random thoughts about pregnancy and philandering artistic husbands

the countdown is getting scarily close to D-day. a week left before my due-date. there are still conflicting parts of my brain which fervently believe that a) there's not really a baby in there or b) that i will be pregnant forever (which would be OK, really, as long as i didn't get any bigger. every week i think, nah, i can't possibly get more enormous, and then poof! i get more enormous...)

projects remaining to be completed prior to arrival of parasite (apart from the metaphysical ones, like "acquire large amounts of patience and wisdom" and "reconcile self to complete mindfuck of having children") are to spray my fruit trees with horticultural oil in the vain hope that that will protect them from next summer's onslaught of evil buggies, finish painting mural in the bebe's room, and finish the bebe quilt. oh, and probably getting another little pedal bin for bebe's room would be a good idea too. "nesting" is such a euphemism; it sounds so cosy, when actually it means things like "buy a pedal bin into which you will be chucking your kid's smelly crap-stained nappy wipes." hmm.

the last two nights have been a cinematic lesson in the artistic value of having a philandering husband: last night we watched a biography of frida kahlo, and tonight i watched "sylvia," gwyneth paltrow/daniel craig film about sylvia plath and ted hughes. i have to say, if i was going to be made miserable (and by extension, more tortured and creative) by one of the two philandering husbands, i'd so go for ted hughes/daniel craig any day. diego rivera looked like an obese toad. he must have had one impressively charming personality, is all i can say, to be such a successful seducer of women. (whereas frida kahlo really was quite lovely, i think; she totally overexaggerated the unibrow in her self-portraits and in the photos at least had very delicate features). plus ted hughes had his whole sexy working class northern lad accent thing going as well. i don't know about the whole being-married-to-a-poet business, though; that sounds kind of exhausting. that said, i really, really don't buy the myth that an artist must be unhappy and/or alcoholic in order to be productive, and i wonder what the relative proportion of mental illness among professional artists to the general population is.

ok time to frapper le sac; i only had one two hour nap today so am completely wiped :)

ooh la la chez panisse

tonight was reminiscent of some of my french bloggy entries, so i thought to commemorate the historic occasion of my First Ever Dinner at Chez Panisse, i would add another one to the archives. so so so good.

i should also add that today was historic for the additional reason that it was my first day of maternity leave. so far i am a big fan of maternity leave. it's like being on regular holiday, except because you are pregnant you feel entirely justified in taking as many naps as you feel like. today i had three. being very pregnant is not, i think, unlike being a newborn; so much of your time is taken up with sleeping, eating, and going to the loo that you really can't be expected to do much more. anyway. i did achieve greatness in the form of clearing the shower drain (hoorah!) and nearly finishing the weatherproofing of the back deck (hoorah number two) and getting my car headlight fixed (hoorah number three) and that is enough greatness for anyone for one day, really.

having achieved daytime greatness, i then headed down to berkeley to meet kim d., gourmande extraordinaire, for dinner at chez panisse (with a brief and surreal stop off at the petaluma factory outlet mall along the way to return a couple of the pinker, more cartoon-infested baby outfits that we acquired along the way.) kim is a regular at chez panisse and gets total movie start treatment there, and i basked in the reflected glow of her celebrity; while going to chez panisse as a regular joe citizen i am sure is still pretty great, it was extra great getting to go with her. after every hunky italian/french waiter type person had come up to give her a hug and greet her by name, we got a tour of the kitchens; so so so cool - big walk in fridge with enormous cuts of meat hanging on hooks - usually you don't think of raw meat as smelling delicious, but it really did. pastry chef person doing arty things with tiramisu towers at one counter, another person arranging beautiful radiccio leaves on plates with drizzles of olive oily something yummo, big bins of freshly delivered mushrooms, greens, etc. fun. then we sat down and started to Eat.

first mini mini item were little cherry tomatoes fresh off someone's vine which you had to be very careful that your mouth really was all the way closed before you bit into them or juice would hit the people at the next table over. then first course proper was artichoke and radiccio thingy, accompanied by rioja rose wine that if i were more articulate & knowledgeable and if it were not 1 a.m. i might be able to come up with an actual description of, but as it is i can only say yum yum and it was quite unusual tasting. then the main dish - pork with winter veggies and broccolini mmmmmmmmmmmmmm and b/c kim is a rockstar they also brought us some roast ribs as well to go with. and some red wine what i don't remember what it was but it is written down on the menu so i can look it up tomorrow when i am properly awake.

pudding was tiramisu - intensely caffeinated - followed by little turkish delighty things and little chocolatey things and a mint tisane. oobh and apples and fresh DATES what i had never had before. super good.

oh oh oh it is way too late and i need to go sleep. love to all.

new years' rezzies revisited

I don't think it counts as insomnia when it's only 9:30 at night, but I definitely have sleep pattern wonkiness at the moment, having had a three-hour-long attack of gestational narcolepsy starting at 3:30 this afternoon, and I have terrible horrible premonitions of a sleepless night tonight as a result. Being on call is also massively unrestful, even though the pager gods have overall been astonishingly kind this entire weekend (rest assured that if they leave me alone tonight I will absolutely arrange a goat sacrifice in their honour tomorrow, complete with dancing and ululating around a bonfire in the backyard, possibly naked except for bright blue body paint, depending on the weather and how many mosquitoes are out).

I have resumed my New Year's resolution list (a bit late in the game, and there are, I have to admit, some items on it that will not get attended to this year, but I was heartened by the completion of my master copy of the Van Eyck Arnolfini marriage portrait, so I am feeling more energized about the rest.) I am happy to report that I can check off with varying degrees of good conscience the following items:

- looking into adult literacy programs locally to volunteer for (I looked; there's only one, and they're only open during times when I'm at work)

- making two new friends (both named Michelle - what are the chances?)

- exercising (up until this week I have been a paragon of regimented virtue with regard to my half-marathon training schedule. I did fall off the wagon a few days ago, however, partly out of sheer laziness, partly out of worry for the meeplet, who was measuring small at her last doctor's visit, but who has been confirmed to be exactly the right size on ultrasound as of Thursday, good girl, and thank you to Tara for coming with me for moral support)

- more portraits (we are, we are pleased to report, working on an actual commission at the moment.)

- learning a Schubert sonata (the first one in the book. haven't learnt it all the way yet but I'm getting much better).

So, the remaining items, if memory serves, are 1) another master copy (Sargent or Vermeer, I think I said) 2) a tango workshop or cello lessons and 3) polishing essays to send off to my friend Emily's agent so that I can get rejection letters from publishers. I might transmogrify 1) into painting a mural for meeplet's room, if I get permission from babydaddy (permission more likely if it's painted on removable canvas and is of, say, the Amalfi coastline. I was kind of thinking a view of Lake Ullswater. Meh, it can be another thing to argue over. I need to learn my mother's technique of not asking permission first. Like Emo Phillips says, "When I was a kid, I prayed to God every day for a bicycle, but He never gave me one. Then one day I realized, that's not how God works. So I stole a bike and asked Him to forgive me.") With regard to tango workshops - I have been keeping half an eye on the website for La Rogaia, a villa in Tuscany where they do tango holidays, which looks divine and delicious and decadent and not really feasible due to budgetary and obstetrical limitations. But we will continue to fantasize. and look for options closer to home. It just feels wrong to be learning to tango in a non-Latin country, somehow. oh dear, speaking of Latin countries, I just remembered the resolution re: my Spanish cookbook. That got put on the back burner (nice metaphor for a cookbook...). I will have to revisit that one as well.

The baby is kicking all over the place at the moment; belly-watching has become something of a pastime for me in my current low-ambition state. It's like the puppy channel on public access TV - restful and contemplative with small peaks of excitement. Oh look, that was a big kick on the left side! Wow, that's the first time I've felt a sweep across the belly as opposed to just random thumps! I wonder what body part that was?! It's a good thing there's not actually a clear window through into my uterus, or I would never get off the sofa. I do worry that she listens to all my conversations (I should complain/swear less) and that she might be getting sick of my taste in music/propensity for very loud farts/the graceless joggling around when I run.

is it time for a change in career?

I remembered tonight (in the midst of ER chaos, sitting next to Dr. D. at the desk as he wrote out a prescription for Percocet while muttering, "idiots, they're all fucking idiots, all of them, and all they want is narcotics") that my ideal, when I started medical school, was to be one of those enviably flexible brilliant people who switch careers every ten years or so, and move on once they have achieved greatness in one field to achieving greatness in a totally different field. i graduated from medical school in 2002, which means that if i am going to pull this off, a) i have to achieve greatness in medicine in fairly short order and b) that I should start thinking now about what career number two is going to be. Having sent two people with appendicitis home from the ER in the last twenty four hours, my track record is not looking so good for the former, and i am completely blanking on my options for the latter. What I really need is something that I can be good at that doesn't require much additional formal training, because the very idea of going back to school makes my eyeballs ache. Mural painting sounds like fun. If someone wanted to pay me to be a tango dancing student, I'd totally go for that. The pisser about medicine is that just when you have an inkling of confidence in your own competence, you have a disaster, or a patient that you don't know what to do with, and your professional self-worth is knocked right back down to zero again. and it's not like there's even a good correlation between your mistakes/triumphs and the public recognition of your mistakes/triumphs; one of the nurses was really impressed with me last night for being able to instantly find fetal heart tones on a woman who was sixteen weeks' pregnant, after the nurse had been searching all over this woman's abdomen, and kept saying, wow, that's amazing, you just found them, just like that, (when in fact the truth is that there's really only one place you're ever going to find fetal heart tones on a sixteen-weeker, and i just stuck the doppler there). on the flip side, i got a lot of shit for sending home a guy with an appendicitis, when i don't think i actually did anything _wrong_: he looked completely fine, his pain had resolved by the time he came back from the CT scanner, he didn't have a fever, and (this is the kicker) i talked to the surgeon and the surgeon said, send him home and have him come back for a recheck in the morning. and yet everyone's rolling their eyes at what an idiot _i_ was. urgh. you win some, you lose some, but it's never the ones that you think you are going to win or lose.

anyway. c'est time for bed. tomorrow is my first four mile run in the half-marathon training program. we'll see if i can run four miles without falling over.

recovered from terrible horrible no good very bad day

The days after the terrible horrible etc etc were actually OK - I finished off my week of being hospital rounder in reasonably intact fashion, and even got to send nearly all the patients happily home to their nearest and dearest.

