As we hurtled toward our destination, you could hear the thick, icy rain pelting the TGV. This didn't bode well. And although the rain had stopped by the time we hit the terminus, the weather was still bitingly cold and wet when we disembarked at the station.
"I don't understand how it can be so cold and icy here," I said to my wife.
"Paris is south of London, for crying out loud. It should be warmer."
No, really, this is Hyde Park in mid-February
We'd just gotten back from the UK, where it was dryer, sunnier, and – dare I say – the food and drink were better.
Of course, this is all a matter of perspective. Today marks two years that we've been in France, and I've already said many times that it feels like home. As such, you start taking many things for granted, start whining about the things that bother you, and start pining for things that are markedly different. I started noticing this just over a year ago, when I wrote the unimaginable – postulating that beer is cheap in London. Good beer, at that.
My previous trip to the UK was also part of a trip to France, all while still living in San Francisco. Afterward, I wrote a post trying to quantitatively compare the two rivals. It all seems so naïve now, but at the time, I didn't know I'd be living in Paris, just a hop skip and 180km/h jump away.
So I know that I say the following with no authority or consistency whatsoever, and that my perspective will likely change again in less than a year: Food and drink are now better in England.
Warning: Foodie Talk. Skip down to the following heading if you don't care.
The Countless Feasts Laid At My Feet Now before you get out the torches and pitchforks, I don't buy into the current Michelin brouhaha fueled by Chef Alain Ducasse's statements that London is now the world's fine dining capital. Ducasse is no longer a chef but a businessman, and he likely makes far better margins promoting his UK joints. And Michelin sells more books whenever it stirs the pot. Besides, I can't afford to eat at places like that, so these gastronomic titles are moot.
I furthermore don't believe Michael Steinberger's doomsaying in Au Revoir to All That, a book claiming that French gastronomy is all but dead. There are plenty of innovators on this side of the Channel. It's just that, again, their stuff falls in the budget of Sarkozy-voting suits who don't even live in Paris proper: The suburban nouveau-riche whose kids, ironically, eat at McDonald's and make American-style consumerism appear chic.
So I'll repeat, from the perspective of someone who loves to eat, travel, go out and fully enjoy life, yet also has to deal with a severely limited household income: Eating and drinking is better in London.
Part of this has to do with the near-parity of the Euro and the Pound Sterling. When Alannah and I first came to France on vacation (and wound up really liking it, so much that it was a no-brainer to move here) it was because we knew we could stretch our dollar farther than in the UK. But beyond exchange rates, my newfound appreciation for London has to do with the quality of what's accessible to the common traveler. Or resident.
Two towers of afternoon tea
For less than the price of a barely passable, likely-made-of-frozen-ingredients two-course "meal" at a typical Parisian shithole of a brasserie (a misnomer if ever there was one, as I don't see any beer being brewed locally), we were able to have a fairly regal afternoon tea at the swanky St. Pancras Grand.
Even if we'd thrown in a couple of flutes of champagne, it would've cost less than what passes for a decent lunch at a typical Parisian resto. And St. Pancras Grand is on the high end.
In Paris, if I want to have lunch for less than 8€ ($11), my choices are fast food, pathetic "wok" fare, cockroach-infested Chinese take-out that's been sitting under a sneezeguard for three days, hygenically questionable kebabs, or some inauthentic crêpe made with industrial ham and cheese. Granted, there are some tastier options like boulangerie sandwiches or falafels, but I'm talking about a hot meal that fills you up.
For £7 in London, while you won't eat like a king, you can pick up a best-in-class Fish & Chips or enormously satisfying Pie & Mash, all made freshly with proper ingredients. Maybe even a drink or two. (For a full run-down of what we ate in London, see our food blog Hungry Amateurs: Eating London Out.)
While you can't beat Paris' multitude of outdoor markets – many featuring excellent products – the supermarket is starting to rule the roost, filled with industrial, processed garbage from across the world. London, on the other hand, seems to be having a food renaissance not only in its gastronomic scenes, but even its supermarkets are now replete with a dazzling variety of organic fruit and veg, locally sourced convenience foods (!) and information on responsible consumption. My local Picard, on the other hand, recently patted itself on the back for carrying frozen sushi.
Chugging ale at St. John. The hulking figure in blue partially behind me is chef Fergus Henderson.
The real coup de grace, though, was having lunch at St. John. While the maitre d' apologetically informed us that there were no tables available in the dining room for lunch, we were more than happy to order a few pints from the cavernous bar, where the menu overlaps that of the restaurant and comes from the same cooks in the same kitchen. For the same price as mediocre tapas in Paris, Alannah and I shared a few plates of fantastic, beautifully interpreted, and – yes – Michelin-starred renditions of classic British food. (Again, I don't hang out in that strata, but why not grab it when you can?)
I oohed and ahhed and licked my fingers and sucked the marrow out of bones and savored slices of ox heart and enjoyed the housemade whole wheat bread, vowing that we'd come back each time we're back in London.
All that and we were able to wash down our lunch with multiple pints of hand-pumped real ale, with no silly fancypants markup or that-doesn't-pair-with-your-meal scowling from the waitstaff.
And as much as I love a good wine (I'm polishing off a bottle of Gaillac as I write this), it's refreshing to go somewhere it's not frowned upon to have beer with your sit-down meal.
This is More Than a Party While the English may be known for binge-drinking, it's also obvious that the wide availability of good drink makes for a more convivial atmosphere in general. Even if you're not a drinker, there's a happy vibe to a warm pub, a cozy booth, or a concert where they're not gouging you at the door or jostling you on the floor.
Happy just to be here!
When it was announced that Depeche Mode would be headlining this year's Teenage Cancer Trust charity show at the Royal Albert Hall, I told Alannah I'd sacrifice going to their Paris shows to come to this one – if I could score tickets. I did, it coincided with our wedding anniversary, and we agreed that a smaller, more historical venue like the RAH would be more romantic than a giant box like the Palais Omnisports de Bercy anyway. Score another for London.
