Mango Chutney

Craft(y) Project: Art Mail 4

2015-08-23T05:34:00.001-07:00

Yes, the few people who are reading this, it's time for another post about recent art mail packages I've sent out! Oh, the excitement. The feels. The suspense. The drama.

What our table looked like last week

First on the list is the second one I've sent to my mom, the follow-up to the one I sent in maybe early April, which that had a springtime theme. It was also heavily Lala Pado-based, because that magazine is free and available in train stations, and their stylish lady covers are super cute. So I did a summery one.

Right, no, this bit's a picnic done with other clippings, packaging, and junk mail I'd saved.

Here's the Lala Pado part. I used a Sharpie pen to bring the cute background designs - like the flip flops, the cruise ship, her hat, etc. - into the foregound, and added part of the packaging from a cute pair of insoles I bought a while back and the designs from some pieces of Disney memo paper.

I'm pretty proud of the fact that the contents ended up having a colour scheme.

And a Disney theme. And a bird theme. Planned this. Totally. Planned it. >_>

Next is the package I made for one of the coolest people I met in Korea, an Air Force officer who was a fixture in the punk scene until he left a few months before we did. He was also a really good friend to me when I was super down and having a bad time there.

So, I decided to use old show flyers and also to make a picture of his ridiculous little dog, which had a blue mohawk at one point.

Oh, and I found the flattest snacks I could, plus a Star Wars one, to stick in there along with

the letter I wrote. He had no idea I was sending anything and it brightened up his day, which I was really happy about.

Next up: the super cute, super pink Hello Kitty-themed envelope I sent to my friend Sara, who would've been like a big sister to me back home if I'd met her sooner and we'd known each other longer. She likes cute shit and cats, so that was more than enough reason to finally use my Hello Kitty clippings.

And cutsey stickers, of course. Many, many cutsey stickers.

And that other little package you see was the flattest pink snack I could find: pickled plum sheets.

Finally, a spur-of-the-moment but Grade-A art mail achievement, the Pika-Box.

Disclaimer: I have not been to the Miraikan PokéLab exhibit, but would like to go,

and in fact picked up the flyer this part came from in Kamakura.

Those space stickers glow in the dark!

My friend Bree asked me to get this stupidly adorable little Jenga-like game for her if I saw it while at the Pikachu Outbreak event, and wouldn't you know it, it was the last one, and it was still hidden where we left it once I had gotten cash and gone back for it later in the day. Boom.

I also included a magnet from the event, a little boxed Pika-figure, and a Pika-waffle cookie snack with a collectible card thingy inside. This turned out to be a well-timed day-brightener-upper, too!

Cute Shit: Pikachu Outbreak

2015-08-18T19:17:00.002-07:00

From the 8th to the 16th there was a special "Pikachu Outbreak" dance-themed event in Yokohama, so last Monday I met Rejon at Ikebukuro and we went.

It's hard to put into words what a huge nostalgia bomb this was, but basically, it was everything you'd want from a large-scale Pikachu event in Japan.

Most every place in the immediate (or affected, I guess) area had huge decals on their windows

At the Landmark Plaza exit of Sakuragicho, they give you these nerd-tastic visors

And the Pokemon Center in the mall portion of Landmark Plaza? A complete zoo.

Exactly as crowded as you'd think. Disneyland status. But look at these fucking cookie tins!

8-bit ones with the noises they make in the game?!

Those ones on the bottom there have little clips on their hands and sit on your shoulder.

Let's be honest, I'll probably end up buying one.

Rejon: "This, what, X-Japan-era hide visual rock whatever Pikachu?

It's too much. Look at the eyebrows! It's ugly!"

Clip-on Pikachu: buy me °__°

We pretty much lost it over this derpily aderpable Ditto plush, even if they did make it lilac instead of pink. I want Lapras, too!

"Awwwww, it's so stupid! Look at Ditto-chu's little Pika-ice cream!"
(almost certainly going to end up buying this, too)

"From this angle it looks like they're ascending into heaven."
"That's how it's supposed to look! That's where Pikachu's from, where Pikachu belongs!"

Cold drink break. Heavy breathing.

In other news, I didn't know there was a dry dock at the base of Landmark Plaza!
Port cities are so cool.

After breaking for refreshments, we ventured into the heat and humidity to see the various outdoor Pika-installations.

The best part of this is that the inflatable one on deck didn't end up being the captain.

No detail was overlooked. The nautical Pikachus were perhaps the cutest, and I wish

we could've seen the sailor Pika dance, which was either on the deck of the Nippon Maru

or in the area in front of it (probably the latter).

OMG

EHRMAHGERD

Look

his

HAT

We walked all the way (it was hot as a motherfucker, it felt like a long way) to the bridge leading to the ferris wheel and other big rides that Hannes and I had gone on about a month before to get a shot of the Pikachus with the iconic wheel and had an interesting conversation about Japan's abandoned 90's theme parks along the way.

Back inside Landmark Plaza, where we had to go because I didn't have cash and the line was crazy long anyway the first time we stopped into the Pokemon Center..

This looks retardedly big when you're standing right under it. All I could think was, "Piiiiii-kaaaa.." in the voice of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

The sculpture in Queen's Square

We couldn't resist the temptation to stop into Krispy Kreme, because the shop was totally decked out in Pika this-and-thats and all of these businesses had special event deals posted on their windows. Krispy Kreme's indicated "one original glazed present", so after staring at that for a moment, I was like, "Do you want a doughnut? I mean, worst case scenario, there's no present or it's not cute, and you still have a delicious doughnut," and of course Rejon was like, "....... Yes."

Turns out that the present IS one free original glazed. At first we thought it was another of the Pikachu visors, and then we were like, "..........."

But hey, she was nice enough to get two so I could have a persent in case there was one, and then I had one more to bring home to my enormous pastry-loving ginger cat.

After a very long, sweaty day of excitement and a long train ride back, we were totally pooped by about 6. This here's my Pika-swag. Those little gachapon magnets on the right were only 100 yen, and we kept taking turns playing until Rejon got the fox Pokemon (no one can be reasonably expected to know the names of all the new ones) she's been playing with in the game lately. I also got that stupidly adorable flying Charizard Pikachu from another of the many machines they had set up.