I had a quite lovely day yesterday - I was scheduled to be in baby resuscitation class all day, which means that even though I'm technically working I am allowed to wear jeans, which is always good for a surreptitious thrill (wow, my life must be really boring if wearing jeans to work is exciting). When I arrived, I was pleased/terrified to see that the teacher slated for my group was the hospital's most legendarily ferocious neonatologist, a man who strikes terror into the heart of any resident who has the misfortune to ask a stupid question in front of him (I ran afoul of him many times as a resident) BUT here's the thing - he is ferocious because he really really really wants to scare everyone around him into being competent, and if you work hard and pay attention he is disarmingly sweet. So even though having him put you through your plastic-baby-resuscitating paces is bowel-looseningly scary, he also makes sure that you think about every single tiny little thing. Most of the instructors just make you go through the algorithm - baby not breathing? use the ventilator mask. heart rate under 60? start chest compressions - which 99% of the time is all you might need to know. This guy makes sure you know how to do things like recognize when your suction tubing is broken and the oxygen tank has a leak in it and someone's accidentally turned the valve off and the heater on the table isn't working properly and you blew a hole in the baby's lung by ventilating too hard and the baby's still zonked from the heroin that the mother used right before arriving on the labor and delivery floor that she didn't tell you about and oh by the way it's a baby who's three months premature and you are the only person there with no help - god forbid that ever happens to me, but if it does I will (I hope) be slightly more prepared to deal with it as a result.

Then, in addition to having the terrifying teacher whom I actually really like, we were done by 10:30 a.m.!! so I got to go home early and prune my wisteria and put the cardboard down in the back garden in preparation for the arrival of more mulch (this is a vain and desperate attempt to eradicate the crabgrass from my back garden in an eco-friendly sort of a way. The gardening guy thinks I am mad for not just soaking the whole place in Roundup, but I have a vision of my little organic food-producing Eden that I am loath to let go of yet.) Ooh, speaking of the garden, I harvested another crop of raspberries off the raspberry bush... there were three! (don't laugh. they were delicious). I am definitely buying more raspberry bushes next year.

After garden maintenance and lunch, I went up to nice friend's house to take the babies for a walk around Spring Lake, which was lovely (and hot, I think nearly 90 degrees yesterday). Afterwards we sat and fed them and chatted and it was so cosy and comfortable and I nearly fell asleep with one of the twins on my chest so so so sweet.

In the evening, I went with other nice friend to a documentary about Christo & Jeanne Claude that the brother of a friend of hers had just made that was being screened at the Charles Schulz museum, about the Running Fence project that Christo did in Sonoma County for two weeks in 1976. The documentary was cool - they interviewed all the crusty old-time ranchers whom he persuaded to allow this slightly loony project to be built on their land - and there was some BEAUTIFUL aerial footage of Sonoma county, which really made me think, wow, I live in a really magically beautiful place. (On a totally unrelated note, there was a lot of talk by the people who introduced the film about what an artistic visionary Charles Schulz was, which always puzzles me. For those not in the know, Charles Schulz (creator of the 'Peanuts' comic strip) was from Santa Rosa, and there is this perception here that he is a major cultural icon responsible for singlehandedly revolutionizing pop art in the twentieth century and that his work is deep and profound and meaningful etc etc etc and I am always like, er, idongeddit. I think Peanuts is stoopid. But anyway.)

OK, hi ho hi ho, it's off to work I go...

jessiquita's TERRIBLE HORRIBLE NO GOOD VERY BAD DAY

I am having a HORRIBLE DAY today. i have had people either dying, screaming at me, threatening me, hitting me (not hard, but still, they did), crying at me, lying to me, falsifying their narcotic prescriptions in order to get more, asking me stupid stupid questions that i have already answered three times and written the answer to in the chart where they are supposed to look for it first before asking me three times when i'm trying to do five other things, or refusing to consult on a desperately ill patient that i need help with and don't have a clue what to do with, all day long. i have myself cried four times today, once in semi-public after saying "FUCK" very loudly and inappropriately in front of one of the nurses after having had a massive argument with a san francisco neurogastroenterologist. i think even i even threw a pen on the floor out of sheer frustration, and i don't think i've thrown anything out of temper since i was about three.

ohhhmmmmm. OK, we are going to count blessings now:

1. all my major organs are more or less intact and in working order. all four limbs correctly attached.

2. i have family and friends who love me, except for tabitha, who is cross with me for picking more of her raspberries than she thinks I should have. we don't need to go into that. she rang me to tell me she was cross me with for picking too many of her raspberries right after i had the screaming argument with the SF neurogastroenterologist.

3. i don't have to take tara's ER shift on sunday after all, so i will get a much needed day semi-off this weekend (still on OB call, but it's better than OB call plus ER shift)

4. a little girl drew me a beautiful picture of me wearing very puffy sleeves with a purple dog that said "Dear Dr. Jessica thank you for making my mummy better", and another patient brought in a perfectly formed jello flower that she had made for me in gratitude for my having pinched her a plastic syringe out of the supply closet. you inject clear jello w. opaque coloured jello to make what look like jello paperweights. they're sort of weird, but very beautiful and convincing. she had taken a jello-flower making class while visiting her family in mexico, and didn't think to bring a supply of syringes back with her (available at any pharmacy in mexico, but i guess you need a dirty needle to exchange in order to get clean syringes as a lay person in the US, which being a very sweet 70-something non-IV-drug-user she didn't have). shocking, I know, that i would steal supplies from a poverty stricken community health center, but the price of a plastic syringe seemed like a small price to pay to keep an old lady happy, and the health care system wastes money on much stupider things. .

5. I am now at home, and eating thai ramen noodles with tomato chopped up in it.

6. I'm only on OB call tonight, not medicine, so my chance of having a 12 hour stretch without any crazy/screaming/dying/hitting/lying people is relatively high. the medicine service can't hurt me until tomorrow morning, when i'm (whee!) back in the hospital again.

I think this is called compassion fatigue.

magical mystery tour!!

The background: Babydaddy asked me to keep the weekend of June 11-13th free, and to turn up at SFO at 8:00 a.m. on Friday morning with warm weather clothes, good walking shoes, and a nice going-out-for-the-evening outfit. I am learning to do what I am told when it comes to babydaddy and travel, so I duly caught a ride down to SF on Thursday evening, spent a very comfy night comatose on the meeps' sofa, and then barted down to SFO early the next morning, where we ended up in.... the Virgin America **first class passenger** ticket line! Wait, did I say line? There was no line. It's first class. You get your boarding card stamped w/ a big red Priority Important Person stamp, and you sail past all the plebeian masses in security and then you get on your flight to... NEW YORK CITY!!

After some initial excitement which related to whether we would be able to feed, entertain, and transport ourselves over the course of the weekend - babydaddy had managed to leave his wallet in California, and I had managed to send mine through a wash cycle the night before & wasn’t sure in what shape the magnetic stripes on my credit/ATM cards would be in) - we were on our way into Manhattan from JFK. We dropped our stuff at nice friends' lovely cosy apartment (hello nice friends!) as they were away for the weekend - they had very kindly offered their place in exchange for the not-onerous task of feeding nice friend’s cat her allergy medicines in a spoonful of cat food every evening. Can I just say that tinned cat food has to be the most unappetizing substance to pass under the designation of food? Liver chunks marinated in slime with a faint aroma of rotting fish. Eeuw. But I digress. Quick wash and change and then out for dinner…

I don’t know why babydaddy bothers asking me what I feel like eating, because he usually disregards completely what I say (which I think was “mm, how about Vietnamese or Thai?") in favour of something much better , which in this case was a little hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant called Spigolo. (warning to readers: some fairly graphic food porn is coming up. I gained about five pounds in 48 hours on this trip, so some of these descriptions are for mature audiences only. You have been warned.)

First course - octopus salad (grilled, lemon vinaigrettey dressing), followed by sheep’s milk gnocchi that were the gastronomic equivalent of a new Ikea duvet - warm and white and soft and fluffy and I was torn between eating them and wanting to actually take off my clothes and lie down in them (in the interests of being allowed to continue to the next course, I opted for the former). Course #3 (don’t worry, we were splitting everything, and so far everything is appetizer sized) was more pasta in a totally scrumptious hearty sausagey ragu oh oh oh oh sausage you are the one thing that seriously stands between me and vegetarianism. I could live with out almost all forms of dead animal, but sausage and morality is an irresistible force versus an immovable object. I will continue to indulge in occasional sausage until I have satisfactorily resolved the quandary. Main dish (number four for anyone who likes to keep detailed track of where we are in the food porn inventory) was a prosciutto-encrusted halibut in a tomato and fava bean sauce, which was actually the least exciting thing we had I think (but still good). And then and then oh my god I am starting to drool again just thinking about it for pudding we had a very, very authentic Cumbrian sticky toffee pudding (what the hell a sticky toffee pudding was doing in an Italian restaurant in New York, I don’t know, but when the little baby Jesus puts a sticky toffee pudding on the menu, I don’t think it’s up to me to question it) as well as an (also curiously English, now that I think about it) strawberry and rhubarb crumble. So so so good.

