trundling around japan

Being in Japan is a little like the unwritten rules in baseball, unless you are in baseball or follow it pretty closely , you don't know the rules. I actually bought a book about Japan that had some stuff that even Erica didn't know about. ( red lanterns outside a doorway means neighborhood pub, blowing your nose in public is frowned upon...but all those other disgusting noises they make are OK?) It is cherry blossom time in Sasebo, just beautiful, not sure why we don't plant like millions of these trees everywhere.We took a little field trip to Nagasaki and Kumamoto. I'm jumping around here, but hey , back to being in Japan...  everything is small, except the money (1000 yen = $12 around there) so the cars are small , the roads are skinny, the doorways are short, it sort feels like your in legoland...in an ashtray, cause everybody smokes. Everything is really clean,on time ( which is helpful to try and figure out which train or bus your supposed to take ) and polite. Japanese people are not the friendliest people around, unless they're drunk, then pretty friendly until fall down time....so friendly for about a half an hour.
  Nagasaki atomic bomb museum ..is what you would imagine. The castle in Kumamoto is world class, just beautiful. It sort of seems like all japanese cities were designed by the same guy...shopping area here, call it ginza,restaurants next to the shopping area, big beautiful park in the middle some where and then plain bordering on ugly offices,apartments, hotels and then huge ostentatious pachinko bars that look like they are on fire, just all the cigarette smoke coming out of them. Almost everyone backs into parking spaces, do you think people that don't get tickets?
  Anyways we're back home now, all jet lag screwed up. Slept like 22 hours the 1st night and then 4 the next, UUGGGHHHH.

love and warm thoughts from home

carrie and glen

another bathroom story

I know I've already written a bathroom story for this trip, but we're in japan and unless you've been here, you won't really understand. OK let's start with most things are in Kanji, which are chinese characters, which means we have no idea what it means...and off we go!!!!!  Feeling an uncomfortable pressure in your reproductive area you decide to seek an appropriate place to relieve said PSI, and trundle onto to a bathroom in Japan. Upon entering you see plumbing and wiring in and out of the toilet that can be some what disturbing. There are also picture instructions that make sense mostly, but you really can't be positive. And what does stand by mean? So assuming your sitting ( you pretty much miss the show if you stand) as soon as flesh touches seat a whirring starts ( 2 things happen here;1- the seat starts to warm, 2- the water for the bidet starts to heat up ) So assuming you're not scared by this point your doing something...or not because your too scared. Anyways after said business you have options ( for me, this has been a trial and error process, lasting 3 or 4 days, with some lingering doubts) So you can go for the direct jet , of which some you can vary the pressure, lots of pressure can be somewhat uncomfortable, you know wrong direction and all.you can choose the light shower thing which I think is mostly for woman ( larger surface area ) and most important, none of this stops automatically ( so on the high pressure direct jet setting and you start to tear up a bit, calmly look fot the stop or power button)Also on some toilets the handles flush both ways, one way for liquids and the other for..well other ( I'm actually just guessing but it seems right ) and others the water to fill the bowl comes out the top so you can use it to wash your hands, although there never seems to be any towels to dry your hands.
  Japan is wonderful and weird and I have lots more I want to say about it in the next few day , including why WIFI was more available in the Phillipines than here

