Hey everybody – this is just a heads-up to let you know that I’ll be in Beijing for just over a week. It’s my first time going to mainland China. Catch you on the flipside.

Well, folks, my tourism project with ICIEA has finally come to a close. It was a lot of fun, and I’m thankful for the experience. I created a video to precede my talk to the crowd gathered at the international fair we held on Sunday last weekend. It was a pretty fun time. I enjoyed looking over the posters and photography from other monitor tourists before showing my DVDs and then getting up to speak. Those videos have been arranged in a playlist and embedded above. The first 2 in the playlist are available in full 1080p HD, so don’t miss out. The remaining 4 have been previously featured on this site.

Anyhoo – I was asked to deliver a bilingual speech, so I frequently repeated myself, I’m afraid. I’m fairly sure that both the Japanese people and the English speaking foreigners in the crowd were able to follow me reasonably well. My take: Imabari should play up its unique food heritage in a play to put itself on foreigners’ radar. I explained the concept of food tourism, and how most foreign people who go to Hiroshima go there in order to take in the history, the museums, and the sights. But they’d be foolish to miss out on some okonomiyaki while they’re there. (Am I right?)

Imabari is the crosspoint of 3 major arteries of transportation, yet people no longer stop here on their way elsewhere on Shikoku. I urged them to think about the slogan thought up by my friend Harry; “Shikoku Starts Here.” Great slogan! If only we could get some people to take a break from their travels, spend a night here, and eat some yakitori. That’s right, yakitori. Imabari is currently the #2 city in all of Japan for yakitori, and it has a unique take on it, at that. In Imabari, shops make yakitori on sheet metal griddles and handheld steel plates instead of on skewers over charcoal. It’s said that this type of yakitori started because Imabari people are impatient and they want their food lickety-split. (It’s also likely that the ship building industry’s presence meant that loads of scrap steel plates were readily available…) DELICIOUS, by the way.

Anyway, my other recommendations were for people to get online and add information to the English language Wikipedia and Wikitravel entries. (I also told them they could pay me to do it….semi-facetiously. Got some laughs. The offer still stands, if you’re reading this, guys. Ha ha. ) All in all, I think my suggestions were well received, and I think the event went well. I want to say kudos to the other foreigners who volunteered their time and to all of the Japanese staff who worked so tirelessly on this project. お疲れ様でした！

I may or may not bring this topic up once more on this blog. It seems there may be some newspaper articles coming up out of this. And it’s also possible that I’ll post a song about Imabari’s yakitori. (No joke. It was made when we were the #1 city for yakitori. Perhaps with the aid of foreign tourism, we can reclaim the title?)

Trip note: I’m currently writing this from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I’ll be here in Vietnam for a bit before making a sweep through Singapore (2nd time), Malaysia (2nd time), and Thailand. I’ll see everybody on the other side of the winter break. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!

This first video shows a bunch of stuff in Naha and the southern parts of Okinawa’s main island. You’ll see clips from the Peace Memorial Park & Museum, Himeyuri Monument, the Naha Harbor Diner, Shuri Castle, and a bus trip northward to the Nago and Motobu area.

The second video features our visit to the Churaumi Aquarium, famous for having the largest single viewing window in any aquarium on earth (yes – bigger than Atlanta’s) and three whale sharks in the same tank. You’ll also see Cape Hedo, a lovely secluded beach where we snorkeled an afternoon away, a restaurant where we tried raw goat meat (yes…goat sashimi…with skin still attached, even…), and random good times in the area.

The final video is basically a ton of scuba diving. Why? Well, that’s kind of what we did in Okinawa. A ton of scuba diving. I went there hoping for 3 or 4 dives, but we pulled off 7 killer dives in the lovely tropical waters. Lots of seriously old reefs (they are freaking huge, mature architectural structures – amazing, really) to visit, fish to see, and nooks and crannies to explore. We did three dives at the Sunabe Sea Wall, one dive out at Okuma Beach Resort, and three more dives out in the Kerama Islands. Gorgeous. I hope to return and dive in the Ishigaki and Yonaguni areas someday. Perhaps with manta rays or hammerhead sharks.

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Whoo hoo! The last video from the daytrip – the first stage of the Imabari City Foreign Tourism Project – has now been uploaded! Actually, I uploaded it ages ago and simply ran out of time to post it here, too, so many of you have already seen it. Anyhoo, as I hinted in the annotations on an earlier video, it contains a brief glimpse of a naked lady on a towel. Stay classy, Omishima. Ha ha.

In the video, you can see us enjoy some primo Hakata Salt Ice Cream. There’s a recipe available for it on the official Hakata Salt website – check it out if you’d like to give it a go. You can see the Japanese Wikipedia entry for the uber-impressive Oyamazumi Shrine on Omishima here. If you don’t read Japanese, you can just know that it houses a seriously astounding collection of Japanese National Treasures – in the form of oldschool armor. It’s great. The video finishes off with a few shots from the Tokoro Art Museum. My favorite part (other than the self-serve coffee and astounding view) was the wooden vending machine. I’d love it if it did give me change in toothpicks.