We went back to the Pokemon Center so I could get the "Wobbling Sleepy Hammock" (more or less) game you see there, where all you do is precariously perch adorable Pikachus onto Snorlax until it all falls down, like Jenga or something. My friend Bree specifically asked for it when I checked to see if there was any Pika-thing she really wanted.

Well, it was the last one in the store, and Rejon helped me hide it on a bottom shelf under an adorable pile of sleepy Vaporeons that we hadn't noticed before and gushed over. It was miraculously still there when we did go back, and I also bought the one darling plush toy sitting conveniently on top of it.

When I went back to Landmark Plaza later that week they still hadn't restocked this game, so boom.

And finally, here's the video I took of the Pika-action. The large-scale event where everyone dances together with all of the Pikachus was a one-time thing last weekend, unforunately, but we had an amazing time being ten again regardless. This totally makes up for the Pikachu Parade that got cancelled at the DDP in Seoul last year.

Hamburg

2015-08-17T03:44:00.002-07:00

Anyone notice how I decided to post this following my last blog entry about my long-standing vegetarianism?

No?

I'll just show myself out.

Hannes and I went to visit his good friend Lars for a couple of days in January, and as with the other places in Germany we ended up seeing, I didn't Google a damn thing in advance so I'd have no idea of what to expect. Usually I have a list of potential places and things to see as well as vegetarian-friendly restaurants in different areas, all within reach of each other but flexibly-spaced enough to accommodate changes in plans, weather, and other things.

But this was my boyfriend's home country and all of his friends treated me like a family member, so for the first time it wasn't up to me to plan everything and figure out how to get everywhere. It was great.

Lars has lived in the northeastern part of the city for years, and took us around to see some of the most famous sights of one of Europe's biggest port cities.

First was Rote Flora in Schanzenviertel, this big-ass derelict building in the most hipstery district of town. It's interesting because it's the remnants of the Rote Flora Theatre, built in 1888, that's been occupied by squatters and gutter punks since 1989. There are events - especially of the anti-fascist variety - and a skatepark, among other things, though I still don't really get how people were allowed to occupy the space for so long. It's a famous cultural landmark now, and I took probably the exact same pictures of it you'll find a thousand times over on Google:

There was also an archetypal old homeless guy wandering around back here,

but taking a picture of him didn't seem very politically correct.

Kodama spotted

It's not a hipster town until you literally have an entire store dedicated to

mustache care products...

This girl was one of my favourites, especially with all the interesting and

conflicting things going on in the background

Do you wanna build a snowmaaaaan?

... it could also be skeptical one with catfish mouth parts?

After walking around Schanzenviertel, Lars took us to his favourite place, the Old Elbe Tunnel. He said he felt like favouriting such a well-known spot was kind of trite, but it's so interesting, the view on the other side is great, and it's so different from old governmental edifices, statues, and whatever else cities usually have on offer in the way of architectural achievements. It's over 100 years old and connects the city with the docks and shipping yards on the other side of the Elbe River.

These are for cars and still run, though it's mostly just tourists and people out for a stroll now.

Woooo, another awesome place for my hard plastic-bottomed combat boots that

are slippery on hard, flat surfaces such as metal staircases and icy streets that were kind of

a terrible winter buy!

so views. such cool. many crossbeams. wow.

I couldn't get a good picture of them in the weird lighting, but those rectangles on the wall are decorative glazed terra cotta plates that have sturgeon, flat fish, and other Elbe-related things on them.

And on the other side waiting for us: hot chocolate with rum in it, or "Lumumba".

WHY DIDN'T I EVER THINK OF THIS?

Also, how fucking awesomely progressive and well-informed is a place that names its alcoholic hot chocolate after an anti-imperialist Congolese leader?

It's hard to respect a photogenic person's unstated but clear dislike of having their picture taken. Sorry. Not sorry.

So after drinking delicious alcoholic winter beverages with profound names, smoking, and enjoying the view, we headed back through the tunnel and then back across town to Lars' place to chill before going on drinking on the Reeperbahn that night.

This looks pretty cool when you view it in full size and can see the foggy skyline a bit better.

But wait, there was another delicious thing I can't believe I never thought of waiting for us: kumpir!

Pretty cute for a tiny Turkish fast food place, right?

Kumpir is a baked potato bar. Omfg. Why are these not everywhere, right?

Now, our finished potatoes totally look like barf because of the sauce on top and because of some very yellow lighting, but what you can see above is the making of my completely obscene potato that was almost too big for the box to be closed even without toppings. I think I got spinach, feta, mushrooms, tomatoes, and... curry sauce? Something like that. Fuck it was delicious.

We were pretty beat, though. Hannes is like a baby and tends to pass out after eating and sitting down to relax, and I had some really mean cramps that Lars brought me hot gluhwein for (we were seriously sober for maybe 20 minutes of that weekend); so we put on a movie in the background and made fun of Hannes while he slept.

And then Lars' girlfriend came over, and we went out to meet their friends and get drunk.

Insert clever caption about achieving drunken singularity

... Aaaand next day!

The view across the street from where we stayed

And the station, which I think is really cool both outside and in.

We were in Hamburg once more for the week-long roadtrip we took around the country, but that wasn't enough. I'd really like to go back; it's basically like a giant German Brooklyn.

12 Years a Vegetarian

2015-08-01T22:08:00.002-07:00

So, it's August now, and it's 2015, and that means it's been 12 years since I went completely vegetarian. Red meat was way the hell off the menu a while before that, and I'd never been big on eating any kind of sea creature, even though fresh beer-battered fish being cooked is one of my favourite smells. That's got to be at least partly because it reminds me of childhood vacations in and around San Diego, but I think it'd smell wonderful either way. Wonderful-smelling or not, though, I think I only ever ate occasional tuna and maybe whitefish as a kid, and had Long John Silver's popcorn shrimp a few times.

Once when I was about ten my uncle tricked me into eating a bite of calamari, and instantly regretted it because he could see that I was genuinely upset. Other than that, though, I'm proud of the fact that I've never eaten crab or lobster, because those giant sea roaches are super interesting. I'm proud of the fact that the only lapses in my diet have been accidental and have occurred while I've been living in Asia, because this part of the world is obviously a fishy, meaty minefield where you have to be super careful and where most people don't get what you will and won't eat even if you can say it or show it to them in the right language.