love and warm thoughts from sasebo japan

carrie erica and glen

things I never get tired off

It's sort of like, some of my favorite thinegs but without Julie Andrews, singing....OK it's not really like that, it's just stuff we've seen in developing countries that would drive OSHA, building inspectors, L&I people, pretty much anyone from a developed country would start shaking their head and mumbling....doing Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.
   Transportation is great!!...So 5 people on a scooter ( yes I said scooter!!!) at least 10 people on a tricycle, a palm tree on a pedicab or about 15 people in and around a small pickup truck and my favorite was outside of the big market at Masaya in Nicaragua at about 4 in the morning, a donkey is pulling a cart loaded about 12 ft high with plastic laundry baskets, plastic chairs and tables , going like 2 miles an hour done the highway. I assume they were taking all this stuff to the market that morning to sell....hanging off the back of the cart was the hazard light to warn on coming cars of a slow moving vehicle, or actually a small boy that looked around 5 years old waving a flashlight at on coming cars, the best, I laughed my ass off. Another good one is babies, yes small toddlers, on the handlebars of bicycles or various pets or food products ( still alive ) on bicycles or scooters, always a good picture.
  I almost always get asked if I want to buy some sort of drugs by various random people... drugs are a pretty big no no in the phillipines...but still, I did get asked by various random people on the street if I wanted to buy some Viagra. Not sure what that meant but going to go with, alive and male.
  Showers and electricity, or pretty much wiring anywhere in third world countries, always exciting. Just yell "Clear " before you plug in anything and remember to not touch the suicide shower while the water is running... again exciting and usually it breaks the heater which means no more hot showers, not exciting.
  Ok one last thing, diving related of course. We all agree ...nobody gets tired of seeing Nemo ( or I guess more accurately, clownfish or anemonefish ) so like I've said in previous posts , Nemos are territorial and pretty aggressive, so getting rushed by a 2 inch fish is pretty amusing, I also learned this trip that they see each other in your mask. So they also think another Nemo is coming to take their anenome from them, along with the 6 ft bumbling flesh bag that is getting close to them.
  I also never get tired of travelling, of meeting these wonderful people in their beautiful countries and my favorite of all...meeting their children, they are innocent and old all at once. Sad and wonderful....

Love and warm thoughts from Sasebo, Japan

Carrie, erica and glen

waiting

Hi all, let's see.... it's pouring rain, we've checked out of our room, the girls are playing bananagrams and of course I am writing this down . We are at the dive shop restaurant ( spent alot of time here ) waiting for our boat to come and pick us and take us back to the mainland and our waiting van, for the 3 hr trip back to Cebu airport for our flight at 130am to fukuoka, japan.So we have about 3 hrs to kill, hopefully the rain stops, cause the boat in the rain could be a little uncomfortable.
  Yesterday, our last day diving, and erica's birthday, we did the shark dive, the best one yet!! lots of sharks all around us.For the 2nd morning dive, we dove a seamount, pygmy seahorses and ....a blue ring octopus, which I find out later are quite poisonous. The last dive is a shallow dive just mucking around the bottom looking for stuff. Found lots, pipefish, stonefish, cuttlefish and seamoths ( they must be mating because they are travelling around in pairs )A really good last dive here.
  Then back here last night for dinner and swap war stories about divers with some of the staff here. Some of my best stories. It's been fun here, we weren't able to see as much as we would have liked to, which is usually the case when we travel and we really didn't get to experience as much of phillipine culture as we would have liked. But we can always plan to come back. Next stop japan and the home of my ancestors, should be interesting, will keep you updated.

love and warm thoughts from malapasqua

carrie, erica and glen

something in the water

We're in the water the other day, diving Gato island. There's a few boats around with other divers, like almost all the places we visit when we are diving, the head is pretty much just a hole in the floorboards to the ocean. ( are you getting the fore shadowing here? ) So we are coming up from the dive and I notice stuff floating down from the surface. We are underneath another dive boat and well the light goes off in my head!!!, I look once more at what looks like toilet paper and !!!!??????? I'm swimming in #$%&, everybody out of my #$&*% way now! Everybody is looking at me like I'm rude, but obviously nobody realizes what is going on, don't care I'm looking for clean water. That will be our bathroom story for this trip.

