Would you like to link to
this website? Please use
one of the buttons below. Thank you!
Webdesign & contents
by ClaireWorks.
Copyright 2000-2002
Beverly Claire L. Fangonon.
All rights reserved.
All graphics & photographs
by ClaireWorks,
unless otherwise indicated.
The Nagoya Queen
Stupidity That Knows No Bounds: The Tour Guide Straight From Hell 02 January 2002
Tell me the truth: can you tell where North is? Do you know your Left from your Right? You probably do, because you're a normal human being.
It's the year 2002 and here I am about to make another confession. I swore to myself and to my readers that ClaireWorks.Net will not be another one of those angst-ridden, narcissistic, tedious "weblogs" wherein the majority of the contents are about the site owner's boring life. ClaireWorks.Net is for entertainment, and its aim is to provide content and graphics that will, at least for the time being, prevent you from pulling the trigger, be it on yourself or that cruel person who broke your heart.
But then for some reason I feel the strong urge to apologize for something, and to do so in public. Since this website is the most public I could ever get, I would like to, with apologies to my readers who expect something less pathetic, make a public apology.
I would like to sincerely apologize to all the hapless people who have put their lives in my hands by letting me play the role of Tour Guide, and who have unwittingly become victims of my utter lack of a sense of direction.
You know who you are. There are quite a few of you. The latest casualty was a Singaporean pilot of a major international airline. He was a friend of a good friend of mine, and since he had half-a-day to spend in Nagoya my friend had asked me to show him around, of which I readily agreed, as I was on winter vacation anyway. I don't want to recall the details. Suffice it to say that I was a tour guide straight from hell. I got us so lost that by the end of the day I'm sure that, if he could get away with bloody murder, he would have whacked me on the head with a baseball bat. To think that I was giving him a tour of a city that I had lived in for the past four years. I shudder to think of how I had us walk around and around, only to have him figure out how to get back on the right track. It's funny how, for the nth time, I was holding a detailed map in my hands and yet I couldn't figure out where we were standing. And funnier still was the fact that the place I wanted to get us to was one that I had gone to before. And yet I got us lost like crazy. By funny here I mean strange, not the ha-ha-ha kind of funny. Because it's not funny in that way. It's so absolutely pathetic it couldn't possibly be funny.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, as the casualty list is a long one. There was my Hungarian friend, an old classmate from the Japanese language school, who had dropped by on his way to Tokyo. He had a few hours to spend in Nagoya, but being a "veteran tourist" he wasn't interested in shrines or castles or Zen gardens. All he wanted was to buy a pack of Nagoya postcards. And I, of course, knew exactly where we could get some. It was Maruzen, a popular bookstore that had a good number of English books. I've been there dozens of times, and you'd think I could get us there in a jiffy. But alas! First we got out of the wrong exit, then we went around and around until we finally got to the right place, almost by accident.
Nagoya Dome is the home of the Chunichi Dragons, the best baseball team in all of Japan. I got the catalogue from their character goods shop in the Dome premise.
And then there was a Filipino couple from Osaka. They didn't want to look at castles either. I wanted to show them a landmark that one would not normally go to, and that would be the beautiful, ethereal Nagoya Dome. When it was all lighted up it looked like a grand UFO, and there was a moonlit pedestrian overpass that connected it to the nearest train station. I thought that the couple, who were newly wed, would enjoy that romantic walkway as well as the otherworldly look of the Dome. But then, as it often happens when there's me involved, Murphy's Law was at work. First I got us lost, and then when we finally got to the place it was closed. I was certain there would be an event for that night, but alas, me and my unreliable certainties. To make matters worse, I got us lost again on the way back.
It's unbelievable. Maybe one of my Malaysian friends will be able to tell you a more concrete example of an actual horrendous experience he got with me as tour guide. I wanted to take him to the Tokugawa Museum, a lovely must-see that housed treasures of the Shogunate era. From where we were I thought that we could walk to it easily. Ah, no! Big mistake. We walked for miles and miles, half-lost, and by the time we got to the museum we were too tired to enjoy it.
The list goes on. By lost I mean that I couldn't tell where we were, which is freaky to the tourist because I was supposed to be the tour guide, for heaven's sake! How could I possibly get so lost when, one, I had been to that place before, and two, I had a nice, colored, accurate, detailed map at hand?
