World Spice Merchants, Seattle

A trip to World Spice Merchants has become a mainstay of our visits to Seattle. (I always remember it as Spice World. Isn't it amazing how much cheesier it sounds that way?) It's a wonderful little shop a street level down from Pike Place market. We go mostly to get a ton of chili powder, one ingredient that eludes us in Tokyo. I was extra excited to go this time, though, because somehow my brother had never been in almost a decade in Seattle. He's a fantastic cook and I had a feeling he'd find a lot to love at the spice shop. He went straight to the rows of jars with Chinese spices and showed Emily one that he hasn't found since he lived in Tang Shan. Success! Jim was opening and sniffing the variety of chili powders, and I checked out the loose tea downstairs. (And the veggies and spice dips they'd laid out. I was hungry.) By the time we left, we had a brown paper bag packed solid with vacuum-sealed pouches of seasoned salts, spice blends and chili mixes. How did that dense parcel get waved through airport security while my travel-size Listerine got a full interrogation?

Ostrich Land

We made an unscheduled stop to visit Ostrich Land in Solvang on the first day. There were so many signs with warnings all over the farm that by the time I got my dustpan of pellets to feed the ostriches, I won't lie -- I was pretty wary of them.
We made a lot of unscheduled stops like this. That's why it took four days to drive from LA to San Francisco. That's also why our trip was great.

Check out more of Jim's ostrich photos.

Mad Homes Seattle

 

We only found out about this on the day we were leaving Seattle because we got up to have coffee with Andy and Emily before they left for work. The local news did a little segment on these houses in Capital Hill that were given over to an artists' group for a last hurrah before getting torn down. We found the intersection they mentioned and drove over. Just a residential street with four weird houses in the middle of the block. The houses were really cool. The scale was impressive. One had been completely wrapped in shipping plastic and another had been cast in latex and then the sheets of latex were hand stitched into a skin of the house. Inside, there were some pretty amazing optical illusions. There were just a handful of other people wandering through. Mad Homes is up through August 7 and is free. If you live in or near Seattle or know someone who does, it's definitely worth checking out.

Check out how mind-blowingly nifty this is in the photo set. 

Of all things, a Hostess cupcake?

And an orange one, at that? With all the delicious food - the fresh cherries, home-grilled carne asada, the whole dungeoness crab - we're starting the trip recollections with the cupcake?
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Yup. I eat one every few years. Like maybe this time it will be as delicious as I remember. It never is, but I sort of enjoy that, too.

Back again again

Flying into Haneda is a breeze. Touched down at 4:55 am, waited a bit for our bags and still made the 5:27 monorail. It's a neat ride, especially at sunrise.
The west coast trip was great. I'll try to post a few pictures and things in the next few days. Thanks lots for all the suggestions of things to do. We hit most of them and then some.

Cool, dude

I'm in LA! But before I left, I put together a round-up for Japan Pulse of products made to keep you cool. If you look back through the last few posts there, you'll find cool clothes, cool foods, how people feel about cool clothes, and official national policy on what to wear to beat the heat. Are we unfairly painting Tokyo as a city obsessed with the temperature? From this sunny, breezy back yard, I say no. The first thing I noticed when I woke up today is that it wasn't hot. My suitcase looks like it was packed for a trip to a desert. Even though I'd checked the weather forecast, from Tokyo, I couldn't imagine it not being oppressively hot and humid. With occasional bursts of chill. Getting into an airconditioning blast when it's that sticky out feels like going underwater with a tank of oxygen. Even though you can breathe, you don't forget that you're wrapped up in a temporary reprieve from an inhospitable environment.

Anyway, my favorite find of the warehouse of wraps, fans, creams, shades, sprays, gel cushions, bath salts and hair gels was this thing, Neck Fresh, a mentholated sticker that goes across your neck to cool down at least that patch of your neck for up to eight hours. Nothing too new about that, but the packages are great. The 70's-guy cartoons are the "new guy," the "sexy section head" and the "dandy president." They wear fresh citrus, sexy musk and dandy green. And you know my suitcase is full of them.

Aloe sashimi and the quiet city

That's all. I just wanted to show you this. It's at Kotatsu in Azabu Juban, and aloe sashimi is what it's called on the menu. The sauce is a spicy mustard miso. The aloe has an unusual texture, firm then a little slimy and then gone, like it was never in your mouth in the first place.
The restaurant was conspicuously empty for a Saturday night. They usually have enough traffic to have lines out the door and menu items that they only serve after 1 am, but when we got the check at 1:30, we were the only people in there. The barman was nodding off on his feet. A friend out in another part of town said both places she went were also empty. Did we miss a memo?

Green curtain revolution

Companies have been told to cut power use or face fines and people at home are valiantly reducing their AC to avoid losing power altogether. Is the power situation really as bad as they say? Worse? Does anyone actually know at all? In a bid to provide some free shade and make people feel like they have some control over the totally confusing situation, some local governments have been giving out "green curtain" kits -- a flower pot, netting and a few bitter gourd seeds. My local plant store has a whole "green curtain corner" of viney plants like cucumber, Goya and what I can only guess from the florist's pantomime is some kind of loofah.
I got some Goya and a cucumber plant, hoping to grow a little shade on the balcony. They're climbing, but they're so wispy that they not only aren't shady, they're almost unphotographable when back-lit, which is always.
Instead, here's a building that may have gone a little overboard with the green curtain thing. Wasn't there a Stephen King story about this?

UPDATE 2013/4/2: This building has been torn down. I guess its camouflage wasn't good enough.