Hey everyone, welcome to bonus episode number 142 of the Culeps English podcast. How's it going?
I hope you're doing well.
My name's Andrew and I will be your host and your study buddy today.
If you don't know me, let me quickly introduce myself.
I'm a Canadian, but I live abroad in Seoul, South Korea.
And every week here in our bonus episodes, what I do is tell you a story from my everyday life and I hope by tuning in and listening to these stories you will be able to build your English fluency.
Spending time with natural English is a great way to build your communication skills and to level up your English and that's what I'm here to help you with with these stories.
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Okay, so let's get started with this week's story everyone.
I'm gonna title this episode, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Because I think that really describes how I spent my time in Japan recently.
I spent a week in Japan and it really was the best of times and the worst of times, and that's a little reference to a line from a Charles Dickens novel.
If you aren't familiar with that line, it's a classic cliche line that all English speakers will recognize.
So let me tell you about the best of times and worst of times in Japan in this story.
Let's get started with it right now.
Here we go. In February my wife and I took a two -week vacation.
We spent a week in Hawaii and on the way back to Seoul we spent a week in Japan.
In the last couple of bonus episodes I told some stories about visiting Hawaii, so if you haven't heard those ones yet I recommend going back and checking that out so you can go in sequence, but in this episode I'll tell you about the Japan trip.
So it took about a day a full day's worth of travel to get from Hawaii to Tokyo which is where we flew into you know, when you go from your hotel to the airport and then check -in at the airport and actually that was a big debacle at the Honolulu Airport.
It took us a long time to check in because our cab driver dropped us off at the wrong terminal and we didn't know about that and so we didn't know where to go to check into our flights even though my wife and I are pretty well traveled we felt like newbies like first time travelers because we had such a hard time checking in at the airport.
Thankfully we arrived quite early so it was okay but that was yeah a big debacle a big debacle means like a big ordeal or a big process to get something accomplished.
So yeah finally checked in at the airport got on our flight it's probably about seven or eight hours from Hawaii to Tokyo and then arrive in Tokyo go through immigration, catch the train, go to our hotel, check into our hotel, you know, that's a whole day gone right there.
So we spent one day just traveling to Japan.
I do have to say that after we arrived in Tokyo and we were staying around the Ueno Station for those of you who are familiar with Tokyo, after we checked into our hotel, we went to a really awesome restaurant.
we had one of the best meals of the trip at this little local restaurant that was really close to our hotel just a couple of blocks away we had a delicious salmon I had a salmon steak and oh man it was awesome.
It's funny our very first meal in Tokyo I think was better than all of the food that we ate in Hawaii i don't know Japanese food is amazing and so it was a really great experience and I learned one thing during this trip a little tip to all of you who will visit Japan in the future and Let me tell you there are so many tourists in Japan right now It's pretty wild that I think probably many people out there plan to visit Japan sometime in the future Google Maps is the app that many travelers use and I think many Japanese people use as well it's for you know finding new places to go and in Google
Maps, well I realized that if your app is set to English, like it is for me on my phone, then when you click on a restaurant you'll get a lot of English reviews, and most of those reviews that are written in English are left by tourists who have visited the restaurant.
And if you notice that there are no English reviews, then probably not too many tourists have visited that restaurant, and when you have your phone set to English then it's likely that you'll see the English reviews first so I kind of realized that if you click on a restaurant to read the reviews before visiting it and all of the reviews are in English there's probably a tourist trap or probably somewhere that tourist go and locals don't go as much so when I was trying to find restaurants for us on this trip I avoided the English reviews and if I saw high reviews that were written in Japanese
of course I don't read Japanese so I couldn't understand the review but if the rating was high and sometimes I would use a translator to see what they had to say well then those were the kinds of restaurants that we tried to go to to get a more local authentic experience and the restaurant that we visited had no English reviews at all it was only Japanese reviews and they were positive reviews and the restaurant was great really cozy nice atmosphere and yeah after a long travel day it hit the spot and we had a nice dinner that first night in japan in tokyo i have to be honest and say that my wife
planned a lot of this trip she took the lead with making the itinerary and all of the travel plans which was just fine by me i actually don't like doing that too much and i think she rather enjoys it so it's perfect and yeah I wasn't exactly sure what our itinerary was but I was under the impression that we were only going to spend one night in Tokyo and then go to a different area outside of the city to a place in the mountains a couple of hours outside of Tokyo called Kusatsu I believe it's called and apologies to our Japanese listeners if I butcher the pronunciation of some place names or Japanese
words in this episode guys please forgive me but yeah that was our plan was to go to the mountains because we wanted to hit up a Japanese style onsen hot spring and so I thought I was under the impression that we are going to go there directly the next day but I was so stoked and excited to find that that was incorrect and my wife had planned a buffer day in Tokyo so that It was awesome because after that long travel day, I was not looking forward to packing up my suitcase again, hauling my suitcase to the train station and taking a train and taking a bus and going to the mountains.
