Dad in a Foreign Land

So lately I’ve been on a hot pepper kick of sorts, inspired by Amal Naj’s book, Peppers: A Tale of Hot Pursuits. A few days ago I went down to the Asian market in Ueno (the basement of Ameyoko’s センタービル) and picked up a bag of Korean green chili peppers. That night we were a bit hungry after putting the boy to bed and decided to try them. Being adventurous fools, we just each took one and bit off the end. The first bite didn’t feel particularly spicy, so we shrugged and took another. It was about 10 seconds after that when the pain started to come. We did each finish our pepper, but it was among the more intensely painful things I’ve put my tongue through. (They weren’t habanero level, but certainly made jalapeños seem like strawberries by comparison.)

Two nights ago we made hummus, and conservatively added one of the peppers. The hummus was great, but the pepper had disappointingly little impact. So tonight I decided to make a spicy late night snack for my wife, who was working on a translation job. I rinsed three chili peppers, took out the seeds, and chopped them finely. I fried 200 grams of ground chicken thigh, adding curry powder, garam masala, dried basil, garlic powder, salt, mirin, soy sauce, and the chopped chili peppers. Basically, in man-cooking style, I just grabbed whatever looked good from the cabinet under the stove. It turned out surprisingly Thai, and was actually incredibly good and reasonably spicy. (A little more bite would have been even better though.) I hate to brag, but my wife was very impressed.

I did make one mistake though. After the cooking was done I went to the bathroom to urinate. I had rinsed my hands previously, but not washed properly with soap. (I wash well with soap after the bathroom, not before.) It took a full minute after I came out for the pain to come. I have never experienced that kind of burning down there. I pray that I never will again. A partial shower and a lot of soap helped, but there was nothing to do but wait for the burning to cease completely. The morale of the story: wash your hands properly after handling chili peppers!

Yesterday when the wife and boy came back from a trip to a nearby import store, boy told me to close my eyes. “I’ve got a surprise for you, daddy. Close your eyes! Don’t look!” I complied, and boy delved into the shopping bag and excitedly held up a little box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

“Daddy it’s macaroni and cheese. I love macaroni and cheese! Make it for me please!”

When I was young I had either an allergy or some kind of intolerance to wheat and dairy, so macaroni and cheese is completely foreign to me, and lacks the nostalgia it might hold for some. We’ve never bought it before, and it took me a minute to realize where boy had heard about it: Little Bill. The Nickelodeon Jr. kid’s show inspired by Bill Cosby’s short stories is also a fountainhead of middle American culture. The boy has been exposed to a lot of American culture that I would never think to introduce him to just by watching the show once in a while.

So I followed the simple instructions on the box and made it for him. When we put it on a plate and presented it to him at the table, he was beside himself with joy. “Thank you so much! I’m so lucky!” He seemed to like it at first and ate it enthusiastically, but his pace declined rapidly. After a few more minutes he quietly told me, “Daddy, I don’t really like macaroni and cheese. You can eat it all if you want.” I’m not a big fan of it either.

One of the problems that I have with writing about nihonshu is that I want to do it right after tasting a few different types, which usually makes my mind too foggy for clear prose. Tonight I tasted and compared the four bottles pictured above. All of them are from the Tohoku (Northeastern) region of Japan. From left to right they are Asabiraki (daiginjo), Jikuu (junmai ginjo), Daichi no Ikken (tokubetsu honjozo), and Uragasumi (tokubetsu junmai). The first three are all from Iwate’s "Nanbu Toji" group of brewmasters, while Urakasumi is from Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture. I should note that while I write this I continue to sip the Daichi no Ikken, so perhaps that is my favorite of the bunch.

Asabiraki is a well-known brand of nihonshu in Iwate, and the closest among the group to a "standard" sake. It apparently won the Monde Selection gold medal four years in a row from 1998 to 2001. It’s of the tanrei karakuchi variety (dry and crisp), makes a strong impression on the first sip.

Jikuu has long been a favorite of mine. This was the first "jizake" or regional variety of nihonshu that I came to love. (Jizake is usually only available near the area where it is made, which differentiates it with more standard brands, which while of course have their own region or locality, are so popular that they are available nationwide.) Jikuu’s 50% senmaibuai is the legal level for a daiginjo. The flavor is rich, not quite sweet, but not all that dry either. It’s not my absolute favorite anymore, but I still love it.

