Those photos of my garden boxes were taken May 13. It is now June 4, three weeks later.
The strawberry box looks about the same but the rest have grown gangbusters!
There are so many things in these boxes, I have lost track. Even carrots. Spinach
and some exotic lettuce. Sunflowers! Those huge plants sticking up are sunflowers.
Beans, too. And of course, lots of tomatoes.
There have been lots of changes in my garden. Agustin finally decided the soil around here is too hard and mostly clay so we have been adding topsoil for years. He finally decided to have boxes with potting mix that won't erode. It's looking quite interesting.
One box for the strawberries
Zucchini and I think some cucumbers
This one is all herbs
Tomatoes!
More tomatoes
Meanwhile in the Earth Box, last year's micro mini tomatoes (AKA currant tomatoes) reincarnated themselves.
Things do happen very fast. Last time I blogged, I was cleaning house and getting ready for the GBS' to move in. Then I went to Japan to visit my mother and spent two weeks experiencing aftershocks every single day. Now I am back; I am the grandmother of three!
There is the proud papa.
Neenie LOVES her little cousin and wants to hold her all the time.
Then Tommy had to have a turn.
And before you know it, Quinn Haruko Sung is almost three weeks old!
Isn't she a sweetie?
I keep wishing I had taken before pictures but here are all the things that left my house in the last month.
Pile #1.
Pile #2
Crates of books.
Donations to charity.
Strange things that turned up in the hall closet. Spools of hoodie string!
Three cartons of thousands of zippers.
The Vietnam Veterans of America will come to your house to pick up your "discards.
Twenty odd years of saved gift boxes, neatly folded and boxed
Friends also help in getting rid of stuff. Sylvia took all these to disperse.
We are not done yet.
The living room while the den walls are being painted. I need to clear all of this for the baby shower!
I have been wishing throughout that I had taken before pictures of rooms and closets before they were cleared out and organized. Here at least are before pictures of the basement, next in line for clearing out.
I am back in Tokyo for over a week now with a side trip to Taiwan. I had not been to Taiwan in over 20 years so it has been an eye opener!
The new international flights from Haneda are very convenient. I came to Tokyo on the redeye which brings you into Hanedat around 6. You gain a day. I will leave on the redeye on Thursday which brings me into LA around 4 pm. From Haneda Airport the limousine bus ride only took just over half an hour; a big difference from Narita. I hope never to have to fly to Narita again!
Our flight to Taipei also left from Haneda and brought us into Sung Shan Airport which is Taiwan's former domestic airport in town and the taxi ride to the hotel only took 15 minutes. I visited with my 84 year old uncle. We used to always call him Small Tubby Uncle as he was the youngest of the uncles and it's hard not to call him that even though he is quite slim now.
While my mother waited in the car, we went to Lung Shan Temple, a small temple which is 300 years old and in the middle of town, A man-made waterfall is outside;at lease we all assume it is man made.
It is a charming temple, full of local colour and there were many people on a weekday praying earnestly.
It is a very Chinese temple, quite different in looks and feeling from the ones in Japan. More colourful for starters. And you see a lot of people just sitting on the ground in the hallways praying and chanting mantras and burning incense. There were tables everywhere for people to leave offerings of flowers and fruit as well as food.
We went to visit my grandparents grave the next day which was up in the mountains. Taxi rides are very cheap in Taiwan. The ride to the cemetary took a good half an hour and cost about $60 for the round trip and wait time.
Tubby Uncle took care of bringing the flowers and the paper money to burn.
You can burn local money or US$. The US$ came with Ben Franklin's face with a $500 denomination. That's the difference between Japanese and Chinese Buddhism, perhaps. The Japanese are more into ritual and don't seem to concern themselves with earthly goods but the Chinese burn houses, cars, refrigerators, motorcycles, air conditioners, furniture besides money and gold bars for use in the next world. I guess the Japanese don't believe you need that when you reach satori.
In the afternoon the Okados and I went to the Palace Museum where we went to look at the jade cabbage and the belly pork jade. There were so many people there we didn't stay long. The Taiwanese economy is being revived by visitors from the mainland.