That just seemed exhausting.
So while we were eating dinner, I was kinda complaining like, ah, sorta sucks that we have to go tomorrow to the mountains into the hot spring.
Like, I'm really pretty tired.
My wife was like, no, we have a day in Tokyo tomorrow.
So that was just amazing to hear.
And so that was great, we were able to sleep in a little bit the next day and just have a lazier day.
That day in Tokyo we went to a temple called Sensoji, I believe, is the name of the temple.
And it would have been amazing to see, I'm sure it looked really cool, but it was overrun by tourists.
Like there are so, so, so many tourists there.
It was so packed that it was just not a pleasant experience And I think that day was actually a national holiday in Japan.
I can't remember exactly what the holiday was, but it was a day off for Japanese people as well.
So you can imagine that people have a day off.
Maybe they want to check out the temple, plus just so many tourists in Japan.
People these days are saying that Japan is suffering from over -tourism, and I felt that while I was at that temple.
So my wife and I took a quick look at the temple, and then we peaced out because it was just so crowded that it wasn't a pleasant experience.
And we just sort of wandered around Tokyo, wandered around through some different neighborhoods.
We hit up a coffee shop called Lucent Coffee and I want to give them a shout -out because we hadn't planned on visiting there at all.
It was just a random place that we came about when we were ready for a cup of coffee and it ended up being a delicious delicious cup of coffee.
Amazing. the coffee in Japan.
So far I've had some really some of the best coffee in my life there so shout out to them for their kind service and good coffee that was cool.
And what else do we do that day we want just wandered around explored some of the different places we went to a Soba restaurant and it was cool at the Soba restaurant all of the tables at the front of the restaurant were occupied and so they sat us in the back on the floor seating area.
And Qlubz listeners will know that I'm interested in floor -sitting culture and I've lamented here on Qlubz before and lamented means to maybe be sad about something, to talk about something in a sad way and to sort of complain about something in a sad way.
So I've lamented here on Qlubz that I've noticed in South Korea where I currently live that floor -sitting culture at restaurants is slowly disappearing and it's getting harder and harder to find and more rare than it was in the past. And so it was cool to see a restaurant in Japan where we were seated on the floor at this soba noodle restaurant.
And we had a delicious meal there.
And yeah I was really impressed.
This was my first time visiting Japan with my wife.
I've visited Japan several other times by myself, but this was our first trip there together, and she can speak just a tiny little bit of Japanese, but it's still way, way, way more than I can speak.
And so when we go to the restaurant, she's able to say, like a table for two people and order the food from the server.
And, you know, if she needs something extra like ask for extra water or ask for a napkin or something, she can do that.
And for me, my Japanese, unfortunately, is like at zero pretty much I know just a couple of words and that's about it.
and so to see her do that is so impressive blew my mind and and was really awesome so yeah that was comfortable having her do the ordering at the restaurant and also fired me up and motivated me to study at least some basic survival Japanese for my next trip so I don't have to be one of those guys who relies on their phone and body language in English when I visit a country like that so my next trip that's my goal at least at least some survival Japanese.
Anyways finally at the end of the day we ended the day off by going for barbecue.
I believe it's called yakiniku in Japanese and we had some great grilled meat.
