Regina Glei's Blog, page 5

Temple Mania

The number of tourists to Japan reached a new record in 2019. I found on some website that it’s been 32 million visitors. By comparison, in 2020 only 8.6 million came to Japan and in 2003 it was only 5.2 million. Not all of those millions are tourists of course, there are plenty of business trip people who have no time for sightseeing, but every single one of the millions of tourists goes to Kamakura!
There is a whole historic period named after the area, from 1185 to 1333 – the time of the Kamakura Shogunate. You can read all about it on Wikipedia etc. Fact is the place breathes history and has myriads of temples and shrines of offer, of which some 25 make it onto tourist maps. I have been to Kamakura (of course) during my very first visit to Japan in (OMG) 1993, when there were probably only 2 million or so visitors coming into the country and then again some time around 2005 with my sister (on a rainy day and we saw nothing much more than the great buddha statue). Ever since I have not been to Kamakura again, scared off by the horrendous number of tourists walking through the small town.
Now it happens that my current apartment is only 50 train minutes from Kamakura and I thought, hey! It’s the chance of a lifetime to explore Kamakura in detail, while there is an entry ban to Japan for 129 countries during the corona crisis.
So far I have been to Kamakura four times and I intend to go another two times or so, since on one trip I manage only 5 to 6 temples and shrines due to heat and rain

Discover Your Neighborhood

I’m a bit at a loss at the moment as to what to write for the blog. World events are crazy… Japan, at the moment, seems like a happy island of calm with only some 18,000 coronavirus infections and a thousand deaths. Even if there is a gray zone and there actually might be more cases, this is nothing in comparison to many other countries.
What’s happening in Trumpfuckistan is beyond any words, that country is so sick on so many levels and yes, black lives do matter and the biggest virus of the country, agent orange, or as I like to call the creature: the orange fart face, just please please please has to go at the end of the year. Crazy many cases in Brazil, despite a hefty lockdown so many cases in India, the UK the worst affected country in Europe… but alas, their idiot government made them leave Europe…
And then the arctic is on fire and climate change rambles on. We are expecting a record summer in Japan too with “temperatures above normal” for the three months of July, August, September.
I had wanted to fly to Europe in August as usual and me idiot booked and payed for a flight in February, now I’m trying to cancel and maybe get some money back… all events (festivals) are cancelled and oh, yes, crazy Japan would not let me permanent resident back in anymore at the moment if I left the country, because I don’t have a Japanese passport… thanks for taking my taxes and all but granting no re-entry.
Money… there are salary cuts and we have shut down days at the company, usually Fridays. We are all doing the work of five days in four and get less money for it, but hey, at least I still have a paying job for now.
Which brings me to the good part and the title of this blog entry. I now have three day weekends and ever since our lockdown ended, I’ve been making use of those and done day trips around the Kanto region, so far mostly Kanagawa, where I live. It’s awesome. I’ve come to love my three day weekends and those day trips to places close by that I haven’t visited in years or not at all.
I’m posting pics on twitter and Facebook with a two week delay to make sure I didn’t catch anything at place x or y and that it has been safe to go there. But this is probably just over-caution, since our virus cases are pretty damn low and everyone is taking care. Everyone wears masks, always and there is hand sanitizer at every shop or museum or restaurant or whatever it is.
I’ve been to Enoshima = at the beach the first weekend after the state of emergency ended. Then for the first time ever I went to Mt. Takao and I loved it there, why the heck have I never gone there before??

Bamboo Magic

Due to all the staying home and home-office as well, I had the opportunity to study the growth of bamboo this spring. lol. This is mostly a photo protocol rather than a blog entry. Bamboo grows so fast it’s incredible. You can virtually stand next to it and watch it grow. You can read all about bamboo in wikipedia, so I won’t repeat that here, but did you know that bamboo is not a tree but a grass?

