Watch today's show at YouTube or BlipTV. Back to Japan 2007 Day 13: Hirafu
We drove up to Hirafu to check out the mountain and the village.
This is the ski field – it looks really different with no snow.
The place doesn’t look that much different than last year except there are a few new buildings here and there. Some buildings are still being built or renovated.
We saw a car driving on the mountain so we decided to go for a bit of drive ourselves.
This is a jump. It looks so different with no snow.
This is the place we stayed when we arrived last year.
And this is the place they were building opposite the place where we stayed. It’s all finished now, obviously.
We went to this bar a couple of times last year. This notice says they’re going to open on the 20th of December.
This is a poster about that summit. The hottest summit in Cool Hokkaido.
The minimum wage in Hokkaido is 654 yen an hour.
Here’s a poster teaching Australian English. よろしくお願いします means please. Well ...
This is one of Kutchan’s characters. His name is Mirai-kun and his nickname is Snopiiii. Wow, I lived here for a whole season and I didn’t realize he had a name.
St Moritz is 8979 kilometres away. That’s always good to know.
Nine degrees.
The Japanese flag on top of the police station.
Hokkaido, Sapporo, Homen Kutchan Keisatsu Sho
Traffic Safety Kutchan. Don’t get on a car if you drink. OK ...
Our flight left on time and everything went smoothly.
They only downer was the movie. Something about transformers. It was lame but I watched it anyway.
The cameraman was fascinated by the fact that there were two kinds of toothpicks. Toothpick. Brushpicks. Wow.
Check this out, our seats were right at the front of the plane. Well at the front of economy class. These are totally the best seats. I was really happy about sitting here.
The wing was firmly attached to the plane.
And this is somewhere in Hokkaido, I think. I have no idea where.
After 6 months away I was fantasizing that someone might care that we were back. Maybe there’d be a bit of a red carpet ... some paparazzi.
But no, instead, after we picked up our bags we were swarmed by immigration officers and whisked away into a small room where they told us they suspected we were smuggling something and they searched and questioned us. Great.
I was kind of shocked because I’m the last person who would ever do that. I’m always lecturing people on how you shouldn’t take even one apple into New Zealand because it’s a really important rule blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, pretty soon after they started rifling through our dirty socks and underwear I think it was pretty obvious that we didn’t have any grenades, turtles or fake Louis Vuitton bags. And it wasn’t as bad as in Vancouver because they were actually quite nice to us.
Eventually, they apologized for taking up our time and we could leave the airport.
The scenery in Hokkaido is nice. It looks different with no snow.
I felt happy about coming back to the things I like about Japan and sad about the things I don’t like. And just tired from traveling.
It took a few hours to drive home from the airport.
notes
downern. (informal) something dispiriting or depressing
Our last day in Canada was one of those excellent days where we walked for hours all over the city, didn't get tired or lost, found everything we were looking for, did everything on our list and met lots of nice people.
We did some shopping in Chinatown.
We went to a shopping mall and had a great lunch at the best shopping mall food court I’ve ever seen.
We walked around town a bit and looked at the scenery.
We went to Gastown and made a video by the clock. Right after we finished the video we walked around the corner and saw some people from a New Zealand TV show which was pretty funny. They were here on an Air New Zealand promotional trip. And they asked The Daily English show cameraman what he knew about New Zealand.
We went to Commercial Drive to do some food shopping and we had dinner there.
We took a taxi out to the airport at about 7.
We found a cool bar at the airport. I don’t expect airport bars to be very good but this was great. They were promoting Air New Zealand too.
As for the flight it was the worst flight I’ve ever been on. It was a huge plane and it was completely full. I think there were about 500 people on it. There was a massive queue at check in three hours before the flight and it didn’t really get any smaller. I think we took off an hour later than we were supposed to.
For some reason the plane was full of really rude people too – and the flight attendants looked really stressed out. They were running down the aisles throwing slippers at people.
I was in shock for the first hour of the flight after I found out that we were on a 12 and a half hour flight. I was thinking it would be about 7 hours. Just a random guess ... I didn’t even know planes could stay in the air for 12 hours.