Needless to say, the show was Depeche Mode's best in decades, notably due to the brief but triumphant return of Alan Wilder. (HD video of the best moment of the show here.) Throw in a string section, an intimate venue, and all of it being done for a very good cause, and it made for a special night indeed.
There's no point to comparing this to any night out in our homebase, but overall, I haven't been incredibly happy with the live music scene in Paris. Poor ticketing services/alerts, overpriced tickets, overpriced drinks, overcrowded venues, and an over-coked-up crowd (probably because drinks cost so much) make for lousy nights out, which is painful for a music junkie. While London concerts aren't immune to these problems, I simply find it easier to have a big night out over there.
Another Hole to Feed Besides eating and drinking, one of the things I've learned to love in London is shopping. Despite my anti-consumerist leanings, I still like... stuff. And thanks to France's boutique culture of highly curated items, shopping can be a bit frustrating here.
Alannah made the Martin Gore style hat. I made the giant scarf. All in my fave color.
For example, I recently got into knitting. This is actually good for my anti-consumerism, because it means I've started on the path to creating my own clothes. To some extent. It's bad, though, in that I now obsess over finding the right yarn for a project. (I can thank Alannah for turning me on to this neurosis... Thanks, honey.) Unfortunately, yarn stores in Paris – even the highly-touted Droguerie right in our neighborhood – carry a limited selection of what they find appealing or is trendy enough to sell. And because no one likes taking risks in this culture, every damn mercerie carries the same limited yarns. What's the fucking point? Who's dick do I have to suck to get a skein of Debbie Bliss "Como" cashmere-merino yarn?
So yeah, thanks to being turned on to knitting, I'm now one of those assholes who goes to London to shop. I couldn't believe I was telling the lady at the fantastic and charming Loop (Islington) that we were going to come back from Paris more often to shop there. She even gave me a loyalty card.
Again, I'm not loaded. But when I do choose to shop, I'm going to go where there's good pricing and variety and quality of product. (And before you get on my case about buying locally, most of the textiles at the grands magasins are Made in China synthetic blends.)
We even did a huge duffel bag's worth of grocery shopping in London, since not even the hippy organic stores here carry certain vegetables like kale. (Which grows like a weed in continental Europe... WTF, man?)
Feels Like Home – I Should Have Known From the First Breath With that cold blast of the icy Paris air filling my nostrils on the Eurostar platform at Gare du Nord, I smelled that I was home. Paris has a particular scent to it – a moistness mingling with the faint scent of baking bread and stale cigarette smoke. It's "the Paris scent" as far as I'm concerned, and I find I long for it whenever I've been away for too long.
As much as I complain and always see the grass being greener on the other side, it's magnificent living somewhere that not only everyone wants to visit (for very good reason), but that I actually do love on a daily basis. Whose smells I love. Whose sounds I love. Whose irritating idiosyncracies I love, much like the quirks of any loved one.
Even being away for only four days, I missed baguettes. I missed being able to blindly pick a wine and pretty much never go wrong. I missed our local market people (even if they don't have kale). I even missed, believe it or not, the Métro. (Though not the craptacular Ligne 13. Nique la motherfuckingLigne 13!)
We've become so Parisian, in fact, that everywhere we went in London, we were surrounded by French speakers. At our B&B, at nearly every pub, at half the restaurants. Then Alannah had an epiphany: "We now are French tourists!"
Now that both of us have our residency cards, root for the French rugby team, and feign indifference with the best of them, we've become pretty integrated. But as I went to yet another mediocre lunch during work today, walking past the skinny undersized cans of fizzy yellow Kronenbourg in the beverage section, I really missed the chippie and the pub. And the gigantic serving of Welsh rarebit at St. John. *sigh*
Side note: Yes, all the headings in this post are Depeche Mode lyrics, as I still can't get over how awesome that show was. And yes, I did take my wife to see my favorite band during our anniversary holiday. And she sang along to every song. Except for the kinda boring ones where we went and chugged Old Speckled Hen. For less than the price of a soda in Paris, naturally.
While for me I don't feel that writing about France is so much writing about being in a foreign country anymore as it is about writing about what I now consider my home, there are times that I feel like I'm in an alien land.
Take this last weekend's SantaCon, for example. Santa Sparkle and I prefer to Frenchify it and call it "SantaConnerie." Not because we're calling for the sainthood of Sean Connery. He's already a knight, for crying out loud... but the French word derived from con, meaning "idiot," and its inherited form connerie, meaning "shit only a goddamn idiot would do." Because, to us, SantaCon is about going out en masse and getting stupid. While fueled on liquor. And, well, there was plenty of that. But there were also plenty of those alienating things that you'd think I'd be used to by now.
Let's rewind to last year, SantaCon Paris 2008. Here are some pictures. Really tame, right? It was mellow, and we Yanks were the only ones to show up with flasks, but it was pleasant – we really did roam around Paris spreading holiday cheer. It was almost naïve and innocent, and while not at all what we expected, we liked this nicety-nice version of SantaCon. Even if it wasn't the booze-fueled anarchic mayhem we're accustomed to.
So it was nice to see earlier promotion this year, and more people showing interest, with the Facebook page gathering more "Will Attends" in the first month than we had in total last year. And suddenly it really grew. With a new flyer design and a few promotional videos (ummm, okay) there were hundreds interested in joining the fun. Was this going to be the Naughty version we'd left in our beloved San Francisco? Or was it going to be like last year's Nice version we'd come to like, only on a larger scale?
So once you get past the cheesy ending (sorry, sometimes I can't help myself, but I wanted an excuse to use some slappin' bass), did you see anything else wrong with the picture?