Adventures in Cooking

Let me say this right up front – I cannot cook at all and I don’t really like cooking either, although I unfortunately like eating,

To Close or not to Close

I find it interesting how my local shopping mall struggles with the best method to close or not to close which kind of shops during these lockdown times.
There is of course the directive and the necessity to keep food shops open, especially those with fresh produce. In the rear of the LaLaport Yokohama is the Ito Yokado department store with three floors, ground floor is a huge supermarket, and floors 2 and 3 are for clothing, stationary, kitchen items, etc. I go to this supermarket usually on Saturdays to refill my stocks for a week. Other than the Ito Yokado, there are about 50 to 100 other shops in the mall.
For two weekends before our official state of emergency was announced, the shopping center closed down on weekends on a voluntary basis in order to reduce large gatherings of people. The three floors of the Ito Yokado stayed open and awkwardly some restaurants were open, but not the ice cream shop for example. Next to the Ito Yokado is also a food court with a MacD and other fast food stuff, which also remained open.
Then came the official state of emergency and the mall closed down apart from Ito Yokado, a drug store and two other specialty food shops (which were closed during the voluntary shut down). On the first weekend after the state of emergency was declared, also floors 2 and 3 of Ito Yokado were roped off. They closed the food court as well, put all chairs and tables to the side, and put socks and underwear into the middle of the food court while at it’s far end only MacD remained open for take out.
Yet another weekend later all the socks and underwear had been moved to their original floors again and Ito Yokado had open in its entirety. Chairs were back in the food court, if roped off and MacD was still open for take out. Yet another week later, the food court was empty of chairs and just remained an open space. Yesterday they had an “event space” there with pottery items. What a hustle for the poor Ito Yokado staff having to re-arrange everything every week!
There is also no logic as to which specialty food shops are allowed to open and which not. Why is Kaldi (coffee and import food shop) allowed to open, but Tomiz (baking goods) and the Okinawa and Hokkaido food shops must close? All three have some perishable produce to offer but are shut down. I especially missed Tomiz, since I have rediscovered baking (as so many other people these days).
I wonder how we will get out of the closure of all these shops. Once they are reopened, there’ll be a run on them! Well, let’s see what happens. My only hope is that they all can reopen and have not gone broke in the weeks and months without customers. If I can’t to go Okinawa, then at least I wanna be able to get my Shikuwasa juice and the Chinsuko cookies… The first “round” of the state of emergency ended on May 6 but was extended to May 31. Despite that there were two additional shops open yesterday, the ice cream parlor and Tomiz! So, luckily I could get some of those wanted baking items

Golden Week at Home

Japan has a collection of national holidays end of April/beginning of May, which are known by the name of Golden Week (GW). It also happens that the company I work for closes off for the entire week around those holidays (using other national holidays on which we have to work).
Golden Week is thus the perfect time for a little travel and it’s easy to extend the GW a bit by adding one or the other day of paid leave.
I have made use of GW extensively and the last time I spent GW at home was 2010……… Alas… 2020 will be spent at home as well! I had booked a trip to my beloved Okinawa, but now cancelled it all, following the #stayhome directive.
I am of the kind who of course remembers having been on a trip to country X or island Y, but I do forget which year I went where. As a remedy I am in the habit of writing a journal and now it came in handy. I checked my journals and made a list of where I went every year during GW since the last time I spent it at home in 2010. The list is lovely and I shall bicycle around the neighborhood lost in memories of happy travels and island visits!

