Bananas

Food in Japan is notoriously expensive. Milk = $10/gallon. Butter = $15/pound. Strawberries = $6 (if you're lucky). One apple = $1-2. Green beans at one store cost $5 for 1/3 pound. And one banana, on average, costs $0.50 cents.

So I was astonished to find the most amazing bargain at Daimaru Peacock, a fairly expensive grocery store in Azabu Juban.


18 Chiquita bananas - for only 198 yen! That's $2! We ate 15 in 3 days, and I made banana bread with the remaining 3.

Nishimachi's birthday

Lucinda's school, Nishimachi International School, is celebrating its 60th anniversary. It was founded by an American-educated Japanese woman, Tane Matsukata, in 1949, to build understanding between people by, in part, having all students study English and Japanese.

I went to a cocktail party tonight (on Founder's Day, which is Tane Matsukata's birthday) and snapped some archival photos on display.

From the 1950s.


From the 1960s, dancing around the maypole in front of the Matsukata family home, which was built in the early 1900s and survived the war. Now it's the recently earthquake-proofed admin building.


From the 1970s, Miss Matsukata and students.


Lucinda's kindergarten class in 2007-8. Lucinda is in the second row behind Rhen, the boy in the blue shirt. Compare this photo to the 1950s one; the school has fulfilled the goal of selecting students from many nations.

Chiang Mai

The best stretch of our trip was 3 days in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, an hourlong flight north of Bangkok. (Interior flights in Thailand are only about $100/person, fantastically cheap.)

Chiang Mai is Thailand's cultural capital, influenced by northern "hill tribes" -- in the photo above, Lucinda is wearing a traditional hill-tribe hat -- as well as Burma (to the west), China (north) and Laos (east). Wikipedia tells me there are nearly 200,000 city residents, with 1 million in the metro area. But it didn't feel crowded and had much less grime than Bangkok.

Our hotel, Yaang Come Village, booked on Expedia for about $200/nite, was lovely. Its entrance-building is next to a massive rubber tree (you can see Arno's tiny shape next to it in the second foto).



Our room had murals painted on the walls. (Click foto for a closer look.)


The sweetest hotel accoutrement was this tennis-y bug zapper. You press a button, swing away - and fry mosquitoes! Revenge for years of bug bites. (Our hotel attendant warned the kids not to play with it.)


Our first afternoon, we walked to Chiang Mai's "old city" to see the excellent Sunday Market. It wasn't crowded at dusk but was packed by 8pm.


I thought Bangkok's famous night market was quite dull: heaps of counterfeit Gucci, Polo, Chanel, Dior, Vuitton, etc. We quickly realized that Chiang Mai's market was going to be more genuine - not just for tourists - when we saw the table of cooked bugs for sale, including...


...fried grasshoppers and...


...grubs with a leafy seasoning. I once wrote a story for The Boston Globe about a "bug chef" in Washington State, but this was the real thing.


Other curiosities: Monks buying books.


A girl dressed for a stage performance.


We bought street food for supper and Blaine made the best choice. From this woman, who was cooking in clay pots on a side street...


...Blaine bought spicy curry-noodles for about 25 cents. The most delicious dish of the whole vacation.


Here was my favorite dish, which Lucinda and I bought at Chiang Mai's regular night market. Mango sticky rice for 50 baht, or about $1.50.

Arno's joke

Whilst eating his Cheerios this morning:

"Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to other slide."

(With credit to Elmo.)

Hong Island

Thailand has fantastic diving near Krabi, and you can take a longtail boat to famously beautiful islands like Ko Phi Phi or James Bond Island to see fish. When we considered day trips, though - with Lucinda, a good swimmer, and Arno, who can't swim and is fully capable of whining his way through the most delightful scenery - we decided to take a much easier snorkeling trip to Ko Hong (Hong Island).

We hired a longtail boat for about 1200 baht (33 baht = $1, so that's about $40 for the day), including lunch. Our captain, who said his name was Jack, met us after breakfast.


We arrived at Ko Hong a half-hour later, the second boat to anchor - and the beach was almost empty (see top photo and below).