So that was a great way to end the day, a delicious way to end the day then we went back to our hotel and went to bed early because we a big travel day the next day we had to wake up we had to catch a train and then catch a bus to go to kusatsu the next day for our onsen experience so that's pretty much exactly what we did the next day we woke up we went to the train station we caught a train and then we had to transfer to a bus and then we arrived in kusatsu and the This whole journey took probably about two and a half hours it wasn't that long to be honest with you and it was nice getting to
see some of the countryside.
Didn't get to see Mount Fuji unfortunately from our train but we did arrive at the Village of Kusatsu and I think this whole village is just centered around hot springs right in the center downtown area of the village the central area of the village.
There is a hot spring and this amazing ancient cooling mechanism so the water comes out of the earth and then there were all of these pipes I guess or channels that were built out of wood that were designed to cool the water so the water comes out of the ground and then flows through these channels and as it flows through the water it cools down.
And guys I did put some photos on our Instagram from the Japanese trip so if you haven't checked our Instagram yet and you want to see some visuals, then please check out the Instagram.
You can see some pictures of some of the things I'm talking about here in this episode.
But yeah, the whole village seemed to be centered around hot springs.
And we stayed at a traditional Japanese inn, which is called Youkan.
And I'm probably mispronouncing that again.
So apologies, but the spelling is R -Y -O -K -A -N in English, Youkan.
And yeah, amazing. it was such a good experience traditional Japanese inn and a beautiful room we had this huge room that was just gorgeous and we decided to sleep on the floor so there were no beds in the room and instead we slept on these futon mats and slept on the tatami mats that are the traditional flooring in Japan and we slept super well it was pretty pricey this inn so we only stayed there for one night but it was pretty upscale and really nice so I'm glad we splurged for that one night but yeah essentially we arrived at the village we checked into our inn and then we went to our first
onsen hot spring and this one was outside so we had to walk to the hot spring probably for about a kilometer and half of that was up this sort of hiking trail because this hot spring was really in the forest and then we arrived and we had to pay maybe probably around five US dollars to enter so it wasn't too expensive and it's a naked experience so you have to go into the onsen naked and because of that it is gender segregated so yeah the women are on one side and dudes are on the other side so my wife and I had to split up but we went and we did our own thing.
And I have to say, it was such an amazing experience, very relaxing, just so calm and nice to be in that hot bath and the natural hot water with all of the good minerals inside of it.
You feel like just a new born baby after you come out of the bath and it was still winter when we were there, so to be in the forest, and there was snow lightly falling it was just a super relaxing awesome experience and yeah really really good I feel like hot springs are my new thing I talked about visiting a hot spring in Canada with my brother not too long ago in a bonus episode from the past and I'll put the link to that episode in the description for this one if you want to go hear about that hot spring experience but to do that in Canada around a year ago and then to do this in Japan recently
was so awesome and comparing the two was really cool too there are both really terrific experiences but in different ways and yeah I think this is gonna be my new thing going forward is to try and find hot spring experiences especially ones outside it's just so cool.
So we did that and we felt super refreshed when we came out of the hot spring we drank some yogurt.
There is a yogurt drink that's famous in this village so we drank the yogurts and we We went back to our inn and we had a delicious dinner.
The dinner was crazy good.
We had our own private dining room and they prepared the food for us and many courses and took it into our dining room.
We wore the traditional Japanese inn clothes, like they give you some clothes to change into when you arrive at the inn and those are called yukata.
So we wore our yukata and we went to the private dining room and were just pampered and spoiled.
I guess with this delicious meal of many courses.
So that was great. And then after we went to another onsen in our inn there was an onsen as well.
So there were several different bathing areas and again gender segregated.
so I went to one my wife went to another one and the one that I visited was also outside so now it was night time so I was sitting outside and again it was snowy out and yeah just a really really cool relaxing de -stressing experience after traveling for so long from Hawaii to that area kuzatsu it was great just to relax in the hot waters of the hot spring and yeah pretty much after that we were done we were like completely it's funny it's funny to say like after relaxing all day you're super tired and sleepy but after relaxing all day I was super tired and sleepy so we slept and woke up the next
day and also went back to the private dining room for again a private breakfast which was multiple courses delicious and we hit up the onsen again in the morning before returning back to Tokyo.
So guys this pretty much at this point is going to wrap up the good up until now it was amazing it had been a fantastic trip the first three or four days and in japan were amazing but this is where things started to get bad so we went back to Tokyo and we stayed at a different hotel.