2011 – that was right after the big earthquake in Japan and I ventured out on my pre-booked travels to the Netherlands and the UK for sightseeing and heavy metal concerts in Amsterdam and London.
2012 – one of my most adventurous remote island trips so far. I went to the Ogasawara islands, 1000 km straight south of Tokyo in the middle of the Pacific. These islands have no airport and can only be reached by ship. One way takes 25 hours. The islands are insanely beautiful and I saw whales and dolphins during boat tours and in the harbor of Hahajima I saw sharks and mantas frolicking about.
2013 – I went to the island of Izu Oshima, not so far away from Tokyo and hiked around its central volcano, Mt. Mihara, which was great, but alas, my hotel was super crappy and infested with cockroaches, giant spiders and centipedes and I fled it one night earlier than planned.
2014 – No tiny Japanese island this time but a bigger one – I went to Taiwan finally after postponing a trip there for many times. I had a great time in Taipei and Kaohsiung walking around temples, skyscrapers and having good food.
2015 – Miyakojima. I rode around there with a rental car, sweating my guts out because of my fear of driving. But it is a wonderful island and I grew especially fond of the neighboring islands of Irabu and Shimoji where there is a fantastic beach studded with black rocks. Every day after the driving session was done, I went to an ice cream shop and rewarded myself after the driving stress.
2016 – Ishigaki. That time I tried with a scooter instead of a car, but found that to be equally scary and ended up not seeing much of Ishigaki island at all but hopping on boats every day to go to the surrounding islands which I explored on foot, with busses or rental bicycles. There was Kuroshima with 2000 cows and 200 people, Hateruma with a dream beach, and my favorite, Iriomote island with mangrove boat tours and hiking to waterfalls through the jungle.

2017 – something completely different! I flew to Moscow and St. Petersburg for sightseeing and heavy metal

Bacteria – Part 4

Today I had an appointment (which was fixed a month ago) at the big university hospital I stayed at six weeks earlier, for the decision whether to do sinus surgery in May or not.
Over the weekend I debated with myself whether to go, considering the coronavirus situation, but eventually decided to get it over with.
The hospital it was spookingly empty. Next to every door of the ENT section hung a small poster saying politer than me but not less decisive (in Japanese of course): “You ain’t getting no PCR test here. If you think you have coronavirus, call the call centers and follow their guidance. Do not come here if you have more than four days of fever, cough, breathing difficulties etc. Call the centers!”
Of course it’s kinda too late to post that inside the hospital, but what else are they supposed to do. Since it was very empty, just two other people in the large waiting area, I got to see my doc after a five minute wait. After talks about my situation were done, I bluntly asked him if he is seeing any coronavirus patients and his answer was no. He said that coronavirus is handled in Japan by “internal” medicine and not ENT. He added that “internal” has a hard time, but he is actually far less busy than usual right now! Most of the operations he is in charge of have been rescheduled or outright cancelled… very interesting.
I was in and out of the hospital under half an hour, phew!
As for my personal situation: At the moment no operation is needed. Another big phew! There might be one in the future some time, since my sinuses are not the greatest, but not now. My nose is as clear as it hasn’t been in a long while