The food in Taipei is very inexpensive. On our last night we went to a Taiwanese seafood restaurant. We were six and had 2 orders of fresh steamed shrimp, razor clams, red snapper cooked two ways (steamed and the head and tail went into a hot pot) fried pomfret and fried noodles with one veg for a total of about $65! Here is the hot pot. The decor was a bit strange, framed wild animal print cloth and we sat on stools. I was trying to explain the difference between a chair and a stool. Tubby Uncle asked how to spell "stool" so I did and he said "as in poop?" We all cracked up. Fish head and tail soup.
Taiwanese dates. Good for eating; tastes like a cross between an apple and a pear but has a seed like a date.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it never ceases to amaze me how little I know about Japan. I lived and grew up in Tokyo. But every time I come here (twice, sometimes 3 or even more times a year) there is something I never know about.
We went to spend a day in Hakone. I have been there lots and lots of times. There was a poster in the Fujiya Hotel (of the 5 oldest hotels in Japan) for the Hakone Ekiden Museum. The what? My brother then proceeds to tell me that he follows the Ekiden every year and it is the most favourite thing in his life? What? What the heck is an ekiden? How is it possible that in all the years I have been here that I have hever heard of it? It in an inter-collegiate marathon relay. It takes place every year on January 2 and 3 from Otemachi (in downtown Tokyo) to Hakone and back. It is possibly the most popular sports event in Japan. People stay home for 2 days to watch it being televised, unless they happen to be the fans that line the sidewalks to cheer the runners. It started in 1920 and 2010 was the 86th running.
On Wikipedia, it ways "Twenty universities, which belong to The Inter-University Athletic Union of Kanto (関東学生陸上競技連盟 Kantō gakusei rikujō kyōgi renmei?), can participate in this Ekiden. Ten of them have seed rights which they got the previous year, nine are the best nine universities in a preliminary contest, and the tenth is a group of runners made up of those who do not belong to any of the 19 universities but achieved a good record in a preliminary contest.
Five sections are provided between Tokyo and Hakone each way. Each runner runs one section, alternates with the next runner at a station. Each team has ten runners, running with their teams' sashes which are handed over to the next runner on the team at each station.
If a runner cannot get to a station within twenty minutes after the top runner reached it, the next runner starts with a substitute sash. The time difference is added to the goal time.
That's me in front of the Hakone Ekiden Museum. It's only five years old and only in Japanese but it was pretty interesting, especially the vidoes of the past runs. It has an incredible following.
It's a relay race but instead of a baton, they pass on a sash. There are the winning team colours and sashes.
Chuo University has won it 14 times.
That's Ryuji Kashiwabara, the Super Rookie, who as a freshman led his Toyo University team to victory in 2009 and again in 2010. It will be interesting to see whether he makes it to the Olympics.
Again, according to Wikipedia, "To give a taste of the quality of competition in the Hakone Ekiden, consider the profile of the athletes in the 2010 (86th) race. Of the 380 athletes (190 runners and 190 alternates) that represent the 19 universities, 328 have run under 14:40 for 5,000 meters; 150 at 14:20 and 33 under 14:00. [5] This figure compares very strongly with USA collegiate men from all schools: athletic.net's list of collegiate men 5000 meters in 2009, which lists approximately 400 athletes at 14:40, 200 at 14:20 and 60 under 14:00 in 2009. Stepping up to the 10,000 meter distance, the same sources show that these 19 Tokyo universities list over 190 runners with personal bests under 30:00 (14 more sub 30 minute runners make up an all-star team of runners from other Tokyo universities); about 90 USA collegians ran under 30:00 in 2009."
It's pretty interesting. I'm not a runner but I'm impressed.
Some other odds and ends from Hakone.
My brother drove and we stopped at a rest stop where we tried so called World's Best Bao. From a store in Yokohama that won come bao competition. It wasn't bad. We stopped to have lunch at an odd little buffet place. The food was not bad, and what you see is the latest rage in Japan. Bread made from rice. Sanyo is coming out with a home bread machine where you put in rice grain, gluten and yeast and you get bread in 4 hours. It tastes just like bread from flour. Very odd. Something to do with rice consumption going down in Japan. Gohan is Japanese for cooked rice. Sanyo's machine is called Gopan, as in the French word for bread.
Another oddity from the same place. Water jello for dessert. Hakone is known for its hot springs and the quality of it's water so for dessert, there clear water jello with syrup. Very, very odd.
On our way back we stopped at Yokohama Chinatown for dinner. They serve dimsum there all day. An unbelievable number of Chinese restaurants. Food was okay.