We checked into our hotel which is around Tokyo Tower in that area of the city.
And again that day was mostly a travel day, so going from Kusatsu back to Tokyo, checking into the hotel, that pretty much occupied most of our day.
In fact, I don't even remember what we did that evening.
Pretty much just crashed out.
The next day was a shopping day on our itinerary and I was interested in record shopping in Japan, and my wife was interested in doing some clothes shopping, and I also wanted to do some running shoe shopping because running culture is so amazing in Japan.
They have great running stores, and it's easy to find good running shoes compared to Korea here, where it's a little bit more difficult, and also Japan's an amazing place for record shopping as well, one of the best places in the world, at least that I've visited, So I was super excited and I had a long list of record stores that I wanted to check out so that day we went to the Shibuya area and we did a little bit of record shopping a little bit of shoe shopping a little bit of clothes shopping and just walked around and Had kind of a nice busy day checking out some of the more commercial shopping
areas of that part of Tokyo and It was a long day.
We were out and about for pretty much the whole day from the morning until the evening.
And in the evening after eating dinner, we came back to our hotel.
And I have to say that Tokyo is like a mega city's mega city.
It feels so much busier than Seoul for whatever reason like Seoul is a mega city and it's super densely populated.
But Tokyo feels like another level and of course if you look at the population between the two cities Tokyo is much bigger but it really feels that way as well it feels super super super dense and populated and maybe it's just because I'm not as familiar with Tokyo and I don't know it's just a really busy place and I was kind of feeling exhausted as we were coming back to our hotel from that day of shopping in Shibuya and Shinjuku and some of the areas around there.
So coming back to the hotel I felt a little bit exhausted and when we got to the hotel I I sat down for a moment and suddenly it was like this wave just hit me and all of a sudden I started having a fever I started sweating a little bit and started getting a headache and just not feeling really good and then boom it hit me like a semi -truck.
I had to go to the bathroom and it was a nightmare in the bathroom.
I just got hit with the worst, I don't know what it was, food poisoning or maybe norovirus or something but i was suddenly so so sick and we have this expression in english called maybe you can guess what the meaning is it's to come out at both ends so if you're sick and you're throwing up and it's coming out one end of your mouth and if you're sick and you have diarrhea and it's coming out the other end well that's the expression that we use come out at both ends and man was it coming out at both ends.
I was so so sick very suddenly it just sort of hit me and I stayed sick for the next several days until we had to go back to Seoul in fact.
So we were planning to stay in Tokyo for another three days before coming back to Seoul and that whole time I was just in the hotel Being really sick like running to the bathroom almost at first it was every 15 minutes or so and then little bit later towards when I left it was like maybe every hour or so but yeah it was terrible.
I've never had an experience like this I've never had food poisoning before or a virus before and I was trying to figure out like what was it that I ate or what happened how did I get so sick so quickly and it was really weird because my wife and I had exactly the same food and she was fine and I thought if it was a virus then a virus would be infectious and probably she'd get it too, but she was fine the whole time.
So I don't know, I don't know what happened but it was a terrible experience and of course I didn't want to spoil my wife's vacation so I told her you know you can go out and explore Tokyo and do the things that you want to do.
And so she did that so that was great actually she had a wonderful time and she would go out and then come back at the end of the day and show me all the photos that she took and all the things that she did including doing some of the things that were on my list that I wanted to do.
So that was really unfortunate but yeah it was I mean it was lucky that our hotel room in Tokyo was so small it was only a couple steps from the bed to the bathroom but I was just going back and forth from the bed to the bathroom yeah every like 20 minutes or so and I instructed my wife to go get me some supplies from the pharmacy and the convenience store so she picked me up some medicine and picked me up some Pocari sweat a lot of it because I was worried about becoming dehydrated so I was drinking a lot of pakari sweat and fluids but I couldn't keep anything down.
Any food that I'd consume or even the pakari sweat and water that I would drink would just come right back up again and out again.
So a terrible experience.
In fact, that first day when I was really sick, I couldn't do anything.
I had a bad headache.
I couldn't watch TV.
