Shanghai'd

Ah, Japan. A land steeped in enigmatic ritual and intrigue. A land of miniature electronics, rectangular watermelons and humanoid robots. A land where protocol and procedure reign supreme. A land where the first baseman tips his cap in respect when his pitcher hits a batter. A land where ... okay, enough. Here are the pictures already.

Community Supported Agriculture.

So, I don't really write about it here too much, but I have definitely joined a subculture of snobby eaters, a self declared "foodie". For a foodie, I try not to be too snobby; I'll eat what is in front of me for sure (I am still a good Midwestern girl), but may experience what Tim and I call "eaters remorse" when I eat something that is maybe not as good as expected, or I waste a meal on something not great, just because of the missed opportunity to have a great experience. So I guess that makes me a food experience maximizer. Anyway, enough of the negative aspect of foodie-dom. The good aspect is that travel offers me a whole level of experience for food. I was dreaming for weeks about the opportunity to experience Japanese food, and I have to say it lived up to my every expectation! With only one or two "food remorse" events :)

So, here is my food blog from Japan. Highlights only. I will try and do more posting about Chinese food, as well as some of the adventures going on in our kitchen at home. Maybe you all will become foodies too...

On our first day, we wanted to eat somewhere authentic. Tim's requirement was: somewhere without an English menu that looks quintessentially Japanese. What we didn't know at this time was there are not too many English menus in Kyoto. The first spot we peeked into had a cool looking sushi bar, but no people (too early?). We pressed on. We tentatively stuck our heads under the linen curtains and slid the paneled doors aside checking out other spots we thought were restaurants. We finally decided on another restaurant that fit the bill, went to sat down, and were questioned by the sushi chef, "You speak Japanese?" We shook our heads. He simply said "No" and pointed to the door. Rejection! yikes! Now our search got desperate. We also didn't want to dine where the menu was in plastic recreations in the window (not technically an English menu, but somehow not so... authentic. And after our severe rejection we were tentative. Finally a back alley lead us to a place with a magazine clipping posted outside of the door showing one of our favorite dishes - rice with sliced sashimi tuna and seaweed flakes on top. Peeking in, we saw a sushi bar with a salary man sitting inside having a beer. We stepped in, pointed to ourselves and said, "No Japanese". The guy behind the counter said, "That's OK, I can speak English." We sat down. The menu he presented was all Japanese, but he helped out. "Do you like... Sashimi?" Our heads bobbed up and down. A plate of thick slices of bonito was presented. The best sashimi of my life (to that point, we still had 4 days in Kyoto to break the record!) We also ordered our favorite rice bowl, some sesame/peanut spinach, and a dish of tempura. Everything was fantastic. The bill? $34, including drinks. Not terrible. And we got exactly what we wanted for our first night in Kyoto.

Day two started out with a leisurely Japanese style breakfast at our hotel. The proprietor took the opportunity to explain the meal. It is based on rice and miso soup, which there was a bowl of each. Then a small dish of vegetables, some baked salmon, sliced egg cake (basically egg seasoned with salt and sugar and cooked into an 1.5" cake) and a packet of thin dried seaweed sheets that are to be dipped in soy sauce and eaten with the rice. That last one is way better than it sounds, and is addictingly salty. I later bought some to take home. This fantastic take on breakfast was artfully served in our quiet zen-ful dining room off the garden. Wonderful start to a leisurely day spent visiting temples in the rain.

Dinner day 2 was also a highlight. We wandered around (Tim and Laurel style) for about 2 hours before poking our heads into a tiny sushi bar. This one was a step up from the "working class" one we had seen the day before. All Japanese menu, but upon sitting down we were presented with a poster size picture menu of all the sushi on offer. We started off pointing to the cuccumber maki roll and sea bream (Tai). We were slightly flustered, but when the first rolls came, we couldn't complain - there it was again, that heavenly, wonderful raw fish. Mmmm. Not knowing what to order next, I tried to ask for water by pointing to the guy's glass next to me. What I didn't know is that that glass was actually full of shochu (a sake-like liquor)! That was enough to start up a conversation with the couple, the man was a university professor with perfect English (who also helped me order my water). Tim decided on a shochu, which he has loved since a trip to a sushi restaurant in San Francisco. We ended up talking to them for the rest of the night. They helped us order a sashimi taster plate with one slice of whatever "the master" recommended. The plate turned out to contain cuttlefish, which we did NOT like, and blowfish, which we didn't know what it was until the next day when we saw it in a market! That we did like. We also got a sushi plate with 8 different fish and found that Tai is definitely our new favorite fish to have raw. Yum! After we had spent a considerable amount of time there talking, eating and drinking shochu, the owners showed off the garden in back. A tiny space about 4' x 3', it was a intricate Japanese garden, apparently designed by a famous guy. Pretty cool. This ended up being our most expensive meal, but was worth it for the company and fantastic sushi, which was now back on the top of our list!