When we arrived in Taipei I saw a sign for a shower and I thought, oh I’ve got to have a shower. Seriously, that was the best shower I’ve had in my life. It felt so, so good.
I love Taipei. Yay, for Asia where the internet is free in airports like it should be. I won’t miss that about Canada.
I think that it’s really cute. And also I think that it’s very, ah, interesting because there are people from everywhere. And there are a lot of cultures and you can learn different languages also.
I think it’s one of the greatest cities in the world.
Oh, it’s a great place.
Oh, it’s a fantastic city. It’s a wonderful place to live. And being here is part of the lifestyle, ah, rather than, say, the income levels, what not.
I don’t know, I like it ... but I don’t come here very often. It’s fun, though, because there’s a lot of stuff to do...
I think it’s great. I just love it. I mean, ah, this clock, for example, is just amazing. I mean, yeah, I could, ah, I could fall in love with this place, definitely.
It’s a nice city. I’ve been here two years and I’ve had no problems.
Vancouver is very quiet and many ... you can’t see many animal. And ... the air is clean and sometimes noisy but quiet is many time.
Um, it’s great. It’s beautiful and I feel like it’s more like a big town than a, than a city like it kind of has that small town feel to it. And it’s dry today.
It’s good. It’s pretty awesome. I don’t know what to say. Good city.
I think it’s a pretty cool place. I guess. I mean it’s a new city, so ... I mean it’s cool to be involved with something that’s still trying to find its identity. And I guess that’s an interesting aspect of Vancouver.
Um, I really like it. I’m from the East Coast. And it’s ... the weather’s really nice. I love the beaches. I love … there’s always places to go for music. And ... I don’t know, the partying’s not that great. I don’t know, the clubs close kind of early. But um, yeah, it’s a nice place, I don’t know ...
I think Vancouver’s absolutely beautiful. Um, we’ve just been to quite a rough area round the corner with a load of druggies and that was quite shocking - but I suppose every big city’s got that. But the rest of it’s absolutely stunning. The hills and the mountains. Just been up, what was that thing we went up? Grouse mountain, today. That was superb, superbly beautiful.
notes
This video was filmed by the Gastown Steam Clock in Gastown, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Thank you to everyone who was in this video for agreeing to answer the question on camera.
Today was pretty uneventful because it rained all day.
In the evening we decided to go back to Commercial Drive to check out the bars there.
These were goodbye Canada / happy 550th show drinks.
The first bar we went to had faces painted on the wall and quite a few screens showing hockey and football.
It was alright. And a bit sad.
I liked the second place more.
They had graffiti on the walls and a kind of gallery out the back.
The bars on Commercial Drive closed around twelve which I thought was strange since it was a Saturday night.
I found some ads for nice-looking restaurants in a magazine so I looked up the addresses on Google maps and we decided to go the one that was closest to where we are staying.
The restaurant was called Yogi’s and it’s on a street called Commercial Drive which also happened to be a place where a guy called Jason had recommend – so I figured it was a good bet.
We walked pretty slowly and filmed things on the way so it took about an hour to get there.
Commercial Drive turned out to be a nice place. Lots of shops and restaurants that looked interesting.
Our lunch was tasty and the service was good. In their ad it says: We specialize in cuisine created for such personalities as Bryan Adams.But Bryan Adams wasn’t there and the waitress said it was quite a while ago that he went there.
We had someone to meet at 2:30. So we walked from here to here. It took about an hour walking pretty fast.
That turned out to be a place called Yaletown which was quite nice. Everyone seemed to be wearing new, designer clothing - a bit different than our neighbourhood.
Back to Japan 2007 Day 5: Tofino
Today the pouring rain killed our sightseeing plans so I decided to make a dash for the shops and find someone to interview.
The first shop I went into turned out to be very cool and the woman working there was really nice.
She said she was born and raised in Tofino and the shop was owned by her husband’s parents.
A lot of everything in here is native-made, from the area, the masks, the basketry, the jewelry. There’s ... there’s so much stuff in here.
I asked her what she liked about Tofino and she said she liked being close to nature. I still go to the beach all the time and I still say to myself, “I just love it.” Like I, I go running on the beach all the time and I just ... like it’s like therapy for me.
She said the Tofino had changed a lot over the last 30 years.
