentiating between countries, so we are doing all we can to teach them about our destinations before we go.  The older two frequently confuse, India, China and Japan for instance, so we look at picture atlases, read National Geographic and talk about our experiences of visiting some of these places before they were born.

We are trying to find out what children in our destination countries like to read, play and watch, and remembering books and programmes from our childhood set in foreign lands.  So ‘Skippy the Bush Kangaroo’ and ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ are on order and the picture book ‘I live in Tokyo’ by Mari Takabayashi is studied with great concentration as we learn about the Doll’s Festival and how to write fish in Japanese.  Playdough sessions are interspered with origami making and Thai kick boxing.  Although I’m now regretting suggesting the latter.

We are planning to see volcanos, coral reefs, glaciers, deserts and jungles on our travels, so we’ve been mining the library for reference books.  I would love it if we went on a walk through the Malaysian jungle and one of the children said “Look there’s a …”  Then I would know that we were doing the right thing.  Having a geologist Daddy is helping.  I’m confident that we’ll all know a lot more about glaciers and volcanos by the end of our trip.  Whether we want to or not.

Learning about animals is easy, with Battersea Park Zoo down the road and a well-used season ticket to London Zoo last year.  We’ve adopted a Cambodian otter and an orangutan called Sen, who lives at Sepilok Sanctuary in Borneo, a place we intend to visit.  He’s the same age as Dickon, likes splashing in the bath, throwing food and playing with his toy train.  Apparently, Charles Darwin’s visit with his infant daughter to the orangutans at London zoo was one of the catalysts for the Origin of Species.  Hmm.

One of the great joys of travel is trying new foods, particularly somewhere like Thailand or Vietnam.  But if you are four years old, trying new food  can be something akin to being made to walk across hot coals, and if you add chili to the food, well you might as well be throwing your four year old to the lions.  I don’t want to have lots of battles about food, so I’m quite prepared to let them survive on a diet of rice, fruit and cartons of chocolate milk for three months.  But I’d love it if they could enjoy eating in Asia, so to that end, and also because we are greedy, we eat out as much as possible, and almost always Thai, Vietnamese or any cuisine involving chillies, noodles or raw fish.  We have also persuaded them that seaweed makes a yummy snack.

I do realise that a four year old will have a limited memory of a trip like this as an adult, but I also think he will get things from it that are not all about remembering.  He will have a year away from formal schooling, a year spent with his family, a year of learning to adapt to new places and new experiences, a year of learning to amuse himself on long bus journeys, all things which I hope will have a lasting impact.

As for not remembering, we’ll have blog posts and photos coming out of our ears by the end of the trip.  Forgetting about it won’t be an option.

The Japanese Bento box is a thing of beauty.  Essentially it’s just a lunchbox.  But to compare a Bento to a common or garden lunchbox, with soggy sandwiches and a carton of juice, is like comparing a bullet train to a third hand Micro scooter with a dangerously wobbly front axle.

A Bento box can be a black lacquer box containing a set meal in a restaurant, a packed lunch made by your mother in a Micky Mouse box with little plastic compartments and ingeniously included chopsticks, or a takeaway meal in a prettily decorated cardboard box bought in a Combini (convenience store) or railway station complete with tiny packages of soy sauce, ginger and wasabi (Japanese horseradish).  Every Japanese railway station has their signature Bento box, with people travelling to particular stations to buy their favourites.

The filling of Bento boxes is an art over which great care must be taken.  Each separate compartment will hold a tiny portion of food, delicately arranged and often looking like something else.  Tomatoes become flowers, sheets of seaweed are cut into Hello Kitty faces and carrot slices become fish scales.  Japanese supermarkets have aisles selling all the accompaniments needed for lunch boxes including plastic sheets of grass, Pokemon seaweed and sesame sprinkles and tiny soy sauce bottles in any shape you can imagine, with even tinier pipettes for refilling them.  We have a set of vegetable bottles with a cherry pipette.  The Japanese word for ‘cute’ is ‘kawaii’.  It gets used a lot.

The central point of any Japanese meal is rice and the same is true of a Bento.  In a restaurant, it will be a mound of rice in one of the little black lacquer compartments.  In a home made Bento, it is likely to be an onigiri or rice ball.  These are very easy to make at home, you simply cook sushi rice in a little more water than you’d use for long grain, until it’s nice and sticky.  Wet your hands, then sprinkle a little salt on them and mold your rice balls, either with your hands, or much better, in plastic molds in the shape of hearts, teddy bears or stars (see above).  If you like, you can make a little pocket for a teaspoon of tuna mayonnaise or a pickled plum.  The last thing you need to do is wrap your rice ball in a strip of seaweed, or sprinkle with Pokemon fish flakes. Oishi*.

Shop bought Onigiri have an ingenious method for preventing soggy seaweed.  The always triangular ball of rice is wrapped in a sheet of seaweed which is fully encased in protective plastic.  At the top of the triangle, there’s a small tab that you pull, in the same way as you open a packet of digestives.  By the power of magic and Japanese inventiveness, the wrapper comes away in two pieces, leaving the seaweed encasing the rice, without you having touched it.

Japanese meals usually also include pickles, some form of vegetable or salad and fish or other protein.  If you are having boiled eggs, you will of course want to turn them into flowers or hearts, they taste better that way.  Don’t let your three year old put the eggs in the pan.  Cracked eggs do not make pretty hearts.

Despite being on a budget, our experience of food in Japan was overwhelmingly postitive, we rarely had a bad meal, and some were truly delicious.  Our two most memorable Bento meals were very different.  One was the ‘cheap’ option in a very expensive restaurant with a picture window onto a river view outside Kyoto.  The box was beautiful and the food yummy.  The only other diners were a middle aged man with his young, glamorous mistress (possibly), who giggled flirtatiously as course after course after course of beautifully presented food were brought to their table by kimono clad waitresses.  Our other memorable Bento box was also eaten by a river, sitting on a log.  The food was a little luridly coloured for my tastes, but the setting in a pine forest with a waterfall rushing in the distance couldn’t have been better.

If I have whetted your appetite for Bento boxes, check out the  Flickr Bento Pool for some truly amazing examples of the finished article.

*delicious

When we visited Japan ten years ago, we didn’t have children.  We had the most fabulous holiday visiting temples, hiking, being amazed by Tokyo’s sheer verve and whiling away evenings in cosy izakaya’s (Japan’s answer to the pub).  When I came across this picture I took of an izakaya one evening, it got me thinking about the differences between travel with and without children.  On our next trip to Japan, I doubt we’ll be whiling away many evenings in tiny, smoky bars, with drunken salarymen for company.  But I’m sure we’ll discover things that we wouldn’t have dreamt of on our last trip.

In Switzerland our ‘evenings out’ consisted of a rosti with cheese and egg in the town square cafe at 6pm, with the children running about playing with their water pistols.  I would have loved to visit a cosy wood panelled bar for a beer later on, but it wasn’t to be.  On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have learnt the German for pirate ship (Piratenschiff, incase you’re wondering) if I hadn’t been with my boys, and I would certainly have missed out on the most scenic playgrounds in the world, talking to grannies, stroking cows, goats and dogs, amazing swimming pools and visiting Chur’s beautiful natural history museum.

Like everything else to do with parenthood, travelling with children will never be the same as travelling without them.   But I know that exploring the world with them will be an adventure.  I wonder what the Japanese is for pirate ship?

This post is part of Photo Friday at Delicious Baby. For more lovely travel pictures, click here