Aloha! & The Return of Tsukihoshi

Two topics of discussion today. While this blog may bore everyone to tears, I will continue recklessly without remorse because, well... ultimately this is our family blog.

Shopping in Japan, once one gets acquainted with the "ins and outs" of it, can be dangerously fun. I especially enjoy shopping for children's shoes here. There are so many options. Almost all of them are designed to (for obvious cultural reasons) slip on and off a young child's feet easily. Plus, folks start walking long distances at a very young age, so they have to have supportive shoes. During the summer, Japanese shoe companies come out with just about every style of "aqua shoe" imaginable.

Many Japanese companies, while making their debut in the western world, like to use their Japanese names or use kanji characters as their company logo. For example, check out Uniqlo flagship logo for the US.

Tsukihoshi used the same idea. Only for me, this was a little more difficult to figure out and I had to recruit my husband to ask our good friend Hide to translate. While surfing the Zappos web page, I stumbled upon the Tsukihoshi brand of shoes. How intriguing that Japanese shoe company was now selling children's shoes to Americans and the likes of Angelina Jolie were buying them for their kidlets. However at $53, I wasn't about to venture that far into the depths of my pocket book for a pair of shoes for my 3 year old, so I went on a mission.

First I tried emailing the Tsukihoshi US sales rep and asking where I could find a pair of Tsukihoshi shoes here in Japan. Although he returned my email promptly, he wasn't much help. Come to find out that Tsukihoshi translates into "Moonstar". Well, Moonstar brand of shoes is a huge manufacturer and seller of footwear. Basically, they use an English name here (Moonstar) and a Japanese name in the states (Tsukihoshi).

That is where my search ended for a while until I came upon Carrot brand of shoes which I finally figured out is sold by Moonstar and is basically the same kind of shoe that I originally spotted on the Zappos site. At my local department store, I spotted a pair of Carrot shoes that were the aqua type shoes, complete with antibacterial foot insole. Sweet! All for the much cheaper price of 2600 yen (about $21.00 under the current exchange rate), which is less than half of what I would have paid had I ordered them online from an American site.

There you have it. My little shopping adventure comes full circle with a happy ending.

I suppose I should bring this blog entry "full circle" as well. The reason I bought yet another pair of shoes for Josh is because we are taking a last minute vacation to Oahu and he'll need them on our hike up Diamond Head. This will be Mike's first visit to Hawaii and along with taking in all the sites we are really looking forward to trying to get in some surf time. We'll be gone for a few days so, wish us happy trails!

Kodomo No Hi 2007

Nicki wrote recently about Kodomo No Hi, or Children's Day, and how we celebrated it for the second year in a row with the Kakimoto family on May 5th. We've received several requests to see more pictures from that day, so I thought I would write a quick new post with more pictures. The entire series is in our Gallery, dated 05/20/2007.

Richmond Pictures

Quick note to family and friends that the final remaining pictures from our trip to Richmond, VA are up in the Gallery, dated 05/16/07. And in case you don't know but are curious, that cute little girl that is with Josh in a bunch of those pictures is our beautiful niece, Ashleigh.

Reliving The West Wing Tour

When we were back in the States in March, we stayed part of the time with my folks in Richmond, VA. Fortunately, that put us in relative proximity to Washington, DC. Nicki hadn't been there since she was in 8th grade, so we decided to take a day trip up to see some of the sites on March 14. We were hoping to get to the White House for a tour, but it didn't work out that day (more on that in a bit). Instead, we started at Arlington Cemetery, where we visited the plots of the Kennedy brothers and their family, and we timed the visit right to see the Changing of the Guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Wow! What a spectacle. Those guards are well trained at what they do.

Afterwards, we headed over to downtown Washington, DC, to see the popular memorials. My dad and mom recently purchased a camera very similar to my own, so it was fun seeing my dad test out the new toy in a photographer's paradise. Since I had recently visited DC for work (and got some great pictures then), I was just interested in shooting "fun" pictures and didn't really focus on finding the perfect shot. As a result, some of my shots turned out pretty interesting anyway. As I mentioned before, we couldn't do a White House tour that day because we just ran out of time... good news is that we did better our second try.