Let's start with the Santa pageant. Or whatever the fuck that was. While Santas participating in SantaCon are encouraged to come up with a Santa "persona," and there were certainly some admirably creative ones, it's meant to be a group movement. In no past SantaCon have we highlighted individuals, but celebrated our coming together en masse to delight, surprise, and sometimes disgust passersby. The eventual winner of "Miss SantaCon" had invited Sparkle to come out and participate, but she refused on principle. As she kept asking me during the whole timefuck, "When are we going to start drinking?"
Luckily that was a rhetorical question. Santa Black and Santa Sparkle, like all good bad Santas, came equipped with flasks. Again, we were the only ones, but I'll chalk that up to something Paris does better: There's no open container law here, so you don't have to hide your hooch... Still, a flask (or two or three) is SantaCon tradition, god dammit.
What was wrong in the beverage department was the Red Bull. While I'm not opposed to the taurine-powered mixer (it is a MIXER, not a drink on its own), I was appalled to see two women in Red Bull jackets carrying a portable Red Bull-branded cooler, handing out the little silver cylinders of energy drink. Last I remember, Santarchy began as a cheeky rebellion against commercialization. Here, people were glad to suck the corporate dick 60ml can.
The over-organized march was fine. While extremely lacking in drink stops, it brought a distinctly French flavor to SantaCon: That of the grève, or strike, if you will. Striking is ingrained into French culture, and it was actually a ton of fun turning typical strike chants into Santa-related mockery. Liberez les sapins ! Liberez les lutins ! Liberez [whatever we happened to be passing by]! Taking over a Left Bank boulevard was pretty awesome, too. But would anyone have had the cojones to do it if we didn't have a police escort?
When we finally did stop at a bar – one of many same-ol' same-ol' Anglo-Saxon themed pubs throughout Paris – at least there was a drink special on hand, helping the lightweights around us get wasted.
We got moving again, on to the crescendo that was Notre Dame, and in all spent a couple of hours dicking around before the second and (what... the... fuck...) last bar stop. Worse off, at another English pub (ok, the first was Scottish) in our very own neighborhood that Sparkle and I don't particularly like. We'd been there before for the Couchsurfing pub quiz on Monday nights and decided that we hate The Lions. The bartenders are slow, don't know how to manage a crowd, and spend more time chatting with their buddies than doing their job.
"Wait," you might say if you're familiar with SantaCon. "Why did you go there? Why didn't you just storm another bar?"
Well, Sparkle and I did (the much more locals-oriented Le Tambour down the street), and didn't look back. The real trouble with the Lions wasn't the Lions itself: It's shitty, but it's roomy. No, it became clear that we were led to a Couchsurfing spot, by Couchsurfing people, catering to a Couchsurfing crowd.
Let me iterate, I like Couchsurfing. It's a good organization (despite some dickheads trying to turn it into a for-profit venture a while back) and makes for fantastic networking. But to be led at the end of the evening to their shit hangout to get shit service at shit prices... What. The. Fuck.
You may as well have hung up a Couchsurfing banner over Place Monge where we met up. Oh, what? Someone was wearing one as a cape? You don't say...
The trouble here is that SantaCon isn't supposed to be owned, sponsored, or cater particularly to anyone. It was born of an anarchic spirit of self-expression and anti-commercialization, to bring joie de vivre back to the now long fucked-over holidays. How that's expressed is entirely up to the city and the crowd participating in it, but for the love of Saint Nick, do it as differently as you want, but remember what it's all about.
Now I'm not claiming San Francisco's superiority. While I'll stand by the statement that we are the world champions of drinking, SantaCon SF started to lose its way a few years ago, starting with its advertising of the event (again, WTF!?) on a douchebag nightlife web site. I won't mention any names, but it rhymes with ViteNibe. There are now three official routes, and many official bars. Can I say "WTF!?" again?
Back in my day, there was a starting point, a rough ending point, and every bar along the (not particularly rigid) route was ripe for an unannounced invasion. Some bartenders didn't like it. Some welcomed the opportunity to do a week's worth of business in less than an hour.
But don't take this as a curmudgeonly gripe. My crankiness comes from nothing more than misplaced hope. I was hoping that with SantaCon Paris being a relative toddler on the global scene, it could bring back some of the anarchic, free-for-all spirit of the old days. Channeling the soixante-huitards and Théatre de l'Absurde into one glorious day. A haven for the slightly surly but loving Santa in all of us, who's both a mean drunk and a genuinely fun person to be around.
In the process of editing the video above, I received a friendly note from one of the organizers, who's got no problem with my gripes. This rundown is a bit more developed than my Tweets and status updates to which he was responding, and potentially more inflammatory. (Just in case it isn't inflammatory enough: FUCK YOUR LIONS PUB.)
BUT... We'll be back again, flasks in hand, regardless of how over-organized or over-commercialized it may get. No one can crush these two Santas' spirits. After all, we'll full of 'em.
I've been back for a full day now, and my little head is still trying to process everything from the trip to Japan. Not only because of the mind-boggling array of stuff I saw - and ate - from Osaka to Nakamura to Tokyo and every point in between, but also because I'm running on so little sleep.
It's a complete time warp coming back from Japan. There's the whole issue of coming home from the future: I left Japan at 5 PM on the 27th, took a 9 hour flight, and was in San Francisco by 9 AM of the 27th. All the way, instead of sleeping or getting a few quiet moments to read, I also had to contend with the incessant screaming and spoiled demands of some undisciplined little shit of a child, whose parents should be drawn and quartered and served up as a delicacy at some Japanese izakaya, so we can consume these dickweeds, punish them further with our digestive acids, and subsequently flush them down as the human pieces of shit that they are.
Seriously, if you bring kids on a plane - which is totally fine - have the decency to exercise a little discipline and control. Otherwise, you are nothing but human feces. Excrement. Shit that doesn't deserve the honor of being flushed down a super-duper-musical-automatic-do-everything toilet.
