Earth Celebration on the internet!

It's not the same as being there, but world-famous taiko group Kodo put HD video of last weekend's Earth Celebration concerts online. It's streaming on-demand for free, but only until August 31. Check it out while you can! They really are incredible. Watch here on Ustream.
Being there was great. It was another world from Tokyo. The fauna was  prehistoric - I found a six-inch long poisonous centipede. In the bath. A moth that looked like a fat bird. A lizard that was fat and shiny. The coast was jagged and the greenery jungle lush.
There was plenty of great food, like Brazilian pastels, Italian sausage, and Turkish kebabs. A lovely coffee roaster guy was grinding his beans to order and brewing individual cups of coffee that were worth waiting 20 minutes in line for.
The social media coverage thing went pretty well. Turns out that people who come out to camp and chill out on the beach with an acoustic guitar aren't necessarily  into tweeting every second of their day. Weird, right? But there were people watching our reports from Hong Kong, England and the US.
As much as I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, I didn't fall under the spell of the festival like all of my friends who get that faraway look in their eyes when they talk about EC. I think that level of intoxication probably demands late-night beach parties, intense and doomed three-day love affairs and, well, intoxication. As staff, we stayed in a beautiful tatami-matted building that was near all the action - it had a kitchen, nearby onsen and kept us snug despite the rain, but there were no bonfires or parties. 
My phone shut down on the last day. Kaput. I lost all the photos I had taken that I hadn't posted online. Luckily, Jim brought his camera along and got some nice shots.

Earth Celebration on Sado Island!

Taking the midnight bus tonight to an island all the way on the other side of Japan. We've been hearing about how amazing Earth Celebration on Sado Island is since we got here, and now we're finally going to check it out. And taking you along! This is a music festival that's always welcomed the world by hosting international guests and acts - this year the festival is reaching out, too, via streaming video and social media stuff. The festival has Twitter, Facebook and -- if it goes as I hope -- Storify pages. It would be so great if you would follow, like and check out those pages for the next four days. You might say there's a little bit of Japandra in all of them. If I can get my phone battery to last for more than an hour at a stretch...

So, please! Get a little taste of all the music, dancing, art and good good vibes. Maybe if we all celebrate the Earth real nice, she'll go easy on us for a while.
Follow Sado_EC on Twitter
Like Earth Celebration on Facebook
Share the link for Storify.

And please check out the streaming video on Ustream. We'll announce on Twitter when video is going up.

Palace of Fine Arts

This Palace of Fine Arts is beautiful and makes no sense as an outdoor structure. It's not much of a garden, it has no facilities and isn't really big enough for a city-scale public event. So what is it? Turns out it had a fascinating role in revitalizing San Francisco and the surrounding area after the devastating 1906 earthquake. The building that's there now is just a small, fully reconstructed part of the sprawling 1915 Panama-Pacific Expo.
It also had a role in The Rock, and I looked everywhere but did not see Sean Connery.

Give me back my finger

Speaking of posting old stuff... this has been sitting for a year. A year since we sat at a restaurant that no longer exists with friends who are no longer in Tokyo.
Talking about a guy who no longer has a pinkie.
Our friends Alex and Alwyn had wandered into the festivities at Yasukuni Shrine right on August 15 -- a big rallying day for nationalists. Going to see the right wing protests there had become sort of a tradition for the two of them, ever since they had ended up there during their first week in Japan five years earlier. This time, as they were getting ready to move out of the country, they found the ultimate souvenir on the ground behind the crowd of young and old in WWII costumes: a prosthetic pinkie with dirty gauze still stuffed inside. We all handed the finger around the dinner table with equal revulsion and merriment. Yes, that is terrible on many levels.
I miss them.

The blogging equivalent of jetlag

Well. We've been back from vacation for almost two weeks now. There are still pictures and little non-stories from the trip I'd like to post. (There's still stuff from Turkey from a year ago I'd like to post, but that's another story.) Meantime, there's life going on here. (Nothing too exciting, just, you know, life.) But I feel like going back and forth with stuff from Japan and the trip is like flying too often across time zones. Like when you wake up trying to figure out why all your furniture is in the wrong place. What's that behemoth Korean taco truck doing in Tokyo? What's that Japanese pop group doing at a train station in Seattle? They're wearing sweaters, they're complaining about the muggy heat, she's eating an icecream sandwich bigger than her head and yet sorting trash into burnable and non. And why are there suddenly tall buildings outside? I secretly look forward to that moment of utter confusion between sleeping and waking when I open my eyes in a strange place at an off hour. If you kind of like that too, stick around.

Catastrophic molting

On the second day of the drive, after an afternoon at Hearst Castle, we pulled off the road in San Simeon to see the elephant seals. There's a beach that they come to throughout the year to do what elephant seals do -- mate and shed. In July, they're shedding. Signs explained that they weren't sick, they were undergoing a "catastrophic molt" in which all their skin comes off at once. This does not leave the elephant seal-shaped rugs lying on the beach that the description suggests. The skin just rubs off in patches. While they wait for their skin to fall off, they mostly lie around in groups packed tight against the chilly wind, rearing up once in a while for a quick skirmish, then flopping back down with mighty thuds. (They say they can be up to 5,000 pounds.)  The viewing platform is maybe 100 yards from where the seals are. Through binoculars, they had the funniest faces. The lighter ones look like they have pretty eyeliner -- and hideous floppy, whiskered nose flaps.

We were planning to drive to a beach another hour north or so to catch the sunset and then keep going til we found a place to stay. Maybe it was the jetlag, but watching these slothful heavy beasts, I realized there was nothing I'd rather do than thud down and just lie around. So we decided to stop nearby for the night.