Love and warm thoughts from malapasqua

carrie, erica and glen

so it never rains in malapasqua

So we get up at 430 in the morning to do the thresher shark dive...ughhh, so getting up before sunrise is not my thing, you know you meet these people that get up early to take sunrise pictures, yeah that's not me...but to see thresher sharks I make an exception ( we're actually going to do it for the 4th time tommorrow) still 430 is early, except for Erica, who seems to get up at that time, all the time, WEIRD!! We hop on the boat and get to the dive site just after daybreak, and of course I'm taking sunrise pictures, cause what the hell, who would believe it. In the water and down to about 90ft and bingo just like you ordered it up...thresher sharks. Very cool and well it wakes you up pretty quick. This is me underwater; mutter, mutter, somewhat grumpy mutter, I'm telling you there better be sharks on this dive OR ELSE!! not that I know what else. Then boom 2 sharks about 8 or 10 ft long , just swimming around, they hang out for a couple minutes then leave. Then more swimming and we see a couple more, some get pretty close, maybe 10-15ft away. they seem curious, if screaming about how cool this is wouldn't scare them away, I would be screaming how cool this is!!and by the way you can hear screaming underwater, Carrie yelled at me the other day just as a thresher shark was swimming over my head that I hadn't noticed, and I heard her and saw the shark...probably the only time I liked being yelled at. We've done the shark dive 3 more times and saw sharks everytime, ok so here's the deal... they feed at night, deep, like 300 or 400ft deep and then come up shallow in the morning to get cleaned, so we are seeing them at cleaning stations that they use all the time at this shoal, and they are there every day, amazing.
  We did a nitrox course here, which means we are breathing gas that has more o2 and less nitrogen, which means we can stay down longer and be exposed to less nitrogen ( bad thing!!) So we have been doing some nitrox dives and some regular compressed air dives. Hmmm. this is kind of even boring me. We are starting to slow down and get tired, we've been diving 2 or3 times every day since we've been here except !! for the 2 days it poured rain here and we're not talking thunder showers , we're talking rain straight for 2 days. And what do you do in tropical paradise when it rains for 2 days, well we read alot and start drinking at the restaurant around 2 and not alot else, we did a couple of dives but being on a boat in the rain is less than fun and really quite cold , which is something we were trying to avoid by coming to a tropical paradise. Anyways we are just going to do the 2 early dives tommorrow, our last day of diving here, so I will get on again and blog about other stuff, or if your lucky maybe my wonderful wife will give you some of her insights into travel and diving here in malapasqua.

love and warm thoughts from malapasqua

carrie, erica and glen

malapascua

OK let's see,  it's around 8 pm on monday and we're going to do the thresher shark dive tommorrow morning at 530am..this is going to be great!!!! then it's off for a 2 dive day trip ahh I cannot wait. We saw a seamoth today, very cool, sort of looks like a seahorse with too many after market parts, can't really swim properly, just sort of bumps along the bottom.
   Travel has been somewhat difficult here, the distances are far and there are not a lot of airports and things have been late. The slow boat from el nido (8 hours ) was 3 hrs late, so again we were looking for a place to stay in coron after dark. OK so the diving in coron was pretty good, lots of wrecks, not sure we're big wreck fans...dive deep for a short amount of time and then come up, looking at pretty much nothing, But we did dive barracuda lake, so... 30ft of fresh water at about 85F, then 30 ft of brackish water at about 105F, and the rest sea water at 82F. Sort of like the grand canyon underwater with shrimp and catfish and really hot water, very beautiful.
  We stayed in coron for 4 days and decided to jet to malapascua to see the sharks. So you take a van from town and travel for about 45 minutes to the airport, which is just on the other side of the broken cattle crossing. We had this 5 hr lay over in manila before our flight to cebu ( yes there again ) but it turns out our flight was 4 hrs late , so there was some rushing involved. Overnight in cebu after getting some more money ( they only took cash jn coron) snacks and yes ..vodka. The next morning we got a van for a 3 hr ride to maya, a 1/2 hr boat to malapascua and we're here!!! That's all for travel , we're here till we fly to japan...so a week.
   Again for you non divers, this is just blah, blah , blah. The diving hasn't been great, there's alot of divers here, enough that we have come up with a underwater sign for cluster fuck. The visibility has been average, but we have been seeing really cool stuff...we have been seeing pipefish so regularly that it's almost boring, but it's not. We saw a burrowing sea cucumber, well lots of them, a long lure frogfish, ornate ghost pipefish, ornate filefish, seriously stuff from the dive magazines you just never see.
  Ok it's 9pm now and I need to go to bed, and well I'm at the bar outside our hotel and it's starting to rain, so way I go. Now that we have a somewhat regular schedule we will blog more.

Love and warm thoughts from Malapasqua

Carrie, Erica and Glen