Kyouzen was always one of our favourite kaiseki restaurants in Tokyo. Popi has known the chef, Mr. Matsubara for almost 15 years. He has worked at Kyouzen for the last 11 years. On September 25 he opened his own restaurant, KASUMITEI MATSUBARA. We had a lovely dinner there.
Now that he is the owner chef, he doesn't wear his chef's hat anymore. Our first course in lovely new dishes. Yuba with uni on the right and saba shushi on the left with huge fresh gingko nuts and a taro root.
One of his cooks shaving fresh bonito flakes on the bonito shaving box he has had for his entire career.
Grilled unagi with taro root cubes and matsutake mushrooms. Very, very delicious. He grills his unagi on a ceramic hibachi using bamboo charcoal.
In the back you can see his special ceramic steamer. He keeps his fresh fish for sashimi in a special wooden box instead of plastic.
The special grilled beef that melted in our mouths.
His special knives on display behind the counter. He recommended a special potato shochu that comes in a ceramic pot with a lid.
Alas, in his first week of business a customer left a cigarette burn mark on his beautiful finished counter.
Hateful smokers.
After a beautiful and slightly warm fall day yesterday, we are back to grey and dismal drizzle. We are stuck in the house again, waiting for the gas company supervisor to come and give us a quote for a new water heater. Hopefully it won't take all day!
Last night we had dinner at Popi's favourite restaurant. On my last solo trip in November I dragged her, rather reluctantly, to a restaurant down the street. It is across the street from 99 Ramen and looked like it was worth trying. All seafood and quite good. Since then she has stopped going to the awful Chinese place and goes to Bistro Shiro a couple of times a week. She and Mrs. Okado have become true regulars and when Popi called yesterday to make a reservation, they said they were worried that they hadn't seen her all week! The food seemed even better than when we last went. The fresh fruit tomato salad with walnut. I wouldn't have thought of the combination of tomatoes with toasted walnuts but it was really very good!
Sanma fish sashimi. Sanma tends to be a fishy and oily fish but this was very fresh and not fishy at all.
Five different kinds of clams steamed in white wine. Quite nice.
Tossed green salad with walnuts and blue cheese. Not overly dressed and very good.
Grilled hirame with fresh fruit cherry tomatoes. Really, really yummy.
After reading all the emails about uni pasta, we ordered uni pasta with eggplants. It was a winning combination.
Three desserts. Pumpkin custard with vanilla ice cream.
Fig compote with red wine jelly. Last but not least, the chocolate gateau.
It was a very good dinner. Popi had a cooking class yesterday so my brother took me to lunch at the Meiji Kinenkan. The lunch was not bad but gave me the MSG attacks. I think OISHINBO is spot on about Japanese people being addicted to MSG. OISHINBO says that food with no MSG does not taste good to most Japanese people. I was watching some TV this morning (yes, every other program is still about food) and they were featuring former Iron Chefs cooking with bottled dressings. Risotto with bottled Caesar dressing? And on and on. All quite horrible.
This might actually be my favourite restaurant in Tokyo. SEKI is a classic izakaya restaurant where the owner chef is a creative and enterprising young man. He seems to have 3 restaurants but is always at Seki where he mans the open kitchen by himself. The counter seats 8 and there is table seating for another 6. You used to be able to walk in but now it requires calling ahead and making reservations.
That's Mr. Kawakubo, the owner chef. Our first dish, a mekajiki sashimi with green onion, wasabi, lime and mustard garnish.
An excellent potato shochu recommended by the chef, Katana.
Sorry, we ate half before I remembered to take a picture. Corn and edamame tempura. One of my favourites! A very delicate steamed squid.
The weather has been yucky. Slow persistent rain pretty much all day. To get out of the flat we went clothes shopping. On the road in Aoyama there are not many restaurants so the saleslady sent us around the corner to the Floracion Hotel. I think they must cater to rich provincials to come to shop at the high end boutiques. It is a second rate hotel in a pricey neighbourhood but the restaurant was not too bad and really cheap. My mother had the set lunch with sanma (translates to Pacific saury, if that helps)
The fish, a flavoured rice, a chawan mushi (steamed egg), stewed vegetables, pickles and miso soup. I had the unagi lunch.
A salad, chawan mushi, unagi rice, pickles and miso soup. Two lunches for ¥1050 each. That's $25 for 2 lunches. Cheap for these days. And you get coffee or tea with it.