In Japan, "vegetarian" usually seems to mean, "No visible pieces of meat, but seafood is fine"; in Taiwan it seems to mean, "Right, no meat or fish, except when I feel like eating it sometimes"; and in Korea it's something like, "What do you mean 'no ham'? It comes with ham and ham is good for you. I'll sneak some in at the last minute because I can't physically stop myself and personally feel that you need the protein". I don't even want to guess about what it's like in China (-shudder-).

I remember vividly when I announced in Chili's the summer before I started high school that I really wanted to have the chicken enchilada soup one more time, but that after that delicious, cheesy bowl, I wasn't ever going to have anything meaty again.

Yep, here it is. This shit's delicious, really. (Source)

My mom understandably wasn't sure whether or not to take me 100% seriously because I'm a big talker and was just a kid at the time, but when it comes to the important stuff, I do what I say I'm going to do.

And she was glad, because chicken was the last thing I stopped eating and we'd both OD'ed on it pretty hard over the course of maybe a couple of years. For as much as a few years after that landmark lunch she could barely look at it.

Based on their appearance, occupation, course of study, beliefs, sexual orientation or other things, some people are forced to answer one question repeatedly during the course of every conversation with new acquaintances and friends, because the topic in which it's centered inevitably comes up.

I try not to broadcast the whole, "I don't eat meat or seafood and have multiple shifting but non-life threatening food allergies" thing, but it's one of those ones that's going to come up whether you want it to or not. If you've successfully avoided it, your boyfriend or best friend or cousin (no accusations here, just examples; we're cool, guys) or whoever's with you is probably going to bring it up, wanting to share some interesting, relevant, innocuous info with your new companions.

Le sigh.

So, here we go. Everybody be all like, "Why are you a vegetarian?"

And over the years I've trimmed it down to, "Eating animals isn't necessary."

That's it. It's just not. And it's really selfish to eat large quantities of animal products, because it's terrible for the animals and the planet and probably your arteries.

The scripted response: "But meat's delicious!"

Yes, okay, we all know how much the Internet loves bacon and and how eating huge portions of marinated pork is part of your culture, how it's sometimes hard to avoid eating meat even if you're trying, and how cravings are hard to ignore. But everyone agrees after a moment of arguing back guiltily even though I'm not all up in their grill (ha!) or trying to convert them or anything:

"Well, you're right, I don't need to eat it to survive and it's bad for the planet".

Some people go a step further, though, and rationalise it by arguing that eating a vegetarian diet isn't much better for Earpf (ala DMX) in terms of resource and energy consumption, always pointing to the least prudent and environmentally-friendly crops that also happen to be in the news a lot, such as fatty nuts.

To be fair (and to come at this Stateside), yes, Virginia, growing almonds in large quantity the California desert is one of the dumbest ideas ever, we can all agree on that. Importing rice from naturally wet states in the deep South would be a much better idea than trying to maintain paddies in the Mojave, and in 25 years people sitting on permanently empty ancient aquifers are going to look back on this gross resource mismanagement and collectively facepalm.

I was going to cite some popularly circulated statistics on how much is required to produce, let's say, one pound of beef (we don't do metric in the overseas), but this is actually very convoluted and difficult to measure. For example, free-range beef is difficult to factor in and average out with cattle that are fed an all-grain diet. The largest and least efficient all-grain diets are the domain of the U.S., but these range from the amounts used by hyper-detrimental large-scale feedlot operations to those used in highly efficient smaller-scale ones that are much, much less common.

I was also going to include a right-wing source in the form of a Forbes article that appears near the top of Google search results on this topic, but the article was snide, condescending, and straight-up douchey. Not only that, but the guy didn't use any relevant statistics whatsoever, seemed to mostly want an excuse to broadcast his annoyance with and possibly seething hatred for vegetarians, and the entire comments section ripped him a new asshole about how uninformed he was, so...

Some statistics that can be agreed upon, though, are the facts that about 40% of world grain and more than half of U.S. grain is used to feed livestock (source). Assuming an all-grain diet going into edible red meat and not including things that aren't popularly consumed in the U.S. such as intestines, it takes approximately 4.67 pounds of corn (source) to produce one pound of beef. I'm not sure about wheat, soy, and other grains, but a cow does not live on corn alone, right?

For the most-popularly searched for and damning statistic, though, we're back to water. For one pound of beef, 1847 gallons of water (source), or 2464 for California beef according to the Water Education Foundation. According to that first source about grain, which I think is the most reliable, beef requires a total (fossil) energy input to output ratio of 54:1. By comparison, chicken requires 4:1, turkey 13:1. In total, producing animal protein requires eight times as much fossil fuel energy than producing plant protein, but the animal variety is only 1.4 times more nutritious to humans.

And then you have to take into consideration the huge amounts of clear land required to raise large grazing animals, the deforestation, the slashing and burning of huge swathes of the Amazon, the methane output, the antibiotics and hormones, the disgusting chemical-rich byproducts leaking into the ocean and other bodies of water, and so on and so forth ad nauseam.

After spending a month in Germany I became allergic to dairy and eggs for the second time in my life (the blood test results included a lot of other things, too, and were depressing at best), just as I had a month after moving to Korea. This second time the reactions thankfully haven't been as severe, so right now I'm supposed to be on a forced vegan diet as I was 2 1/2 years ago, but I've been cheating and just dealing with the inflammation, nausea, and acid reflux that follow a convenience store iced coffee or some melted cheese.

But something I have been doing since moving to Tokyo is using almond milk in curries, oatmeal, and coffee, and to go back to the rationalising meat eaters' point about how wasteful fatty nuts are, I feel pretty bad about it. I mean, think about how much went into producing the almonds that were painstakingly crushed and milked to in turn produce this new watery, not-very-flavourful substance. And then think about the fact that the cartons were shipped via trucks, ships, and planes to the other side of the planet. Ugh. Not very responsible or sustainable.

Sometimes it feels like you just can't win. Your new milk might be cruelty-free, but it easily guzzles just as much energy as its tastier predecessor. This is why people don't want to deal with altering their diets: it's complicated and a huge pain in the ass. It's the same reason people are losing their shit over Cecil the lion but don't have anything to say about ongoing Chinese poaching atrocities in Myanmar: people can't deal with every single relevant item in today's all-connected all-media all-sharing 24/7 world. If we think about the fact that additional fossil fuel energy goes into the transporting and melting down of recycled plastics, we'll go crazy. But that's still better than just throwing them into a hole in the ground or the ocean and seeing how many years it takes for them to break down and in some cases enter the food chain, right? Right?!

