Unkateeve in Singapore

Long ago, when my niece Eileen was a toddler, her attempt to say “Uncle Steve” came out as “Unkateeve” -- it was cute, and the name Unkateeve occasionally has popped up over the years, long long after Eileen got my name right.

Eileen has been in Singapore for three years, teaching animation art at the University. I hadn’t seen her in years, and suddenly the ms Amsterdam was approaching Singapore.

On Oct 22 I met her at the terminal, with a plastic Viking helmet on my head, complete with horns, and a Thailand umbrella as a little gift. The two items together were pretty incongruent, and made for a pretty goofy photograph, especially when you throw in a New York Mets T-shirt. So cosmopolitan I am.

But there was purpose here -- the umbrella was a gift (why do I keep typing umbreela?) -- and the Viking helmet was the centerpiece of my Halloween costume-to-be. With an artsy lady like Eileen as a consultant, I thought Singapore would be a good place to add stuff to the costume.

We got a pretty decent piece of velour-like cloth that could serve as an upper-body garment, with a tiger stripe pattern. It didn’t occur to either of us that there are no tigers in Scandinavia and the tiger stripes were yet another incongruent thing.

We were in a time crunch, and had to give up on the wig/beard search, surprisingly two different costume shops were unable to sell me these items. So we went to a “Microbrewery” in downtown Singapore, where you can look thru the window and see the huge metal vats that brew the beer. They had a special where you sample a dozen different styles of beer. This plus catch-up family chitchat made for a fine afternoon, but Unkateeve was back on the ship by 4:00PM, having enjoyed a terrific tour of Singapore. Thank you Eileen.

Singapore is the halfway point of the grand Asia-Australia tour. And 300 people disembarked at Singpore, having purchased “only” the first half of the voyage. They were not completely replaced, I hear only 70 new people got on. Possibly because the second half of the voyage has 20 sea days out of 33 sea days, and the first half had only 15 sea days out of 32 days.

So now there will be less ports to occupy people’s time with. The staff will be hard-pressed to dream up interesting “stuff to do” -- especially for the great majority that purchased the whole 65-day voyage.

In the piano lounge I’ve hosted numerous contests, “Name That Tune - 60s tunes” -- “Name That Tune - tune titles beginning with letter S” - “Name That Tune - one-word titles” - “Name That Tune - generic” , Elvis Hour, Sinatra Hour, Open Mic, and “Fill in the Missing Lyric” -- my twist on the hit TV show. All the contests result in trinket prizes, among them Holland America coffee mugs, Holland America key chains, Holland America luggage tags. But people compete quite seriously, and can get pretty contentious about the point system. Bob Barker I ain’t, but think I can increase my value around here by thinking up more “events”.

Right after Singapore the ship crosses the equator, continues through the tropics and makes its way to the south side of Australia ("...is the baddest part of town...and if you go down there ya better best beware...")

Oops, excuse me, couldn't help that. Anyway -- the ship will reach about 40-45 degrees south latitude, the opposite of the 40-45 degrees north latitude on Long Island. So in early November it'll be well into spring down there.

Thailand

Bangkok is on a river too shallow for cruise ships, so the ship docked at a place called Laem Chabang. It required a 2-hour bus ride to get to Bangkok. And EVERYBODY wanted to go to Bangkok. 17 buses headed up there, and once again I was fortunate enough to be a Tour Escort.

The Grand Palace in Bangkok is one of the biggest highlights of this entire voyage. It’s a huge complex of incredibly ornate buildings, built for the Thai royalty. Buddhism and royalty are bound together here, and kings have the spiritual status of Pharaohs.

The complex was started in the late 1700s, and apparently there was unlimited budget and labor. Nowadays, certain religious and royal events still happen in the complex, but you’d never know it. There is a gate, with tickets to purchase, and throngs of tourists.

But once you get in there, you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the magnificence of the architecture. Like everybody else, you pull out your camera and start clicking away.

There was a second visit in Thailand, two days later, to a tropical isle called Samui. For all its palm trees and forest and seashore, Samui also had a major tourist stop in the form of a big Golden Buddha, perched on a high hill overlooking the sea. Big parking lot for the place, and many tour buses. Many adjacent gift shops selling little gold buddhas for $20 apiece, a little pot-bellied guy with a big smiling face, and I almost bought one.

