A green tea Kit Kat for the road

Green tea Kit Kats are scarce on the street now, but they are always in season at the airport. They're giving out whole sticks as breakfast. As samples, I mean. samples.

200 yen and a dream

Miki bought lottery tickets for the Year End Jumbo drawing last night. She picked up a scratcher for each of us, too. We scraped them while we waited for food at a crowded Vietmamese restaurant.
Neither of us lined up the triple candy canes, toy drums or Santa heads we needed. But the Christmas bonus star! Beneath the Christmas bonus star, I found a holly wreath worth 2000 yen, about 20 bucks. We got back in line to pick up the cash. I spent - and respent - it on everything I bought the rest of the night.

My local Tokyo post office is awesome, #372

Have I mentioned before how good the post office near my work is?

It's mostly the people. Once they rummaged around in their own internal mail to find something I could use as a mailing tube since that is the one kind of packaging they don't sell.

One woman is especially nice. When I tried to buy a sheet of lackluster stamps, she pointed out that some really pretty ones were going on sale the next day. Another time, when another employee was weighing a package, she came over just to make sure she was sending it at the cheapest rate.

I was glad to see her when I went in yesterday, underprepared on the vocab front.

I said in Japanese, "Please help. I don't know what you call it, but I'd like to send this so that it's registered."
She said in English, "Register?"
Yup.

She zapped the envelope twice with what looked like a bar code reader and tallied it up. While I was fumbling for change, she pulled a receipt out of the printer with the weight, mailing class, and space for comments. The spots for sender and addressee were filled in with photographs of the address and return address. How cool is that? I'm pretty sure I had to fill out forms by hand earlier this year to send registered mail. No? Has this been going on forever all over and I just missed it? Or is Japan on the cutting edge of postal technology?
 
Official Japan Post info on registered mail.

Good Samaritan of Hibiya

I was engrossed in a podcast of This American Life last night, moving through a crush of people down the subway stairs when I felt a tug on my shoulder. A Japanese guy in a shiny down vest was holding out a white cellphone with its bare battery and cover carefully piled up in his hands. My cellphone. It must have fallen out of my bag when I took out my wallet to pass through the wicket. I hadn't noticed. The guy and a woman in a matching puffy jacket were pressed against the bannister above me, smiling, and I was twisted around as people continued to pass around us. I said "Thank you, sorry, sorry, thank you," and they bowed and turned back up the stairs against the flow.
Nice, eh?

Bright bike

I can't believe this bicycle wasn't playing music.

Odoriyaki is Japanese for nightmare

Note: My most sensitive friends shouldn't read this. Go on, get out of here.

I stayed at a luxurious hotel in Hakone this weekend with a spacious tatami room, gorgeous views of Mt. Fuji from its own outdoor hotspring, and delicious gourmet dinner and breakfast. The food gave me nightmares.
I often say things are bound to give me strange dreams, but I rarely mean it*.  I actually woke up at three in the morning haunted by abalone. I couldn't get back to sleep. See, at dinner, right between the soup and the sashimi, they brought out some abalones to cook at the table. Fine. Except, they are big, meaty critters, and they were still moving. I can't explain how hideous it was. I looked away when one looked like it was trying to launch itself out of its shell. I peeked again a few minutes later and... shudder.
If you had asked me in the abstract, Do you believe abalones experience suffering? I would have said Nah, pass the lemon. But the way these things writhed and kept writhing over the fire was unbearable. 

The waiter grinned that it's called odoriyaki "because it is like they're dancing." Remind me not to go dancing with that guy.


*Except about the Himalayan curry. That is true.

Watch your fingers, panda lips

Pandas are inherently cute. You have to put in a little extra effort to make a cartoon panda look creepy. If you are so inclined, giving it lady lips is a good place to start. Good job, Keisei Card.

These panda pants, these are cute. 

Tea sparkling

 

AFTERNOON TEA

Tea Sparkling

Afternoon tea has been drunk by the English ever since the custom was started by the Duchess of Bedford in the mid 19th century.

The truthbox bears this out, though I find the claim unlikely that Anna Russell and the whole of England were going around starving to death every single day between breakfast and dinner until she decided to start serving crustless sandwiches to her high society friends in the afternoons. Though, if it is true, I feel certain that every single person noshing at midday was saying, Man! Why didn't they think of this sooner?

That's what I was thinking when I just tried Tea Sparkling. It's like a sweet tea spritzer. Darjeeling and seltzer. Light and delicious. Sorry, Duchess. I'm sure you are wondering what you did wrong in life to have your image and name appropriated on bottles of bastardized tea derivatives. But you were a forward thinker. Maybe you'd have even invited a few friends around to try it.