From there (no, the evening’s decadence was _not_ done yet, thank you) to a wine bar down the street where I sipped at a ladylike pink bubbly something and babydaddy had a deep dark peasanty Italian something out of a bowl (also very nice). Then, yes, it was home to bed (one a.m.ish or something at this point - going to the east coast is brilliant because I can feel really sophisticated at how late I’m able to stay up without getting sleepy.

The next morning we were very serious and businesslike; we got up and went straight out and got in line for the cheap-theatre-tickets booth (with a very restrained and plain half a pita bread sandwich from a street vendor each for breakfast while waited in line) and bought theatre tickets for Saturday night and Sunday afternoon (ooh, you’ll just have to wait to find out what we went to go see, won’t you. Here’s a hint - we’ve been watching the Tony awards on the aeroplane on the way back, and both shows that we saw ended up scooping up Tonys by the bucket load, so we are feeling very smug at our ability to pick good stuff).

BUT! Mystery raison d'etre of the whole trip coming up! From the ticket booth, we went to the ...Metropolitan Museum of Art (babydaddy sent me to the loo while he got an audio guide and tickets, so that I wouldn't know what we were going to see), and then I was led

...to the medieval wing (excitement is mounting)

…down the stairs into the rotunda (do you know where we're going?)

….to see the (drum roll....)

...once-in-a-life-time exhibit of the illuminated manuscript pages of the Tres Belles Heures of Jean Duc de Berry. The book had been taken apart for restoration purposes and the pages are being exhibited separately for the first time ever before the book is put back together again for the next six hundred years. Oh. My. God. When I realized what we were going to see, I actually started to tear up (I am not making that up. I really did).

So while I’m betting that public interest is possibly slightly higher for food porn than for medieval art porn, I just have to take a moment to rhapsodize about this exhibit. Once again, it was a lesson in how completely pathetically inadequate reproductions are when you finally see the real thing in person. Every single one of the pages was exquisite, with tiny little pictures that just glowed off the page, every millimeter of space packed with saturated colour and hilarious/bizarre/grotesque/gorgeous detail. They had magnifying glasses so you could get right into the picture, which was totally great, and a video showing every step of the illumination process (although irritatingly, it didn’t show how they did any of the restoration work, which I would have been quite interested to see.)

Anyway. It was a bit like going to visit Eleanor of Aquitaine’s tomb at Fontevraud abbey, a perfect scratch of an itch that has been there nearly my entire life (except more so, since I recovered from my Eleanor of Aquitaine phase once I hit puberty, apart from a brief moment of glory on an undergraduate history exam, when I amassed undeserved piles of points on an extra-credit question for being able to write a five-page mini-biography of her that I am sure took the grading TA by surprise. I have yet to recover from my medieval illuminated manuscript fetish.)

After the Met, we went to have tea w/ nice friend's great aunt M., who is an astonishing person and I would not mind one jot if I were just like her when I grow up. She paints her own house, walks all over New York, goes to the ballet and the theatre all the time, has an apartment jam packed full of books and art and interesting magazines, does an hour of strengthening exercises of her own devising every morning (and has the body and posture of a dancer to show for it), travels regularly to Europe, speaks Russian, French and probably several other languages as well, and except for lack of email appears to be completely up to date. Did I mention she’s 95? Pretty fucking good, no? We had tea with lemon cake, and then she had both of us down on the floor on yoga mats so she could teach us her exercises. She can do more situps than I can, and is more flexible than babydaddy She gave me a floral shawl thingy from Russia, on the grounds that “I’m coming to the end, so I want to give all my possessions away” - I initially felt a bit funny about accepting it, because after all, I’m not her family (to say nothing of the fact that she’s showing no signs of slowing down, let alone coming to the end), but then I thought, screw it, I want to have this so that one day my kids will say, where did this random thing come from, and I’ll say, ah, well, let me tell you about great aunt M. who was a force to be reckoned with.

Nice friend has shown me photos of great aunt back in the day, and she never looked anything less than mega-glamorous, and in all the pictures has at least three handsome young things falling all over themselves to get to her. It’s got to be hard to be as spry as she is when you’re in your nineties - if it were me, I’d be jumping up and down saying, “I’m not dead yet!” but just because of your age, people say things like, Oh back in the day she was really glamorous, and using the adjective "spry" about you, implying that, despite the fact that you’re completely healthy and with marbles, all you are doing now is hanging out waiting to die. (Although I think if I make it to 95 I will be extremely lucky if people say how glamorous I was. I should start doctoring photos of myself now, I think. For now, I will be content with being a spry 35 year old).

Ooh, speaking of age, BP was trying to convince me recently that it is completely common accepted practice to lie about your age on online dating sites in order to fit between the usual search criteria of under 35, which seems totally peculiar to me (and equally common accepted practice to then announce casually the first time you meet someone, oh, by the way, even though my profile says I’m 28 I’m actually 35. I like the concept of blaming your profile for the misinformation, as if it wasn’t you who wrote the profile in the first place). I will have to think about how whether this is unethical or not. I think it is. OK, I am digressing again. Back to New York.

After Maia’s, we went for a wander past the Lexington Avenue shops (stopping off for a brief je ne sais quoi at la Maison du Chocolat (really we needed to use their loo, but once you’re there…. You know how it goes) and back on the subway to nice friends' flat to get ready for the theatah, (Having been in Tokyo not a month before makes you very, very self conscious about how filthy and decrepit and generally crap U.S. cities’ public transportation is. But hey, at least we have it. Oh, wait, that’s right, we STILL don’t have regular decent bus service between Sonoma County and San Francisco. Never mind.)

We had tickets for La Cage aux Folles (with Kelsey Grammer and Douglas Hodge as Georges and Albin) and it was AWESOME. The first ten minutes I felt a little bit, meh, oh god, it’s a musical, with all the schmaltz that implies, and then I completely got sucked in. there’s lots of sparkly costumes and slapsticky bits and _amazing_ dancing (I have never before seen six burly men in tutus and feathers land in the splits from a height of about six feet; my non-existent testicles ached for them, but it was very impressive) but the really impressive thing was how the two main guys managed to keep their relationship so entirely human and believable despite all the over-the-top silliness. Douglas Hodge in particular - despite the fact that he was playing a flaming transvestite gay guy - never let his character slip into just campy cliché, and the story was actually extremely moving as a result.

After the theatre - to dinner! Are you ready for more food porn? Oh goody. We ended up at the Spotted Pig, a British gastropub somewhere at the bottom end of Manhattan (I am not good at New York geography, and besides, it was late, so we took a cab and I didn’t have to pay attention). Starter: little plate of bacon-wrapped (warm) dates oh oh oh mouth orgasm here I come. Then (because the gnocchi of the previous night were so good) some sheep’s milk gnudi (I don’t know what gnudi are. Maybe they shear the sheep before they milk them?) and some pea bruschetta on toast, followed by a yummo high-end cheeseburger with a pile of perfectly done string fries. Chocolate amaretto cake and rhubarb tart for dessert, coffee, and we were home, by a very staid two a.m.

This morning needless to say I woke up still full (might need to change the name of the blog to gluttony diaries) so we had to go for a walk along Broadway to look in all the posh overpriced boutiquey clothes shops (aren’t you glad to know there is a place where a pair of silver hotpants can be yours for the low low price of $250? I was). Breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien - generally I am happy to keep pain as infrequent as possible, but in this case I would have no problem with daily, if it comes with fennel lemon scones, soft boiled eggs, and fresh fruit. (Today also marks the first time, I realized, that I have ever tried to eat a soft boiled egg in public. If anyone has any tips on how to do it neatly, please pass on. Do you peel the whole thing first? I was afraid it might fall apart, so I opted for the gradual peel while keeping it in the egg cup, which I am assuming gets easier with practice. And what are you supposed to do with the shell bits? They didn’t give me a receptacle, and I ended up panicking and just leaving them in a messy pile on the table. Restaurants are so difficult. We should have antisocial ramen bars like in Tokyo where you practice eating soft boiled eggs until you can get it right.)

After breakfast to a matinee of ‘Red,’ which is a two-man play about the artist Mark Rothko (whose work I can’t stand but babydaddy absolutely loves.) starring Alfred Molina (whom I have a little bit of a premature middle-aged lady crush on). It was interesting - sort of a meditation on what’s-the-point-of-art, interspersed with the character study of a completely unhinged narcissist (that’s my take) - clever but ultimately not that emotionally engaging, I thought, because it was hard to like either of the two characters.