Couldn’t do it. I felt ridiculous. Perhaps the Big Buddha of Samui and the Grand Palace complex of Bangkok were built with solemnity and lofty intentions from long ago. But the commercialism reduces the whole thing to the mundane. Apparently with Buddhist approval. Oh well, enjoy the damn pictures.

Santa and the Penguins

Approximately 30,000 years ago, man started migrating from the African cradle of civilization. A huge portion of mankind went toward the lands now known as China and India.

A large portion of those people traveled further, following a long and winding land bridge to an incredible fertile place they called Australia. This land had no deserts, only beautiful greenery and attractive temperate climate. This land came to be the most populated area on earth. Culture grew, with the first human developments in philosophy and creative literature and science.

The Australians developed large ships before the other populations of the world, and eventually started reaching beyond its shores toward the nearby Indonesian islands in one direction, and , in the other direction, the cold and forbidding place they called Antarctica.

Their voyaging came with a precise knowledge of the heavens above, as star charts became indispensable to sea travel. They noted that the stars seemed to revolve around a fixed point above Antarctica. They called this the North Celestial Axis. Anybody facing this celestial axis was said to be facing “North”. The opposite direction -- toward Indonesia, was called “South”

Maps got larger in size, representing larger and larger areas, as the Australians knowledge grew. The top of the map was always the North direction, with the useless Antarctic land mass at the top.

Eventually the world was proven to be spherical, with navigators sailing around it in every direction.

Globes were manufactured, now accurately showing what the world looked like. Some globes were mounted so as to be spinned, on a 23 ½ degree axis, to imitate the now-known rotation of the earth.

As a simple expansion of the “map” idea, the globe had Antarctica at the top. Some referred to the area as the North Pole, and the fabled character called Santa Claus was said to live there, with thousands of penguin-elves helping make toys for the children of the world.

In the 18th Century, models of the solar system were drawn, Planetariums were built to represent the earth and other planets moving around the sun. Conveniently, the nine planets moved around the sun on the same plane, together describing a “disc” spinning like a record. The visible side of the record, with the turntable needle on it, showed the North side of all the planets. Including of course, Antarctica, Australia, and the northern part of Africa.

The rotation of the earth demanded a corresponding celestial axis point on the other end of the earth, and it turned out to be a watery area, covered by an ice cap. There was a solitary star located exactly on the Southern axis, thus called the South Star. The Southern half of the heavens had some of the most attractive constellations, like Orion and the Big Dipper. Primitive peoples were found far south, among them the Eskimos, Siberians, and Scandinavians. They were said to be living “Down Under” , and the Scandinavian pop group ABBA had a hit song by that title in 1983.

Space satellites eventually provided photographic proof of what the earth looked like. The Australians had it exactly right. Beautiful photos were produced of Antarctic North Pole area, with Australia just to the south of it, Indonesia further south, past the equator, China, the Siberian “Down Under” area, and the South polar icecap.

In the year 2750, a spaceship from a faraway galaxy approached the solar system, and saw it exactly as earthlings had pictured it. They saw a “disc” of planets rotating the sun. One of the aliens wondered if they were looking at the “A” side or the “B” side of the disc. The answer of course, was that it didn’t matter.

Two Tours in Vietnam

On the morning of Oct 14 we were in Da Nang. I had successfully applied to be a tour escort for this day, so at 8:15 AM I was standing out on the dock in front of tour bus #8, with a big metal flag with a big red number 8 on it.

36 guests got on the bus, and it was a 45 minute ride from Da Nang to a little town out in the rice paddies called Hoi An. Along the way we saw the huge distinction between the Haves and Have-nots, as a series of squalid hovels would suddenly give way to some fenced-off resort hotel along the beach.

But I’ll remember this day for the angst and difficulty with trying to be a Tour Escort for Holland America. This group of guests was full of spaced-out, inconsiderate persons who didn’t care if they got lost in this crappy little town out in the middle of nowhere, didn’t care if they fell behind the group. If they missed the bus, it would be a huge problem getting transportation back.

But my job was to keep this group together, not allow people to straggle behind and wander, also not allow the Vietnamese tour guide from moving too fast.