Speaking of which, I miss the toilets in Japan. After a couple of weeks, I finally got used to them, and even started to like them. I made a little video the first time I decided to try one whole hog, but I never had a chance to upload it. Be warned - even though the video section of my website has been edited to say, "Watch me my crap on YouTube," you will, indeed, get to watch me crap.
Sadly, all the pooping in the world isn't helping me shed the, umm, shitload of weight I've gained in just a few weeks. It didn't help that I'd just been on feeding frenzies in Europe and Tennessee just before, but having the opportunity to sample all sorts of new stuff like sparrows, locusts, raw horse, akebi and more really put the face-stuffing pedal to the metal.
I thought I'd lose weight being in Japan, what with the whole small-portion thing, and the myth that Japan is ridiculously expensive.
Well, that's exactly a myth. Even though our exchange rate fell a couple of times while i was there, Japan is really not that expensive. Although transit and hotels can be pricey, you can work around that.
Transit For instance, a JR (Japan Rail) pass for foreigners is just around the $225 mark for a week. I used this for most of my traveling around, and it's good for all the trains (except the fastest nozomi bullet trains), inlcuding the JR lines that go through and around Tokyo. And it's simpler than a Eurail pass in that you don't have to validate it each journey. You just walk up to the side of the turnstiles with a little booth, flash your pass, and walk in. No reservations, no nothing.
And trains in Japan are ridiculously on-time. As such, if you do miss the 4:12 to Shinjuku, they are so plentiful that it's not so painful to wait around for the 4:16. Intercity trains aren't quite as many in between, but you'll generally never have to wait more than an hour for a train anywhere which is more than I can say for the CalTrain on which I'm riding at the very moment, a train for which last night I had to run across active tracks and jump in before the doors closed right behind me. That wouldn't happen in Japan, because I'd just kill a few minutes on my keitai (mobile phone) while waiting for the next one.
Oh, and despite the fact that they allow eating, drinking, and sometimes even smoking on the trains, they are devastatingly clean. Not that you'd ever want to, but if you spilled a little rice from your bento box onto the floor, you could probably pick it up and eat it without getting deathly ill. You can't even touch a railing on San Francisco's MUNI system without scheduling an appointment for a shot of penicillin.
Lodging I was lucky enough to stay with family for all but five nights of the trip. But should you need hotels, they are plentiful, and pretty affordable. Especially when compared to Europe or the US. There are hostels, of course, and if I were traveling solo through the country, I wouldn't hesitate to stay at one. They tend not to be in the center of cities, but - again - the transit system is so good, it doesn't really matter so much unless you plan on going on a bender until after the trains stop running. Even then you have the option of the legendary "capsule" hotels. But if you're with others or simply can't stand the thought of communal living, "business hotels" are a good option. They're generally small, but fairly decent, and often provide breakfast with the price of lodging. They're also western style, which is great if you're trying to get used to Japanese social norms. However, if you really do want to dive into the Japanese experience, you can stay at a ryokan, where you'll get the full-on Japanese style tatami room, futons for beds, breakfast (and sometimes dinner) served to you, and as is the case with many of them, onsen communal baths, which are the bomb.
Bathing Yes, I just said communal baths. Oftentimes, in the western mind, this stirs up images of hiding one's genitals in shame, contracting lice or athlete's foot, or even being cruised by lascivious gay men with handlebar mustaches. As such, it seems like an odd thing to do, but as I've recounted in this blog several times, it's actually very pleasurable, and probably one of the things I miss most about Japan. Even when I had western-style bathrooms at my disposal, I was still happy to throw down a couple of bucks to bathe at an onsen. Besides the ability to get myself nice and clean before dinner or before going to bed, it also gave me a chance to unwind in one of the thousands of geothermal hot springs that are all over Japan. Definitely worthwhile and not to be missed.
Eating, Eating, Eating Yup, in the paragraph above, I mentioned bathing before dinner. This is actually very common in Japan, and I'm guessing it's because dinner can be an event. Take kaiseki for example, the artful, methodical, and absolutely gorgeous multi-course dinner that's as much about presentation and beauty as it is about taste.
Of course, having such a dinner can be very expensive, and it's just as much fun - if not more fun, to share a communal pot of sukiyaki or shabu shabu or teppanyaki, all of which can be found at the dinner table of just about any Japanese family on any given night. Like the bathing, communal eating in Japan can somehow become a magical, fun experience, even though it seems awkward and invasive in the west.
And don't worry - while I've showcased a bunch of weird-ass foods on the video clips about this trip, you won't be surprised by fried locusts or boiled eel guts or smoked fish heads when ordering normal, every day foods. I went to specialty joints for these things. Most everyday Japanese food is very palatable and easy to order.
Then you've got your ramen bars, izakaya, soba bars, fast casual restaurants... The Japanese take all their food very seriously, so even at these - the cheapest of cheap - the quality of the food is generally high. For only a few hundred yen (just a few dollars), you can have a small but very satisfying meal, and often very quickly.
While you may feel like lingering for hours at an izakaya ordering up various grilled or fried items, you can be in and out of a ramen bar in less than five minutes if you so choose. Japan has a huge culture of convenience - if you couldn't tell by all the mobile phones, automated ticket kiosks, butt-washing toilets, etc. And this becomes highly obvious when ordering food at some places. You just go up to what looks like a ticket vending machine, insert money, click the pictures of the food you want, and you get a ticket or two. Hand these tickets to your server or cook, and within minutes you've got your bowl of ramen, your plate of yakisoba - whatever it is whose picture you clicked on the machine.
While tipping is out of the question, service is still excellent at most places, even the ticket-machine ramen shops.
Polite Society You have to go out of your way for the Japanese to be mean to you. With the exception of Roppongi (have I mentioned I fucking hate Roppongi?) I didn't once feel unwelcome, uncomfortable, or generally that I'm "in the wrong place." If anything, I felt a bit uncomfortable with the fact that so many people were being so damn nice to me without having to profusely kiss their ass first.