I couldn't watch Netflix on my phone.
I could just sort of lie in bed and listen to podcasts.
I couldn't do anything visual.
I couldn't read books, anything like that.
And slowly it did start to become better, but still by the time we had to check out of our hotel and go back to Seoul, I was really worried.
I was like, oh, do we have to extend our trip?
I don't know if I can make it on the subway.
I don't know if I can make it on the train to the airport.
Like, what am I going to have to do if I have to go to the bathroom and I'm stuck on the subway?
And my wife was joking that she was gonna go buy me some diapers.
It was that bad guys, it was really really bad.
In retrospect I probably should have gone to the hospital but thankfully just the night before we had to wake up and check out of our hotel to get the airplane I was researching about the best medicine that you could take for this situation in Japan and trying to what it was called and I found a medicine called, it's got a really funny name and I don't know how the Japanese pronounce it, but on the the box it was written in English stopper, stopper and so this stopper medicine is supposed to stop any throwing up from happening, stop any diarrhea from happening and so I instructed my wife you must
go to the drugstore and get me some stopper.
All of the reviews that I had read online said this was the medicine that you need to and so she got me the stopper and thankfully it worked it stopped everything and so I was able to take the train and take the subway and take the airplane back to Seoul and get home.
So yeah that last part of the trip was really a bust I didn't do anything for the final three days in Tokyo except run between my bed and the bathroom so that was really a shame and kind of Unfortunate that the trip had to end, with that sour note.
Ended on a sour note, it wasn't a pleasant way to end the trip.
I am kind of glad that it happens in Tokyo because it's easy for me to visit Tokyo.
It's only a couple of hours flight away and it's not really expensive to visit there, at least compared to Hawaii.
So the Hawaii portion of the trip was amazing and if I had been sick like that in Hawaii then it would have been really a waste of time and money.
Of course, nobody wants to be sick on holiday, but if it had to happen anywhere, I guess I am kind of thankful that it happened in Tokyo because it's easy for me to visit.
My wife had an amazing time.
Thankfully also she does well on her own.
So she wasn't upset that she couldn't travel with me or not.
She's pretty independent and does well on her own.
so it was fine for her to spend a couple of days in Tokyo, hanging out by herself and just wandering around by herself, but she had a great time.
So we'll definitely be back, and next time I hope that I will be fully healthy.
When we did come back to Seoul, I was still quite sick for another three or four days, like, I felt like I was really out for like a week where I was useless for a week.
I couldn't do anything so I don't know what it was exactly but it hit me like a ton of bricks.
It was just an intense sickness and I lost weight even if I look at some photos that I took of myself.
I look really gaunt and gaunt means to look quite skinny so my face looked really skinny and yeah this was the lead -up to my marathon as well.
I ran the Seoul Marathon in mid March. I think the start of march end of february where I was going through this so it was pretty much the worst timing imaginable to get sick while on vacation and while kind of prepping for a marathon but anyways I survived in the end I didn't die.
I'm here in full health I was able to finish the marathon even and thanks by the way to everyone who's been asking me about the marathon. I got a lot of DM's and comments on social media to either cheer me on or to ask me about how the experience went And so I think I'll talk about that next week So I'll do a Seoul marathon recap for next week's bonus episode But for this week's episode, I think this is a good place to stop.
So congratulations if you made it all the way to the end Thank you for listening to my travel story about the best of times and worst of times in Japan and for this week's completion code why don't we go with the idiomatic expression to hit me like a ton of bricks I told you that while I was in Tokyo I got super sick super suddenly and that sickness hit me like a ton of bricks and that just means that something impacted you really really intensely and suddenly and when you weren't expecting it and so that's what happen to me that sickness hit me like a ton of bricks.
So for the completion code please leave a comment either on our YouTube page or our discord community or our Instagram and just make an example sentence with that expression something hit me or hit you or hit him or her we can change the pronoun hit someone like a ton of bricks and by leaving that example sentence that will signal to me and our entire Qloops community that you made it all the way to the end of this episode.
All right everyone so please take care don't be sick like I was it's terrible I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
So stay healthy and happy have a great week of English studying up ahead And I'll catch you in the next Qloops episode.
Until then, bye bye.