Japanese Hospital Life

Let’s say this right up front, I found the Showa University hospital (Yokohama branch) where I stayed for five nights because of my sinus/jaw infection to be very good.
The sixth floor was for ENT plus “general” if that’s the word, including cases of very old people who are heavy nursing cases. How do I know that? Because all doors to the sick rooms are open 24/7. The building is laid out like a triangle. On the long side are five-bed rooms, on the angle sides are four-bed rooms. At either end the angle sides overshoot the long side and there are a few private rooms, which cost 25,000 yen per night instead of 5000 yen per night, and they are the only rooms whose doors are closed. In both cases, add another ten percent VAT to the price. All beds in all rooms are surrounded by curtains. The four-bed rooms on the triangle’s flanks have a very nice star layout which gives each bed a window. In the five-bed rooms only two people are lucky enough to have a window. I heard the five-bed rooms are cheaper than 5000 Yen per day but I don’t know how much cheaper.
In German hospitals no curtains. In hindsight I find the curtains great, because they give you a bit of privacy and you don’t have to be conscious of other people seeing you all the time. If you’re really sick you wanna be left alone anyway (on my first day for example). Once you are better, you can wander around and go to the so called day-room for visitors and for using the phone or getting a soft drink from the vending machine. The day room is at the tip of the triangle. In the center of the triangle are the two nurse stations for the wards 6a and 6b.
The heavy-care rooms are facing the nurse station, and some guys had their curtains open, therefore I know what was going on there. Except for the heavy-nursing cases, everyone else was still able to walk around. Average age maybe 60 and I was the only non-Japanese I saw the whole time.
What I found remarkable is that all nurses were under 35 or even under 30. My guess is the more experienced nurses are in other floors where the patients are sicker. A few male nurses were around too, but not so many. All ENT doctors I saw were also very young, all of them under forty. Only on my first day, three doctors came by to say hello who were older and who looked like the head doctors of the ENT department. All nurses were exceptionally friendly and careful. The young doctors were eager and ready to help, only one woman among them, but better than no woman at all. The nurses make their tours with their rolling wagons crowned with their almighty computers and scan the wrist band you got before every load of medicine. You are allowed to go downstairs to the convenient store and coffee shop even with your infusion stand, but you are not allowed to go outside.
Since all sick room doors are open, you hear a lot of what’s going on. One night one of the heavy-nursing cases was screaming a bit, the guy in the next room had a bad cough. There was one sad/funny scene in the corridor. An elderly male patient sat in a wheelchair, his visiting wife by his side and a nurse. He wanted to get up. The nurse told him he can’t, he’ll break his legs if he tries to get up. Grandpa still wanted to get up until his unnerved wife told him to do the bloody hell what the nurse was saying and grandpa gave in with a grumble.
I found this mixture of exposure to what’s happening around you and the curtain shield quite interesting.
When I was admitted there were two ladies in my four-bed room, one looked like a thyroid case, the other I don’t know. Except for greetings I did not communicate with them. After two nights one lady was released from the hospital and the other with the thyroid operation was moved to a cheaper five-bed room apparently upon her request. For a few hours I was alone, but then they brought in another lady and from the next day onward we actually started chatting to each other. I didn’t catch for 100 percent what was wrong with her, some heavy case of tonsillitis where her throat swelled shut? She was very eager to get out of hospital. She had no husband around but a 15-year-old daughter who was now alone at home, and she also had to work, (as a home nursing helper) saying she had no money to stay in hospital for long… I’m sure she is insured, since everyone here is, but it costs a couple hundred USD to stay for a few days after all and that’s tough especially when you are a single parent… life is hard, being sick is even harder! I wish my room mate lady all the best and that we don’t have to return to hospital any time soon because of a certain virus for example!

Bacteria – Part 3

Thursday 27th February
I arrived at the hospital around 11:00 in the morning and before seeing a doctor you need to get your shinsatsuken first, your registration card. It does make sense though, since everything about you connects to the magic bar code on your card. I handed over my recommendation letter and waited for my card. Then they sent me to the ENT section and I waited to see a doc. My doc was rather young, in his thirties and he surprised me by showing compassion, lol. He said several times, oh my that must hurt so bad, well yes, it did. He immediately decided I have to be hospitalized and sent me to get blood drawn and to be prepared for infusion. Next came an X-ray of the chest, my lungs looked very black = clean on the X-ray. I saw my doc again and he was going, why is there no CT scan yet? Maybe we have to emergency operate! He said that to the nurses, not me. Uh? Emergency operate? That didn’t sound so good but I was too phased out to ask.

They sent me to CT scan where you have to fill out a declaration that you are okay with the scan, since the iodine whatever they are pumping into you can actually kill you in rare cases. Then I sat there and waited and my doc came along again, concerned, angry even, “still waiting?” Me, um yes. I remembered the word emergency operation and asked what’s that about. He said if the bacteria have reached the optic nerve I could go blind and we’d have to emergency operate to try to prevent that. He turned away from me and ordered the staff to speed up my scan. He stayed with me and got me into the CT room. He joined the radiologist staff in the computer room while I was being scanned. He came out and looked much more relaxed. Eye is not yet affected, we don’t have to operate, you’ll be processed now into the hospital bed and be hooked up to antibiotics infusions as fast as possible. Funnily I was not in panic mode anymore at all. Probably just too phased out. The staff made me wait a little bit for more formalities, but it didn’t take too long and finally there was a hospital bed. Temperature 38.3, pulse 106, blood pressure 165 to something, I forgot, I wasn’t doing too well…

