Good eats, mild let-downs

The past couple of days have been a bit more low-key on the energy-o-meter. Something about walking for 4 hours a day sort of took it out on my ankles, so we've been treading trodden trails and reprioritizing our restaurant "must eats." Yesterday scored a culinary victory for us but a couple of disappointments as well.

Disappointment #1: Harajuku. Sunday is supposed to be the big "all the cosplay, gothic lolita, punk rebels, Jpop, and all other flavors of non-conformity fun come out to play" day. Unfortunately, it was raining all day so all we got to experience was a river of umbrellas in the tightly-packed alleyways. Not so much with the eye candy, alas. We are heading back out there with Rosie and James this morning--it won't be as large-scale as yesterday should have been, but we ought to be able to see SOMEthing.

Disappointment #2: DDR. If any of you reading this are not aware, Tavis and I are big enjoyers of the video game series Dance Dance Revolution. If the name is not a clear enough indication, it came from Japan, so we were looking forward to finding a video arcade in Tokyo and playing it in its country of origin with many of the ridiculously talented otaku (nerds) to be found here.

We searched about 3 arcades in varying regions before we found an employee who knew of a place that had a DDR machine. Seriously. This is like, last year's game or something, and nobody plays it anymore! There was one lonely little DDR board set up in the corner, with no crowd at all. We played a couple of rounds but it felt sort of surreptitious and unrewarding, no hecklers or admirers or even observers amidst the action in the arcade. Sigh. Always sad to find out you just Aren't That Cool.

Anyway, back to happier things: eats! We went to Vin Chou, a french fusion yakitori place recommended in my Lonely Planet. It was by far the easiest place to find out of all the restaurants so far. Hurray! We might actually be getting the hang of this place!

Tavis ordered the prix fixe menu, which included:

• An appetizer of potato salad (ha!) and a quarter of a cabbage to cleanse the palate in between courses of greasy meat. Sadly, this was just about the most vegetables I've eaten here.
• Quail. Very good, not charred beyond flavor like most of the quail I've had
• Skewer of duck. Also very delicious. I do so love duck.
• Skewer of chicken livers. My first livers! I loved them. Tavis didn't care for the consistency.
• Skewer of chicken gizzards. Flip the roles; I hated the consistency and found the flavor so-so, but Tavis thought they were great.
• Dish of pickled vegetables, including red bell pepper, lotus root and cauliflower. Mehh.
• Bress chicken thigh. Bress is apparently a region in France known for their great chickens. This was a great chicken. Wish there'd been more.
• Skewer of asparagus rolled in pork rib. Very tasty!
• Chicken soup. Strangely, this might have been my favorite flavor of the night. They spent a lot of time developing the flavors in the little sake glass of stock. It was fabulous.

To that, I added:

• Skewer of grilled quail eggs. I actually have never eaten a quail egg before. This was probably not the best way to try them. The flavor was okay. Grilling made the outside a very strange, rubbery texture.
• Cheese plate. We had a yummy brie, a very nice spicy blue that was thankfully lacking in sourness, and a tasty hard cheese that I suspect was mimolette because it was bright orange. But I'm still definitely no expert in fromagerie.
• Foie gras in a teriyaki sauce. Again, Tavis didn't care for the texture but I liked it quite well. Not my favorite thing and I probably wouldn't order it again. Much to the relief of the collective outrage assembled. Yes, I eat foie gras. There's a special level of hell (probably like B.1 or something, you have to take a separate elevator to get to it) for people like me. They probably fill a small room with irate noisy geese and push me in. Anyway, I digress.

It was a great meal and I enjoyed the progression. But Tavis and I agreed that if we were just craving a good, tasty meal, we would go back to Akiyoshi, the first yakitori place, and spend 1/4 of the money for as much flavor and probably more enjoyment. And larger portions. Ah well, a good experience all the same.