Daichi no Ikken is made by Sakuragao, the same toji (brewmaster) that makes Jikuu. I’ve actually tried about five different sakes made by Sakuragao, and liked all but one. (Luckily, the one that I didn’t like, Kurabito no Yume, is a limited edition anyway.) Daichi no Ikken is surprisingly good for how cheap it is. At 980 yen for a 720ml bottle, you wouldn’t expect to get such a smooth sake with a 50% senmaibuai, no less. Of course the senmaibuai is about the only technical detail I know about Daichi no Ikken. Neither the box nor bottle mention even the type of rice used. Still, it keeps you reaching for another sip. (This was also my wife’s favorite of the four.)

Uragasumi, the little bottle on the right from Sendai, was sprung on me by my father-in-law. I was very upset one afternoon last week after discovering a work-related loss of a large sum, and my father-in-law suddenly appeared with the Uragasumi tokubetsu junmai in hand. I couldn’t help but be cheered up a bit, flattered that he had gone to the trouble of driving to the store just to get it for me. (I later discovered he had actually made the liquor run because he ran out of whiskey, and the nihonshu for me was an afterthought. Still a nice gesture though.) Uragasumi surprised me with it’s rich flavor. A moment after the initial sip I felt a sort of blossoming fizzly-effect in mouth. I have been trying to find the right words for it, but the best I can do is describe it as the sort of fireworks that appears bright at first and then sizzles with thousands of sparks around multiple centers. It must be something to do with the fermentation, and it’s very pleasant. This was most pronounced when it was freshest, however. I left about 100ml in the bottle for the following day, and it had already lost some of its charm then. Uragasumi is rich in "umami" and must have high amino acidity.

I’ve started reading a Japanese book on nihonshu, (日本酒ことば入門) by Shinoda Jiro. He starts by introducing himself as a amateur fan of nihonshu with no professionals status. His expertise comes from organizing a nihonshu drinking group that has been meeting monthly for the last 30 years. In the forward Shinoda states that it’s all about enjoying sake with good friends and good conversation and that it’s better not to have a professional nihonshu connoisseur around, as discussions of production techniques and technicalities can be antithetical to lively discussion.

Tasting a few different types of nihonshu once a month would indeed be a good excuse to get some friends together to drink…

Kina and Nina, the pair of leopard geckos that live with us, usually dine on crickets raised and bred in captivity. This translates to a plastic bin filled with 30 to 100 crickets - more than would ever live that close together in nature. I feed them left-over vegetable scraps or a nutrition-enhanced cricket feed from the store. This is not apparently an ideal formula for happy healthy crickets. The bin ends up accumulating dead crickets that die for whatever reason and I often don’t get around to cleaning it out. After a week or so it starts to stink pretty bad, at which point I do clean it.

When we came up here a month ago, my father-in-law suggested we just catch wild crickets instead of buying them at the store. I thought he was joking at first, but after further thought decided it was a good idea. This is becoming a pattern.

The easiest place to find crickets turned out to be rocky areas. Kicking a few stones around or just walking in a circle is generally enough to send several of them jumping… to their doom. The boy is surprisingly proficient at grabbing them with his bare hands and somehow not crushing them. I prefer to chase them with one hand so they jump into the sawed-off plastic bottle I’m holding in the other. We can usually catch about 10 crickets in a couple minutes.

What surprised me is how quickly Kina and Nina devour these freshly captured crickets. As soon as I drop them into the aquarium it’s a feeding frenzy of flashing tails and lunging attacks. The boy and I are always lying on our bellies to enjoy the show, and even Wife has been watching with us lately. These wild crickets have so much more energy and spring to their step - it’s no wonder they excite the leopard geckos.

It reminds me of a point made in the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Meat and vegetables are often treated as commodities, but not all carrots nor pigs are alike. The diet and lifestyle of an animal have enormous impact on the nutritional content, not to mention taste, of the meat. Paying more for free range pork or organic vegetables from a local farm hardly seems expensive when you think about the difference in what you are getting compared with industrial meat and vegetables.

I hope Kina and Nina won’t stop eating completely when go back to Tokyo and have to feed them store-bred crickets.

Boy, watching the Olympics, “Wow!”

“That’s the high dive. Would you like to try that someday?”

“No. I’m going to die someday, right?”

We’ve been having this conversation a lot lately. Several months ago, when we were looking at a dead cricket, the boy asked me if we would die too. I told him that all living things die someday, but that we wouldn’t die for a very long time. That answer seemed to satisfy him, but now it seems that to him “someday” means “the day I die.” I’ve tried to explain that someday doesn’t mean a certain day, but the morbid association persists.

I need to choose my words carefully when explaining new things to him.

The Funekko Nagashi festival in Morioka takes place during Obon. The spirits of those who died during the year are inscribed with Buddhist mantras onto a boat that is loaded with fireworks and set ablaze upon the Kitakami river. A fireworks festival follows.