Yes, we usually tell ourselves, feeling soothed for a few seconds, up until we realise that producing solar panels and large lithium-ion batteries probably requires so much fossil energy and does so much environmental damage that in the end, we're probably only breaking even, if that. Aaarrgh!

Why am I musing about this stuff and what is my point? Well, I guess it's that we should all try to be as conscious as possible of what we're using and where it comes from. It's hard, and I obviously don't live in a treehouse and cultivate my own organic local crops as a hemp-touting subsistence farmer who spends her free time actively protesting fracking and the building of new dams and oil pipelines, but fuck, who is?

Those people are too extreme and annoying and out of touch for most of us to listen to for more than 30 seconds, even if we admire the strength of their convictions. I mean, militant vegans have even chewed me out plenty of times for not being one of them. Why the fuck would I want to be? You're the single most egotistical, condescending, irritating, socially inept person on the very planet you claim to want to save so badly. How? By driving everyone else so bonkers that they're forced to leave and start a new civilisation in another star system?

Once in a vegan restaurant in Seoul I listened to a white dude trying to pick up a Korean girl by telling her about how he was an empath, how he literally felt other peoples' feelings. Those people are worse than the dickbag who wrote that Forbes non-article, because at least Forbes guy probably knows how to have a good time. Good grief.

Don't even get me started on the ethics of factory-farmed but unfertilised chicken eggs versus organic and free-range but decidedly fertilised ones. That could go in circles for days, bringing to mind the popular neverending debate about which came first.

It's probably too late for much of the planet as we currently know it anyway, but that doesn't mean we all can't do our best to recycle and buy second-hand and thereby reduce not only waste but the demand for new products and the fossil energy needed to produce and transport them. It doesn't mean anyone should think it's okay to air condition their apartment or house to the approximate temperature of a meat locker or overheat it instead of using another blanket, because that's stupidly wasteful even when you can afford it. You know?

So anyway, if anyone who wants to eat less meat for the reasons touched on above or any others has happened upon this and has followed me this far, here are my 9 most satisfying, nutritious, and versatile foods that will serve you well, not taking into account their environmental impact and/or ethics:

These things are full of vitamins and protein and can all be sweet or savory, breakfast, dinner, or dessert. Mushrooms of all types, lentils, black beans, sweet potatoes, and bell peppers are also at the top of my list.
Skeptical? Well how about a delicious quinoa bowl for breakfast, broccoli salad, tofu cream, putting yogurt in your hearty lentil soup, or concocting a sweet spinach smoothie? I don't know about you, but all of those make me hungry. You at least have to look at the photos.

If the issue with eating less meat and less processed food in general is that you can't really cook, well, then, you have to learn sometime. People will try to tell you that constantly buying fresh ingredients is more expensive that going for quicker, more processed, or already-prepared things, but they're full of shit. Especially if you're buying in-season. I'm the most frugal person I know and can assure you that fresh, at least semi-local veggies are cheaper than meals in a box, even if preparing and cooking them is also quite time-consuming.

If you're concerned about getting enough protein, iron, and other essential nutrients, consider that my iron levels were described by my doctor as "surprisingly robust" shortly after I started eating eggs a few years ago, and thanks in part to dark green leafy things. Everone's nutritional needs are different and it's possible that a few people who for some reason need more protein than average would basically need to eat meat or fish from time to time, but if you're an unhealthy vegetarian, you're doing it wrong, friend.

B12 is the only essential nutrient a vegetarian diet could chronically lack and the only case in which I personally believe it might be necessary or at least prudent to take something in vitamin tablet form. For a little while I thought I had a B12 deficiency, but the same blood test that described my iron levels as very good described my B12 levels as being on the lower end of normal; ultimately, I think it was an anxiety issue but never knew for sure.
A deficiency in this key vitamin can have far-ranging consequences and can be quite difficult to pin down, so it's probably better to err on the side of caution, especially if you've decided to raise your children with or switch them to an animal-free diet.

This spinach pan frittata is probably one of my favourite recipes of all time; it's easy, fast, low in calories, and requires very few ingredients. This amazing quinoa bake, these risotto-stuffed mushroom caps and these stuffed bell peppers are a couple of others.

Maintaining a vegan, gluten-free, and supposed-to-be-soy-free (that last blood test man, damn) diet in Japan is driving me up the wall, but my ridiculous shifting allergies are one of many reasons why it's good to know how to cook. You may not have any, but they can come and go, so you never know. Here are my favourite completely vegan (except for one that can easily be made so) things I've made since we moved here:

Chickpea, sweet potato, pumpkin, and spinach curry with soft crumbled tofu and soy milk.

Lentil soup and oversized spicy home fries.

Mexican rice!

This was an important discovery: you put a can of diced tomatoes plus just a little water, salt and pepper into the rice cooker. Saute finely-chopped bell peppers, onions and garlic in a pan, then add kidney beans and sweet corn. Then dump in the tomatoey rice and mix it all together. Serve with sliced avocado arranged on top and a dollop of spicy salsa taquera.

Non-breaded vegetable croquettes, composed mainly of a mix of potato and sweet potato with medium-sized chunks of sweet yellow bell pepper and green onion inside for texture variation.

Atsuage (deep-fried tofu) with bok choy and twice-baked new potato halves filled with a mashed mixture of the scooped-out potato, onions, garlic and finely-chopped mixed mushrooms. The tops have such a nice consistency from the broiler because I put a wee bit of mozzarella cheese on them. That salad dressing is also clearly not vegan; it's the creamy garlic one from Ikea.

BUT you could just, like, not sprinkle mozzarella and do balsamic instead.

Veggie quinoa and refried black beans with green chiles.

So, you see, if it's not only possible but delicious for someone with allergies (that they admittedly have the luxury of ignoring a little bit) in Japan, it's stupidly easy in a country like the United States, Canada, Australia, or Germany. It's been a long and interesting ride for me, and those who don't need to avoid wheat products would do well to check out couscous and the many delicious wheat-based meat substitutes readily available in supermarkets in Western countries. They were shit ten or fifteen years ago, but because there's an increasingly large market for such things, competition forced the biggest companies to step up their game.