A culinary side note: the big dessert thing here in Tokyo are crepes. Like, crepes stuffed with a variety of sweet things and rolled up like a waffle cone. The kids here go NUTS for them and these creperies are everywhere with their big beautiful plastic models of every possibly combination of flavors. They tend to have:

• A layer of fluff, such as whipped cream, custard or ice cream
• A layer of fruit, such as strawberries, bananas or apples
• A layer of cake, such as chocolate cake or cheesecake
• Additional drizzles of chocolate or caramel

Insert the happiest heart attack here. And also, WHY do we not have these things in the States? We clearly are way too fat as a nation to need them....but that sure wouldn't stop us from eating the heck out of them! So I dreamed the other night that I bought a shack with the intentions of turning it into a creperie. Check back in in a few years to see if my dreams become a reality.

Last but not least, our shopping adventures. Minimal, really--we've bought a bunch of souvenirs and our kimonos are lovely and authentic, so we've been toning it down on the expenditures. But we found a place called Tokyu Hands which has several branches and encompasses about 7 floors per branch. Think of it like one part Home Depot, one part World Market. Anyway we found some neat wall art there. And on the 8th floor, they had a cat cafe set up. Pets aren't very common, what with the limited living conditions and all, so there are cafes with tons of cats where people pay to come in and snuggle. This one looked really cool and had lots of interactive walkways and stairs on the walls and hideyholes for the cats to enjoy, but dealing with the crowd of exuberant kids was probably more than most cats would care for. It made me sad and lonesome for my pups. (Also I saw a cat with a white 0 on her sides and it made me miss my Flannel very much.)

Should've put that higher, don't want to end on a sad note! Oh. Rosie and James decided to stay in Hamamatsu another night last night and so are getting into town....right about now, actually. They should be at our hotel in half an hour and then we will venture forth and have more adventures in Harajuku and a nice lunch before they have to get to Narita and fly back home. It's been great visiting with them. Hopefully we have more culinary win to speak of at the end of the day--Tavis and I are hunting down a place that serves Kobe beef. Noms await!

Where the streets have no name

Our past two days in Tokyo have followed somewhat of a pattern:

• we get up
• eat breakfast either in the cafe downstairs (a mostly Western style buffet with a few unusual offerings like salmon) or from munchies we picked up from a convenience store
• I pick a location to visit that day, as suggested by my Lonely Planet Tokyo Encounter
• we figure out the intricate route of trains and transfers necessary to get there
• we spend the morning at that location. The first day it was Shibuya, one of the major shopping areas where young people congregate to blow cash and be seen. Yesterday it was Harajuku....for much of the same reason. We lunch somewhere during this trip.
• we get exhausted and come back to the hotel to rest for a couple of hours in the heat of the day
• in the evening, we select a restaurant out of the Lonely Planet, figure out the convoluted subway system once more, and have an adventure in that district trying to find the restaurant in question

The first night was pretty straightforward. I selected the restaurant Komagata Dozeu in the Akasuka neighborhood, and while it was about a 30 minute walk from our rail stop (we purchased the cheapest 1-day unlimited pass, which basically lets us make a circle around Central Tokyo, but is missing many of the non-JR-run lines. So we adjust. And walk. And walk.), it was along the road to which we emerged from the station and we had landmarks to let us know if we were close and when we had gone too far. So we found it with minimal difficulty and enjoyed an amazing dinner.

Dozeu, as in Komagata Dozeu, are eel-like river fish. They are the specialty here and almost everything on the menu was dozeu cooked in various fashions. We had dozeu simmered in rice wine and reheated on a hibachi in front of us with green onions in a special soy sauce, and then we had grilled dozeu. Tavis very understandably was not able to tap into his inner Andrew Zimmern, and seeing a pot of little eely fish with their heads peering reproachfully at him was a little more than he had an appetite for. However, the grilled dozeu were headless and he nommed them quite happily. I loved them all--they were tender and tasty, not fishy at all. I'm such an indiscriminate carnivore. Sake and beer in abundance made the walk home seem much faster than the walk to the restaurant.

