October 2008 Archives

For Halloween this year, we are in Thailand, which is very different than in America. People here don't celebrate Halloween, but there were still lots of tricks and treats for me.

Getting to go on an elephant was the "trick." We rode them to the river. When we got to the water, they made us take everything off except our clothes. We had to give them our shoes, hats, and all of our valuable things, but we didn't know why. When we got in the water, the elephant suddenly sat down, and then the person that was steering, made the elephant lay down on its side. Then, we knew why they made us take off all our valuables -- because we were going to get wet! We were all scared until we found out that they did it on purpose. The elephant sat back up and my Dad and I got back on. Then, it sprayed water on us with his trunk. The elephants kept on doing it until we all yelled for them to stop. It was annoying, but fun. We all had a good time. That was the funniest Halloween trick ever.

Happy Halloween, everybody! I'm in Thailand for Halloween this year and instead of running around in some cool costumes collecting an assortment of wonderful candy of various flavors and colors, we are doing some things of a different nature. The first thing we did was take a wooden boat down a river to an area of small mud houses with leaf-covered roofs. We stopped there to take a look at a tribe where women put coils around their necks. Over time, the coils push their ribs down and make it look like they have really long necks. They also wear ornaments on their head, like long pieces of fabric coming down from another piece of cloth. When we were walking around their village, we were shocked to find that a lot of the smaller girls had the coils too. 

Q:  What is your best memory from Bhutan?
A:  When I got my prayer beads blessed by a lama (click here to watch the video). It was special because we did it as a family. I also really liked the people in our tour group. They were very nice to me. I also really liked our guides, Tshering from Bhutan and Richard from Scotland. Richard is an expert on Bhutan and told us a lot about the culture and Buddhism. I learned a lot.

Q:  What's the biggest difference between Bhutan and the United States?
A:  In Bhutan, we are the foreigners (or Chilips as we were called). They have terraced rice fields almost everywhere you look. You don't see that in America. They don't have any traffic lights in the entire country, so you don't have to wait in traffic. My dad liked that!

Bhutan is full of so much great culture, like their prayer flags. Prayer flags are long pieces of cloth that come in all different colors. They are stamped with prayers. People hang them up in trees near temples and holy sites.

Hello everybody! I'm here in Bhutan, a country located in the Himalayas. In Bhutan, they rate how successful the country is based on "Gross National Happiness," which I think is cool because that means they value happiness more than having money.

In Bhutan, we were with a National Geographic Expedition group. We all first met at the airport in Bangkok, Thailand, where we boarded a plane to Paro, Bhutan. As we landed, we got really close to the mountains and you could see the whole valley. It was awesome.

Kuzuzangpola, everybody! Kuzuzangpola means hello in Dzongkha, the language of Bhutan. That's where I am now. Bhutan is in Asia and it's a really small country in the Himalayas with a lot of snow-capped mountains.  

Most people in Bhutan practice Buddhism and there are lots of temples and monasteries. I really like the colorful prayer wheels in the temples. A prayer wheel is like a big giant top that you spin with your hand. Inside, they have paper with prayers written on them. You have to spin the wheel clockwise and when the wheel goes around once, it rings a bell. One ring equals one prayer. Lots of people spin the prayer wheels with prayer beads in their hands. Prayer beads have 108 beads. You are supposed to go around in a circle, holding each one with your fingers while saying a mantra. A mantra is a phrase you say over and over like praying for good health or good fortune.

Hi, I'm in Tokyo ... YEAHHHH! When we arrived here on a bullet train (they are really fast!), we were greeted by a man named Yoshi-san. He helped plan our trip to Japan and he has two children who came to meet us too. Their names are Shuntaro, a.k.a. Shun, and Lisa. Shuntaro was funny and Lisa laughed a lot. It was great to be with other kids and we had a lot of fun with them.

We all went to a place called Kidzania where you can get your own wallet and credit card. You can choose from a lot of different jobs to do to earn more money. Then, you can spend it on things like making your own pizza and getting your drivers license (I passed my driving test even though it was in Japanese!). I even rented a real cell phone to use while I was there and I used it to call Lisa and her mom. Kidzania was so fun. Speaking of fun, take a look below. We played on a GIANT foosball table while we were in Japan. The pieces are almost as big as me!
                                                                                                                          
One day in Tokyo, we went to a shrine. There was a ceremony going on for the new champion sumo wrestler. Two groups of three wrestlers came out and were all in their official sumo outfits. It was so cool to see them because they are big celebrities in Japan. We were super-duper lucky to see them in person because most Japanese people only get to see them on television.