They gave me pain meds, which also push down fever and hooked me to the infusion rack. Finally pain meds that worked! Heaven! I thought I could rest, but nope, ENT called me down once more and tears around at the nose, jabs stuff into it and I heard myself saying fxxk once, which I think doc didn’t take so well, but c’mon, this was bad. He also told me my sinus is so crappy and so clogged shut it needs to be operated. Let’s fix a date, how about 8th of May? It didn’t sound like I had much of a choice. And by the way, the teeth need to get fixed before that too… then I’m finally allowed to rest and in the evening get the second antibiotics infusion and pain meds.
What I realized when taking these meds was, there is a reason for why you can only apply them in the controlled environment of a hospital. Every time I took the pain meds, I got very hot for a minute or so a little while after taking them. At the second round of meds I suddenly broke out into cold sweat from all pores and when a nurse checked the temperature some time that evening, my body temperature was 35.8 Celsius. Wow. Chemical hammer, thou art appreciated. During the first night I had another sweat attack, and once the shivers, but by morning my body had calmed down.

Friday 28th of February
Yeah! I could open my eye again! The swelling was still awful but it was very relaxing to be able to see with both eyes. They do keep you busy in Japanese hospitals. Three times a day I had to do some inhaler stuff, which goes by the fancy name of “nebulizer”, lol. After breakfast an ENT doc sees you, not “my” doc but whoever was on duty. I was in the ENT plus whatever general ward for the not severe cases. I saw several people who looked like they had thyroid surgery. But there was an ENT room with the respective equipment on my floor so that’s where they sent you, rather than the doc coming around to see you. I got to see an ENT doc every day, also Saturday and Sunday. But I’m getting ahead of myself. So after the ENT visit on the 28th, I got my next infusion, then they sent me to the eye doc to check once more if everything is okay about my eye. They asked me all the time whether I see things double, which seems to be a sign of meningitis, meaning bacteria having sneaked to the brain.
Fever was down meanwhile, pain was bearable, they also gave me ice packs.

Saturday 29th of February
On Saturday morning a highly welcomed decision happened during the ENT morning visit. The ENT sent me to the hospital’s oral surgeon. Meanwhile the swelling was much better. I dreaded the dentist chair and there was pain again, but the dentist guy did something badly needed, he took out whatever my regular dentist had plugged into tooth number 5 and then drilled a bit and poof! I bled quite badly and spit out blood into the basin. He had popped open the abscess at the top of number five. I could feel a fat swelling with my tongue there and later how it was retreating within hours. He released the pressure by popping it open and a lot of infected goo came out too. Phew. He then showed me parts of my CT scan for the first time, the right jaw and sinus being a goo filled mess, bacteria have done their work there for more than half a year. His recommendation seemed to be to pull number 7 and 5, maybe number 4 can be saved with root canal cleaning. So that was my homework… he promised to will write a letter to my dentist with his recommendations.

Sunday 1st of March
After the popping of the abscess, things turned better quickly and by Sunday morning the swelling had very much retreated.
Also the doc in the morning was pleased and said I’d get to do a blood test Monday morning and that would decide if I could be discharged on Tuesday, meaning, if my blood test was satisfactory, I could go home.

Monday 2nd of March
On Monday morning came the promised blood taking, then, at 09:00 they ordered me to the ground floor and for the first time since admission, I saw the doc again who was in charge of me. He jabbed around my nose again painfully. There was a rest of bacteria left around the teeth, but the sinus had cleared up a lot. He said a dentist appointment on Friday would be too late, I’ll be discharged Tuesday and am supposed to go to the dentist on Wednesday, I’m supposed to call him immediately. He said that if I’m lucky and the teeth stuff clears things up, I might not need that operation in May. So let’s see what happens on the teeth front.
In next week’s blog, I’ll report a bit about life in a Japanese hospital.

Bacteria – Part 2

I thought a bit about whether to put my medical troubles onto the blog or not, but decided to do so. First of all as a chronicle of what happened for myself, second as kind of a case study, which might one day help someone with similar problems.
It’s also a “study” of actually wanting to get into a hospital and finding it difficult to be admitted. I kind of wanted to be admitted around 36 to 48 hours before I eventually got hospitalized.