Lucinda, almost always willing to try new things, enjoyed snorkeling; Arno was predictably a bit anxious about the novelty but enjoyed looking for shells on the beach. Then some beer-drinking Germans (beer at 10 a.m.!) gave us some slices of bread to feed colorful fish who swarmed around us in a frenzy.



A little later, we walked into the island's interior and learned, by way of wooden boats flung 100 meters into the jungle, that Ko Hong was slammed by the 2004 tsunami, causing some deaths and injuries. (Here's one person's account of it.) There hadn't been any tsunami damage at our hotel or in Ao Nang, as (I think) that slice of shoreline was protected by Phuket, to the west.


Ko Hong has a neat geology: limestone formations that make the rock look like dripping candle wax.


After lunch, when it was high tide, "Captain Jack" took us around to the other side of the island to see its lagoon. Quite beautiful views, as you float through the narrow entrance.



The water was very warm and only a few feet deep over flat, soft sand. So Lucinda, Arno (buck-naked by that point) and I climbed out of the boat and walked around.



It was an easy adventure, without being too much adventure, for everyone.

The Beach

We flew south from Bangkok to Krabi province (a quick hour on a packed Airbus) on Thailand's west coast. Krabi is vastly more sedate (I'm told) than Phuket, with pleasant beaches and massive limestone rock formations for climbers. This is what we saw on the way to our hotel.


The Sheraton Resort in Krabi was comfortable and well-designed, though a bit dull - a fine place to decompress from Tokyo life. There's a good breakfast brunch, a small "kids' club" with arts and crafts, hammocks, free internet, and a powdery beach on the Andaman Sea. The downside to the resort was the $100/night (!!) fee to borrow an extra twin bed; last year, the Westin in Bali didn't charge anything.



The best features were the resort's two huge swimming pools. They were wonderfully warm with varying depths; I swam laps and the children spent hours playing in them, often with an 8-year-old American girl whose family (from Michigan) lives in Shanghai.


There wasn't much to see near our hotel, just a few restaurants plus laundry, tchotchke and massage shops, so we twice went to Ao Nang, a touristy beach village with long rows of shops selling counterfeit stuff and handmade suits.


Fortunately, Ao Nang's beach is quite picturesque, with traditional "long-tail boats" anchored offshore and cliffs in the background. We took a stroll and the children hunted for quality shells.


Then we had supper (twice) at Ao Nang's beachfront restaurant row.


Our Lonely Planet guide suggested Sala Bua & Lo Spuntino, which has Thai and Italian menus, and it was fantastic. Every restaurant has an ice-filled "boat" at the entrance to show the daily seafood catch: massive prawns, shiny clams, mussels, fish, crabs and Andaman lobsters.


We ordered crab and prawn pasta one night, and seafood pizza the next...


...and Lucinda and I indulged in shockingly good, fresh "watermelon shakes."


We all enjoyed the sunset (behind Phuket island in the distance).

Day in Bangkok

Our flight to Bangkok was right between Ho Chi Minh city and Taipei on this Narita Airport departure screen. (If I'm taking a photo of it, it's still a thrill to live here.)

And Thailand: we loved it! I found Bangkok a bit overwhelming with children, but we had a nice work/life decompression at Sheraton's beach resort in Krabi province (southeast of Phuket island) and especially enjoyed Chiang Mai, a mid-sized city in the north. I'll write several posts about it.

The flight to Bangkok: 7 hours, arriving at midnight. Here we are, headed to a Mercedes that took us to Le Meridien hotel. (Posh 5-star hotel at the "bargain" rate of $160/night deal on Expedia!)


The morning view from our 16th-floor room:


We took the very clean Bangkok subway to the Chatuchak weekend market to see some neat stuff. First stop: Coconut ice cream, scooped into a coconut shell, with raw-coconut scrapings underneath.



A Buddha shop.


Frosted cupcakes!


Gigantic prawns, gray, alive and wiggling (at left) or pink and boiled.


Feather duster salesmen.


And a shop full of baskets.


After a few hours in the heat (December is the mildest month to visit Bangkok but we are wimps), we returned to the hotel to swim in the swanky 6th floor pool.



More on the way...