You have to picture this. A narrow road in a congested, little village in the boonies of Vietnam, all the little skinny residents dirt poor. Some Vietnamese kid (25 years old) is the tour guide, with poor English skills, leading the way, and these 36 old Americans are walking almost single file. The distance between the first and the last is constantly increasing, as the weakest old people slow down, and as others get distracted, stopping to take pictures, talk to peddlers, look at postcards and other crap, buy bottles of water……

…..oh yeah, the weather suddenly got brutal at about 9:41 AM. It suddenly dawned on all of us, This is a goddam steambath. Really nasty tropical humidity.

Everybody really wanted to go their own way, instead of following this incompetent Vietnamese tour guide, who made laughable efforts to gather us up and tell us about some “point of interest” in the town. His voice had no projection, no expression, and barely recognizable English words.

All this chaos was reported on a form I was given to fill out. I trashed the tour guide especially. I faulted many guests for constantly falling behind the group, with Yours Truly doing his best to nudge them along diplomatically. Nonetheless, one of them told me I was rude, something like “I paid for this tour and I don’t like being pushed”.


Two days later, On Oct 16, the ship arrived at Phu My, further down the coastline from Da Nang. 40 miles inland from Phu My is Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon.

Once again I got to be a tour escort, this time it was called “A taste of Vietnamese Cuisine” -- where guests are taken to the Saigon Culinary Arts Center and cooked things under the direction of a Vietnamese Executive Chef.

My idea of cooking is throwing a can of Hormel chili in a pot and heating it up. Throwing in a can of corn with it would be getting fancy.

So this Vietnamese Cuisine thing was of zero interest to me, but I went along as Tour Escort so I could see Ho Chi Minh City. It would have been dicey and difficult to do it without the auspices of a tour, especially here.

The boulevard running from Phu My to Ho Chi Minh City is about 40 miles long. Guests looking out the windows were aghast at how bad this country looked, for the entire length of the ride. Arriving at Ho Chi Minh City you get a slight hint of wealth and style in the city center, but it’s gone in an instant.

Part of the tour agenda was a walk through a Vietnamese marketplace to look at the raw materials that everybody would cook with. Like with the previous tour two days prior, the market visit was a chaotic struggle to negotiate narrow aisles and walls of people, trying to keep the guests in view. I could just see the headline “80-year old American tourist kidnapped in Vietnamese market.”

About a hour later the tour bus arrived at the "main course" of the excursion. We all got off the bus and were led down a back alley. After walking about 150 feet we entered the "Saigon Culinary Arts Center", which had as much professional ambiance as the mens room at Grand Central Station. Just one big un-airconditioned lousy ground floor, with a bunch of tables with little one-burner stoves on them, in a semi-circle around the executive chef's little dais where he delivered instructions.

I hadn't intended to participate in the cooking anyway, but now it appeared there was no comfortable place to even hang out inconspicuously, no lobby, no waiting room, no back room, etc. The tour bus was gone. It was lunchtime, so I got bold and I went strolling in this surreal city on the other side of the planet, looking for a some kind of cafe. I passed by quite a few places that could have been named Steve's Last Meal on Earth, finally settled on one pretty passable place.

The stroll was weird, perhaps a little dicey, a middle-aged overfed American wandering by himself in the Viet Ghetto land of coolie hats, toothless smiles, and especially funky old motor scooters. Much more motor scooters than China. The Vietnamese flag should simply have the image of a motor scooter.

I found a café, ordered a grilled frog. With coke and fries of course. No attempt on their part to conceal the look of the original animal. There was ol’ Flip the Frog himself, decapitated and spreadeagled on the plate. I got the feeling he was captured in the backyard a few minutes after I ordered. Tasted like chicken.

Paying the bill was a big problem, due to total language barrier and the ridiculous rate of inflation in Vietnam. I was amused to find out that the unit of currency in Vietnam is the Dong. No joke. And it deserves to have a funny name because the exchange rate for it is pretty funny. One dollar equals 16,500 Dong.

Knowing absolutely nothing of each other’s language, we got out pens and paper, looked at the bill together, he did his calculations and kept circling the number 84 at the end. As if the frog, fries and coke was $84. I don’t know how willing I was to part with $84 just to avoid trouble. I was quite outnumbered in my surroundings.

Finally a breakthrough, I realized that “84” was his shorthand for 84,000 Dong. A little over $5. I tipped them, all smiles, have a good day.

Meanwhile back at the Cooking school, the 30 guests were receiving their “diplomas” -- silly rolled-up papers tied in ribbon, certifying their participation in this seminar.