The exception comes on the road. And yet again on my travels, the stereotype out there has proven true:
Asians suck at driving. It seems that once the rubber hits the road, the whole concept of courtesy, politeness, and doing things with honor are straight out the driver's side window - which in this case is on the right. At first I thought getting around Japan by car was odd because of the whole drive-on-the-left thing, but I've driven in England. I've driven in Australia. I've gone the wrong way down a one-way street in the US after one or two drinks. But something here seemed wrong. Then I realized - these people can't drive! In a society hell-bent on following custom and rules to the letter, the roads are anarchic. Stop signs are ignored. Lane markings? Ffff-whatever! Traffic signals? Hey, stop in the middle of the intersection once you notice it's red!
If you want proof that the Japanese suck at driving, all you have to see that over 90% of car sales in Japan are automatic transmissions. And everyone knows that only vehicular morons can't drive a manual tranny. Ok, you can say the same of America. And I say my theory still holds true. Even on this side of the Pacific, you're a moron if you don't know how to drive a stick.
But Japanese drivers definitely trump us in one aspect. While they may not be able to see traffic signals, road signs, or lane markings, they can squeeze their cars through the tightest of spots without a single nick on the bumper. One-lane roads with two-lanes of traffic? No problem. One-lane bridges with no railings with cars going both ways? Again, no problem. Squeezing between a brick wall and two illegally-parked cars? They'll do it in their sleep here.
This strangely acute skill, however, disappears again when riding a bicycle or walking. Neither of which you are allowed to do, apparently, in a straight line. Step out or ride out on the sidewalk (which is the norm here), and just try, TRY, to get somewhere in a logical fashion. Everyone is swerving, or walking around dizzily, or nearly bumping into everyone you move. This is largely because everyone on their mother is on their phone. While that's illegal on the road, no one's stopping anyone from being a jabbering or text-meassaging moron while under foot or pedal power. Walking a crowded sidewalk in Japan can be one of the most maddening experiences in an otherwise orderly, beautiful place.
I asked my friend Keith - who's been living in Yamagata for the last few months - if he bikes, and if so, if he does it on the sidewalk. Both answers were yes, the latter of which infuriated me. Because I'm a cyclist in San Francisco, where we have some serious biking balls, and he's from San Francisco, and should have some serious biking balls. And on only one night, in Tokyo, did I see anyone with serious biking balls, riding along in the slow lane of traffic with all the car craziness. They even have bike lanes in many towns, yet no one uses them. Even the ones on the sidewalk. So I asked Keith, "Hey man, I understand drivers here suck, but how come everyone rides on the sidewalk? Even you?" And he told me that in smaller towns, the gutters - unlike ours - are open ditches and with the crazy way people drive, it's easy to get run off the road and into a ditch. So everyone rides on the sidewalk.
This answer made sense. Even as a ballsy SF cyclist, I'd be pretty freaked out if an evasive maneuver had a 75% chance of landing me in a drainage ditch. But Tokyo doesn't have these, so I still posit that Tokyo cyclists are still a bunch of inconsiderate jerks. And pussies. Big, inconsiderate pussies.
Speaking of pussies...
Drinking in Japan I knew this already, but the Japanese are a bunch of drinking lightweights. How my inconceivably high tolerance came about despite being born of a Japanese mother is beyond me. I thought maybe my mom wasn't quite representative with her ability to get smashed after a drink and a half (I got her hammered at the 300 Bar with a couple of cocktails), but no, it seems the majority can get pretty schnockered off of a few orders of sake or shochu.
Which is a good thing.
First off, public drunkenness is totally acceptable in Japan, judging by the number of salarymen I saw stumbling through various bar areas and to numerous train stations throughout the country. Or the loud, conspicuous slurring and yelling of young ladies who gather up to get shitfaced after one large bottle of beer shared among them after work.
It's also a good thing (for them) because drinking can get damned expensive if you're not careful. I wish I had the Japanese ability to nurse two drinks over the course of the night and end the evening in La La Land. Instead, I got accustomed to $60 bar tabs for an hour of drinking. Damn my crazy gaijin tolerance. It's bad enough that bars can surprise you with cover charges, seating fees, and other hidden costs. (That girl sitting next to you? You just bought her drinks!) But if you drink like, say, an Irishman, a German, or a Japanese-Iranian-American, don't be too shocked if your bar bill is in the quintuple digits. (That's triple digits in dollars.)
That isn't to say that there aren't good bargains to be found. Drinking at an izakaya isn't too bad with giant beers at around $5 a pop, and then there's the Ginza's ¥300 Bar, which may well be my favorite bar in Japan, if not the world.
But for most westerners, you're going to burn a 10,000 yen (ichi-man en) note or two if you want to get to the point where you're pissing in every alcove on the way to the station.
Which is totally acceptable by the way. While there are signs in some spots telling you not to urinate there, public pissing is the norm throughout Japan. Sure, public bathrooms are seemingly always open, but it's totally normal to unbutton your 501's and let the golden glory fly as you stumble back to wherever. Oddly enough, I've pissed in the street in every single country that I've visited, except for Japan. I just felt bad. I knew it was socially (and legally) acceptable, but I couldn't bring myself to urinate on otherwise pristine looking streets.
Cleanliness is next to Godliness If that idiom is true, then Japan is pretty much up there with a commanding view of heaven. With the notable exception of *gag* Roppongi, it seems everything in Japan is immaculate. If someone does litter, it's cleaned up right away. Train stations are spotless. Train station bathrooms are spotless. Hell, bar bathrooms are spotless. Except in Roppongi.