We battled out of the theatre into the chaos of a) pouring rain b) post theatre traffic and c) the remains of the Puerto Rican Day Parade, which is a major, major event in New York as it turns out, and blocks up traffic for miles around. Once we were completely soaked through (despite the fact that we did actually have an umbrella with us), we got a cab to the airport, and it was looking as it we were going to barely barely make it… and then our flight was delayed 2.5 hours. On the flight home now (sadly, I am being forced to fly proletariat class on the way back), and we will likely not be getting back to San Francisco until 1 a.m. oh lordy work will be fun on Monday…

update: in bed in SF (having had a shower, even) by 12:30. God bless taxi drivers who drive at breakneck speed up 101 in the middle of the night to get you home, and good night to all....

day seven in tokyo and home

last full day in tokyo: i had breakfast at the coffee shop down the street w/ jonathan, where i was able to successfully order hot cocoa and a croissant in japanese (made easier by the fact 'cocoa' and 'croissant' in japanese are 'cocoa' and 'croissantu' respectively). home to get cleaned up and ironed and pressed and dressed and ready to go out w/ j's host family from 15 years ago; we took the train out to erisu (sp?), had half an hour to wander around a super super posh clothing store (i saw a pair of shoes i quite liked that cost $900, and a t-shirt that was $250), and then met up w/ his host mother and host sister and host sister's little girl aged 2 for a delish lunch at a non-weird-fusion italian restaurant. (posh little portions, tres elegant, white linen). a bit fragmented, because we were all on good behavior; eugene was the only one who spoke japanese and english really well; the little girl was antsy and fussy and couldn't sit still, so her mum was constantly up and down taking her outside; but still, very nice to have the chance to sit down and talk to regular people and not just be a tourist (in which regard i feel i have been extraordinarily lucky this trip, actually). ooh and i totally scored w/ the little girl because i knew the words to the greeting song and the donkey song from Music Together (thank you, Theo Scott Ebling) which is apparently an international phenomenon, not just a hippie california thing.

after lunch we headed back to central tokyo to meet up w/ eugene's friend/girlfriend eriko for coffee and a little tour of some of the modern architectural marvels of downtown tokyo, and then they dropped me off at a bathhouse while they went to shop for medicines-only-available-in-asia for various family members. eriko came into the bathhouse with me just to get me started, which was very sweet of her, because i'm sure that otherwise i would have committed even more horrendous bathhouse faux pas than i did. it has the look and feel of a very small public swimming pool minus the smell of chlorine; first you go into a locker room, where you undress and stow your stuff; then you go into the bathing room, where you sit on an upturned plastic bowl and scrub yourself under the shower (apparently you have to make a big show of how extensively you are scrubbing yourself, and how much soap you are using, for the benefit of all the other ladies who are keeping an eye on that sort of thing.) then you get to get into the actual bath, which is like a giant jacuzzi, totally lovely and steamy and peels your skin off. afterwards you shower off again, dry w/ the tiny flannel that you had to buy from the front desk because you didn't know that the regulars all bring their own towels, get dressed (i treated myself to a 20 yen hair-dry under one of those bubblehead hair drying machine that i associate with hair dressing salons from the 1950's.) and then you're done. my main faux pas (at least that i know about) came when i was towelling off - there are little mats that you stand on to dry off in front of your locker, and i did not managed to contain my drips to the mat, but accidentally got a few drips of water on the floor, and a lady came in, pointed at my drips, let off a tirade of pissed-off japanese, glared at me, and went round the other side of the lockers so that she would not have to step over the foreigner's unsightly puddle. oh dear oh dear. anyway.

after that the others picked me up again and we headed off to a famous sushi place (famous in part for the wait, which is an average of two hours yikes). but a two hour wait does at least have the effect that being seated gives you the most tremendous rush of victorious smugness, and the food was quite yummy. home again home again after that - jonathan and eugene went out for late night carousing, i crapped out and went to bed, and that was that.

jonathan left the next morning; i spent the morning wandering around the harajuku area in the pouring rain, checking out the flea market and the crazy teeny bopper shops and the handful of anime enthusiasts who turn up in their freakiest manga finery (think foot high red leather platform boots, black leather trench coats trimmed with rhinestones, crazy wigs, corsets, spikes, floor length punk mullets). i also went to the meiji shrine nearby, where you can go and pay respects to the emperor and his family, which according to the signs all patriotic japanese citizens like to do regularly), and then went home to pack my stuff, say goodbye and thank you to eugene, and get myself to the airport (1oo% completely successful train experience. correct ticket purchase, correct bullet train boarded, correct seat located, and i even got off at the right terminal). and thus ends my first ever trip to japan. flight home medium horrible - i was sitting next to a pair of hindu grannies who fussed with their video remote controls in loud voices and pulled out tinfoil packet after tinfoil packet of pungent homemade chapatis to eat during the flight, but i managed to sleep, which is really the definition of a good transoceanic flight, i think.

day six in tokyo

again, a veeerrrrrryyyy sllloooowww moving day in which very little of cultural import was achieved, but meh, whatever, it's vacation.

after breakfast, we headed out to the ginza shopping district, so that i could go to itoya, which is a mega paper store that got rave reviews in the guide book. i was a bit disappointed because it seemed to be mostly office supply type stuff until we got to the fifth floor and then it was japanese art paper HEAVEN and i sat on the floor and poked through all the drawers of gorgeous hand printed rice and silk paper and drooled (but neatly, so the shop attendants wouldn't get cross). after being very restrained about _not_ buying the entire shop, just 3000 yen worth or so, we went to a matsuzakaya for lunch - one of the big department stores with a food court in the basement where they have the $150 cantaloupes etc. we did not, you will be relieved to hear, have the $150 cantaloupe for lunch, but instead went to the little pseudo italian cafe in the basement; there is apparently a long tradition of bizarre low budget italian/japanese fusion cuisine that jonathan very properly felt i should be introduced to. i had pasta with mushrooms and cheese with seaweed sprinkled on top in a little bit of broth.

after lunch, we parted ways: J. went shopping, and I went to the Imperial Palace in the hopes of wandering around the gardens, which were supposed to be very nice. Unfortunately, it was the emperor's brother-in-law's day to get his hair cut, or something, in honour of which the gardens were closed to the public, so i had to settle for a wander around Hibiya Park, where they were setting up for the annual Oktoberfest celebration (of course. Tokyo in May. Oktoberfest. duh.) and then to the Hama Rikyu gardens down next to the water, which were quite pretty. I was very tickled that at fifteen minutes before closing, they start playing a lush orchestral version of "Annie Laurie" over the loudspeakers in the park, so that everyone knows to make their way to the exits. Ooh, I forgot to say, swimming around in the moat of the Imperial Palace I saw two turtles (!), a crane, and several fatty orange koi.

Home for a snooze, and then out with Eugene and his friend Mai for what has to be one of the most delightfully weird food experiences of the trip. Eugene didn't give us much of a hint as to why he wanted to take us to the this particular place other than to say they had really good ramen (I will never, by the way, be able to eat a Top Ramen or variant ever again now that I know what proper ramen is about). So we get ourselves to a slightly seedy but absolutely hopping street with loads of cheapy shops and bars and African pimps out on the street hustling for business (a totally weird demographic distribution that I don't even begin to comprehend, but never mind) and Eugene takes us up a couple of flights of stairs of an undistinguished looking building until we find ourselves standing in front a vending machine, from which we order our basic bowl of ramen (noodles plus two slices of pork included) plus any additional extras (green onions, mushrooms, egg, fish, other mystery ingredients). The vending machine spits out little paper tickets, which you then take inside. Just inside the shop there is a display board with stall numbers lit up to show you which ones are free; you pick a number, and sit yourself down in a totally private little booth, just you. There is a bamboo curtain between you and the kitchen, and you slide your tickets under the curtain, and a a few minutes later an anonymous pair of hands delivers your custom bowl of ramen to you, which you slurp down in complete and total privacy. if you have ordered extra noodles, for example, there is a little button that you can press to let them know when you are ready for the noodles, and the anonymous hands appear again from the kitchen and deliver your noodles, all without saying a word. It's basically a perfect arrangement for complete social phobics, who want to go out to eat a really good bowl of ramen without ever having to talk to - or even look at - another human being. it was totally weird and i loved it.

after dinner we went out for karaoke wooHOO! fun. we got a private little room and our karaoke machine had all the requisite cheesy music videos, flashing lights, and a good selection of japanese pop (mai and eugene), 90's pop/rock (jonathan), 70's motown (me), and dumb musicals (everyone) to keep everyone happy. a good time. home in a taxi by midnight, at which point i went to bed crosseyed with exhosstion and the boys went out for another drink down the street, just because they could. and so, another day.

day five in tokyo

well, we are starting to wind down the frenetic pace of sight seeing of the first few days - the jet lag is almost conquered, so we aren't getting up until 8 or 9 in the morning; we've discovered a cafe down the street that has croissants and coffee, which means another hour or so before we can get moving, etc...

yesterday we were EXTREMELY slow moving and didn't actually get out of the house until noon; breakfast at the cafe was followed in quick succession by lunch at a funny little asian/french fusion restaurant off Omote-sando (where I managed to splatter blueberry sauce all over my shirt. I went into the loo to try and wash it off and managed to go from having a splotchy purple shirt to having a soaking wet splotchy purple shirt, so i gave it up as a bad job and wore just my jersey for the rest of the afternoon, which meant that i was sweating buckets the whole rest of the afternoon until my splotchy shirt was dry enough to put back on because it was really hot out).