When I was little, like growing up here when I was little, I used to know everybody and now, like I, in the summer especially, I walk down the street and I don’t know anybody, I can’t … some people you can pick out, like you’re not from here, but, like, a lot of people like – do I know them? I don’t know them. They don’t know me. Like I feel like when I go out, if I go out at night or anything, I don’t know anybody. It’s kind of scary.
I asked her why she thought Tofino was such a popular tourist destination.
Again I think it has to do with the beauty and the activities to do here. Just a lot of people ... I don’t know, just to get away from the city, the crazy life, a lot of people come here to go to the beaches, like we have so many beaches, and trails, there’s kayaking, surfing, a lot of people come here to surf. It’s a really big, popular sport here.
In the evening we saw some trick-or-treaters out the window. Then we went to the bottle store and saw Oscar the Grouch. Very cool costume.
Yuko took us to the bus station in the morning and we took the bus from Courtenay to Tofino.
The bus took four and a half hours.
It left Courtenay at ten to ten and arrived in Tofino at twenty five past two.
When we got to Tofino we found our accommodation which turned out to be a bit of a disaster.
And then we walked around the town a bit ... which turned out to be a bit different than we imagined. We thought it was a surf beach town – but it’s not really. The town is next to the water but it’s actually quite far from the beach.
Today we visited Yuko and Andrew. That was the reason we came to Vancouver Island. Yuko made us a great lunch.
In the afternoon walked around Courtenay. It seems like a nice little town.
In the evening we talked to some people at the hostel. The German girl was really nice.
I like this hostel. The only bad thing is that there is no laundry.
The room is nice, the internet is fast enough, the kitchen is really clean and well organized, the owner is nice. And the best thing is Jake. Jake is a very cool cat.
It was a cool ferry.
There were lots of different places to sit, cafes and a shop ... this was the kind of ferry I was imagining when we took the ferry to Hokkaido.
We had to wait for a couple of hours in Nanaimo for the bus so we went to a bar. It was packed with people. There was some kind of event on called a silent auction. They had wireless internet which was cool.
We took the Islandlink bus from Nanaimo to Courtenay. It took about an hour and a half.
The bus driver was really cool.
It was still raining when we got to Courtenay but the driver was nice and he dropped us off pretty close to our accommodation.
This is our room. I like it.
notes
took about an hour - actually it took about 40 mins
it took about an hour and a half - actually, sailing time is one hour and thirty five minutes
silent auction
This is from Wikipedia: This is often a variant of an English auction, where bids are written on a sheet of paper, and at the predetermined end of the auction, the highest listed bidder wins the prize. This auction variant is often used in charity events, and many items may be auctioned simultaneously. Participants submit bids normally on paper, near the item. Other variations of this type of auction may include sealed bids. The highest bidder pays the price he or she submitted.
This morning we left Wolfville at about half past ten. Ted and Lucy drove us to the airport. Before we went to the airport they took us to a place called Peggys Cove. They said you can’t leave Nova Scotia without going to Peggys Cove.
It was a beautiful place. Awesome rocks.
Our flight left at ten past five. The service at Halifax airport was great. The staff at check-in were super friendly and helpful.
The staff on the plane were good too.
We stopped in Montreal for a couple of hours.
Check it out, commas.
I did some editing and drank a $9 beer. Damn airports.
Before we took off, we had to wait about an hour, because, as the pilot explained to us, they couldn’t find anyone to push the plane out.
They gave us a free drink to apologize.
When we got to Vancouver there was a big line for taxis – we thought about taking a limo instead, because it’s not actually that much more expensive. But we didn’t have to wait too long.
I thought our taxi driver was really dodgy because he didn’t display any ID and because he was chatting on his cell phone for almost the entire trip – but apparently both things are actually legal in Canada.
We stayed at Pender Lodge in Vancouver. They weren’t very happy about us arriving an hour later than we said we were going to. But thankfully they let us in and we didn’t have to sleep on the street.
notes
This comma is for something called a decimal separator. (I just looked it up).
The Daily English Show is the world's first daily online English language show. Produced by studio tdes and presented by Sarah - a New Zealander currently based in Auckland, New Zealand.
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