As the bus threaded its way through town we passed the city center again, past a statue of Ho Chi Minh, the George Washington of this stupid country. Nobody wanted to stop the bus for a closer look. In my wallet were a few denominations of Dong -- 2000, 10000, and 20000, with Ho Chi Minh’s ugly face, stupid long goatee and all, on each bill -- a fine fate, your face etched on every bill of a currency that’s almost worthless.

The ride back, and other discussions on the ship later on, focused on America’s military involvement here 40 years ago. Tempers can still flare on this subject after all this time. But the debates subsided, and people settled back into their airconditioned cabins that evening as the ship pulled out of Vietnam and headed for far more pleasant places.

Bird Men of Hong Kong

Hong Kong was my first opportunity to be a Tour Escort. This is a rather cool job, in which a ship employee accompanies the passengers on a particular tour. (also called an “excursion”). The name of this excursion was “A Day in the Life of Hong Kong”.

The bus took off at 9:15AM with 36 ship guests, and a few minutes later pulled into a huge parking lot. This was the parking lot for the Taoist temple, and I was stunned at the amount of other tour buses. I counted over FORTY tour buses in this parking lot.

A few minutes later we were in the middle of a mob scene on the temple grounds. The actual Taoist worshippers were quite few in number, maybe 20 or 30 or so that I saw, inside and outside the temple. Our tour group was on a strict schedule, so we were herded like cattle into the temple, with cameras clicking away, filing past a certain worship area, where people were on their knees, shaking little sticks in a tin can, asking advice from the gods.

Yes - multigods, like in Greece and Rome. The tour guide said each god was a former living person who somehow distinguished themselves during life, something like a saint in Catholicism, but much more elevated. Made me wonder how good a life I would lead if there was a chance of becoming a god later on. That could really motivate me.

Anyway, the tour got more pleasant after we got away from the awful visit to the temple. After a peaceful ½ hour visit to a historic old park, we moved on to the third and most interesting stop….

…The Bird Garden and Market. The tour guide, a lifelong Hong Kong resident, said that space is very limited in the apartments, 350 sq feet being typical, and so it’s inconvenient to own cats, and especially dogs. So birds are the most common pet.

In the afternoon, men leave their apartments, carrying bird in cage, and “take the bird for a walk”, as the tour guide put it. They gather up in this little park area with other bird owners, hang the birdcage on long racks provided for that purpose. Then they stand around and chat, usually about birds I guess. Take that back. I don’t know what the hell they talk about.


Adjacent to this little park is a series of stores, a little mall of sorts, selling birds, cages, and bird food. The tour guests got a kick out of all this, snapping photos of these guys with their birds. The question was asked, “Why is it only men? Where are the wives?” Tour guide’s answer -- “they’re all home playing mah jongg”. So this birdwalking routine is a way for husbands and wives to get a break from each other. All of the men looked middle-aged, but I forgot to ask why.

The last stop on this 4-hour tour was Hong Kong History museum. There was only an hour to check it out, and I got antsy after 15 minutes looking at more pottery from the Ding Dong dynasty. The gift shop in the lobby seemed more interesting. So cultured I am.

I was particularly interested in postcards depicting the mesmerizing nighttime skyline of Hong Kong. It’s kinda famous, and it ought to be. From right to left it stretches longer than the Manhattan skyline. The buildings are newer, and you get the feeling it was all built together as part of a unified look. Everything is from 20 to 50 stories high. The whole thing is framed by the crest of the mountains behind it, no building taller than that crest.

At 8:00PM the buildings put on a light show, with each building participating with its own flashing colored pattern, also green laser beams coming from some buildings, swinging around in arcs like krieg lights. Gorgeous in a hi-tech way, if you happen to like neon. The left side of the ship faced this skyline two nights in a row, in fact from the piano I had an all-evening window view, a really nice way to remember Hong Kong.

Japan Photos

little sailors visit the ms Amsterdam

cool-looking bridge in Aomori


"sittin' on the dock of Tokyo BaY, wastin' tiiiiime..."


no hot coffee here

or here

Buddhist temple in Kyoto

pisces manhole cover -- I looked around for other zodiac manhole covers, no luck

does anybody know what this sign says?