Last night proved a bit more of an adventure. This was only ironic because I had picked this restaurant, a yakitori joint (grilled chicken on a stick), based on how close it was to our rail station. However, it was not on a major street. It was down a cluster of small streets with no landmarks and not much context. And here we come to the basic problem with Tokyo.

THEY DON`T HAVE STREET NAMES.

Unless it is a major street or highway, none of the streets are named. Not just alleyways. Like, my entire subdivision would be anonymous. The address of the place we tried to go, Akiyoshi, was 3-30-4 Nishi-Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku. This translates to "in the Toshima ward (whatever THAT is), go to the neighborhood of Nishi-Ikebukuro and find the 3rd group of blocks, go to block 30 in that group, and you have about a 4% chance of finding the restaurant you`re looking for."

Even the locals got very confused. They had to divine our path in a cup of tea leaves to help us get there. Okay, they pulled out a map, but it was practically divination with as many people as it took to even get us in the right cluster of buildings. After that, we were on our own and it was only because Tavis kept looking for the kanji translation of the restaurant--of COURSE it couldn`t be one of the restaurants with Romaji (Romanized) signs out front, that would be too easy!--that we found the place at all. Until then, we got a good look at the very interesting, very sleazy Ikebukuro district.

However, we both agreed that the yakitori was worth the extravagant amount of trouble it put us through. OMG so good. We got skewers of beef tongue, some other beef deepfried with onions, grilled chicken with green onions, and the juiciest, fattiest teriyaki chicken imaginable. I could have sat there and ordered more all night. The place was absolutely packed, so if you come here, leave early enough in the afternoon to compensate for the frustrated wandering you are bound to experience.

So that's been the memorable eats. The shopping has been pretty fantastic too, if only for the eye candy every which way. The Harajuku district is especially vibrant on Sundays when all the social butterflies come out to frolic, but there were still plenty of people on display down the alleys and in the Vivienne Westwood-esque stores overflowing with frilly maid outfits, lacy corsets and punk paraphernalia. Kitsch doesn't come close. Not even remotely. But they sure do have fun!

Some store names of note, just from a 3rd-grade-humor standpoint:

• Nudy Boy
• Bruce Pee
• Freak Shop
• Candy Stripper
• Snoberry (probably Snow Berry but I hear Snobbery)

I must also say that my total of International Lush Stores is up to 2! Yep my Lushdar led me to both of the Tokyo branches of Lush. I'm just that awesome. And addicted. But mostly awesome.

No agenda yet today. Back to the rail map I go....

The advantage of being married to an extroverted American....

....is that I don't get selected to join the cast of "JUMP" onstage for a demonstration of martial arts to determine "who is the master?"

The disadvantage is that my extroverted American husband does.

JUMP is a Korean "comic martial arts performance," which basically means they act out a story using very little language--handy, since the audience was mostly Korean but this is apparently a major tourist perk--and incredible demonstrations of acrobatics, martial arts and slapstick humor. We were all laughing and oooooooohing constantly throughout the show.


Yes, I have had Van Halen stuck in my head for the past couple of days. Gomen, gomen.

However, there is a place in the show for a person to be selected from the audience. And last night that person was, of course, Tavis. *sigh* He had already been involved earlier in the show; the "narrator," a little old man, asked Tavis to help him to the stage, and as Tavis got up to do so, the old man snuck into his seat next to me. He offered Tavis a piece of candy to leave, and Tavis (the eternal cheeseball) played along and said "Nope. TWO pieces of candy!" And then, upon receiving his candy, walked to the back of the auditorium and "disappeared" behind the back row. I don't think they counted on landing the one person in the audience who commits just as much as the actors do.

