The spring chinook are running up the Willamette and the Columbia this spring…
This is a photo from our trip to British Columbia last summer with the five Maloney girls. It was our most productive chinook fishing trip ever. That fish Mitchell is holding topped 30 pounds, our first Tyee!
We are having a wonderful time on our annual trip to Ashland. I think even Rick is enjoying it — Macbeth was truly terrifying. And he and Will went to Music Man yesterday and both loved it. It was Will’s first full-length play, and it was apparently really entertaining for the kids as well as adults. The mayor, in particular, was a show-stealer. Now I want to see it!
It’s wonderful seeing friends, sharing big Thai and Indian dinners out, keeping the kids up way too late (it’s 9:30 a.m. and Will is still sleeping.) Though Kymberly, who is in the midst of her own Shakespearean adventure, is being totally missed by everyone. We must get her down here next year. And for anyone reading this, go watch her act in “As You Like It” in Oregon’s wine country in the next few weeks. Kymberly asked me to share my thoughts on the plays, so I’m sharing what my head was buzzing with this morning as I relived the play “Equivoation” last night. It’s rough, but I want to get it posted before Will wants up. Note to Kymberly and Brent — you gotta get down here and see it before the season’s out.
PORTLAND, ORE., Friday, July 24, 2009, 2 p.m. — So we arrived back in Portland at noon today, and fortunately for Will, he slept four hours on the plane, but unfortunately for me, who didn’t, he is raring to go and sharing Scotland stories with our next-door neighbor, who is headed to Scotland in a few days.
So I figured I’d finish out our Scotland blog on the front porch. I’m bleary-eyed from the flights and the four hours of sleep I got last night (we got up at 3 a.m. Glasgow time and I now think it’s 10 p.m., so I’m running on fumes.)
Continue readingI jogged around the Imperial Palace this afternoon, about a four-mile run from the hotel. I’m afraid I didn’t represent my country all that well; I was being passed right and left. Tomorrow is the Tokyo Marathon, one of the world’s biggest marathons, and a section of the course includes what I ran today. If only I were in better shape …
Yesterday was a long but eventful day in Sapporo. I toured a beautiful orchestra hall, and went to the top of the ski jump that was used for the Sapporo Winter Olympics, and is still used for events and training. I rode the chair lift up and down. There’s also a cool Winter Olympics museum there, with interactive games, including a simulator where you do a ski jump. I went 113 feet, far short of the 140-foot record. My hosts were nice about it, but clearly unimpressed.
I also met Sapporo’s mayor, a very serious but interesting man who talked about what he thinks Portland and Sapporo have in common, including an appreciation of nature, and beauty, and life conducted at a pace to enjoy both. I liked him, and his city, a great deal. I will always have found memories of Sapporo, and the people I met there, and how important it is for them to have a connection to Portland.
I said goodbye to Yoshida-san at the Tokyo airport late last night, bought sushi to go and ate dinner in my room. It was a relief to wake up at a reasonable hour this morning and have nowhere to go. I needed a break. I watched the Blazers lose to Cleveland on my computer, and then wrote a couple blog posts for The Oregonian. I also did some research on MFA programs at Antioch and Pacific, trying to decide what to do, where to go. I’m leaning Antioch, but I’m just not sure.
Courtenay and Will arrive in a few hours. I am eager to see them, share my stories and spend some time exploring Tokyo with them before I get back to work on Monday.
A long, surreal day that began when I snapped awake at 4:30 a.m., and wound up walking the streets of Shimbashi just after dawn, along with some rather aggressive Tokyo prostitutes, and finished with a great dinner of beer, sashimi and other delicacies with four members of the Sapporo foreign relations department.
I flew to Sapporo from Tokyo today with a translator, Yoshida-san, and we toured parts of Sapporo before visiting a school to meet with students who went to Portland last year. Portland has a sister-city friendship with Sapporo that will mark its 50th year this spring, one of the longest sister friendships between any American and Japanese cities. The city officials, students and others were excited to welcome a Portland journalist, and my interview with the shy students, under the watchful eye of the school principal, also was photographed and recorded by a reporter from the Haikkado daily newspaper. It took me a while to get the students to warm up; they were intimidated, I think, by the setting. But I told them that so far all that I had done in Sapporo was visit a giant trash incinerator (true) and that unless they opened up about their city, I would go back to Portland and write solely about Sapporo and its incinerator, and that got them finally to open up. They were really charming kids, and they followed me outside after the interview, and shook my hand and wanted to pose for pictures.
The city officials were abuzz about the mayoral sex scandal in Portland, and had lots of questions about what’s going on, and what’s going to happen. There’s some anxiety about the timing of a big delegation of Sapporo citizens scheduled to visit Portland in June, timed not only for the Rose Festival, but also perhaps for the beginning of the effort to recall Sam Adams.
There is a lot of curiosity and interest here in Portland, and I hope to write a piece encouraging Portlanders to have more interest in and curiosity about their Japanese sister. There is a lot of pride about Sapporo, a city of 1.8 million that is just coming out of another long winter, with old snowdrifts still piled around town.
Tomorrow I am scheduled to visit the ski jump built for the Sapporo Olympics, a beautiful concert hall that cost more than $150 million to build, interview the city’s climate change and sustainability experts and chat with the mayor of Sapporo before flying back to Tokyo. This has been great fun so far.
Ohayo Gozaimas! It’s 4 a.m. Tuesday in Tokyo, and I’ve been awake for a couple hours on my first morning here. My time clock is messed up after the 11-hour flight from Portland and bus and taxi rides. I went out last night into Ginza and bravely ventured into a yakitori/sake restaurant. The staff concluded that I was Australian, but I’m not certain why, or whether that is a good or bad thing. Tokyo is just as we left it when we visited three years ago, over-the-top busy, noisy and compelling, a sensory overload of a city. I have my first meetings today with leaders of the Foreign Press Center and one of Japan’s top experts on fisheries resources, which are in trouble here. Japan is badly overfishing its waters, its seafood consumption is shrinking and the number of Japanese fishermen, who are aging, is falling by 10,000 people a year. At this pace, they say, Japan will have no fishermen in just 12 years.
Last night I met Suzuki-san, the Foreign Press Center officer who arranged my trip. She speaks very good English, having lived and studied in Toronto for four years. I am a good two feet taller than she is — a towering Australian, as it were.
There is some sort of contraption in my room to press slacks and shirts. It’s not an iron, exactly, and I think I will give it a try now. I still have two hours to kill before breakfast.
Jamata, for now
Here’s a video Rick and Courtenay made of the Lake Party 2008. It takes a little time to load. The colored lights at the end are the kids running wild with their glow sticks. Looking forward to many, many more adventures at the lake.
The Thompson Attigs 