Foodie Notes
Bear with me while I set some background context :) One of the things I love most about exploring new places is the food. As my close friends and travel mates Ellen and Caro can attest to, we have eaten our way through many a foreign country, prioritizing the day's activities based on where and what we feel like eating, and often abandoning more ambitious plans for the afternoon or evening if our current culinary experience calls for more commitment than we anticipated.
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| Caro and I in Costa do Sauipe, Brazil |
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| Ellen and I in Lake Como, Italy |
Caro and I ate our way through Brazil during a new year's vacation several years ago. Colorful foods and flavors and amazing fresh fish! Our most recent foray was tapas and wine in Barcelona.
Ellen and I read about a restaurant in Rick Steve's Italy guide where they'll pick you up from the town square and bring you to their restaurant in the hills. We took a chance and had one of the best and most memorable meals ever! On our most recent trip to Peru we gorged on Lomo Saltado, sampled guinea pig (actually I think Ellen did and I chickened out) and drank many a pisco sour. I could talk for days about our 2012 Omakase experiences with Andrew the sushi chef at The Dolphin restaurant in Kauai, but I digress...
That said, here are a few pics of my first adventures eating in Tokyo:
Shabu Shabu, a delicious and healthy meal involving cooking your own meat and veggies in a pot of boiling water at your table. Swishing the thinly sliced meat through the water for a few seconds does the trick. Let the veggies stew a while. In the bottom right corner you can see a savory sesame based sauce.
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| Lunchtime Shabu Shabu with a colleague |
You make this sauce fresh at your table by grinding sesame seeds with a mortar and pestle in a small bowl and adding a pale pinkish orange sauce to the ground seeds. Soy sauce and rice are served as well. You and your dining mate watch out for each other by periodically skimming scum off the surface of your respective sides of the divided water pot using a ladle and ceramic waste crock provided by the server.
Sushi - My friend Sunny and I went to dinner last night at a Japanese restaurant in Akasaka not far from where I'm staying. I've run/walked by it many times thinking I'd like to try it, and when I asked Sunny to choose the restaurant, she randomly chose this one! The bowl on the bottom right contains a traditional Japanese bean substance called Natto along with some salmon roe, fish, and a small egg which I think may have been completely raw and did not come from a hen but some other smaller bird. I had heard Natto was an acquired taste, and one bite convinced me it's true. Not my favorite thing! The sashimi on the rectangular plate in the middle of the table was excellent. I could only identify two of the fish (tuna and yellowfin). We also ate seaweed sheets, a rice and fish - based broth dish that I forget the name of but which will surely appear in a future post so I'll let it go for now, and a cooked thin bone-in fish that seriously challenged my gradually-improving chopstick skills. Then we ordered a second plate of sashimi, because one is never enough :)
Pizza
I know what you're thinking- Why did I go to a pizza place in Tokyo? A few reasons: The beauty of a city like Tokyo is that you can get any kind of food. Second, I've found that although I love it, I can only consume so much Japanese food before I start craving something more familiar and need a break from sushi, noodles, rice and meat. Third, Savoy had been recommended by my aforementioned gem of a relocation counselor Namiko. It was very difficult to take a discreet picture in a restaurant with total seating for 13, so you'll have to forgive the quality of my photo. Click on the link a few lines up for another blogger's higher quality photos and review. There's a huge wood fired pizza oven in the far right of the picture, a bowl of sauce and cheese imported from Italy in the bottom left, and not pictured is the Japanese chef who serves up exactly two kinds of pizza- margherita or marinara. Paired with a glass of sapporo or house red, this pizza makes for a quick, comforting, delicious meal in a cozy setting. It's the best pizza I've had outside of Italy.
And finally, lunch set. There are a myriad of restaurants in the business districts of Japan serving a full meal including soup, salad, sides, entree, drink and tea for a fixed price (Usually about ¥1000, or 8.50 USD) These meals are high quality, quick, delicious, and make lunchtime at the office fun and easy whether you're alone or with colleagues.
I know what you're thinking- Why did I go to a pizza place in Tokyo? A few reasons: The beauty of a city like Tokyo is that you can get any kind of food. Second, I've found that although I love it, I can only consume so much Japanese food before I start craving something more familiar and need a break from sushi, noodles, rice and meat. Third, Savoy had been recommended by my aforementioned gem of a relocation counselor Namiko. It was very difficult to take a discreet picture in a restaurant with total seating for 13, so you'll have to forgive the quality of my photo. Click on the link a few lines up for another blogger's higher quality photos and review. There's a huge wood fired pizza oven in the far right of the picture, a bowl of sauce and cheese imported from Italy in the bottom left, and not pictured is the Japanese chef who serves up exactly two kinds of pizza- margherita or marinara. Paired with a glass of sapporo or house red, this pizza makes for a quick, comforting, delicious meal in a cozy setting. It's the best pizza I've had outside of Italy. 
I could write for ages about food, but I'm going to switch gears to some random observations.
Other completely random tidbits:
Your IP Address Matters
A lot. My facebook suggested posts and sponsored links are almost all in Japanese and mostly consist of ads for clothing and facial products, with the exception of this morning's rare gem which appears to be a bear/fish cartoon promoting some sort of women's interest (note requisite Japanese clothing ad to the right):
Office equipment in Japan is not intended for foreign users
The printers and printer software at work are only available in Japanese, so I have memorized the placement and look of the buttons for changing my print options, as well as the buttons on the printer itself for logging in and finishing the print job. I've also learned to recognize the Kanji for "English" and "Japanese" because many webpages initially show up in Japanese but you can change them to English if you know how. (**Note, some websites are intelligent and have the word "English" written in English which makes sense because if I want English obviously I can't read Kanji, but many websites don't, which is sort of mind boggling). Kanji and Katakana characters don't look like words to a Roman-alphabet-trained brain, they look like pictures and very complex ones at that, so I've found that this kind of navigating truly is a spatial memory exercise.