The next days passed allowing us to sample more Japanese food, some wonderful, some not so. No trips to McD on this trip, although we did have some yogurt and granola breakfasts. And a night I would rather not remember where we got denied from at least 20 restaurants (who knew you needed a reservation on a Saturday night??), but ended well at a yakitori restaurant where we did cook it yourself Japanese pizza. I also inadvertently ordered some cold noodles one afternoon covered with "mashed mountain yams", with the yams kind of resembling whipped raw egg whites. Oh, and they also came with a raw egg on top. That was interesting...

The next major food highlight was on our last night in Japan, when we did a cooking class! I will post about that next, since this post is getting long.

Snacks.

When Laurel and I told our friends and colleagues we would be traveling to Taiwan, EVERYONE raved about the xiaochi, particularly at the Shilin night market. A few of our favorites were ...

The infamous "stinky tofu" that absolutely reeks from blocks away but tastes surprisingly less offensive:



Not everything is bigger in Texas:



All varieties of sweet shaved ice desserts:



And my personal favorite picture of Laurel tentatively digging into a fatty, deep-fried hunk of mystery meat. Veganism be damned!:

Garage.

Taipei, unlike suburban America, is a place that knows how to maximize a limited amount of space. This can lead to interesting feats of packaging, like this luxurious 2 car cheku:

Comparison.

Having visited Beijing, Taipei, Kyoto and of course Shanghai in the past two weeks I find myself naturally drawing some bijiao between the four Asian cities. Here's my admittedly snap judgments:

Waiting in line etiquette:
1 - Taipei
2 - Kyoto
3 - Beijing
4 - Shanghai

It's interesting to see what characteristics of a city one values and notices after a few years in China. And these rankings were a bit of a surprise to me. Japan is stereotypically orderly in a "domo arigoto Mr. Roboto" kind of way. But Taipei was amazingly even more civilized. I was blown away to see people patiently waiting in a single file line to board the subway and public buses. Beijing gets the nod over Shanghai for 3rd place. Seems the monthly "practice waiting in line days" leading up to the Olympics are paying off.

Percentage of women who walk pigeon-toed:
1 - Kyoto
2(tie) - The rest

Not sure why, but tons of Japanese girls are extremely pigeon-toed, particularly favoring the left foot. Weird.

Likelihood of getting scammed as a foreigner in these cities:
1 - Beijing
2 - Shanghai
3 - Taipei
4 - Kyoto

Proud to say mainland China still dominates this category. It was strangely relaxing being able to take our guard down temporarily in Taiwan and Japan. Case in point was our shuttle ride to the airport in Japan where the driver accidentally rung up the wrong price. Without me even saying a word, he was already calling up the shuttle company to correct the mistake, followed by a 10 minute session of bows and apologies. The poor guy was seriously on the verge of pulling out his driver's sword and performing hari kiri in front of me to atone for the egregious error.

Cost of Living / cleanliness / air quality / water quality / etc, etc
1 - Kyoto
2 - Taipei
3 - Shanghai
4 - Beijing

Think these could somehow be related?

Number of temples per square mile:
1 - Kyoto
2 - Taipei
3 - Beijing
4 - Shanghai

Supposedly, the city of Kyoto has over 1,800. Plus 250 shrines. Taiwan puts on a strong showing here, but this one is really no contest. I think Shanghai has two.