The boy really lucked out this year. Last night was the third large fireworks show he’s seen this month. In Japan they tend to last from 1 to 2 hours, which is a lot longer than I remember the 4th of July being when I was a kid. Of course boy takes it for granted and got bored toward the end. He entertained himself by talking to his new imaginary friend, which he has recently defined as a four-year-old girl.

We fled the Tokyo heat around the 28th of July and aren’t planning to return until September 15th. This may be one of the last times that we can spend a large chunk of time at our house in Iwate, as the boy is starting school this April. So we’re planning to get as much out of this last year of freedom as we can.

Inevitably, being out here in the countryside makes me wonder if living in Tokyo is really a good choice. Being at the edge of a forested mountain brings a lot of wildlife, and the boy is having a great time of it. He’s caught and released a few frogs, collected a couple rhinoceros beetles, and now catches wild crickets to feed our leopard geckos.

We’re entering the Obon holiday, when the dead come back to visit us. Already a few strange events have begun. My mother-in-law had a dream-vision last night of a deceased family member and the boy was playing with a dead relative that he shouldn’t know about… Tonight we’ll go to my wife’s aunt’s house for dinner (and most likely a shochu drinkathon) and tomorrow extended family will be over here, and the drinking will begin at 11am.

The photo at the beginning of this post is from a “yomiya” or small local festival that usually prefaces a large seasonal festival, in this case Hanamaki Matsuri. The main festivities are around the 12th of September.

Like a lot of places, Vietnam is currently experiencing huge inflation. Prices on everything from bus tickets to food are rising month by month. We talked to a friendly taxi driver that voiced his uneasiness over increasing food and oil prices, and how they affect his livelihood.

We also experienced some artificial inflation between two of our nights in Hanoi. The first night we sat on low stools on a street corner where a middle-aged woman prepared spring rolls and a meat salad, for five and ten thousand dong, respectively. The food was good and we like the atmosphere of eating at a popular street spot surrounded by locals, so we went back the next night while waiting for the water puppet (yawn) show. Foolish trusting folk that we were, we didn’t inquire about the prices the second night. The woman was the same and she clearly recognized us. When I offered the total for our food the woman motioned that it wasn’t enough, explaining with a calculator that the salad was 20,000 Dong, not 10,000 (as we remembered it the night before).

She insisted that it had always been 20,000 Dong and refused to acknowledge that we had paid 10,000 for it the night before. We stubbornly refused, repeating that we clearly remembered the price from the night before. We asked another customer sitting near us that seemed to know some English, and after the shopkeeper said something to him in Vietnamese, repeated that it was 20,000. We demanded to watch him pay that amount for the salad he was eating, and after some discussion in Vietnamese, did. We had no real choice but to pay the inflated amount and leave, assuming she was slipping the man back his change as we left.

We found this sort of cooperation (or conspiracy) between vendors and random Vietnamese people to be common throughout Vietnam. For example when hiring a boat for a short one hour ride in Can Tho in the Mekong Delta a boatman asked a couple sitting nearby for the time before we boarded the boat. She said it was three o’clock, so our one hour would be up at exactly four o’clock. We didn’t have a watch, so I went over to look at the man’s watch that she had just checked. He tried to hide it when he noticed what I was doing, but was too late. It was 3:20.

I expect vendors and salesmen of all sorts to try to squeeze as much profit out of any transaction as possible, but the way unrelated people often cooperated, affirming the validity of elevated prices surprised me.

In Vietnam we weren’t followed around by people trying to sell things like happened often in India and Thailand. But when we went to buy goods and services, we were constantly quoted ridiculous figures, sometimes as much as 10 times the going rate. (With 16,800 Dong for $1, the numbers are so large they hope you won’t notice an extra “0″ sometimes.) They often wouldn’t come down from their ridiculous prices even if you walked away. In India they’d rather sell something for a modest profit than not sell at all. Not so in Vietnam. The most irritating example of this was at the Bach Dang jetty in Ho Chi Minh City. We’d been back and forth between Bui Vienh and the jetty a few times, and knew the taxi fare was always 30,000 Dong. But when we arrived at the jetty during a squall after our boat ride back from Can Tho, all the taxis demanded 50,000. Taxis that were clearly labeled as meter taxis refused to use their meters, insisting on a flat 50,000. This resulted in a lot of door-slamming and some bad language from us. (The boy later reenacted this scene with his toy cars. He has quite taken to bargaining.) We did eventually find a taxi that would take us for 30,000, but it was probably the 8th one we asked. The drivers must have figured we’d be desperate because of the pouring rain, but we were wearing rain coats.