Beyond eating a healthier and more sustainable diet (minus the imported almond milk and quinoa I'M SORRY), it's important to understand the supply chain so we know that big business isn't poisoning us or forcing 11 year-old Vietnamese kids to work 11-hour shifts stitching together things we similarly do not need. Thinking about all this stuff might be cumbersome and sometimes stressful and frustrating, but that's the price of living in this new world where everything is connected all the time. Maybe you shouldn't buy Chilean papaya in Nevada in December. I don't know, it just doesn't seem like these kinds of things can possibly last for very long. Let's keep what we've got as beautiful and tasty as we can while we've still got it.

Weekend (7.17 - 7.20): Japanland: Yokohama and Kamakura

2015-07-26T17:44:00.002-07:00

4 1/2 months into living here, we finally got out of the world's biggest city for a couple of days.

We left after Hannes finished with work on the Friday going into a 3-day weekend (4-day for me, because I also had Friday off) to stay at a random stranger's place in Yokohama.

Japan seems like one of the safest and best possible places to finally try Airbnb, and since everything was booked up way (in some cases years) in advance in anticipation of the annual summer festival and fireworks show over the bay, it was our only option.

I'm glad I went on there and found the cheapest places available, too, because the first one turned out to be a real winner. No irony, totally ceral.

It was a few stops from Yokohama Station, not hard to find following the photo directions with drawn arrows, and when we got there, I called the guy. He reminded me that the key was in the postbox, and to just go on in and get comfy. We assumed this was his own apartment and were pretty taken aback when he said he'd be home in like an hour or whatever, so you know, Internet strangers, just go on in and be cool.

Originally I'd wanted to meet a friend who lives there for drinks in Sakuragicho - especially once she told me that she'd gotten a job as a nanny and was moving to New York - but she worked late that night (fucking Japanese companies, having people work until 9 or 10 on Fridays, really) and then never got back to me for the rest of the weekend.

We walked around a little and ended up at a tiny back-alley Hawaiian-themed bar called Sammy's before deciding to just load up on convenience store drinks and go back to our spacious rental apartment.

We got back and met the 28 year-old guy whose family owned the building we were in, found out that he actually lived in the (much newer, nicer) one next door, that he and his family have a number of properties and interesting businesses, and that he was spending his last officially unmarried night with us of all people. The next morning he and his fiance went and handed in their marriage license papers and made it official a ways ahead of the ceremony in November, and before heading to a luxurious hotel suite with a view of the bay that the guy - Takuya - managed, by some miracle, to get.

It was super interesting, and Takuya was so nice. When we found out he was technically getting married the next day, we were of course like, "Congratulations! Let's get drunk!" and he was like, "Yeaaaah!", but then he was like, "I need to go to bed". We sat and talked about all kinds of interesting stuff for a couple of rounds, including the "travel cafe" he has in Tokyo, before his eyes started rolling around in all directions and he just couldn't anymore.

I couldn't find a quick camera setting to deal with the apparently weird lighting, but we ended up having not only this huge master bedroom with a copy of The Goldfinch sitting on the oversized tea table and a balcony the size of our whole apartment to ourselves, but the entire apartment and therefore the whole building. Takuya was like, "Oh, and there's no one staying here tomorrow, so you can just leave all your stuff and come back and get it by like 8 or 9 tonight or whatever".

And the air conditioner was properly chilly.

$36. Awesome.

So, the next day, we set out to Yamashita Park and planned on going to Chinatown from there, because it was the only thing in Yokohama Hannes was especially interested in seeing.

My collection of these is coming along very nicely, in case anyone (-cough-mom-cough-)

who hasn't seen the Facebook album I dedicated to them is wondering.

"Mine?"

Because it was the weekend of the summer festival, vendors were just setting up their stalls all along the park, and Hannes got himself a nice beer. I thought about buying some goma dango (deep-fried red bean-filled rice balls with sesame seeds) but decided to wait until we got to Chinatown.

And I included this one because it was the only picture either of us took of any of the thousands and thousands of girls and ladies wearing their lovely colourful yukata that weekend.

Then Hannes spotted the area where the boat tours are and was like,

"Boat tour! Let's do one!"

The cormorants were also doing the, "Mine?" thing

Cigarette disposal unit is displeased by your shenanigans

We chose this boat partly because it was tall and had a "roof", but it turned out that the roof was enclosed, thereby mostly defeating the purpose of it, and turning it into a greenhouse instead.

Serious kitty thoughts

I'm proud of this one, it was extremely windy and hard to hold my camera

Did I mention that I started this morning and the weekend by realising that I'd managed to forget my ENTIRE makeup bag? That's right, I removed it to shove something else into my bag and then never replaced it. Whole weekend, absolutely 0 makeup. Not even lip balm. Ugh.

All in all I'm glad we went ahead and plowed though all the main touristy things in Yokohama, but guys, do not go on one of these boat tours unless you know for a fact that it's really nice.

This 60-minute one was about 30 bucks for the both of us, and about 70% of it was whatever the opposite of scenic is, cruising past refineries, cargo freighters, and all of the other unattractive, commercial-industrial bits of this busy port. Not only that, but just after painstakingly backing out from the dock, we re-docked to pick up more people, who must have paid less, because they didn't spend 15 extra minutes backing out and re-parking. That's some bullshit right there. Just make it a 45-minute tour that leaves from one place. Dicks.

Anyway, walking back into the city from Yamashita Park, you hit Chinatown.

I really like this one, it looks like a scene from a movie where they had to make the setting

as obvious as possible.

Though the panda merch is plentiful here, I bought nary a pencil, pouch, or sticker.

There was lots of cool stuff ON THE GROUND

Waiting way too damn long for delicious fresh goma dango

Still felt bad about taking this even though I was very polite and thanked her..

It looks just like Taiwan.

I, for one, embrace our new panda comrade overlords.

After spending too long walking around in the hot muggy rain trying to find a Taiwanese restaurant I'd left a couple of maps open for that got fucked up by Starbucks' non-wifi (didn't elaborate because remembering that made me too angry), we got into an argument and decided to go to one of the other places I'd found on Happy Cow, in Sakuragicho.

It's a Hawaiian restaurant called Manoa Aloha Table.

Looks delicious and fresh, right? IT WAS TERRIBLE.

If we hadn't spent so long in the disgusting sauna-like weather trying to find something I could have we would've sent it all back, but we were really hungry and desperate. It was so bad that, the very afternoon we got home, I finally got my own Happy Cow account and wrote a comically scathing review of it.