Ease of communicating:
1 - Beijing
2 - Shanghai
3 - Taipei
4 - Kyoto

You might think Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei would all be the same (don't they all speak Mandarin Chinese?), but Beijingers speak very slowly with a standard accent that is much easier to understand than the Shanghai accent or completely unintelligible Shanghainese. The spoken Mandarin in Taiwan was no problem, but they use the traditional characters instead of the unfortunately simplified characters of the mainland. This made reading/writing more difficult. I wasn't expecting much native communication in Japan given my approximately 3 word of Japanese, but was actually pleasantly surprised that an understanding of Chinese characters provided a decent ability to navigate maps, bus routes and occasionally menus. Laurel and I even found ourselves communicating by writing characters back and forth.

Friendliness:
1 - Taipei
2 - Beijing
3 - Shanghai
4 - Kyoto

Granted I was probably unknowingly committing cultural faux pas left and right but I have never been rejected so often in my life as when we tried to find a restaurant on Saturday night without a reservation in Kyoto.

Average car height to width ratio:
1 - Kyoto
2 - Taipei
3,4(tie) - Beijing, Shanghai

I guess with such limited area for all those people the Japanese favor tall, narrow cars.

Use of horn:
1 - Shanghai
2 - Beijing
3 - Taipei
4 - Kyoto

Lack of constant honking was eerily peaceful in Taiwan and Japan.

Place I would most want to live:
Hmm, sorry to leave you all hanging, dear readers, but more research is needed on this one.

We started early, breakfast at the hotel, then out walking around this area. We are on the edge of the shopping district about 4 blocks from Taipei 101. We strolled through a vegetable/fruit/meat/tofu/beans market then circumnavigated the Tower. Taipei 101 is at least 80 stories taller than all the other buildings around. Even with that contrast, our idea of big buildings is so skewed from 2 years in Shanghai that we felt it wasn't such a spectacle. We wanted to go up, but that doesn't start until 10. It was 8:30, and the streets were essentially empty (way different from Shanghai, which gets up to Taichee and construction at 5:30). We went on to explore a little park with 2 temples in it. There are temples everywhere here!

We then took the subway & a bus to Yangming Mountain - a big national park inside Taipei city limits. We climbed to the 1120m 7 stars peak (pinyinized as cisingfeng in Taiwan where we would expect qixingfeng on the mainland - the characters are different too, but it's all said the same, so confusing!). It was a gorgeous hike through thick vegetation until the last 50m or so which were in an open grassy hilly peak. It was also the butterfly festival that day and the flowers were covered with a thick layer of all kinds of butterflies, from small to big. We headed down the back of the mountain towards the bus stop, while a group of school kids tried to guess where we were from by shouting out "Hello!" in as many languages as they could think of: "Hello! NiHao! Bonjour! Sawadeeka!" That last one is Thai, and I can't really believe they thought were were from Thailand, but I guess the others didn't work, and they were desperate!

After the hike we were soaked from the rainforest like humidity there, and stopped in for some lunch and to dry off a bit. Tim ordered the stinky tofu over noodles (when in Taipei...), which really wasn't that gross, but it was the last time we ordered that.

We then headed over to the Gu Gong, or national palace museum, which is noted for having the best of China's national treasures, as the nationalists took them out of China when they left in the early 1900s, and they were not destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. The item on prime display was a jadeite carving of a cabbage with a cicada on it, which somehow had some sexual innuendo. The rest of the museum was definitely better than museums in China, but still a museum. We left as they were closing the doors and headed back to the hotel for a change of clothes and a (brief) sit-down. The air conditioning at the museum had turned my soaked t-shirt into a block of ice!

We headed out for dinner at the night market (see Tim's xiaochi post). Unfortunately, it was in a different spot that was indicated on our tourist map, so we walked around for an hour until we hit the undeniable scent of stinky tofu and knew we were there. We browsed the street carts and stands before deciding on a Taiwanese burrito (pickled veg, bean sprouts and tofu in a wrap), that scary deep fried meat thing, a sugary peanut smoothie and a fresh squeezed grapefruit juice. We jumped back on the subway (probably our 6th ride that day) and headed for the hotel.

After this crazy day in Taipei, we crashed in bed around 10:30 pm and fell asleep so deeply and soundly that we didn't even notice the 6.0 earthquake that rocked Taipei at 11pm that night.

Taipei in a day, Tim and Laurel style. Good day.