After lunch we went to go check out some of the trendy high end fashion houses (Comme des Garcons: Salvation Army dress shirts chopped up and sewn to Salvation Army 1970's knit vests, with $500 price tag put on; Prada store (nifty immaculate white bubble building, nice but unremarkable clothes). Tokyo is definitely a fashion-watcher's paradise; while the uniform for men is eerily standard (black suit, white shirt, dark tie, briefcase), the women are all kitted out in some quite astonishing outfits. lots of lace, lots of frills, lots of very short hemlines, lots of bling, and everyone in regulation 4" stilettos.

In the afternoon, we went to the National Theatre to go to a bunraku traditional puppet performance - us and a whole crowd of Japanese oldies with their buzzing hearing aids and their immaculate old-lady kimonos. it's kind of fun - off to the side of the stage are two guys sitting cross-legged on pillows; one plays twangytwangy bits on his traditional instrument thing which i can't remember the name of, and the other guy does all the narration/voices for the puppet play (they switch out the narrator at each act, and the most skilled/famous narrators get saved up for the climax of the play). the stage itself was set with a fairly simple set of the interior of a traditional japanese house, and each puppet (about half human size) is moved by 3-4 guys dressed in black and dark grey. you apparently have to train for years being in charge of just one foot before you are allowed to even have a crack at the hands or head of one of these puppets. the play was a (apparently fairly well-known) melodrama, along the lines of boy meets girl, boy is supposed to have arranged marriage with someone else, the honor of various families is compromised, suicide is threatened all round, parents' wishes are denied and tragedy ensues as a result. very realistic, i think, no? anyway. it was fun. i had an english audioguide thing to help so i knew what was going on, and i did my best to transcribe it as i went along so that jonathan could also follow (the japanese they use is i think quite antiquated??), so i now have an unintentionally hilarious 8 pages in my diary of bunraku transcript, along the lines of

- it's dude from oil shop

- dad is mad! says go away

- oil shop dude says you stole my money

- no i didn't

- and your daughter's fiance had an affair w/ the boss' daughter

- daughter says i am going to kill myself now

- sick mother says who's there what's happening

- father says here have some plum blossoms as a peace offering.

i am sure it will all still make loads of sense hundreds of years from now when bunraku historians are trying to piece together what it all looked like.

after the theatre we had an umbrella retrieval adventure - all shops etc have neat racks outside where you can leave your umbrella when it's raining, and the theatre is so fancy (or perhaps theatre patrons are so untrustworthy) that there were actually little mini locks so you could lock up your umbrella and take the little key inside with you. when we came out of the theatre, we discovered that the entire umbrella stand had gone missing, along with our umbrellas (strictly speaking eugene's umbrellas; we had each brought our own plain black ones from california, but we both had serious umbrella envy of eugene's clear umbrellas, which are all the rage in tokyo, so we had borrowed those for the day). we went around backstage and tentatively hallooed (ok, jonathan did, in japanese) to see if we could retrieve them, and a very nice guy in flipflops and a fag hanging out of his mouth came out and was very sweet about trying to understand what on earth we needed, a process which was not helped by the fact that neither of us knew the japanese word for umbrella. (it's "kasa" for anyone who ever needs to know. as in, if it's raining, mi kasa es tu kasa.) eventually lost umbrellas were found, everyone was pleased, lots of thankyous and bowing to each other (people really do bow all the time, or at the very least do a lot of head bobbing, which i find intensely charming), and we were on our way.

we went to shimbashi (sp?) station to meet up w/ machiko (bernat's wife), and the old black train which is in the middle of the square as a kind of museum exhibit is not only THE place to meet in tokyo (there were loads of people lined up in rows next to it, looking expectant), but you stand on different sides of the train depending on whether you are a nonsmoker or a smoker. it's all very organized, and presumably all without anyone actually saying anything.

machiko turned up, and although japanese people don't seem to ever actually touch each other (at least in public - no handshaking, no hugs, no cheek-kissing; you just bow) i gave her an enormous hug without thinking about it, which was kind of funny, considering we had never met, but it just felt like the right thing to do, and if she thought it was weird, she didn't say anything. we went to a gorgeous funky little izakaya restaurant where she had made reservations, and eugene turned up shortly afterwards, and we had a very nice time. it was a little tough conversationally, because her english is quite limited (and despite jonathan's best tutelary efforts, my japanese has remained limited to please, thank you, hello, yes, and orange juice), but she seems like a very cheerful nice person and in the end we managed fine. (also i was very brave and ate a fish eyeball. it was gluey with a little bit of crunch to it). after dinner we went to one of the nearby sky scrapers that has a really speedy elevator with a view over the city (terrifying and puke-inducing and whooshily futuristic) and then out to a parfait place for bowls of tea-flavoured ice cream and mochi. jonathan had a large bowl of what looked like slimy bright green brains, which sent him into raptures of childhood nostalgia. he is weird. then we all went home to bed the end.

day four - kyoto continued!

Day four:

This morning we were LATE FOR BREAKFAST oh dear oh dear. We had asked for breakfast at 7:30, and we were still in our room getting ourselves sorted at 7:31 and the phone rang, and it was the front desk lady saying, where are you we are waiting for you for breakfast, so we hurried downstairs and if you can imagine the horror, started our breakfast a full three minutes after the appointed time. If they spit in our food to punish us for our tardiness, you couldn’t tell, however, since it was the most aesthetically beautiful breakfast I have ever eaten. After the hot hand towel thing (which I love), we got a lacquer tray with nine little lacquer bowls each with a different exciting thing (fava beans, tiny little mini fried fish, lotus stem, pickled mystery vegetable, etc.), followed by a big still-bubbling thing of rice porridge with two raw eggs and a yuzu citrus fruit in it that they mixed up in front of us to cook the eggs and infuse the whole thing with citrus flavour), and then a little plate of the most gorgeous perfectly cooked cod ever, and finished up with green tea.

After breakfast we headed out to the imperial palace complex, where the emperors of Japan lived for nearly a thousand years until the capital was moved to Tokyo. Despite the fact that it is a UNESCO world heritage site blah blah blah I didn’t honestly think it was anything all that special (except for the gardens and the few painted screens that you could see through the open doors (you are not actually allowed in the palace buildings, just around the grounds). I found the architectural style a bit bleak and austere, especially set in acres of flat white gravel, and with the exception of a few ornate carved bits along the roofline, it did not give the impression of antiquity at all; it looked to me for the most part as if it could have been constructed in the 1970’s. (Jonathan was totally blown away about it, and said that was the point, it was timeless, and reflected the philosophical ideals of simplicity) and we ended up getting quite cross, arguing over aesthetics and what makes things beautiful and form vs. function etc., J. being passionately pro modern minimalism, and me preferring a more organic antique lumpiness (I don’t think it’s a simplicity vs. gaudiness, quite; for instance I much prefer plain stone early Romanesque churches to later cathedrals that are all gilted up with enormous chunks of gold everywhere, although I will admit that I was ready to move in to the Bangkok Royal Temple when I saw all the crazy colored glass and detailed mural paintings and elephant statues everywhere.) My theory is that a lot of it is gender difference - I can think of an awful lot more men than women who go for the very clean, spare, cool, rectilinear look, and a lot more women than men who prefer bright rich colours, curves, warmth, soft edges, elaborate detail. I will continue to collect data, in any case.

After that, we took the train out to Arashiyama, on the outskirts of Kyoto, and had okonomiyaki omelets at a little sit-at-the-counter grill place (egg, cabbage, pork, squid, green onion fried into a patty in front of you, and then topped with mayonnaise, seaweed flakes, and mystery spicy powder). After lunch we walked along the river in the misty (slight) rain, which was very pretty, through a gardeny foresty area to the estate of an old Japanese silver screen movie star who had designed this rural retreat for himself and then bequeathed it to be used as a park after he died. Narrow stone paths led through little hidden gardens, all beautifully kept, and we had the entire place more or less to ourselves because of the rain. I think that might have been my favourite thing that we have seen so far. At the end of the walk through the gardens there is a teahouse place where you get given a cup of green tea and a rice cookie by a nice lady, (again, with beautiful peaceful view out the open screen window to the bamboo forest) and I sat and tried to sketch the beautiful peaceful view but it is HARD when there are a million leaves everywhere and not a lot in the way of definite lines to help you plan the drawing.

Anyway. After that to the costume museum (J. complained, I insisted, only took half an hour, beautiful little doll’s houses w/ dolls in authentic period imperial costumes), back to hotel to pick up bag, bus to train station, and now on the train back to Tokyo, having consumed our train ’snack’ of a bento box of beef sushi, a plum roll, a raisin scone, and a sugar bun…

day three - kyoto!

Day three (Tuesday): we took the bullet train to Kyoto (massively expensive, scarily efficient, with departure and arrival times accurate to the minute). It was a little bit exciting at first because we actually got on the wrong train (a bullet train going from Tokyo to Kyoto that left three minutes earlier than our train did - we should have known) but the conductor was very nice and sorted us out properly, giving us an incomprehensible book of apparently every single train going in any direction anywhere in Japan at any time during May 2010 which was very helpful, especially to me. However, we did manage to get on the correct train eventually and we were in Kyoto by late morning, and checked into our guesthouse, which was BEAUTIFUL - a traditional ryokan set in a gorgeous landscaped garden, water features everywhere. There was a lot of shoe removal - first you have to take off your street shoes and put them in a little wooden locker at the bottom of the stairs, then you have a pair of leather slippers to wear up the stairs (they did not have any big enough for Jonathan. The lady had to go get a special pair which they probably keep in a safe somewhere for when really tall people come to stay, and he still had three inches of heel hanging off the back), and then when you go into your room (beautiful room with traditional shoji screens and tatami mats and a low tea table) you take off the slippers. We had tea poured for us while they explained the bath procedure (different wooden shoes, special kimono outfit) for the traditional baths downstairs (more on that later) and then we ventured out.