Shanghai Shots

Chinese kids posing in front of the Chairman Mao statue

In the Shanghai Museum - 5 foot demon statue from the Ding Dong dynasty


Escort service ad in taxicab

Front car of the Maglev train

The Pearl Tower is the centerpiece of the "new 21st Century Shanghai"


Motorscooters, mopeds and bicycles at intersection, held in place by the Traffic Director on the far right


Lance Armstrong eat your heart out

He didn't know "Leroy Brown" but I tipped him anyway

Slow Boat to China...

…fast train to the airport. Fast, as in 268 mph.

Shanghai is home to the world’s first commercial MAGLEV train (Maglev as in “Magnetic Levitation”).

Somehow they force two repelling magnetic fields to face each other, one coming down from the train, one coming up from the track. And the train levitates! About an inch above the track. No ground resistance, so it can zoom on a 20-mile ride to the airport in just 7 minutes.

Well I just had to check this out, so I took a cab from downtown Shanghai out to Maglev terminal in the suburbs, something like taking a cab from Manhattan to Hicksville.

The only available ride is the 20 mile ride from this terminal out to the airport. I had no need for the airport, but Joe Tourist that I am, I bought a roundtrip ticket for 80 Yuan, which is about $12. I was prepared to pay more.

Oh by the way. What’s the deal with this guy Chairman Mao? I had Chinese paper currency in 5 yuan, 10 yuan, 50 yuan, and 100 yuan denominations, and this guy’s picture was on ALL of these bills. Don’t they have any other heroes in this country? In Canada and USA at least, the glory is spread around -- Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt, even a lousy president like Grant on the $50 bill. The Chinese should mix things up, find a famous emperor from the Ming or Xing or Ting Tang or Ding Dong dynasties or whatever. Even a picture of Charlie Chan or David Carradine would do. OK, now I feel better.

Anyway, it was an exciting ride. It was advertised to be smooth. There was almost no noise, just a low-volume hum. There was some occasional bumping and jostling, which is a mite scary at 268 mph.

Perched 30-40 feet in the air, the Maglev passed by expressways with cars going 60 mph, those cars looked like they were parked. There was a digital sign at the front of my Maglev car, with a readout of the train’s speed. When it reached the maximum readout of 431 Km, I looked around for some OOHS and WOWS. But I was the only American Joe Tourist in this car, and the other passengers, all Chinese, were hardly impressed, doing their reading, sleeping, etc, like it was just a trip on the Long Island Railroad.

The Shanghai Maglev has been around since 2004, and has been a financial disappointment. Unexpectedly, many people simply chose to take taxis to the airport, since cabfare is very affordable in Shanghai. Thus far there hasn’t been enough Joe Tourists to make up the slack.

But Maglev still seems to be the Train of the Future, and there’s talk about running a 170-mile Maglev from Shanghai to another city.

In experimental runs, they’ve reached 350 mph. So you can picture a Maglev taking 9 hours to zoom across the whole USA. I gotta stick around for that.

Thar She Blows

I’m into my second attempt to read “Moby Dick”, the literary classic by Herman Melville. My first attempt (25 years ago) failed because I was too impatient to absorb the more thoughtful passages, especially with Melville’s mid-nineteenth century writing style.

In fact, “Moby Dick” was not too well-received at first, back in 1850, being criticized as digressing and meandering too much. 100 years later, all the “unnecessary” stuff was left out of the movie version, and it made for a cool movie. The Gregory Peck version of Captain Ahab is pretty well stuck in my head, no matter how the book describes the character.

The narrating character, a somewhat spaced-out young guy named Ishmael, enjoyed being the lookout up on top of the mast, in the crow’s nest, 100 feet in the air. Up there he truly “got away from it all” --

“There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks….” , so says Ishmael in one of his dreamy passages.

Bankrupt securities? Fall of stocks? So strange, people were concerned about that stuff way back in 1850. But if you were a young guy like Ishmael, you could free yourself from the whole thing by going out on a 3-year whaling contract. Even if you had some stock investments, the 3 years at sea would force you to forget about it for that time.

Judging by the financial news of the past few days, I think there’s a few million people who could use a few weeks on an 1850 whaling ship, with a couple of two-hour shifts a day up in the crow’s nest, looking around for whales. Truly a getaway, in both time and place.

The ms Amsterdam will provide no such getaway. On a cruise ship in 2008, you can stay totally in touch with everybody and everything that you left on land. Telephones, internet, wireless and satellite systems, allow you to stay in touch with every damn thing. A morning 8-page news synopsis printout of the NY Times is placed on the door of every guest. CNN is on 24 hours a day, uses the slogan “your world today”, and comes out crystal clear on your cabin TV, no matter where you are.