It's like a disease I have, this getting lost. I have to admit that when I first moved to Nagoya, it took me two weeks before I could walk home (a short, 15-minute walk) from the university to my apartment without the help of a map. I remember that I had been in my new apartment for a week, but even then I got lost and had to stop a person along the way to confirm with him whether I was going in the right direction.
Entrance ticket at the Tokugawa Art Museum.
"Watashi wa ima doko ni irun desu ka?" ("Where am I right now?") I asked him.
He looked at my map and pointed. "Kono hen desu." ("You're right here.")
"Chizu no katachi wa tadashii desu ka?" ("Am I holding the map the right way?")
Entrance ticket for Nagoya Castle, the city's symbol.
He adjusted the map around in my hands and that's when I realized I had it all wrong. No wonder I got lost. Again. Now mind you, I can read Nihonggo and had no trouble reading the street and building names. It was the "map reading", that thing you do when you look at a map and not just read the writings but also read where you are and where you're going, that I got all screwed up.
No, no, don't laugh and say it's a gender thing. It's got nothing to do with my being a woman. A British friend had suggested that I read the book Why Men Don't Ask for Directions and Women Can't Read Maps. Yes, I'll read the book someday, but then my being spatially challenged has nothing to do with gender. I am certain of it. I have girl friends who, if you'll give them a pen and a sheet of paper, can draw a relatively accurate map of the whole city. One time I was out shopping with my friend Kyoko and I only needed to give her vague directions to a Mexican restaurant I wanted to go to, and that was enough information for her to take charge and find it for us despite the fact that she's never been there before. Or take Mari. We wanted to go to a burger shop and the only directions I knew was that it was near a certain building. Boom! We were there in no time, with her leading the way, of course. And then there's Kayo. She's about the best driver I have ever encountered, and has a detailed map of the whole city (if not the whole prefecture) in her head. Just give her an address and she'll find it in a jiffy, and if she's gone there before the path is burned in her head for good.
I think it's pretty normal for people--both men and women-- to find their way without much trouble. Of course everyone gets lost when navigating unknown territory, but for someone to get lost in a place where one has lived in for some time, or even worse, get lost on the way to a place one has actually been to before (and not just once, but several times), well, there must be something terribly wrong with that person's head, the way her brain is wired.
And that person is me. For some reason I am incapable of having this virtual map in my head. I can't tell my left from my right, I can't find North even with a compass in hand. And when we come from a subway station and enter a building but leave from a different exit I get lost and can't find my way back to the subway.
I was to meet a British friend once, for computer shopping. She asked me on the phone which exit we were to meet at. Nagoya (central subway) Station, mind you, is a large, sprawling one with a whole gamut of exits. I knew that two exits, #1 and #7, were at opposite ends of each other, and that I wanted to go to one of them. So I closed my eyes and tried to picture the layout of the station in relation to the streets outside of it. "Let's meet at Exit #1", I said. Ah me! It was the wrong one. I had the layout of the subway exits all upside down. So we walked all the way from #1 to #7, which was a long walk for my friend who happened to be suffering from arthritis. This sounds all the more unbelievable because I've been to Nagoya station a hundred times and by then you'd think I'd know better.
Sigh.
I wonder why, even if I go to a place several times all by myself, I still can't go there with confidence. I wonder why, one summer a few years ago I went to a recycle shop that was pretty far from my place. Of course I got crazy lost going there the first time, despite my maps, but on the third and fourth times I was able to get there without going round and round. However, a few months later, in early winter, I wanted to go there again. And I got lost. Lost like the way I got lost when I went there the first time. I simply couldn't recall how I got there before. It's stupefying.
Entrance ticket for Higashiyama Sky Tower.
Which is really okay, when I get lost all by myself. I've gotten used to going around and around trying to look for a certain place or building. In fact, I've always gotten lost for as long as I could remember. So whenever there's an appointment and I've to go someplace unfamiliar (though it is within the city), I make sure I set out to leave at least an hour before the set time, because I knew I'd get lost along the way, map or no map.