We took the bus to Kinkakuji shrine, which is a gold painted templey arrangement set in the middle of a lake with very pretty surrounding gardens (this is going to sound very clichéd, but everything looks so eerily like a Japanese print, with cherry trees and pines and Japanese maple trees and little pagodas and artistic clumps of rocks everywhere, that it is quite surreal). From there we walked to Ryoanji, another shrine-within-pretty-gardens down the road, which is famous primarily for a rock garden which consists of a bed of perfectly groomed white gravel with fifteen seemingly randomly placed boulders set in it (the trick is that it is impossible to see all fifteen at once unless you are “truly enlightened,” (or really tall, or have a helicopter, maybe), and so you are supposed to sit there and meditate upon the meaning of that. It was a little difficult to concentrate on my meditation when there were school groups of about two hundred navy-uniformed adolescents shrieking at top volume and taking pictures of each other with their fingers held up in a V on their cell phone cameras, so instead we gave up and just wandered around the gardens (again, exquisite) and into the tea shop, where we ended up having a very nice lunch. The food wasn’t particularly memorable (tofu and vegetables with some additional fun mystery ingredients, all immaculately laid out on trays, the whole elegant tea thing) but the setting was to die for - we were sitting cross legged on little cushions at a low table, and through the open screen window we had a view of the beautiful garden with babbling water feature (with carp sub-feature), stone statue feature, etc.

After all that peaceful meditative simplicity, we decided to amp up the crass capitalism, and we headed to the shopping arcade, which is targeted to the broadest demographic range of any shopping mall I think I have ever been to. There were loud video game arcades, where you could put money in a slot to win a chance at a large scary pink fluffy animal bigger than yourself, elegant little confectionery shops, a place that sold fruit and vegetable seeds, a print shop that sold old maps and prints (I definitely did not go in and spend more money than I really should have in that one), a home decorating fabric store, fresh fishmongers with burly guys slapping around in rubber aprons and wellies, florists, high end clothing boutiques, etc. We also saw some fashion to prove that the Japanese are not all conservative conformists when it comes to clothes: Jonathan spotted a guy wearing a pair of Micky Mouse ears, a mini skirt and tights, with large calf length furry boots, and I was impressed by the number of teeny bopper girls who were dressed (frankly) like prostitutes (ripped lace, garter belts, hot pants, bras) who couldn’t possibly have been prostitutes because a) they were so many of them and b) to all other respects they looked like gangs of teenage girls just hanging out with their friends in the evenings. (Ooh, we also paid a visit to a department store to confirm Eugene’s story that in posh department stores here you can buy single perfect cantaloupe melons that cost $100 - he is wrong, they sell for $150, and they come nestled in their own little Styrofoam fluffy thing with a gold sticker and a pink or blue ribbon on them, as if they are newborns in a nursery.

By eight pm the shops were closing up and our feet were about to fall off, so we headed back to the hotel for a nap and a bath; we couldn’t have a nap because they hadn’t put out our beds for us (I forgot to mention when we first got our room, there were no beds because the futons are kept in a special cupboard) so I went downstairs to try out the bath thingy. First you have to get dressed up to go down there in your special kimono dressing gown business and slippers, and then when you get down there you undress again, and then you have a shower before you can have a bath, and finally you get to have a bath in this enormous beautiful stone tub with citrus fruits bobbing around in it so that everything smells like orange blossoms (even my feet, by the end of it, which was quite a, er, feat). The water is super hot so you hop in and out between the cold shower and the boiling bath, and then you get back into your dressing gown and slippers and go back upstairs, to find that they still haven‘t put the futons out because they can‘t believe that you are so pathetic as to need to go to sleep at 8:30 at night and besides Jonathan was getting that cagey/sheepish I-was-sort-of-thinking-about-going-to-get-some-more-food look (we had opted against an official dinner because we had been snacking on street foot all afternoon) so… out of the dressing gown, into street clothes again, and out we headed, this time to a little noodle shop down a dark hidden alley way full of gorgeous funky old wooden two story traditional houses (passing three bona fide geishas on their way to work, accompanying an elderly guy with a cane, which got me thinking all kinds of inappropriate and vulgar things, but which I know is not really the point of geishas, it‘s all about the ceremonial and cultural bits blah blah blah). Yummy udon noodles with spring onions in broth, then staggered home to bed, where they had finally put out the futons with blissful white fluffy duvets and I was asleep in about thirty seconds flat.

day one and two in tokyo!

Hello, everybodies! So… after a mad dash through San Francisco airport to catch my flight to Tokyo (which was exciting primarily for the fact that a) I got upgraded to executive class, doubtless because I looked like such a high-powered individual in my stretch pants and thermals and b) I found out what your eyeballs feel like after watching four movies in a row without a break) I arrived on Sunday evening in Tokyo! I miraculously found Jonathan (thanks to J’s brother Eugene and his prompt telephone triage), who had also arrived without incident, and we took the train to Shibaura Island, where Eugene lives. Tokyo city trains and subways are very exciting, especially if you don’t really know where you are going, but we did magically end up in the right place and Eugene found us and took us home to his immaculate and stylish little bachelor pad with a gorgeous view of the river and the city in the background from the 23rd floor. Everything (trains, apartment, roads) looks like a slightly surreal gleaming vision of the future - everything is super clean and swishy and works perfectly. I bet the relative percentage of GDP that comes from manufacturers of “Out of Order” signs is very, very low (as opposed to tailors of dark suits and white dress shirts. I calculated today that there are probably around 250 million dress shirts in the Tokyo metropolitan area alone).

Anyway. The night we arrived, Eugene took us out for dinner at an izakaya restaurant (specialties: meat on skewers and alcohol) and I did my very best to remain upright. In addition to meat on skewers and alcohol, we ate: daikon radish salad with dried bonito flakes, fried chicken, beef tendon soup, ramen with raw egg and onion and probably some other things that I am forgetting (ooh, we are passing Mt. Fuji on the right side of the train right now - it’s a beautiful clear day and there is a bit of snow right on the top lovely lovely). Then we went home and went to bed and it was so completely delicious to be showered and fed and sinking into a big clean fluffy duvet mmmmm.

Day two (Monday)

We woke up early in the morning (partly jetlag, partly because they don’t have daylight savings time here so the sun comes up at 4 a.m.) and took advantage of being wide awake at 5 am by catching a taxi to the Tsukiji fish market to watch the morning tuna auction. The fish market is a gigantic maze of about a square half mile that rivals a Jacques Cousteau type nature program for making you appreciate the vast diversity of stuff that comes out of the ocean. Every so often I get depressed about how there is really no point to traveling any more because everything is Starbucks and 7-11 everywhere, and then you go some place like the Tokyo fish market and you think, oh, hm, perhaps you would be hard pressed to find fish that look like translucent pink legless miniature crocodiles at the Safeway in Santa Rosa, much less translucent pink crocodiles that are fresh caught and that they will prep for you. The trip was made much more exciting by the frequent near death experiences; about once every fifteen seconds you nearly get run over by a man in gumboots and a rubber apron driving a mini trolley at 70 mph through the narrow aisles of the market, with three enormous (as in the size of about an eight-year-old child) headless tuna-fish on the back.

After the market we went to a ramen place for breakfast; all I have to say is that now that I have had proper ramen I will never be able to look at a dried Top Ramen packet again without feeling superior and sniffy. We crammed into a little divey caff with everyone lined up at the counter on stools (approximate leg room: six inches; average femur length of the Hsiao/Stanton traveling party: thirty inches) and got enormous bowls of yummy broth with big fatty noodles, pork chunks, tofu, and mystery vegetables, all of which guaranteed that the next stop was a search for a loo for Jessica “strongest gastro-colic reflex in the West” Stanton. Luckily, it’s Japan, so there are immaculate, gleaming, functional, public toilets everywhere, which I have decided is the truest hallmark of high civilisation. Forget cultcha, it’s all about the lavatories.

After breakfast we tried to go to a famous gardeny thing nearby, but it was still only quarter to eight in the morning, so instead we headed up to the Asakusa district where we walked along a famous shopping street (famous primarily for things to eat. There is a certain delightful predictability about traveling with Jonathan…) and then went to a lovely old temple/shrine place where we got our fortune told by a piece of paper that came out of a slot in the wall (unfortunately it wasn’t that good; it basically told us to beware of everything) and lit some incensey things to make a wish and then went and sat and had a coffee. Ooh, I almost forgot; they have little pancakey things with bean curd in the middle that have the shape of pagodas and dolls and things, and they have a little stampy machine that pours out the hot dough and cooks it and we had several of those, hot off the presses.

Next stop was a wander around leafy shady Ueno Park, which has a beautiful seventeenth century shrine in the middle of it (as well as gleaming immaculate flush toilets, natch) and I had a snooze on a bench while Jonathan organized us. For a city in which gazillions of people are crammed into not-that-large a space, there are quite astonishing large quiet expanses of space with almost noone in them.