On our way home from DC, we got a call from my mom, who was babysitting Josh at the time. Apparently, some family friends have a daughter-in-law with access to the West Wing of the White House. She offered to give us a tour of the place on Sunday, March 18. Even better, she mentioned that the President would be arriving by helicopter (Marine One) sometime that day and we had a shot at witnessing the action.

So we drove up again on Sunday to DC to meet our family friends (who I'll keep anonymous at this point until I get approval from them). We met them at the northwest corner of the White House property, just outside the fence line. When they arrived, we got confirmation that the President would indeed be arriving soon in Marine One, so we immediately went through security and headed straight to the South Lawn to wait with the rest of the onlookers, which was probably about 20-30 other people.

Within a half hour or so, several choppers flew overhead. As the first one continued to circle the airspace, the second one prepared for landing. I've never been that close to a helicopter as it was landing before and let me tell you, it's exactly how it's depicted on TV - lots of wind blowing and lots of noise. A marine exited the chopper first, followed by the President and several secret service guys. We were told that the President might stop and shake a few hands, but unfortunately he just waved to the crowd and scurried his way into the White House. Regardless, it was really exciting to be there to see it all.

After the Presidential detour, we made our way over to the West Wing tour. We saw the Rose Garden, the Oval Office, the Presidential Library and several meeting rooms. We even saw the outside door of the "Situation Room", which is where the essential staff go when the metaphorical poo-poo hits the fan. We weren't allowed inside, though, for obvious reasons.

One funny story: As you can imagine, the President and the Vice President have staff photographers (and good ones at that) who travel with them to events and shoot pictures for framing on the walls of the White House and West Wing. These photos are apparently updated every few weeks, so it keeps the place looking fresh and is a decent little reminder of where the Pres and VP have been recently. As we were walking through the VP wing, Nicki and I stopped at a very familiar photo, a panoramic one that was shot from inside the USS Kitty Hawk when VP Cheney was in Japan visiting the troops here. Nicki and I mentioned that we attended that speech, so we got a close look at the picture and found the very distorted shadowy figures of us in the lower corner of the frame. Our wonderful tour guide mentioned that it was probably the first time that people on the tour found a picture of themselves on the wall.

So now Nicki and I can brag to our family and friends that we have had our pictures up in the West Wing of the White House!

We were fairly limited on taking pictures inside the West Wing, but I've posted the shots that I was allowed to take in our Gallery, dated May 11, 2007. Check them out!

Friends & The Holiday

Mike, Josh and I really had a special weekend. On Saturday, we were invited once again to the Annual Kakimoto Children's Day Celebration. There was wonderful food, friends, and of course many children! I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to be dressed in kimono by a real expert, Mrs. Kakimoto, who enjoys dressing in kimono and also teaches people how to wear kimono as well. She was very fast getting all of the layers on me and, of course, Michael took a ton of pictures.

We also had some last minute visitors that we really enjoyed. Let me just preface how amazing it is that when we decided to move to Japan, we found out that many acquaintances we had throughout our life were residing in the Land of the Rising Sun as well! Just recently I found out that an old high school friend of mine was living with his wife and 2 daughters here in Japan. They had just moved further south from Aomori to Numata to pursue a different English teaching position. Golden Week was their time off and at first we offered to meet them in Tokyo as it was halfway but then I decided that it might be more fun if they could make it further down south to our home to stay. Mind you, I hadn't seen this guy in about 8-9 years and his wife and I had never met. I'd imagine taking a 4 hour car drive down to a place you had never been too and meeting someone you barely knew was quite a nerve racking adventure. However, after some wine & beer it soon ended up feeling as though we were old friends. Since they are living as us Military Folk call it, "On The Economy" we decided it would be fun to treat them to lunch on base and to experience a little piece of home (America). As far as we could tell they had a really good time and we were thrilled to find some new/old friends.

On a sad note, we are saying goodbye to some very good friends who will be PCSing any day now back to the States. They came by a couple days ago to donate some things that they couldn't take with them and I tried hard not to tear up while waving goodbye after we saw them for the last time (in Japan). Josh and their son have become very close and we are still hoping to keep up communications between us, especially while they live the Navy life traveling all over. This summer will be our first military PCS experience. Many of our military friends are old pros at it, but saying goodbye to them will be a tough new experience for us and it will take some time for our skin to thicken.