In fact, while litter and trash do exist in Japan, it seems you have to be actively seeking it to find it on the streets. Hell, outside of Roppongi, you didn't even see cigarette butts on the ground. Maybe this is because the "pocket ashtray" is a top-selling item at convenience stores. It's a foil-lined fire-proof pouch that you can use as - you guessed it - an ashtray that you pull out of your pocket when you can't find a real one. Tossing butts on the ground is frowned upon.
In fact, in most of Tokyo and busier parts of other towns, it's downright illegal to smoke. This may seem odd in a country that has cigarette vending machines no more than 12 feet apart from each other on any given city block, and where McDonald's has a smoking section, and where any other restaurant IS a smoking section. But walk around Tokyo or parts of Osaka or Kyoto and you'll see a sign of someone walking and smoking with an "X" through it. Even weirder, you'll see - outside - signs for "Smoking Area," with a mass of people huddled around an ashtray.
But it's totally OK to light up while eating dinner at a restaurant, drinking in a coffee shop, browsing through a record store, or even playing games at a video arcade. Yes, there are ashtrays next to the joystick of the Virtua Fighter machine in the local game center. WHAT!?
Other Non-Sensical Bits There are lots of seemingly paradoxical things going on in Japan, besides peeing on pristine streets and smoking while hanging out with a bunch of five year-olds playing Taiko Drummer.
For a country obsessed with cleanliness, you will rarely find a bathroom that has hand soap. Restaurants are often an exception, as food handlers have to wash with soap by law, but you still won't find soap at all of them. And towels? Some places have air dryers, and even fewer have paper towels, but it's best to do like the locals do and carry a handkerchief or mini-towel with you at all times.
Internet access is another non-sensical phenomenon. Or rather, the lack of it. I hiked around Kyoto with my laptop all day hoping I could find an internet cafe with Wi-Fi or even an ethernet port so I could get online and work. Strike one. Starbucks? Tully's? Doutour Coffee? Strike two. I was finally able to get access at Kinko's, which was barely a base hit because I could've mortgaged a small house for the price. Looking up access on jwire, I found out that McDonlad's has wi-fi. And Mos Burger, a Japanese burger chain. Great. Otherwise, the lobbies of hostels and some tourist information centers and maybe some hotels have coin-operated internet kiosks for us lowly foreigners.
So I wondered to myself... "Why the hell is this??? How is it that the most technologically advanced society on the face of this planet has so few internet cafes and wi-fi hotspots?"
It's because that jerkstain who nearly ran into you on his bicycle on the sidewalk was probably surfing the web. Or checking his email. Or putting in an order for some hentai comics. Everyone has email and other internet access on the ubiquitous mobile phone, making net cafes more or less obsolete. Although you can also get internet at 24-hour manga kissa places (comic cafes), which double as crash pads for those that missed the last train. How, I don't understand. Being in any manga shop or cafe is like having a seizure without the joy of shaking around on the ground.
Seriously, there's only so much demons-raping-schoolgirls hentai anime and lactating mom bukkake porn one can look at. At least for me... I have a living, breathing girlfriend.
Which brings me to another point...
Sex in Japan No, I didn't have any, thankyouverymuch. Although the offers were plentiful in that filthy Roppongi.
I'm talking about the concept itself. It seems everything is contradictory when it comes to sex.
Selling sex is very much out in the open (see: Shinjuku, Roppongi), but people pay more to not have sex. (see: hostess bars charging ¥10,000 a drink)
I'm a former San Fernando (aka Silicone) Valley resident - home of the porn industry in America - and thought I'd seen it all. Well in Japan, here's demon rape porn, tentacle porn, school girl porn, and all sorts of stuff that makes even a hardened pervert like myself blush, or at the very least wonder, "What the hell...???" Yet it's illegal to show pubic hair.
News and public opinion show outrage over sexual assaults (which is great, don't get me wrong), yet there is no age of consent, and grown women are often encouraged by their mates to dress like school girls and take on teenage mannerisms to maintain youthful sexuality - this only blurs the lines. I was on the train with my mom and pointed out some adorable little kids, telling her, "Mom, Japanese kids are so adorable. It's crazy that their moms look like adorable 12 year-olds themselves." Which I meant as a compliment because, well, every damn person, place, and thing in Japan is cute. And my mom replied, "Yes, but that's why you hear about young girls getting raped. There's no line."
I'm no expert on the subject and despite my background in anthro I've not really researched any of this stuff in Japan, but at first glance, it seems there are incredibly competitive forces of repression and perversion at work, making for a cauldron of strange sexual practices and predilections which, frankly, turn me off.
I'm glad I have a western girlfriend!
But if you look past the strange porn, perverted cartoons, horrible driving, drunk public pissing, environmentally unfriendly foodways, human sardine can commuting, and strange toilets, you'll find a people who are as kind, welcoming, and joyful as any other on the planet.
Dig a little deeper and you'll find that - like you or I - we all have the same interests at heart, we just have different ways of getting to them on a daily basis. We love to eat, drink, be with our friends and family, and get our rocks off. It's the variations in how we get about it all that makes traveling a worthwhile experience.
And while this time around I had the unfair advantage of family showing me around and helping me get a closer glimpse at Japan behind closed doors, I advise jumping on any opportunity to travel there, if only to get a little taste of a culture that's got a foot in the past and another one well in the future.
For you experienced Euro backpackers out there who haven't hit up Japan yet, take London's propensity for putting gleaming new architecture next to centuries-old historical points of interest and multiply it by several orders of magnitude. And make it a hell of a lot cheaper. If that's not incentive enough to go, then I don't know what is.
Of course, it helps a lot to know the language. Again, I had an inside track on this, but still, even with my somehwat decent abilities, there were a few times I felt dead in the water - and that was just ordering yakitori at a bar.
So do yourself a favor. Learn a little bit of Japanese. Visit Japan. It is truly, as the natives say, sugoiiiiiiiiiii!
I left the computer alone when I stopped working this morning, and now I pick it back up again to start working. In between, it was quite a full day. Again. And I thought coming to this humble fishing village would be restful. At least it was very educational. So today, you're getting history lessons.
