Mother-daughter walk

On a school-vacation day last Friday, Lucinda and I went for a stroll from Sendagi to Nezu, two shitamachi (old neighborhoods) near Ueno Park. The nabes Yanaka, Nezu and Sendagi, known together as "Yanesen," have narrow streets with traditional shops and houses. Early May is also the perfect time to see the blaze of azaleas at Nezu Shrine.

I edited a story about shitamachi for the Japanese arts/culture magazine Kateigaho International Edition, which has a wonderful map in the current issue (cover below) to mark shops and restaurants that preserve the culture of "old Edo," as Tokyo was known from the 1600s to late 1800s.


Some snaps of our day, starting with Sendagi's famous paper store, Isetatsu, where you find samurai prints from the Edo period.


This senbei shop sells large, square rice crackers (modern senbei are round)...


...coated with green tea, sugar or soy sauce. Individual crackers are 60 yen (66 cents) and this package was 780 yen ($8.50).


Geta (wooden sandals) in a shop window:


Storefront selling candied imo, or sweet potatoes. The noren curtain (it's orange for this shop but more often navy or black) is displayed when a restaurant is open for business.


This shop, with buckets, cutting boards, and benches, had an intense menthol-like scent from the Japanese cedar or sugi.


We ate lunch on the grounds of Nezu Shrine, which was hosting a festival for thousands of seasonal visitors. Large torii gate at the entrance...


...leads to long path of tiny torii gates inside...


... which leads to the blazing hillside of azaleas (also shown in 1st foto of this post).


It's a short walk from the shrine to Nezu station, and along the way, we stopped at a tiny candy store (also mentioned in Kateigaho) that makes long rolls of ame (hard candies) with traditional Edo-style faces inside.


The rolls are sliced into discs, like these, that half-melt in your mouth. This package of 8 was 210 yen ($2.50) which I thought was a bargain for Edo craftsmanship. Not sure how this is done, but pretty cool-looking, neh?

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.

Sunday in Shimokitazawa

Shimokitazawa, or "Shimokita" for short, is one of my favorite neighborhoods in Tokyo. It's a half-dozen stops west of busy Shibuya on the Keio Inokashira commuter train line, and totally worth a trip to look around. Heaps of college students, cheap restaurants, fashion-y stores and nightspots - on a human scale. (Natasha Caryl, whose husband was Newsweek's last correspondent here, took me there 2 years ago.)



I took Lucinda and Arno there on Sunday to see "Playmoland," which had a gazillion Playmobiles and other stuff.



Other curiosities from our day out: This restaurant sells fugu, or blowfish, which are poisonous unless you prepare them properly. There was a fish tank built into one corner of the building (just in front of Lucinda).



The Hana Donuts shop which, in addition to plain and cinnamon-sugar, sold a donut that maybe had basil or thyme in it?


And a pink Jaguar.


Very stylish.

Mystery treats at the konbini

One of the games I play in Japan is "mystery treat": At the konbini (convenience store), I buy random things without knowing exactly what's in them. I search the label for English clues, decipher Japanese hiragana when I can (like finding the word oishi, which means "delicious"), look for color clues (among soy milk boxes, for example, I've learned that yellow is banana flavored, pink is strawberry, green is green tea), and buy it anyway.

Sometimes it works, like when I found green-tea flavored milk or honey-flavored milk with tapioca in it. Sometimes it doesn't, like when I bought ume (sour plums).

Tonight I found an unusual ice-cream treat at our local AM/PM konbini. The only English was "White Taiyaki," and because it was in the ice-cream freezer, it seemed logical to guess that it would be a fish-shaped ice-cream dessert.


This is what it looked like inside: a palm-sized fish, very lightweight. The outside layer was made of very thin, styrofoam-y, edible wafer material.


I've seen fish-shaped treats lately at the grocery store, which led me to believe there were greater cultural forces at work in the design. I was right... Wikipedia tells me that a taiyaki is taiyaki is a "fish-shaped cake" that is usually filled with azuki (red bean) paste. I think they must also be an expression of autumn, because the Japanese love seasonal variations in food. Here's the taiyaki from Wikipedia.


I'm not a huge fan of azuki because it can be thick and bland; today's other "mystery treat" was azuki-bean-flavored soy milk that I bought for Lucinda. Not a big hit. So I took a bite and...


Delightful! Inside the fish, there is vanilla ice cream and a thin layer of sweet red bean jam.


So delicious that after Blaine finished writing about the new Japanese prime minister, he rode his bike to the konbini to get one, too.

Soup of the gods

For our Saturday date last night, in honor of the recession, Blaine and I spurned fancy restaurants for a cheap ramen shop under Shinagawa train station. These places are common near big stations because you can grab a meal quickly and sit by yourself. (This photo shows Blaine's $10 salt ramen with pork - very steamy!)

Underneath the trains, there's a long hallway filled with ramen places.


We chose Saijo restaurant, where we've been before, because there's English on the menu. The restaurant is enclosed in plastic sheeting all year round.


You use a vending machine by the front door to choose dishes and pay in advance.


The menu, with English titles, hangs above the vending machine - but the vending machine only has prices and names in Japanese. So we stand there looking stupid while we match the kanji characters to get the right dish.

My 900-yen ($9) miso ramen on the menu...


... and its button on the vending machine.


The machine prints out small white tickets, which you hand to a waitress and she hands to the cooks.


5-10 minutes later, your supper arrives. We ordered 2 bowls of ramen, a $5 plate of fried gyoza (potstickers) and a $5 draft beer. It's customary to loudly slurp your noodles as you inhale them, but we're not very good at it.



The well-considered extras on the table include (left to right) soy sauce, toothpicks, white pepper or red pepper for extra-spicy flavor, chopsticks, and tissues - because the soup really can make your nose run.


Ramen, soup of the gods.