Of course up until the 1990s there were officially different prices for Vietnamese and foreigners. It’s been a while since this was abolished, but the mindset lingers.

Halong Bay is probably the most popular tourist destination in northern Vietnam. Since its 1994 listing as a UNESCO World Natural Heritage, Halong Bay has received a steadily increasing flow of tourist traffic. In 2008 there are more than 500 large tourist boats clogging the bay with dozens of smaller buzzing about selling fruits to tourists aboard larger boats. The photo below shoes a small garbage collection boat next to a tourist junk.

The borrowed 2005 Lonely Planet that we brought with us said something to the effect of, "While we don’t generally recommend package tours, for Halong Bay it is basically the only way to go." And that’s pretty much what we heard everywhere else, so for the first time in all of our traveling around Asia, we signed up for a two-day package tour. In July 2008 the price was $30 per person (the boy was half price). This included the bus trip to Halong Bay, complete with a mandatory 20 minute stop at a gaudy ceramic souvenir shop, a boat tour around Halong Bay, a fishing event in the evening, one night at a two star hotel on Cat Ba island (with WiFi), the boat and bus rides back to Hanoi, and all meals to be eaten during that time. For $30, this is indeed much cheaper than doing all of those things individually without a package.

Halong Bay is undeniably gorgeous. But something about being herded around with a group of tourists and marched through a cave that while admittedly beautiful, was so clogged with tourists that it felt more like Disneyland than a cave with breathtaking rock formations. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but something about the exhausted schoolteacher manner of the guide and the total lack of freedom (five minutes here, ten here… then we go there…) made us feel trapped on the tourist boat.

It was a relief when we were arrived at Cat Ba Island and rode a bus through rural villages and farms to Cat Ba City. We were dropped off at our hotel, and free until 8am the next morning when the bus would come to pick us up. The boy wanted to go to the beach, so all three of us squeezed on the back of a motorcycle taxi. There was only one other foreigner at the local beach (a European swimming in his underwear). The boy and I had a great time playing in the waves and swimming around a bit. The locals here were very friendly and this is where the boy was briefly "kidnapped" and taken into the waves by a couple of playful Vietnamese guys.

Dinner at the hotel was surprisingly good. We were directed to a special outdoor balcony room where other tourist groups were sitting at individual tables. We noticed that we were the only people there unaccompanied by a tour guide. We didn’t think much of this at the time, but the next morning when it was time for our tour guide to pick us up it became apparent that we had been forgotten. We waited until 8:30, watching other tourists at the hotel departing with their guides. Wife was convinced that someone would come to pick us up, but I started getting worried around 8:20. I spoke with another tour guide who knew the company we had hired, and he was kind enough to call a friend of his that worked for them. He discovered that we had indeed been forgotten, and in order to cover for his friend’s mistake, let us join his group on their boat back to Halong Bay. From Halong Bay we were passed off to a different group from our company that took us back to Hanoi. So there was no real loss in our being fogotten, but it added to our general dislike and distrust of organized tours.

Traveling to Vietnam with our three-year-old son was not as difficult as you might think. The fact that he has a very severe egg allergy did complicate things, and made "kong trung" which means no egg, our most repeated Vietnamese phrase. Of the places we visited, Ho Chi Minh City definitely had the most to offer young children. (Huge waterparks!)

People in Vietnam generally love kids, and I think having our son with us made everyone a bit friendlier. People on the street would often pinch the boy’s cheeks or suddenly touch his face or hair as they passed. When we were on the beach or in restaurants some people even picked him up suddenly, much to his consternation. At the beach on Cat Ba Island in Halong Bay for example, a couple of guys playfully threw sand at him and then picked him up and dragged the petrified boy into the waves.

We balanced the trip between doing what we like - wandering around on foot, finding little restaurants popular among locals, exploring markets, etc. - with doing things that the boy wanted to do. He was most interested in eating sweets, going to the zoo, water parks, and the beach. So in Hanoi we took him to the water puppet show <yawn>, and the local zoo, which was half amusement park. In Ho Chi Minh City we visited one of three gigantic water parks and took a day trip to a nearby beach. In the Mekong Delta area there wasn’t much for him to do, but he basically enjoyed all the little boat rides around the delta.

For wife and I, the highlights of the trip were probably eating at local restaurants in little alleys, drinking beer or iced coffee on the street after walking around all day, and the sunset boat ride we took on a little side channel of the Mekong Delta.

Overall we had a great time despite a few frustrating elements that I’ll write about soon. This trip is perhaps a manifestation of a minor shake-up in our lives that we’re exploring. Depending on what we decide for the long term, we may spend a month or more in Kathmandu this winter.