After that we took the train to the sumo wrestling arena, and got tickets for the sumo wrestling tournament that is going on this week (?) month (?). I don’t know even how to begin to describe it: the arena/stadium thing is quite big, with seats for maybe four or five thousand people. The wrestling ring itself is on a square platform down in the very middle, about fifteen feet by fifteen feet, with a circle marked out with straw ropes on the ground, and then the most expensive seats are red cushions on the floor right around the ring. The next most expensive are the ‘boxes’, which are tiered steps marked off by low brass railings, and each box has four floor cushions and a tray for tea (!) in it, (we sat in one of these until the stadium began to fill up) and then up in the balcony are the regular theatre type seats (where we ended up).

The wrestling itself is something else; it is weirdly compelling. Everyone involved (wrestlers, referee, guy who calls out the name of each wrestler before they go up into the ring, judges (?) who sit around the edge of the ring) is traditionally dressed in their own profession-specific fabulous outfit. Each bout starts off with a parade of all the wrestlers who will be competing; twelve or so men, ranging from solid to terrifyingly obese, dressed in tassled loincloth-y arrangements and huge elaborate aprons with their long hair lacquered up into a topknot, come out and arrange themselves around the ring and do a few synchronized stamps and claps all together (interestingly, although the audience went nuts when one or another of the wrestlers was announced, the wrestlers themselves were extremely stately; there was no playing to the crowd or indeed even recognition of the crowd at all). Then they all file off again and go and sit around the edges of the arena, and the name-calling guy comes out and does sort of a Gregorian chanty thing, calling out which wrestler will be “East” and which “West”. Then those two come up into the arena, and the referee (splendidly dressed in a huge shiny kimono and fancy hat) has them bow to each other, and then they do some more synchronized stamping and clapping and stretching and throwing of salt (?) down onto the floor of the ring and they slap their bellies and wipe their faces and armpits off with special cloths that their helpers give them and then after a lot of that they finally squat down facing each other, fists on the ground, and then at a signal that I could never figure out suddenly they charge at each other. It’s quite scary when they do, because these are big, big dudes, and the thwack as they body-slammed into each other made me jump every time. Some of the time the wrestling was very fast and violent - there’s a lot of face and neck slapping and grabbing - and sometimes they would come to a complete stop, arms around each other, each with a hand hooked around the loincloth of the other, and it would look oddly tender. The bout was over either when one guy was down or had been forced out of the straw ring, which usually took anywhere between five and sixty seconds, and then the process would repeat itself with the next two wrestlers. As the afternoon progressed, each match became more elaborate (the outfits, the amount of time spent belly slapping and salt-throwing and stamping before they fought) and the crowd got more and more excited. Interestingly, there were several non-Japanese wrestlers, including a Serbian guy, whom we saw fight a couple of times. The tournament goes all day every day for a fortnight; we stayed for about four hours (we had a fortifying bento box for lunch) and it was quite hard to tear ourselves away, (even though I was in desperate need of a nap) as the whole thing is oddly compelling.

Home for a nap before dinner, and then Eugene came home and we went out for dinner with a friend of his from work to an amazing tempura place. When I have had tempura in the US, everything gets brought out to you on one big plate, so by the time you get about halfway through everything is cold (in fact the last time I had tempura, in San Francisco when I was interviewing for residency I got really sick afterwards and spent the whole night puking, which is why I don’t usually order tempura when I go to Japanese restaurants). Here, however, we sat at a counter, and the two chefs did everything right in front of us, so you ate everything about fifteen seconds after it had come out of the oil and was deliciously hot and crispy and light. We had a fish tasting menu, and I have absolutely no idea what most of the things were that we ate; there were a few familiar items (tiger shrimp, shallots, eel) but mostly I shut my eyes and thought of England, and it all turned out fine. (I think my favourite was at the very end: ice-cream tempura in a blueberry dipping sauce. Not very sophisticated of me, but if you deprive me of dairy for a couple of days, ice-cream tastes really really good. (I just asked Jonathan whether they make icecream lactose free here because everyone is lactose intolerant, and he said he didn’t think so, with the justification that, “it’s a culture that enjoys suffering.”)

After dinner we went to a tiny (as in five feet by ten feet square) bar in the Golden Gai area, which is a slightly seedy area of very narrow streets and ttiny atmospheric little dive bars piled on top of each other. We climbed a set of very narrow rickety stairs to the second storey; there were two guys already in there, so the four of us plus the proprietress meant a full house. It was like the Monty Python cheese shop sketch; every drink that anyone asked for, she would come up with a reason why we couldn’t or shouldn’t have that (the Coke is warm, it’s not a good brand of vodka, we’re out of that beer) until we ended up with OJ (me) and camparis and soda for everyone else. She also gave us little bright red octopus tapas and chatted to us about having lived in France. (I was strongly reminded of Douglas Hofstadter’s story about a day he spent touring a Polish radio station: first he was taken around by someone who only spoke Polish, and he only speaks one or two words of Polish, so there was a lot of just grinning and nodding; then he was handed off to some else who spoke some Russian, of which he knew maybe 50-100 words, so the ability to communicate was somewhat improved, then he was supposed to interview someone who happened to have some German, which he speaks decently although not marvelously, then French, which he speaks really well, then Italian, which he speaks really really well since he lives in Italy and is married to an Italian I think, and then finally he ends up that evening hanging out with some American friends and is back in his native tongue, and he describes at each stage the relief of improved communication and the sensation of brain-opening as he moved up each level. I thought of that because it was an unusual feeling to be _relieved_ that someone spoke French - like, wow, I can have an exchange with someone that consists of more than just bowing and grinning like an idiot and saying thank you over and over again. (While my spoken language skills are still limited to hello, please, and thank you, my written Japanese, I am pleased to report, is bounding ahead by leaps and bounds; I now know about twenty characters and today I reached my goal of being able to decipher an entire phrase unassisted. Are you ready? Here it is: “Vehicles enter this direction,” posted outside the parking lot of a restaurant. Jonathan criticises me for doing the pen strokes in the wrong order, if you can believe it, but what does he know.

so cal road trip day numero trois

oh goodness, just realized i never published THIS post. you all can have a wee break from reading about tokyo and revisit southern california in april....

after lunch in san luis obispo, we attempted to drive to lompoc; for some reason the map kept changing on us, and didn't correspond at all to where the california state highway system thought lompoc should be, but never mind, the drive was gorgeous, and we stopped at a roadside fruit stand and bought three massive punnets of strawberries from an old man in a big hat which kept us going. we drove through guadalupe, a dusty little outpost that nearly fit my criterion of no starbucks/walmart/barnes and noble/etc but it didn't have much of anything else either - just a wide street with some shops that went out of business in 1952 and forgot to tell anyone. once we got to lompoc we forgot why it was that we were supposed to be going there - something to do with swallows? no, that's san juan capistrano - but as it turns out the beach just beyond lompoc is quite fabuloso and totally deserted. we went on a tromp along the beach and saw lots of birds - several places we have been are nesting sites for snowy plovers, which are apparently making a comeback, so yay hooray for the snowy plover (not that i knew what a snowy plover was before this holiday). i lay in the sand and read my book (swallowdale, in an incongruously adult looking edition, loan courtesy of Mr. Meep, who i am gratified to find out enjoys them as much as i do) and got sand in my ears (fine) and in my camera (less fine, but i am hoping that my camera makes as confident a comeback as the snowy plover.

after a snooze on the beach, we continued on our way towards santa barbara, stopping at la purisima mision de la virgen de somewhere, which was kind of a random unintended detour but i think may in the end have been one of most interesting little cultural thingies we have seen so far. it's a not-so-little spanish mission in the middle of nowhere, which really helps, and the visitor center at the entrance was closed, which really helped as well because it meant that there was almost nobody there and we could just wander around and stick our noses into things and probably touch things that we weren't supposed to, etc., and they had done a very nice job of making it feel as if the sixteenth century spanish missionaries had just put down their things and wandered off but would be back any moment.

after all that, we went onto santa barbara, where we checked in to our relatively tatty motel on state street, and then went out to indian food and then home to BED.

wednesday- santa barbara mission, lunch at natural cafe, walk along santa barbara beach, birdwatching, icecream, botanic garden, home for dinner in bed (looxury!).

thursday - getty museum wowee, sushi dinner w/ nice friend in LA, and then to best western in san fernando where my mother wanted to move in

friday - long drive home to san francisco past scary industrial agricultural areas, reinforcing belief in only eating organic food and, if you are going to eat meat, definitely only meat from happy cows etc.

so cal road trip day numero deux

Oh dear oh dear I have gotten behind and now I am not going to be able to REMEMBER

everything that we've done! I think I will have to go back to the beginning to remind

myself.

Sunday - SF in the pouring rain. sister with a cold. dinner at delfina's.