My just recently reported bacteria story took an unexpected turn for the much worse.
Mid of February the front pillar of that old tooth bridge (see previous blog entry from 23feb20) was starting to act up, hurt when eating and felt generally weird and appeared even a bit loose. I asked the dentist, he wriggled around at the tooth and said hm, let’s see for another week how it behaves. Fine by me, since he was working on the other pillar of the former bridge. In dentist terms he was doing the root canal cleaning on tooth 7. Number six got pulled maybe 25 years ago. So what was starting to trouble me now was number 5.

24th February:
Number 5 started to hurt massively and the tissue around it swelled a bit. Chewing on the right side became nearly impossible.

25th February:
I called the dentist in the morning, he agreed to see me more or less during his lunch time. He took an X-ray. Same story as with number 7. At the top of the root is a pocket with bacteria, bad news, also at tip of tooth 4. Number 4 is an old crown with former root canal action, but number 5 is/was the only molar tooth on the upper right side left with a living nerve. He drilled it open and pulled the nerve, having to give me five (!) dosages of anesthetics because it hurt like hell. He stuffed medicine into the root canal and closed the tooth and sent me home.
The tooth hurt more and more during the afternoon and the face started to swell. In the evening my boss said I look cute with the fattened cheek (friendly meant joke, I laughed at it). Back home it got worse and worse and even touching the area with the tongue hurt, any form of pressure was excruciating. I took the regular one pill a day antibiotics prescribed by the ENT doc and some pain meds from the dentist which helped zero. I couldn’t sleep from the pain and it swelled more and more. At 3 in the morning I freaked out and called the medial emergency hotline. That’s a pretty cool hotline, where someone listens to your story and gives you advise and judges whether to call an ambulance or not. I told my story and the advisor guy recommended to send over an ambulance and connected me to them. For the first time in my life I had thus called an ambulance. They came ten minutes later and looked at my swollen face, checked temperature, blood pressure, listened to the story. The emergency doctor said, that at this hour the next dentist is about an hour drive away and I probably have to wait there too and that dentist will probably only give me stronger meds and that’s it. They can take me there all right, but if I can stand it somehow I should wait till the morning and go to my regular dentist. The prospect of an hour in a car and all that let me decide to hold out until morning. I asked the guy what it cost that they came to my place. Oh, the ambulance doesn’t cost anything. I was starting to get back some of the health insurance I’m paying. I dozed off at about 5:30 in the morning for maybe an hour, that was it.

26th February:
I went to my dentist without an appointment and stood at his door when he opened, my face looked interesting by now. Dentist said he cannot drill around anywhere if it’s that swollen and slabbed stronger pain meds and antibiotics into my hand. Hm… I went back home and did some home office, several phone calls with Germany, while feeling worse and worse. The new pain meds helped for about an hour but that was it and I was only allowed to take three pills a day. At 17:00 I called the dentist again, asking what to do, whether he can’t submit me to a hospital, he says he can’t, I should check with my ENT. I called the ENT and he ordered me to his practice, so I’m on the train for the second time that day despite feeling terrible. He said, okay, forget the dentist’s antibiotics, take yet other stuff that’s stronger. Not being able to sleep is no surprise, I have to be patient. It’s already 18:30 in the evening, if the yet new antibiotics work, fine, if not I should prepare to be hospitalized on Thursday. During the night fever started, I dozed on an off but got up hourly to change ice packs, the only thing that kept me from freaking out. By morning my eye had swollen shut. ENT warned that this could happen, so I was prepared and didn’t freak out over it. Fever was at 38 Celsius.

27th February:
First thing in the morning was to call the ENT and he said to come over and he’ll decide whether to send me to hospital or not, which is likely and I shall prepare and bring stuff. I rode on the train hiding behind mask and sunglasses. ENT took one look into my face and said, he’ll write a recommendation letter and sent me with it to the Showa University hospital Yokohama branch, which is luckily in walking distance from the ENT. I staggered to hospital seeing only from one eye. Luckily I didn’t have to do initial explaining anywhere, I just removed the mask and showed them my face and everyone went OMG…