This tendency to get lost becomes truly embarassing, however, when there is another person involved and I'm supposed to be the Nagoya City resident. Now Nagoya City, mind you, likes to call itself "Design City", and for good reason. It's a very well-planned city, highly organized and logically spaced every block of the way. So the maps are extremely accurate, and the whole city has a sort of arrangement that makes a lot of sense. How could anyone get lost in a city like this? If it were the mess that Tokyo is, then maybe one could find some acceptable excuses. But Nagoya? Please.
My friends whom I have tour "guided" are most likely to forgive me of this disease. They'd go, "Beverly Claire gets lost for no good reason, but we still like her anyway." But when it's strangers, guests, people you're meeting for the first time, that are involved, well, it's a totally different story. My latest casualty was the Singaporean pilot. I was so embarassed at the end of the day that I could no longer look him in the eye. Still he was very nice, and after dinner when we got back to his hotel, he even walked me to the station. I wanted to apologize profusely for my horrendous display of utter stupidity and incompetence, but all I could do was to say I was sorry for getting us lost and then thanked him for the dinner. When I got back home I was feeling really ashamed of myself and couldn't muster the energy to email my friend and say that I got the package she had sent through the pilot.
I could tell you other embarassing stories wherein the people I was supposed to guide ended up being the navigators themselves. Tour guiding me. I'll be the first to admit that they would have been much better off without me, because instead of wasting all that time getting lost with me they could have given themselves a much better, more satisfying tour.
Entrance ticket to Higashiyam Zoo and Botanical Garden. One of the largest in Japan.
To all my tour guide victims, you know who you are. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for wasting your time, and for being the tour guide straight from hell. I am very sorry for not making your tour easy and pleasurable. I really believe that Nagoya is such a nice city and I am ashamed of myself because I am incapable of sharing her beauty and grace with other people.
Entrance ticket for the Nagoya-Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Nagoya is known for its fine museums. There is almost always a notable exhibit on any day.
Now that it's the Year 2002, I'm to have my new set of New Year's Resolutions. I had better do something with this propensity to get utterly lost. I don't know how to remedy such stupidity. I can tell myself, as I sometimes do, "You're just being careless" or "It's just that you're not paying attention" or something like that. But then I know a lot of people who are careless and who hardly pay attention to where they are heading and yet are able to get there without considerable pain. How come everybody else can find their way around except me? I feel like a retard.
I need a new watch. One with a compass. And then take a course in orienteering.
It's really frustrating. As if it weren't bad enough that I suck at Math to the point that I can't do anything beyond simple arithmetic, I also happen to be so spatially-challenged that it takes literally a hundred times for me to learn how to reach a certain place without getting miserably lost.
Sigh. Any help for the spatially-challenged that doesn't involve commitment to the halfway house or dedicated therapy or expensive lobotomy? I'm all ears.
To all my tour guide victims in Japan from 1998 to 2001, as well as my victims in Manila from 1995 to 1997, and my Baguio City victims 1994 and earlier, I truly apologize for all the getting lost that I put you through. Please forgive my utter incompetence. I will make no excuses for myself, because baseless stupidity is not something to be excused. I am very sorry for having been unable to make your trip memorable and satisfying.
embarassingly yours,
Talk back!
Please use the form below to comment on the above article. Your input will be posted on this page within 24 hours. Thank you for your time! (Note: '**' means the field is required.)
Readers' Comments
Date: 2002-01-24
Name: sarah
Referred by: You told me, silly
Comments:
claire - just forget the maps and start looking around you. its a visual thing...can you remember which side of the page in claireworks you picture of the kabuki theatre is on? yes, its on the right...so when you walk down a street you make pictures in your head...make a picture of the lawsons on the left side of the road and bookmark it. then whenyou walk along the road again, you see the same picture...now go out and TRY IT! good luck!
love, sarah
Date: 2002-02-26
Name: Chris Houser
Referred by: Just surfed on in!
Comments: Sarah: I beg to differ! I know a few people (all of them women, it turns out) that figure their location by sighting landmarks, but other people (most of them men) that can't remember landmarks, perhaps because they don't look around much in the first place. Personally, in order to avoid getting lost (Claire's not reading this, right?) I need to prepare by spending many long minutes staring at (internet) maps.