I can tell I haven't used my brain in this sort of capacity in a while because I actually really love not knowing what the buttons say and navigating by memory- I can very much tell it's engaging my mind in a different way. Yeah, now I really sound crazy, but I'm sure there's some neurological way to explain this that I just can't articulate very well... It's the same feeling I had when playing that simple card game "Memory" as a kid- where you have to remember where the picture of the first bunny is so that when you pick up the second bunny on your next turn, you can make a match and earn points.
The box even says "No reading required to play" - see tiny print in the far right bottom corner. Copyright Milton Bradley 1980.
Retire your jeans and t-shirts. Japan dresses for success
Dress matters in Japan. People are generally well groomed, smell good, and wear nice things. Women wear tights every day with their skirts and dresses, even in hot weather. I think jeans are a thing of the past for me, at least when working or going out. I've worn them exactly twice since I got here, for my forays to the pool and back. I've discovered I like dressing up though and that good quality tights are kind of nice- comfy and prevent your legs from sticking together, which may come in handy when the weather turns unbearably hot and humid this summer. Most men wear suits to the office every day, except during summer "COOL BIZ" months when jackets and ties can be left at home due to the oppressive heat. It's neat to walk through the subway every day admiring such a smartly-attired group and observing interesting trends like the completely acceptable practice of wearing tights with open toed sandals (<<this is one I just can't embrace)
I need to improve my efficiency in blogging
It's 2pm and I've been on the couch for about 4 hours working pretty steadily on this post. Blogging regularly is giving me an appreciation for writers everywhere. It's not easy to capture your thoughts articulately on the first try and it's difficult to pick and choose what you want to talk about when you're on sensory overload and feel like you could word vomit for ten hours straight about everything you're experiencing. It's awesome and frustrating at the same time to know I'll never be able to capture in words everything this experience is, but if there's one thing I've learned from my personal journal-ing over the years it's that it's worth doing anyway. Stick with me while I try to sort myself out and write more succinct posts :)
Sushi For Expats tip: Tipping is not necessary in Japan and can even be considered insulting. Restaurants, bellmen, and taxi drivers do not expect and in most cases won't even accept a tip. Prices everywhere reflect an inclusion of good service.
A lot. My facebook suggested posts and sponsored links are almost all in Japanese and mostly consist of ads for clothing and facial products, with the exception of this morning's rare gem which appears to be a bear/fish cartoon promoting some sort of women's interest (note requisite Japanese clothing ad to the right):
Office equipment in Japan is not intended for foreign users
The printers and printer software at work are only available in Japanese, so I have memorized the placement and look of the buttons for changing my print options, as well as the buttons on the printer itself for logging in and finishing the print job. I've also learned to recognize the Kanji for "English" and "Japanese" because many webpages initially show up in Japanese but you can change them to English if you know how. (**Note, some websites are intelligent and have the word "English" written in English which makes sense because if I want English obviously I can't read Kanji, but many websites don't, which is sort of mind boggling). Kanji and Katakana characters don't look like words to a Roman-alphabet-trained brain, they look like pictures and very complex ones at that, so I've found that this kind of navigating truly is a spatial memory exercise.
I can tell I haven't used my brain in this sort of capacity in a while because I actually really love not knowing what the buttons say and navigating by memory- I can very much tell it's engaging my mind in a different way. Yeah, now I really sound crazy, but I'm sure there's some neurological way to explain this that I just can't articulate very well... It's the same feeling I had when playing that simple card game "Memory" as a kid- where you have to remember where the picture of the first bunny is so that when you pick up the second bunny on your next turn, you can make a match and earn points.
The box even says "No reading required to play" - see tiny print in the far right bottom corner. Copyright Milton Bradley 1980.
Retire your jeans and t-shirts. Japan dresses for success
Dress matters in Japan. People are generally well groomed, smell good, and wear nice things. Women wear tights every day with their skirts and dresses, even in hot weather. I think jeans are a thing of the past for me, at least when working or going out. I've worn them exactly twice since I got here, for my forays to the pool and back. I've discovered I like dressing up though and that good quality tights are kind of nice- comfy and prevent your legs from sticking together, which may come in handy when the weather turns unbearably hot and humid this summer. Most men wear suits to the office every day, except during summer "COOL BIZ" months when jackets and ties can be left at home due to the oppressive heat. It's neat to walk through the subway every day admiring such a smartly-attired group and observing interesting trends like the completely acceptable practice of wearing tights with open toed sandals (<<this is one I just can't embrace)
I need to improve my efficiency in blogging
It's 2pm and I've been on the couch for about 4 hours working pretty steadily on this post. Blogging regularly is giving me an appreciation for writers everywhere. It's not easy to capture your thoughts articulately on the first try and it's difficult to pick and choose what you want to talk about when you're on sensory overload and feel like you could word vomit for ten hours straight about everything you're experiencing. It's awesome and frustrating at the same time to know I'll never be able to capture in words everything this experience is, but if there's one thing I've learned from my personal journal-ing over the years it's that it's worth doing anyway. Stick with me while I try to sort myself out and write more succinct posts :)
Sushi For Expats tip: Tipping is not necessary in Japan and can even be considered insulting. Restaurants, bellmen, and taxi drivers do not expect and in most cases won't even accept a tip. Prices everywhere reflect an inclusion of good service.
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