And so I watch the McCain-Obama debate on CNN, at 9:00 AM, 12 hours removed from NYC. The presidential election story, with election day only 4 weeks away, has
actually been eclipsed by the bizarre developments in the global economy.

I guess whaling ships are few and far between these days, with “Save the Whales” and all that. But even if there is a whaling ship sailing around as I write this, I’ll bet every whaler has a TV in his cabin, with CNN. And so you make your 100 foot climb up the rope ladder, to the crow’s nest, with “global financial meltdown” fresh in your head.

Anyway, I’m 1/3 of the way through “Moby Dick”, getting nicely lost in the book for a few minutes each day as the drama slowly unfolds. And as I do my exercise walk around the deck later on, I look out on the sea imagining that big white whale suddenly jumping out, “as in his immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier…”

No Hot Coffee

Today is the 6th and last day of the Japan part of this tour. The first three days were three consecutive small cities in north Japan. Then one sea day. Then…

…the big two-day stay in Kobe. An overnight stay, which is pretty rare. But there’s much to see in Kobe, and much more to see in the two neighboring big cities, Osaka and Kyoto.

Today I have IPM (in port manning -- basically, it’s my turn to stay on the ship while it’s in port - maritime regulation - everybody has to do it occasionally).

So yesterday was my chance to get out and see something. I went into downtown Kobe, and bought a 1050yen train ticket to Kyoto, which is famous for having a lot of those Buddhist temples with the curvy roofs. So cultured I am.

At one of these places I walked in on some kind of serious ceremony, about 80 young guys in robes bunched together on the floor, receiving some kind of sermon from some older Holy Guy. “Ah grasshoppers…” he said. Just kidding, it was Japanese, who knows what he was saying.

Across the street from this ancient Temple, back in the real world, was this diner of sorts, no tables, just sit at the counter, where the menu had tiny English subtitles, which I sorely needed. Japanese food is really weird-looking, and I’m pretty food-squeamish to start with. Basically I had some chicken tenders, with some inedible alfalfa sprouts (?) coated in some disgusting dressing. One nice touch was the big jug of ice water, which everyone one got, so you help yourself to more glasses of ice water as you went along. I seriously needed water after my first and only taste of the alfalfa (?) sprouts.

I then asked for coffee. They didn’t have any. What, no coffee in a diner? What’s wrong with you people? All they had was green tea and that jug of water.

I continued the stroll, gradually getting better with cars coming from the wrong direction - the Japanese do it like the British. Lo and behold -- a Seven-Eleven ! My favorite coffee place for the past 30 years.

I went in said “Hot Coffee?” -- the guy led me to the refrigerator, pointed to a few cans of various brands of cold coffee. I shook my head No Thanks, and walked around the 7-11 three times, refusing to believe it had no hot coffee. So solly, no hot coffee. This also happened at a Circle K a little while later.

I kept strolling, visited another Temple, did some aimless left and right turns, stopping here, stopping there, soaking in the town, and dropped in on another half-dozen convenience stores of various names. Solly, no hot coffee. Just weird-looking snack food, in Japanese-only packaging. I would’ve paid ten bucks for a Twinkie.


Getting late in the day, I made my way back to the Kyoto train station in he middle of downtown Kyoto, and lo and behold There Was A Starbucks.

Back home I don’t like Starbucks. But here in Kyoto I said to myself If This Friggin Starbucks doesn’t have hot coffee I’ll eat my sneakers (which probably would have tasted better than those alfalfa sprouts).

Starbucks to the rescue. Yes We Have Hot Coffee, There Really Are Japanese Who Like Hot Coffee, especially in the downtown area.

One additional perk in The Kyoto Starbucks, truly unusual to my experience. A Heated Toilet Seat. There was one bathroom for both male and female, and I sat down on a heated toilet seat. Never heard of such a thing, and couldn’t imagine the constructive purpose of it. Hot Coffee AND Hot Tushee at Starbucks.

I Googled up “heated toilet seat” when I got back to the ship, couldn’t conclude whether it was a Japan thing or a Starbucks thing. Maybe this idea is catching on back in the USA and I didn’t know about it. Anybody who can shed light on this ? Your comments on Heated Toilet Seats are welcome.