At this point we were hot, sweaty, tired, pissed off, and so on. This trip marked our one-year anniversary, and I was really down because almost everything about Japan has been total shit so far, and I'd wanted this to be novel, fun, and relaxing. I felt like it'd just been a huge waste of money by the time we left that Kitchen Nightmares-level restaurant.

We absentmindedly walked toward the gravitational pull of the iconic ferris wheel, and soon found that there are also a number of other amusement park rides and attractions around it, including a Hard Rock cafe that had some kind of outdoor event going on.

#notlondon

I figured (especially in my despondent, cynical mood) that the ferris wheel would be $18 - $22 per person, based on previous experience, but it was more like $7. At its base were also the other, more intense attractions on the dock: a roller coaster and flume ride. They were even cheaper. I perked up and told the girl in the ticket booth that we wanted to ride all 3, not sure what kind of a combination discount that would entail, and it ended up being as if we'd gotten one of the six tickets for free. Not bad!

A mighty wheel she be

"Ahh!"

The roller coaster is pretty great, even if it did nearly scalp Hannes. It's called "Vanish!" because it plunges under a large pool that's part of the flume ride and takes you through a seizure-inducing tunnel back to the 1980's for about a half second, making it look from outside the ride as if it had plunged into deep water.

Definitely recommend the flume ride, too. They don't jerk you around for very long before dropping you from a pretty respectable height, and we barely even got wet.

There's also a giant multi-story arcade on the dock. As much as I wanted an Alpacasso pouchette, I didn't bother trying for one...

But we did finally find the table-flipping game! Ah-ha!

Intense, fancy prizes everywhere

Initially we considered trying to wait until it got dark to ride the ferris wheel, but we were way too tired to kill another two or three hours in the arcade. So, after some refreshing fries and ginger ale in the rain, we got on.

Hilariously enough, when I first said something about going ahead and riding it after our arms had tired out from holding up the large guns for the Terminator Salvation game, Hannes bellowed,

"Nope! Not interested!"

I was like, "But.. We bought tickets for that too."

"Oh, what? We did?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, great! Sounds fun."

-_-

That brown boxy building on the left is the Cup Noodles museum, full of interactive exhibits,

and where you can make and eat your own noodle creation.

Thanks, informative ferris wheel touch screen!

See Fuji there, between those two skyscrapers? We didn't even know it was there at first.

It's all like, "Soon".

We headed back to the apartment, took glorious, glorious showers, and chilled out with some snacks in the air conditioning for a bit, because the next Airbnb guy had messaged and told me that he wouldn't be home until about 8.

Bye, cats

That next guy was techically in Yokohama too, but only one stop (after a 15-minute bus ride to the station) away from the first station in Kamakura, near the first of a number of things I'd decided I wanted to see. We followed his instructions and the bus ended up dropping us off down the road from the actual stop, because there was an elementary school summer festival going on literally, exactly, right on the little stretch of dark, quiet, suburban road we were on. We weren't sure at first if there was a marked bus stop down the road, so we parked it and waited after calling the guy. It was also after 9 by this time and we were pretty tired. The guy said he was on his way, but he never came. I tried to call him, but he didn't answer his phone. When he finally did, he said he was there, and I said we were waiting where the bus dropped us off. After a while, I finally went down the road and found him. He was a tall, doofy guy, and he said his phone didn't really work, so we were like, "Cool. Let's go."

Luckily, he lived right up the hill from the elementary school with his Chinese wife and one year-old son. They were clearly renting out their tiny extra bedroom on Airbnb because they needed the money.

Despite how annoying trying to contact and find the guy had been, the festival wasn't anyone's fault, and they were really nice. Their son was cute and entertaining like the reviews on the site said. Their futon bedding was smelly, and I wrapped myself in the comforter like a pita because I didn't want to touch the mattress part. The next morning I found out that Hannes had sniffed it inquisitively like he does with lots of things (umbrellas, coworkers, etc.) and seriously regretted it.

There was no air conditioning or screen on the window, but thankfully, we were high up enough that it was windy and there weren't any mosquitoes.

It looked like this the next morning when I woke up.

We'd set the alarm for 8:30, and I figured I'd conveniently woken up just before it went off. 6:01. This is what 6:01 in the damn morning looks like.

My being awake woke Hannes up soon afterward, and we pretty much grabbed our stuff, sunscreened ourselves, and left as quickly as we could.

The free baby included with our stay had only cried and woken everyone up a couple of times that night, so it wasn't too bad, but also wasn't great, even for only $18 for the two of us. Whatever. We found the gem that is Takuya's aging rental apartment and plan on staying there again.

After taking the bus and the first train we transfered to the Enoden, the cute little vintage electric train that goes to Enoshima via the scenic shoreline. And this greeted us:

Kamakura: "As long as you don't do any of the things people having fun at the beach normally do, we'll get along great."

So of course the first thing we did was stop at the 7-11 on our way down to the beach to buy drinks.

We walked for quite a ways along the shore, because we saw immediately that the beach I thought we might go to at Inamuragasaki point was a mostly-deserted surfing beach. Actually, it took a little while before we found a stretch with enough sand to accommodate people, and when we did, it was not in a spot conducive to swimming. The waves were big and very sucky-outy, only good for surfing.

The view of Fuji along the way was pretty nice, though. I guess we basically are on a subtropical island, but it's easy to forget. Even when you've spotted passion flowers and a parrot on your way to the train station in the morning.

This awesome-looking breakfast spot was crowded with young couples and older folks who are obviously very financially secure, and their little dogs, too. You can order pancakes, eggs, toast, coffee, and other stuff from the window, because waiting for a table inside would take ages.

I wish I could have breakfast! We'd just grabbed stuff from the convenience store, so maybe we'll try to go another time.

We settled on the first sandy spot we came to, maybe a couple of miles from the station, once I realised that Enoshima didn't seem to be getting any closer. I looked at my worthless prepaid flip phone that had run out of money (over $20) just because of the very brief Airbnb-related calls I'd made that weekend. It was only about 9:30 A.M.

Tried to take a hotdog legs picture, failed, tiny surfer attacked Hannes' knee instead,

it was a mess

This right here is a winning beach snack combination

At 11-something when the sun had gotten too intense and I'd given up any hope that Hannes might get into the water at all, we set off back toward the station, because I wanted to take pictures of Inamuragasaki and wasn't exactly sure where the next Enoden stop was.