Regardless, we think that since he played along so well, he was the one selected for the second event. The story is centered around one family of martial artists who all train and live together; in the second scene they are competing with one another to see "who is the master?" However, the master may be found among the audience! They cowered in fear when they saw Tavis, asked where he was from, and dragged him up to stage. The first round, "Drunken Uncle" came at Tavis with a (slow-mo) punch and Tavis blocked it. The second round, Drunken Uncle did a forward somersault/backward somersault combo. Tavis, after playing to the Grandpa and audience for comedic effect, did a very nice job of replicating. (I am by this point thinking of nothing but Zoolander--"first model walks; second model duplicates, then elaborates.") After this, the family swarmed Tavis for a patdown and found that he was carrying an axe, a knife, and other assorted weapons. They all cowered in fear and ushered him off the stage with much laughter and appreciation by all.

It was just hilarious. My face was of course beet red, but I could not have wished for a better time.

Before that, the group of us were in Itaewon, doing some window shopping and getting massages. Tavis was unfortunately brutalized there and has a bruisy back today from his "deep tissue" torture. I had a much better time, fortunately. My legs and feet are still sore today from the amount of walking we've been doing, but that's no big deal.


Yes, I got a massage in Itaewon. Keep yer innuendo to yerself.


After the massage, we are walking on air. It looks like brick, but that's just because of the pollution.



A perfect pagoda.



I'm sure he's of some historical significance. I just love how dynamic his expression is.


I somehow don't think that jelly and coffee is going to be a big hit in the US. But everywhere you go, there are jelly drinks, or drinks with pulpy fruit mashed in. It's hard to explain unless you're a zombie and are familiar with a nice tasty mushy brain. They really are quite delicious if you can embrace the squishy.

Insadong, the "arts and crafts" community was next in our afternoon. We picked up some neat souvenirs and a nice wall hanging for our house, and then had dinner at another barbecue house where we had a room to ourselves with the low table and mats to sit upon. I liked this dining experience the least, actually--just not as many astounding flavors as we'd had in our other places. Still very pretty.


Neat lamps for sale in a ridiculously expensive store with ridiculously beautiful things, especially the textiles. Ties for $70, scarves for $110, normal-sheet-of-paper-sized silk wall hangings for even more than that. Wah for pretty things that I can't have.


Ceiling of a building in Insadong. Very neat.


I think this is a ceiling too, but for the life of me I can't remember which way it's oriented.


View of the layers of stores.


Us at the restaurant. Not pictured: numb feet.


Jo is such a wonderful hostess. We're so fortunate that our good friends have good friends.

Today we are getting started bright and early. As usual. Whyyyyy can't we sleep in?!


Cuteness part 1.


Cuteness part 2. My sleeping mask is awesome, don't lie.

We are heading back to Daejeon; should be there in time for lunch. Our travel plans have changed somewhat--we just found out that procrastinating on buying our ferry tickets to Japan was probably not the best move, and the ferry we want doesn't run on the day we'd planned to leave. So we're flying from Pusan (South Korea) to Osaka (Japan), which will cost a bit more but fortunately Rosie's travel agent got us a discount and this will really save time in transit. Hurray!

Anyway we're in Daejeon for another couple of days; we fly out to Japan on the 25th. Plenty to do and eat before then--I am really mad at myself for missing all the street food! It almost all smells amazing, with the notable exception of the stirfried larvae which stink up the whole street. Those aren't on my "must nom" list, obviously. I just hope the stars align to where we are walking down a street NOT after having just eaten.

That's all for now! If you didn't read the comment, Rob (Tavis's dad) mentioned that this blog is the #1 English hit for "Kundori Daejeon" on Google, so woot woot for my moment of celebrity. :)

Happy birthday to me! Or: if it's so won, why does it feel so right?

Edited with pictures!

Yes, the "won" puns are likely to continue until we're ensconced in Japan, at which point I shall cheerfully transition into "yen" puns.