Hello everyone! We are now in our last, Japanese city, Tokyo. Here, we met the man who helped us plan our trip to Japan. His name is Yoshi-san and we got to spend the weekend with him and his family. Since he has two kids too, we got to do kids stuff like play ball in a city park and visit a place called Kidzania, a mini-city made for kids to learn about the real world by doing all kinds of different types of jobs.

We left Tokyo for a couple of days to go to Ishikawa Prefecture, which is a state in Japan just like New York or California, just smaller. We stayed in a place called an onsen, which is a traditional Japanese inn built near thermal hot springs where people go to relax and take hot spring baths. This area has special water from deep in the ground that makes your skin really soft when you take a bath in it.

For our second week in Japan, we left Nagasaki and went to the much bigger city of Kyoto, where we spent our first day going on a tour of the city. The first place we went to was the Golden Temple, which is a pagoda that is painted all over with gold. The tour also went to a few other temples and palaces. I really liked our last stop at Kiyomizu Temple because there were all kinds of really cool stores, called yomise, on the street leading up to it. Stefan and I had fun looking for souvenirs (I got an awesome ninja sword keychain to add to my keychain collection).

The next day we went to the Gion district of Kyoto where we stayed at a traditional Japanese inn to celebrate my Mom's birthday. They had a person come in to dress us all up in kimonos. The kimonos were kind of hard to walk in because we only had about a foot of free space inside, but it was still really fun walking around the streets in them. When we got back to the inn, we changed out of our kimonos and had a traditional Japanese dinner in our room, where we ate stuff like fish, batter fried vegetables (tempura), miso soup and fruit. After dinner, we went to a traditional Japanese tea ceremony like the one we had in Hirado, where you eat a 'sweet' before you drink the bitter green tea. We liked doing all of these traditional Japanese things and really like the food here, especially the sashimi (sushi without the rice).

Hi Everybody. I'm in Japan still, but in a different area of Japan. Remember in my first blog I said I wanted to go to Kyoto most because they were going to dress my Mom up like a Geisha girl for her birthday? Well, now I'm here!
                                                                                                              
On my Mom's birthday, they dressed all four of us in kimonos, which are traditional Japanese clothes. So, me, my Dad and Ty thought that it was really cool that we got to dress up too. Once we were all in our kimonos, we got to walk around in the Gion district, where real Geishas live. It was hard to walk in the sandals, but it was still really fun. We liked exploring the back streets of Kyoto because there are temples, shrine gates, and cool stores. We even saw a real Geisha.

One day in Kyoto, we went to a Japanese movie amusement park called Uzumasa Toei Village. It was really cool and we saw a real ninja show starring a famous, Japanese actor. I even got to battle a samurai with a sword. It was so much fun. We went to a haunted house and it really seemed like it was haunted. We also got to see where they film movies and how they do special effects. I had a really super good day there.

Hi people! I'm now in Japan.

After we got off the plane in Fukuoka, we went to a nice hotel that looked like a giant boat, close to a beach. Once we were settled in, we went to the beach where I flew a cool kite that I bought in Shanghai. Imagine that, me on a beach in Japan!

The next day, I stayed at the hotel with my Mom because I was not feeling well. I felt a little better later on in the day, so I finally went out. First, me, Tyler, my Mom, my Dad, and our tour guide all had sushi together. We even made out own! It was really good and I ate everything with chopsticks. They had a tank of fish with a squid. I got to see the squid squirt black ink.

Hello everyone (or rather, Konnichiwa, which means hello in Japanese). The last time I wrote, I was in China, but now we're in Japan.  

We left Shanghai and arrived in Fukuoka, Japan on a flight that was only 90 minutes. We only had one full day in Fukuoka and we did a lot. The first thing we did was go to a temple and shrine with traditional Japanese rock gardens. It was really quiet there because people were either just walking around or meditating.