The black sand looks like velvet. I'd hoped to find a small black volcanic rock, but there aren't even bits of shell on these beaches. I did burn the fuck out of my feet, though, by accidentally walking barefoot through a large deep dry spot on the sand. Be forewarned, beachgoers.

We headed a couple of stations over to Hase so that we could at least try another restaurant I'd bookmarked, and in the hopes that Hannes wasn't too hot and cranky to see the famous Buddha statue there.

The restaurant is an organic, largely-vegan but fish-serving hemp cafe with an awesome view over a large, sandy beach generously dappled with colourful umbrellas. I think we'll go there next time.

It also has no air conditioning and they hadn't even turned on a small fan (Japanese people are crazy), so we were dying a little bit at first after our long walk in the sun, but then it got better. We were also able to move to the bar facing the beach after we ordered.

Most of these were even more laughably overpriced than the average patron of a stylish organic beachside hemp cafe in a resort town would expect, but the artist was nice enough. Her name's Oukubo Akiko and the whole cafe was full of her pieces.

I really liked these little (affordable) ones, and ended up getting a postcard.

We ordered the curry plus a wheat gluten cutlet, and the taco rice. Both come with little sides and there was homemade "tabasco" on the table. Hannes had a beer, and I had a glass of sweet potato shochu. It was all really nice, especially the little cups of hemp vichyssoise.

It took quite a bit of convincing because of how sweaty and oily and sandy and hot and tired we were, but when I asked a helpful guy and found out that the famous Great Buddha of Kamakura was only 900 metres up the road, Hannes had to give in and agree to see it. I mean, we were right there! It would've been crazy not to go.

Kotoku-in was crowded, but it wasn't bad at all for a summer holiday weekend.

Now I've seen the two best-known Daibutsu in Japan, hooray

But, there are actually quite a few of them, so I've still got a long list devoid of checkmarks

You can also go inside the statue, which I'll file under mildly interesting and just as hot and oven-like as you'd expect a huge metal statue full of people to be on a hot summer day.

As we left, Hannes gave us the gift of one final sexy pose before the tropical foliage.

Definitely, definitely going back to Kamakura to find an actual beach soon. Definitely.

Cute Shit: Weihnachtsmarkt

2015-07-23T21:24:00.002-07:00

Lately I've really been missing home. And our extended holiday in Germany. And Korea, with its friendly faces and cheap simple trains and shows. And basically everything that's not Japan.

Living here is hard -_-

So, fuck it: Christmas in July!

Originally Hannes had told me that the Weihnachtsmarkt, or traditional German Christmas market, would be over and packed in by the time we got to Germany just before New Years' Eve. I was disappoint.

But then, lo and behold, it was still going on!

This was the view from the awesome little studio Hannes had never lived in until that glorious time. Obviously his hometown is adorable, and these festive stalls made it even moreso for about the first week we were there.

Glogg (Blogger suddenly hates Alt codes I guess) is the Swedish variety of hot mulled wine, with golden raisins and almond slivers in it. During my first couple of weeks in what I of course now consider to be the best country ever, I tried no fewer than 7 or 8 varieties of the stuff. Had I not been so consistently drunk I might be able to remember a bit better, but that's just further testament to the efficacy of the gluhwein (the more German varieties).

I even decided to mad scientist some at home, and it actually turned out good!

A word to the wise, though: having the flavoured tea and Bacardi together alone is...

Well, you're gonna have a bad time.

The snackage consisted largely of roasted, toasted, coloured nuts, chocolate-dipped things, and deep-fried things. Also baked things, sugar-glazed things, and fruit preserves. such calories. wow.

This is a kartoffelpuffer, which is also one of the few German words I know and among the most fun to say. It's not just potato but also a bit of flour (I did so much allergy damage during the first two months of this year it's untrue), which expands to create little air pockets and therefore a light, crispy texture when the thing is deep-fried.

It's traditionally served with sugar, and Hannes' dad loads on a ton of it while his mother complains, it's pretty classic. It's also served with fruit jams and apple sauces. Not bad!

And here we have a wedge of deep-fried camembert, a roll, and lingonberry jam.

How delightfully decadent!

They even have these awesome "drinking tents" set up, but they're really much fancier than mere tents. They have woodchip floors, Festive winter woodland-wonderland decor turned up to 11, reservable tables, and full-service bars inside.

If you have a chance to visit Germany during the holidays, do it. It's so picturesque, in many cases not nearly as cold as you'd think, but rather, so warm and inviting.

Craft(y) Project: Art Mail 3

2015-07-22T23:34:00.005-07:00

It's high time I posted these snack boxes I sent out; one was paid for and went to Australia, and the other was a gift that went to Germany:

Obligatory Wasabi Soy Sauce Doritos and Green Tea Adzuki Kit Kat,

plus cute DIY kits and more!

Prizes, Prizes, Pri-zi-zes!

Oh, and I used this awesome new mustache-print duct tape my mom sent me.

Stickers stickers stickers

This rainbow explosion went to Hannes' good friends Nico and Andrea and their little daughter. I'd been wanting to send something, anything, for a while, because they were so amazing and generous to me while I was there.

And wouldn't you know it, the package arrived a few days before their daughter's birthday that I was totally unaware of. Such winning. Wow.

This glorious goldfish packing type is from Flying Tiger Copenhagen.

With both of these I sent notes, one with an original illustration, and one on a copy I made of a pen drawing I spent a good two weeks of schedule gaps finishing.

Inspired by my long, boring, generally uninspiring commutes, I dubbed it "Ogawamachi Snack Express". It was originally going to be dark and foreboding and an expression of emptiness and anxiety, but then I was like, "Nope, fuck it, don't feel like drawing buildings. Ice cream sandwich".

... in the interest of saving a bit of time (because this ongoing project is very time consuming already), I made a bunch of copies to write notes on and send out with other art mails.

... and THEN I Deepdreamed it.

Not bad for something that was almost black and white; at least I got a bird and a rat face instead of just dogs.

This next one was finished in April (ahhh!) and I'm only just now sending it to Washington state, to a really nice guy I went to college with and who lived in Japan before I did. It's cafe themed because he works at Starbucks, and because that was one of the easier things for me to do with the magazine and other cuttings I had.