Before I get into today--yayyyy birthday!--I have to finish our adventures from yesterday! So when we left our heroes, we had enjoyed a lovely morning. The lovely continued with lunch at a kimchi jjig (chee-gay), which serves communal troughs of soup with a ridiculous number of side dishes. Very nice location; we removed our shoes at the entrance and knelt/sat on woven mats as we shared our meal. The sense of communion was lovely and the food was spicy and delicious.


Cheers!


In South Korea, it is known that Foreigners Like Eggs. So this place gave us a whole plate of fried eggs to eat with our meal.

Afterwards, we ventured out into the elements (it IS monsoon season and rainy quite frequently) and explored a farmer's market. It was on a MUCH larger scale than I originally pictured. Got some fantastic shots of bins of all sorts of fish, rays, crustaceans, and other oddities, as well as some neat mushrooms, giraffe-striped gourds, little yellow melons and more. Familiar fruit is very expensive, like cherries and peaches. Bananas and kiwis were reasonable.



Crazy fish pt 1



Crazy fish pt 2


Squidses.


I have NO idea what these are.




Produce!


That evening, we ate "siesta burgers" at a beautiful little art cafe downtown. Renaissance-esque art covered the walls, and the floor outside was glass peeking down at an underground botanical garden. Very neat! The burgers themselves were, as with the "Italian" food before, Western food with a twist. The sauces really made it work--some sort of sweet soy on top and a spicy mayonnaise below. Tasty treat.


Ooh ambience.



Nomburger. This picture doesn't accurately show the hugeness of it. Meers burgers got nothin on this!

And then Harry Potter! Nuff said. Oh wait--at the concession stand, you can get popcorn, nachos, or squid with peanut butter. Yes, I'm being serious.

Now onto today, and what a great birthday it's been! We started the day off with a bike ride through a park by the river--side note, I have become fairly non-incompetent on the bike over the last two days! And have the sore butt to prove it--which culminated in a breakfast of crepes prepared by Rosie and me.

Rosie does the messaround!

Who says you can't find cheese in Korea?

Proof that I do in fact bike around!


What's up, handsome?

Pretty water wheel in a pond.


So pretty.

They have exercise stations set up all along this garden. An active Korea is a healthy Korea!


Men being manly. Nothin to see here.


Whew! I'm exhausted.

We then moved on to shopping...and shopping, and shopping, and shopping. Our mark was left on

• a mall. Ohhh the food court--conveyor belts of sushi, bean curd molded and colored into beautiful cakes, Black Uncle cheesecakes, and such pretty dimsum! And a LUSH!!!! Which sold the same things as the Lushes in the states, sadly, and for a higher price.
• A series of street markets. Think Times Square and Mexico smooshed together. Pet store after pet store. Rosie got attacked by a monkey. Kids serenaded us with karaoke from the second floor.
• The underground market, which sells approximately the same goods as above-ground for lower prices.
• More farmers' markets, with all the previous days' food experiences plus more street food, house wares, and clothing, including traditional Korean garb worn at weddings. Rosie says nowadays they will wear it for part of the ceremony and then change into more Western dress.

Me in Daejeon Lush!


Street view of a shopping district.


So many tiny fluffy puppies. It makes me sad and aww at the same time.


Rosie versus the evil monkey! My thought process was something like "hmm, I should probably help her....nah, I'll take pictures of this moment!"

Engrish is awesome. This shirt says "Flying Away: Every hour, every day, I will pray, I have one day to fly." We've seen many many MANY unintentional funnies.


City at night.

To cool down, we visited a coffee shop and played board games with other ex-pats while smoking hookahs (blech) and drinking tea and coffee products (blech). The company is nice. I lose at games. Mehh!

Dinner: Korean barbeque. Amazingly delicious, and again the feeling of communion, sharing a meal and bamboo liquor with my friends. Then dessert at The Chocolate, a cafe where we split fondue with fruit and hot cocoa.


Fallin in love is like falling in love is like barbeque....



The day was complete.