In this video you can see the inside of one of Imabari’s novelty attractions – the towel art museum located in Asakura. In Japanese it’s called タオル美術館ICHIRO. It’s a pretty trippy place, but I give the museum props for taking a local industry and making a fun outing out of it. Imabari City makes 60% or more of the domestically produced towels in Japan, so it’s common to hear about the towels – but you don’t often get to see animals made from towels, or watch the row of mechanical looms create them at high speed. Unfortunately, all of the cute stuff (the art part) is in exhibits where photography is prohibited, so I can’t share any of it with you. But I can recommend that you go there once for yourself just to see what it’s like.

Wow! Twofer Tuesday! This video shows us arriving in front of the Murakami Pirate Museum (which I’ve visited previously with my students). The restaurant operates a touring boat that takes you through the rapids (another thing I’ve done previously). And yes, this is totally where they hold the annual Pirate Race – so glad you asked! The Japanese name of the place is 村上水軍博物館. We tried on armor and goofed off a bunch. But we didn’t have much time, so we had to keep moving.

[Yup, these are both from the Imabari City Foreign Tourism Project daytrip. How ever did you guess? Last video from the daytrip will go up tomorrow, guys!]

Hello, hello! I know, I keep making it harder and harder for everyone to believe I’m not dead. But I’m not, please rest assured. Allow me to break the radio silence I’ve had going for…almost all of June, and post a quick video I’ve uploaded. Last weekend (yesterday, actually), I went on the first chunk of the Imabari City Foreign Tourism Project’s Monitor Tour, or as I affectionately refer to it, ICFTPMT. (No, I really don’t call it that. Ha ha.) This was the daytrip portion of the project, so I jumped onto a charter bus with my fellow monitors, our ICIEA colleagues, and a few folks from the local government’s tourism board. We then bounced around all over Imabari – in both the city proper and out on the islands. This is the first video of a few, hopefully. Enjoy!

(Going to Tokyo for the upcoming weekend, if anyone fancies a meet-up. Anyone in Tokyo, obviously. Shoot me an email or give me a call.)

Allow me to open this short entry with a quick quote. I’m stealing from myself here, when I posted my Tainan pictures. “Tainan is way cooler than Taipei for the lazy casual cultural tourists. … Here’s an analogy for you SAT-prep nerds out there. ‘Tainan’ is to ‘Taipei’ as “Kyoto” is to ‘Tokyo.’” You see, if you’re not a person who wants to shop, you might run out of stuff to do. Granted, I got to stay at a super trendy boutique hotel, eat lots of western food that I’ve missed so much, and generally feel pampered. But it wasn’t a particularly “Taiwan-y” experience. It was the same experience you can get in any large city anywhere. I loved the museums and temples that we got to see, but at the end of the day, I really wished I’d spent more time in Tainan. Incidentally, I’ve heard the same from friends who’ve also traveled to Taiwan. Oh – one last interesting thing that happened is that I bumped into some JETs from my area at random in the middle of Taipei. I was chillin’ out at Cold Stone Creamery (for the second or third time) and they walked right in front of me. I shouted out to them and we caught up for a second, but we were all sort of shell-shocked at the abrupt coincidental meeting. Ha ha. Seriously, what are the odds that that happens unplanned?

This was so weird, it really deserved its own post. No but(t)s about it. I went to a restaurant in Taipei called 便所主题餐厅 in Chinese, or “Modern Toilet” in English. It is exactly what it claims to be. A restaurant themed entirely around toilets and other bathroom fixtures. You can visit the official English site here or the official Japanese version here. Here’s a quick video that I whipped up.

Here are the stills from the video clip again. Ha ha.

It was an interesting experience all around. All of the tables are converted plumbing fixtures, most surfaces are tiled, the dishes are all special ceramic novelties, and the real bathrooms are relatively difficult to find thanks to their inadvertent camouflage. Ha ha. Specialty teas come in urinal cups, but you can purchase a take-home pee bottle to go. while I’m sure it was, I actually found it hard to feel like the place was properly sterilized / clean. Kinda makes sense, I guess.

The main dishes in the toilet bowls were great. (I actually realized that the bowls are self-contained chafing pots when I watched this video! You can see a little bit of flame under the lip of one of them.) I had the Thai curry and made a bad poo joke about how my meal won the prize for resembling its eventual end state. Oh,come on, dining in a place like that you can’t help but make a few bad poo jokes. Don’t judge me.

The sides that come with the main dishes were really lousy. I didn’t bother finishing anything but the rice and curry from my main dish. The included soft serve at the end was similarly disappointing – and not only because it wasn’t solid chocolate to complete the effect. It’s also non-dairy and you can really tell. It’s super watery and doesn’t really taste of chocolate or vanilla…or anything else, actually. That’s probably due to the fact that they offer monstrous portions in their desserts. I saw a few parfait/sundae frankenstein bowls pass by us, and I’m telling you, you’d need a hungry soccer team to kill one off. No wonder they don’t use quality stuff – they’re going for quantity. It’s all part of the spectacle of the thing. Having said that, the fries were freaking amazing. Worth your time? Sure, it’s a restaurant themed for the bathroom! Take the chance when you get it. After all, when nature calls…