Lost in the Ivy

I haven't had time to write more about our adventures in Japan and Hawaii, so I'll let the pictures tell the story for now. I just posted two new Picture Galleries: Lost in Translation and Gone to Maui. It was a truly incredible journey and I do hope to write more about in but first I need to recover from the jet lag.

You leave town for a couple of weeks and return to find your name splashed all over the newspapers. That's what I came home to. Good thing that it was all good news.

Here's the story that appeared in last Sunday's Chicago Tribune. The reporter calls my reading "especially touching."

And here's the story from Friday's Elgin Courier News.

It's 1:15 a.m. in Chicago, where I'm writing from right now. In Maui, where I slept last night, it's 8:15 p.m. That probably explains why I'm awake right now, even though I've accumulated maybe 90 minutes of sleep over the last 48 hours.

I was asleep. For a full precious hour. Until the 4-year-old made his way from his bedroom to the parent's bedroom and sent Daddy packing. When he first landed on our bed, I was disoriented and didn't know where I was. What hotel room am I in? What city am I in? That's what happens when you sleep in five different beds over two week's time. 

Twenty hours, two cabs, three trains and two airplanes it took us to get to our first destination, Okayama, Japan, where my mother-in-law lives part of the year.

In Soja, Japan, we slept in futons, in a Samurai house. From that house, we walked to the graves where the ancestors of my wife are buried.

A short train ride took us to a real-life castle, something that my son had previously only seen in storybooks and in the toys he plays with at home.

Then we took the Shinkansen, or bullet, train to Tokyo, where we stayed in a four-star hotel with surprisingly two-star rates. Everyone tells you that Japan is too cost-prohibitive, and it is pricey, but not everything. The luxury hotel we stayed at was $200 a night and we would easily have paid double or more for the same quality in Chicago.

Tokyo DomeIn Tokyo, we caught a baseball game at the Tokyo Dome. I'll probably write more about this at another time, when I'm a little more lucid, but baseball in Japan seems so much more fun than most games here in the states. Every game is like a Friday night highschool football game, with cheering sections and team bands. As a baseball purist, I kept thinking that this is how the game is supposed to be: fun.

Totoro at Ghibli MuseumMy wife's aunt and uncle also took us to visit the Ghibli Museum just outside of Tokyo. Ghibli features the Japanese anime work of Hayao Miyazaki, the Walt Disney of Japan. His films are pure magic for children - and for parents. Miyazaki is best known in America for his Academy Award-winning Spirited Away, but he should be known for so much more. I've seen several of his films including My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service and Castle in the Sky, and all of them are better than most of the stuff being churned out here in the states for kids. The museum is not like Disneyland but is more like a magical garden filled with surprises at every turn. My favorite is at the entrance where a giant Totoro character greets you inside a ticket booth.

There are more stories to tell but a toddler bed beckons me.  Oyasumi for now.

Read "Three Guys Named Moe," my latest blog posting over at the Lovable Losers Literary Revue.

Sun-Times.com posted Chris Sweda's video of some of the highlights (and lowlights) of the Lovable Losers Literary Revue's season opener. Wait long enough and you'll see a guy holding a stack of Brooks Kieschnick rookie cards who looks a lot like me. My Boys Gone Wild! moment.