Milk and vinegar, maybe not so much.

Let's best of restaurants

Here's something a little different.

One cool thing that happened this year is that I met Gwen Bell, an American entrepreneur with a past in Japan.  She's running a reflect-a-thon (my word, don't throw things at her) called Best of 2009 from her site. She's got a theme a day. Why don't you try it, too?

December 2 - a memorable restaurant experience.

The most outstanding restaurant experience of the year is one I've barely talked about. In February, Jim and I had dinner at the New York Grill in the Park Hyatt in Shinjuku.

We can see the hotel from the north windows of our apartment, and we could just about pinpoint our place in the midst of the city lights from a window seat. We were close enough to hear the live jazz singing, but far away enough from it that it wasn't too loud.

The food was amazing. I had a beet and goat cheese salad. I rarely see either of these on a menu here, let alone together. It was huge, too, an entire goat's worth of cheese. I had a short rib that looked like it came from a dinosaur. I usually eat meat in small quantities at most and found it a bit horrifying, but it was unbelievably flavorful and tender. Like with every bite I thought, no, it couldn't have been that good. Let me try it again. And it was that good. There was dessert. It was good. I can imagine it was a crisp and creamy creme brulee, a flowing chocolate lava cake, or a selection of tart seasonal sorbets, but the fact is that I don't remember. What I remember most is the conversation. Despite the table for two being a bit too wide, we had such an intimate time talking about the year behind us and the years ahead. We were giggly reminding each other about the dinner for days afterward.

I didn't mention it partly because the place is little cliched - it was the lounge in Lost in Translation -  and mostly because it is expensive.  Much more so than anyplace I or my friends go regularly, or, really, ever. I felt embarrassed that we were having such a splurge while friends were looking for work, even though it was the confluence of our first Japanniversary and Valentine's day. Looking back, it feels like maybe it was a bargain, after all.

Tis the season to do it at home

 

Please refrain from drunken behavior.

It's bounenkai 忘年会 season, when end-of-the-year company parties pile up. Drinking with coworkers can be part of the job description any time of year,  but you are especially likely to see (or be) an unfortunate overindulger in December. There's no guarantee that these parties will help you "forget the year," as the name promises, but they do seem likely to make you forget the night.

We saw these two poor guys get dragged off the train at its last stop in Shinagawa the other night as the train was going out of service.  In Shibuya, as the last Yamanote train was sweeping through its last loop for the night, the opposite maneuver: station cops working in pairs roused heavy sleepers from the platform floor and tossed them into the full train. You have to wonder where they get shuffled off to when they get to the end of the line. I think for both directions on the Yamanote, that's Ikebukuro. Anyone gotten off the last train at the end of a line and seen what happens?

Last December's do it at home poster, also about passing out drunk.

Hearing dogs for the deaf, or, I was totally wrong

The FIT for Charity run did not benefit an animal shelter. I glanced at the photos of dogs in vests and assumed, and we all know what that does.

It turns out, the animal charity being helped was Japan Hearing Dogs for Deaf People. These are dogs trained to alert their hearing-impaired owners if a phone is ringing, a smoke alarm is going off, or any other notable noises they are trained to respond to are happening.  It seems there are only 14 of them available for the whole of Japan (if I read that right). That is their logo above. It kind of looks like he's transmitting sound from his ears, but we get the idea. Sounds like a good organization.

That isn't an ingredient

Sometimes I latch onto some nutritional concept like it's the One Truth. Today, as I was eyeing my beautiful, one-dollar Fuji apple, I couldn't help thinking of the advice a friend got from an expensive nutritionist: always eat a protein with a carb. Even when the carb is nice fresh fruit, if you eat it without some peanut butter or cheese, you might as well just eat a fistful of white sugar as far your body is concerned.

Is this true? I have no idea. Did it stop me from eating a sugar cookie with a thick layer of green tea cream sandwiched into the middle of it before I even got my jacket off at the office? No, sir. But when it came to the apple, I just couldn't shake the idea. I don't think there's a jar of real peanut butter within a mile of my office, so I went to the convenience store downstairs for some processed cheese. I found a box (with sliding tray!) of "Smart Cheese" that says Tokachi on it. Tokachi is in Hokkaido and everyone knows that Hokkaido equals delicious dairy. The back says that the product contains at least 60% natural cheese from Tokachi. What is the other forty percent? Let's take a look at the ingredients, shall we?

There are only two. "Natural cheese, emulsifiers." So. The cheese is made of... cheese. Is this acceptable labeling? And is this really the road to improved nutrition?