Monday - drive down to big sur, lunch at nepenthe, elephant seals on the beach!, and Hearst castle. oh, that's right. I was going to do some more describing of Hearst Castle. so, yuh, La Cuesta Encantada, a.k.a. Hearst Castle, is a folly built by megamegamegamega bajillionaire W.R.Hearst once he inherited his parents' bajillions on top of his own bajillions. I was expecting a huge tacky over-the-top Hollywood extravaganza, which it kind of is, except for there are bits of it which are not at all tacky (although the over-the-top adjective applies fairly consistently throughout the whole thing). As soon as the guide (an incredibly mellow middle aged lady with navy orthopedic shoes and a ponytail who had been leading tours at the Hearst Castle for over thirty years, and somehow still managed to make it sounds like she a) enjoyed it and b) had never had to repeat herself once in thirty years) told us Julia Morgan's general concept for the place was for the main house to look like a 17th century Spanish cathedral and for the surrounding guest cottages to look like senorial houses around the cathedral, I liked it much better. Somehow it makes it nicer that there was a particular specific architectural look they

were going for, rather than, let's make it as crazy ornate and luxurious as we can and

to hell with the final product. I think I liked the guest houses better than the main house as well - the gist was Mediterranean villas with old tiles and splashy antique fountains, furnished with heavy dark wood antique Spanish furniture and medieval/early Renaissance artwork, my fave my fave. The high tack came mostly in the form of sculpture - he'd bought a few gen-yoo-wine 18th century French & Italian bits and pieces, but several of the reclining marble ladies around the pool were 1920's movie starlets who were supposed to look like 18th century french ladies, and they looked much too doe-eyed and flirty to be convincing. We watched a promotional/descriptional film about W.R.Hearst, which (I love this) had actors acting out the events described in the voiceover but not speaking themselves (W.R.Hearst's father straining with his mule team, grubby and sweaty, over the Sierras, bags laden with mined ingots which turned out to be silver, WRH's mother looking over the prow of the ship, one hand on the shoulder of her little boy, looking meaningfully into the middle distance where Europe was - Europe being a metaphor for 'future taste in art,' I guess - WRH as an fat middle aged man looking meaningfully into the middle distance standing on his property and then pointing with his stick where he wants his house to be, etc.). The other interesting thing about the Hearst Castle was how lowbrow the visitors' center was: no reproductions of some of the gorgeous paintings/tapestries, for instance, nothing British Museumy about it at all, but you can buy sweatshirts with "Hearst Castle Athletic Team" block printed in a million different colours, shot glasses with a silhouette of the castle, DVD's of the hokey promotional video, etc. Anyway. My only regret is that we couldn't wander freely on our own and (for instance) sit and draw in the gardens) but instead had to keep marching on the official tour. They do several official tours, one which is apparently a little more free-form of the gardens etc. and that might be nice.

That evening we drove down to Morro Bay, where we spent night at the Twin Dolphin Inn -

while I have no trouble staying at tatty motels, it is surprising how difficult it has been to persuade la mama to at least stay at independently owned tatty motels rather than

chain tatty motels...

On Tuesday morning, we drove to San Luis Obispo, which is one of those places that I have

heard of five million times but completely without context, so I had no idea whether it was

going to be a shitty industrial center or a gorgeous little Spanish architectural gem or

what. Here's my ideal of an American town: somewhere that has a nice town center, like

(for instance) San Luis Obispo (sunshine, bougainvillea, Spanishy architecture, nice

pedestrian streets), but that is _not_ surrounded by miles of car dealerships and

Burger Kings. I have yet to see that. The other depressing fact is how ubiquitous so many

of the shops are: it really reinforces the message that it is becoming less and less worth-

while to travel, at least within the US, because everywhere there is a Starbucks, a Wal-Mart,

a Barnes & Noble, a 7-11, a Whole Foods, etc. But I digress. We spent the morning at the

SLO mission, drawring in the sunshine in the garden (la mama did a very pretty drawring

of a fountain, palm trees etc and I did one of a petit fleur) and then we took ourselves

off for lunch at an outdoor cafe next to the creek which was tres jolie and our waiter

flirted with la mama about his love of landscape painting.

oh dear almost time to go i will finish this later.

love to all.

so cal road trip day numero un

why does blogspot always load the photos in reverse? so annoying. anyway.

so hurrah! La mama and I left on our southern california adventure yesterday. we spent the night in san francisco, where I got to go to delfina's for dinner (and have gnocchi and chicken and panna cotta) and la mama got to stay at sister's house and try and dodge flu bugs. i think i won that particular contest. we got up the next morning and packed up the car and drove through magically nonexistant san francisco traffic to Big Sur on the coast which was GORGEOUS, all windy cliff roads and sunshine and crashy waves and rocks and lovely lovely lovely

....and then had lunch at cafe kevah, which is the slightly more downmarket (and i actually think nicer) version of nepenthe restaurant (we went upstairs to look at nepenthe after our lunch, and it was full of fat people eating steaks with ketchup with designed sunglasses on their heads).

after lunch we drove on down the coast towards Hearst Castle, stopping to say hello to some heffalump seals (we passed a beach with literally hundreds of them slothing about looking as if they had just had a really big fish breakfast and couldn't be bothered to move apart from occasionally flipping some sand onto their backs to cool down (fascinating fact: apparently when lady elephant seals are in labour, they do a lot of sand-flipping onto their backs, so it's thought to be a stress response of some sort. we also saw lots of juveniles (who are about four months old by now) which were very cute. they are molting, which they do once a year, so several of them were looking very ratty with big patches of their fur peeling off, and one of the docent chiquitas showed us a patch of elephant seal fur, and it was about as cuddly and soft as a pot scrubber.

after THAT we drove onto Hearst Castle which I was secretly expecting to be kind of lame, a 1950's hollywood version of a medieval castle, with 1950's hollywood versions of suits of armor and heraldic flags everywhere, but it was way cooler than that. eek more later b/c we are supposed to be getting packed up to leave soon.

hearst castle (the _indoor_ pool, smaller than the outdoor pool, all blue and gold pseudo roman mosaics). i wanted to SWIM SO BADLY

mystery birds along the shore at morro bay where we had a sushi picnic on the beach for dinner and then went back to the twin dolphin motel and spent la nuit.

on to san luis obispo mission and santa barbara today. ok must post this before internet connection craps out completely.

love to all!

I am SO BRAVE

I just went to the Ellington Hall Friday night swing dance party BY MYSELF scary scary scary but actually it was fine. They start off with a lesson, and there's about sixty people there, and it's fun because a) you're guaranteed a partner, since they put everyone into two concentric circles that just rotate around one another, b) there's a hilarious variety of ages, from 11 up to about 70 (not a ton in the mid-thirties, sadly, but meh, you don't go to these things to be picky) and c) you sort of get to know people a little bit in the lesson, so by the time the dance party itself starts, you don't feel quite so horrifically shy about finding partners. The only guy who asked me to dance was someone I actually semi-knew from forays into Internet dating who I like, but he's a little strange and also a fantastically good dancer, so I didn't feel I could inflict myself on him more than a couple of times. Boo: I did not get asked to dance by anyone else (all the guys who are beginners seem to be very tentative about asking people to dance, and all the guys who are really good go for the girls who are really good (natch)). But then I thought, the hell with it, and so I started marching up to random dudes and dragging them out on the floor, and ended up having a reasonably grand old time. Also I love love love old swing music. They played Aretha, and the Dusty Springfield song, "Son Of A Preacher Man," and "Frankie and Johnnie" and Nat King Cole, and all sorts of lovely oldies without any schmaltz at all. So points for me for being brave.

fried milk!

true to my new years' resolutions, i am steadily working my way through my spanish cookbook. i don't think i'll be able to finish these, however. they're delicious, but it's a little icky to feel my LDL actually climbing into the quadruple digits. i burnt the patatas bravas, but they were still so good they didn't last long enough for a picture to be taken...

fort ross trip, january 1-3 2010

sonoma coast near fort ross
baby cow
playing karate kid on the rocks at stillwater cove
two seconds away from being hit by a wave
big fatty wave
view from cliffs above stillwater cove
water up close

new years' rezzies

Here's my list, most of which i came up with last night while sitting at the grove waiting for the meeps, but i added some more this morning when the sunrise woke me up (happy 2010 everyone!):

1. repaint my kitchen, including kitchen cabinets and trim, and spackling the one wall that it looks like the surface of the moon at this point from all the nails i have so incautiously whacked into it over the last year or so. i'm thinking robin's eggy blue for the walls might be fun, although i haven't completely ruled out a different colour for each wall (parental units, you are invited to withhold your disapproval for this idea, please). Also finish painting the trim outside the house.

2. cook every recipe in my new spanish cookbook (there aren't _that_ many, i don't think. big print and lots of pictures).

3. hire someone to prune my apple tree (this one has a deadline of february, i think), and hire someone to come and weed and mow regularly (yes, I know this one is overdue. i keep having delusions about being able to make myself do it. those delusions are almost dead. almost.)

4. exercise 30' a day six days a week. one hour of cycling or two hours of brisk walking may be substituted for the half hour jog.

5. fix the portraits that need fixing as best as possible, finish the master copy i'm currently working on, get myself up to an even thirty portraitsoffriendsandfamily, and do a master copy either of a vermeer or a john singer sargent (probly either madame x whom i love, in either her fully-strapped-in or in her racy-strap-falling-down state i haven't decided yet OR the daughters of edward darly whosit)

6. EITHER go to a multi-day tango workshop, if i can find one, OR rent a cello and take cello lessons, OR learn a schubert sonata all the way through

7. make two new friends (up to the friendship level of being able to ring them and say, hey, do you fancy coming to see a movie or something with me and having supper with them on my own)

8. find an adult literacy program to volunteer for

9. write 12 essays (about what, i have no idea. books? painting? past blog entries fair game if i can find any coherent enough) and get them as good as i possibly can to the point where i do not feel embarrassed about sending them to my friend Emily's agent to try and get published (Emily remains the only person who has read - or will ever read - my effort for National Novel Writing Month three? four? years ago, and was ludicrously encouraging, for which she is paying the price of being mentioned in my New Year's resolutions

10. either chuck, donate to Goodwill, or finish mending all the things in my clothes-needing-to-be-mended pile.

woohoo! we'll see how much i manage.