The day started with a trip to go visit my grandmother... at her grave. This bummed me out two-fold, first off because I miss her. She was a smart-assed woman who, for her diminutive size, was wickedly strong. She lived into her 80's doing what she did in her 20's: riding a bicycle through the hilly country, swinging a golf club with friends, drinking whiskey, and smoking half a pack a day. (See who I get my go-all-day/party-all-night constitution from?) I'm doubly bummed because this trip was supposed to happen a few years ago so I could see her before she passed away. We were holding off for the oppressively humid summer to be over and come in the milder autumn... but before we could, she was gone. Not because of her hard livin' - but because she broke her back falling out of bed one day. Go figure.
What surprised me is how far we didn't have to go to visit the grave. It's about a block and a half away from the house. Because Japanese don't traditionally leave their hometown, graveyards for the families of a particular neighborhood are actually in the neighborhood. So visiting daily to light some incense, leave an offering of rice and sake, and water the plants is actually a realistic expectation. And conveniently, the graves of all my Moriyama ancestors are in one place, so I can pay my respects and save a ton of time. Brilliant!
One interesting aspect of the whole never-leaving-the-village thing (although most of my family did end up dispersing) is that Japanese houses are like mazes. As generation after generation inherits a house, more rooms or floors are added to the property. The sliding walls make for endless configurations, as well. The family room can easily be divided into a couple of guest sleeping quarters... A smaller room can be expanded into a larger room when a bird leaves the nest. The possibilities are mind-boggling. And while this is great, it kind of sucks when you wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and find yourself in some rat-race contraption from hell.
Overall, though, the old Moriyama homestead is as I remember it from my last visit about 30 years ago. Until, of course, you slide one wall over to reveal a small wing that was added on. Or you go around the corner to find a stairwell to a whole new floor. (That's where my room is.) It's my room now, and with the rush of childhood memories, I'm kind of wishing it would be my room for always. I guess it is, since at this rate, this house will likely remain in my family forever.
Although that's not true of the land surrounding it. My family owned the hills surrounding Shimoda, but they saw no point in holding on to it if they weren't really doing anything with it. So a little while back, they sold it to the government to turn it into a huge public space. In it there's a children's park, the largest campground in southwest Japan, an onsen hot spring bath, and a park with an odd-looking observation deck that boasts a wide-open view of the sea. And climbing up to check it out this morning as the sun shone over the Pacific, just as it did 30 years before - and invariably 30 centuries before - I thought to myself, "No one owns this land... but this view will always be mine."
Nearby, there's a breakfast place Aunt Izumi recommended. Called the Nest Herb Garden House or something Engrish like that, it has a huge circular atrium where they have a magnificent herb garden, including the most fragrant basil I've ever smelled. They blend their own herbs, which aren't cheap, but smell brilliant. Unfortunately, not a single one of them ends up in the breakfast. I opted for the "Western" breakfast, as pictured above. Yes, that's salad. And that pink thing? Cherry Jell-o. I think they took the place of bacon and hash browns on short notice. And never mind the teacup. I actually asked for them to replace my Earl Grey with miso soup. Wait, no I didn't!
The village of Shimoda is a part of the overall town of Nakamura, our next destination. We went to hit up Fujiya - my grandma's favorite bakery from the days of yore, as well as check out the Shichi-Go-San (7-5-3) festival going on at the local shrine. This is when children aged - you guessed it - 7, 5, and 3 are put in their most decadent Japanese finery and brought to the local Shinto shrine for blessings. And even more so to be photographed by snap-happy parents. And who can blame them? They're so freakin' cute. I just wanted to go up to the beaming parents and ask their permission, "Can I hug it? Do you think I could get one? Do they cost much to feed?"
All kidding aside, it's one of those traditions that my mom steeped me in as a kid, and as I grew older and more resistant (and less appreciative), the less I participated, the less Japanese I felt. I thought it was stupid that my mom would dress me in a kimono or teach me various Shinto and Buddhist rituals, and while I still view everything with an eye toward the future, I'm far more touched by her efforts to instill culture in me now than I ever was back then. Back then, I just liked getting the candy.
Walking through downtown Nakamura, my mom pointed out that it's bars, bars, bars everywhere. Seriously - I think Nakamura has more bars per capita than any other city in Japan. And possibly Ireland. There are probably more bar stools than there are people of legal drinking age. There's even a bar called Jail - where I'm sure many a glass of Shochu has led someone to the actual jail, conveniently located within stumbling distance. We made a pit stop at the local liquor emporium - once the sake distillery - and WOAH are we still in Japan? Oh, we must be - they have about 800 different kinds of Sochu. But on top of that, an impressive array of wines, really impressive bottles of Scotch, and, well, just about anything to supply the town drunk for the next millennium.
I looked around and a funny smile hit my face. All these bars and an incredible liquor store, all so conveniently bundled together, it's almost as though it's urban planning of the best kind... "Hey mom, didn't you say one of our relatives was once the mayor of Nakamura?"
"Yes, that was your great grandfather. You know, Nakamura wasn't even really a city back when he first became mayor."
Bingo. It's become all that much clearer where the drinking gene comes from.
It's at this point where the pace picked up. See if you can keep up.
We drove out of Nakamura proper and into the hills alongside the Shimanto-gawa river one of Japan's largest undammed rivers Here we stopped by a couple of my mom's cousins' places which I guess makes them second cousins to me I don't know I never knew how all that worked Anyway it was very nice seeing them after 30 years because it never gets old when relatives tell you that you've grown not only vertically but horizontally har har har We stopped by a neighborhood shop and picked up what we could for a picnic lunch to be consumed at a later time Then we drove further up the river and stopped off to umm look at the river Then we drove even further up and
--Ok, catching my breath here--
We drove even further up to the bridge of my nightmares.
Or at least, a stressful recurring dream through my childhood, teenage years, and even early adult life.
Once I saw this bridge, I knew this was the cause of the dream. In the dream, I always dreamt that I was driving across a body of water on a narrow bridge, which inexplicably had no railing on the sides, and was barely wide enough for the car. I'd wake up in a cold sweat from the sheer nervousness of trying to go across this bridge without slipping off. And this was that bridge. A damn bridge you can drive across, but sneeze and jerk the wheel just once and you'll be whisked away into the Pacific a few miles down the way.
Yeah? Well fuck you, bridge. I cheated death by running up and down the bridge. I played chicken with an oncoming car. On foot. I teetered on the edge of the bridge as high winds threatened to send me to my watery demise. Guess what, bridge? I'm all grown up now. And I'm not afraid of heights - or the water - anymore. Maybe that's why you can't haunt me in my dreams anymore, you steel and concrete piece of shit. You thought you had me, didn't you? Ha!
Aaaanyway... Then we got back in the car and went further up the river to look at the river some more then stopped at another part on the river where we had our picnic lunch and skipped rocks for a while It was really funny when my mom fell down on the rocks Not because she got hurt but because it's just funny when someone falls We then took a long windy drive through the hills alongside the river because apparently I hadn't seen every possible view of the river and then we criss crossed the river on a couple of different bridges so I could see the various ways to get over the river and then we headed back into Nakamura because my aunt thought I'd like to see the local historical museum and --
STOP!! NO!!
I really yelled that. Not just now, but in the car. This stuff was killing me. Maybe hopping on a bus and seeing every possible little site in one day is appealing for Japanese tourists, and maybe I was starting to feel much more in touch with my roots, and maybe I'm married to my Nikon SLR and my Sony point-and-shoot but... I AM NOT A JAPANESE TOURIST.
I don't care for going from place to place with barely a moment's pause. We spend more time in the damn car than anything else, and we barely have time to sit some place and just... be. As in be on vacation. As in be part of the scene. As in be here, not just see it.
And thusly, we went to the mall.
Which is precisely what I like.
No, I'm no shopaholic spending queen, but going where "normal" people (i.e. not tourists) shop is much more interesting to me than any museum about the local history or most extraneous views of a river. I like to see what's trendy. What's on the clearance rack. What people queue up for. What are the #1 CDs and DVDs? Who's on the cover of magazines and newspapers? Why the hell are they pushing Beaujoulais Nouveau 2007 as a high-end wine option when it's just table swill at even the worst of French restaurants? These are the things I like to ponder when I visit someplace new.
Mostly, I love the market. Be it an open-air market, a specialy market, or in this case a big, bright supermarket. I love seeing what's available. What's cheap. What's expensive. It all fascinates me so much more than a display of what houses looked like here before WWII. Or some feudal lord's codpiece. Ok, that's mildly interesting.
We picked up provisions for the night, and while Mom and Aunt Izumi started preparing dinner, Makoto and I headed to the aforementioned (about 212 paragraphs ago) onsen. As pissed off and worked up as I get about being stuck in a car all day, touring around cattle style at cattle prod paces, and not seeing and doing what I really want to see and do, all that can be magically erased by spending an hour or two in a hot spring bath.
And unlike hot springs in most of the western hemisphere, this isn't just about a soak. You actually come to the baths here to bathe. As I explained in an earlier post, the Japanese approach to bathing is quite different. They shower and scrub and preen and exfoliate... then they get in the tub to soak their bones. It works much the same at an onsen but on a much larger scale. You go and wash yourself, then you sit and soak in a pool fed by geothermal springs under Japan's highly volcanic surface. And then - because it feels good - you go wash yourself again if you like. In fact, I have to say bathing might be the best part. It's a bit uncomfortable at first. There you are, in all your naked glory, with a bunch of other men, squatting at a low faucet with a bucket and a wash rag, scrubbing parts that shouldn't be seen in public... And it feels good. It's meditative. It's you and your washcloth and your soap - and little else. You scrub, you rinse, maybe scrub some more. And for some reason, it all feels very ritualistic. Like you're bathing with a purpose. I mean, other than to not stink. Anyway, I can't explain it. So I'm going to have to go back repeatedly until I can.
In the meantime, it's a brisk ten-minute walk back to to the house in almost pitch black conditions. With the faint glow of the village in the distance and knowing that as long as you feel pavement under your feet you're probably going the right way, it's kind of hard to get lost in a place this small.
And when you make it back, you know you have a hotpot of sukiyaki waiting for you. As in whale sukiyaki.
That's right hippies, we ate the whale tonight. And the verdict is, as Homer Simpson would say, "Sacrelicious!"
The meat itself is tough and chewy. Not soft at all like sukiyaki meat normally would be. Tasty, but not worth putting a species into extinction.
The "whale bacon" as we called it, on the other hand... To. Die. For. As in I'm totally fine with big, beautiful creatures of the sea of which we know little but have so much to learn are totally welcome to die for it. A layer of blubber, a couple of inches thick, with a little bit of the skin on there like a rind - de-harpoony-licious. Somehow, it doesn't taste fatty nor feel greasy at all. It's a sublime flavor with only a hint of ocean gaminess, like a very fatty bacon without the fat. And it paired brilliantly with the chestnut sochu we picked up at the liquor store earlier today. Yeah, chestnut. No, I can't tell you why they work together, but they do.
Again, like with bathing at an onsen, I don't know if I can properly explain it, so I'm just going to have to eat more.
Alrighty, you Greenpeace freaks are getting lucky. Due to the limitations imposed on harpooning, gutting, and slicing whale into meat (and delicious blubber!), it's extremely limited and a rare find, and I likely won't eat more. Consider us both lucky and we'll call it a draw.
Well, I've been writing for what seems to be an eternity now, and there doesn't seem to be much action on the work front. I bid you a wonderful night. *whale burp*