This last one is for another friend I went to college with, who is sadly also leaving Japan soon. We both love Futurama, and since I had this Gundam flyer on hand, I decided to make both sides of her envelope spacey. I actually really like how the front here came out:

She gave me the idea of exchanging short stories as a form of art mail, which I thought was awesome. I kind of sort of wrote one (that is, as you can see, very short indeed) about commuting after she gave me the idea, and that's what also gave me the idea to draw that train hurtling through that silly snack city. Thanks, Evanuska!

And finally, last but certainly not least, the very quick but thoughtful first reply! Hooray!

This one also came from someone who's leaving Japan very soon (aaarrghhh!), but it's so awesome. That fan card is holographic and makes a really cute miniature fireworks show when you turn it.

And as for the Golducks, well, I'm trying to decide on a way to turn them into oversized jewelry. This particular friend, Zac, does various forms of 8- and 16-bit video game art, and pearler beads are of course perfect for that. Love it!

Weekend (6.27 - 6.28): Harajuku at Last

2015-07-04T22:11:00.004-07:00

Now that we have money to spend for the first time since last December (yay!), we've started going out and doing stuff like normal people, at long last.
People be all like, "Have you gone to this and that and the other super cute fun place in Tokyo?!" And I'm like, "Bitch, what do you think?" I got a shitty job I hate immediately after landing here and have been completely broke since, largely because I put my entire first paycheck since before Christmas into getting us out of the disgusting sharehouse we were staying at and into our own apartment. Our free time is spent going to the grocery store, cooking, cleaning, making long miserable journeys to and from Ikea to furnish this place, and so on, just like any other normal, boring adults. It's just the tedious rhythm of life, occasionally punctuated by a hardcore or thrash metal show.

I want those times to be over. Things aren't looking great in terms of my other job prospects right now, but maybe they'll pick up in a month. The important thing is to actually start enjoying our time here instead of being constantly stressed out and pissed.

So, last weekend, Hannes and I went to the best restaurant we've found at our home station, an Israeli one called Shamaim. Their hummus, falafel, dill onions and other salads are exactly what you want them to be. Their pita bread, I predict, will be one of the more likely causes of my imminent death, because it's so stupidly delicious and soft that I want to live in it, even if I am allergic to it. Milk is back off the list of things that don't kill me, too, but we've also been ordering their lovely little creamy desserts. I think the caramel cinnamon one with raisins and the grenadine with peanuts are the best.

These pics are actually from the first time we went to Shamaim, when I was so depressed about how my virtually non-existent job prospects here have made me feel so worthless that I was completely silent on the long train ride back home (to this station, that is). Hannes cheered me up by being awesome and started what will probably become a tradition of ordering caipirinhas every time we go there.

The free bellydancing show last Friday was a lot of fun, though the woman dancing had to be at least 55 years old. She was wearing silver and gold, and honestly, was still going strong, living her life and being awesome. I didn't have a camera of any kind on me, so I didn't get any photos. Actually, we knew that the free shows were the last Friday of each month, but we hadn't correlated it consciously at all. We just thought of going because the place is delicious.

We ended up in a few of the professional-quality birthday pics of the party sitting next to us, though, and it was really nice and jaunty all around.

The next day Hannes had to go to an international economic syposium at Keio University for work and I spent the morning writing more cover letters - I've lost count of how many I've done now, as I've applied for everything from international used auto sales to professional image consulting - and applying for a couple of jobs before meeting NiQui and Rejon in Harajuku.

4 months in Tokyo and I still hadn't been. You know, that whole thing of being broke and not doing anything fun that I opened this post with. As I told them, I could practically see my teenage self looking back at me in the mirror every day with nothing but contempt and occasionally trying to strangle me through the glass.

We went to Bodyline and had a good laugh at some less-fortunate design combinations and what it would be like trying to cram our boobs into dresses half the width of the perfectly average and healthy Western woman.

I found one of those little clip-on mini side hats that I kind of wanted for only 500 yen, but didn't end up getting it. It was a summery little number with a ribbon and spray of flowers. Since I'm still thinking about it, I should probably go back for it.. >_>

The other obligatory store to hit was the 4-story Harajuku Kiddy Land, and holy shit, I thought I was safely beyond the point where I could be overwhelmed, but this place proved me wrong.

Their sections are organised by character/franchise, so you know, there's a Crayon Shin-chan section, a Gudetama one, even one for Cheburashka (I want those teacups so bad).

There's a display of dancing Sanrio robot plush toys that's way more hypnotic than it should be.

The Sailormoon section is at once glorious and heartbreaking, because of course, the new TV series is just an enormous merchanising cash cow explosion, and the items aren't cheap.

There's also a TV in the wall above that section showing the original early 90's episodes, or at least the intro, and you'd better believe that everyone from second-grade girls to women in their 40's stop and look up at it with religious reverence, recalling from years past how the catchy theme song emboldened them to live out their dreams and always stand up for what's right and good.

(-wipes tear from eye-)

The Disney sections only just barely stop short of being totally stupefying. NiQui was nice enough to give me the coins I needed to get an adorable Stitch phone charm from a vending machine by the bathroom, because I figured that was one of the most affordable options.

In the Powerpuff Girls section we stopped to watch the episode you can see playing, where the evil mime (that's redundant, isn't it?) takes all the colour out of the world and the girls turn into a rock band and sing that adorable song about love making the world go 'round.

Miffy pouches that are made to look like realistic cookies. Star Wars Lego sets. Grown British women running up and down the stairs: "Can we play with it when we get back?" "That's why I bought it!" (insert near-hysterical childlike laughter). It's a magical, magical place.

Look at these things. I literally knelt on the floor and stared at them for like 5 minutes.

Hannes and I saw some things like this in a museum in Berlin, intricate paper dioramas that create a vivid three-dimensional scene when you look at them head-om. I wish I couldn't gotten the Kiki and Totoro ones better. They're also like 20 bucks, and I still want them.

Aside from the Stitch charm, I managed to make it out of the store with nothing but two adorable postcards to add to my collection:

We walked to the neighbouring Omotesando, a swanky and expensive shopping area with all the big designer brands you normally find in places that attract those adjectives, and went to Flying Tiger Copenhagen. That place is great; I've seen a few of their totes around but wasn't sure what they sold. It's like if a brand like French Bull had babies with Ikea. Got myself a little orange plastic goldfish pencil sharpener for less than a dollar. Good times.

There's also a See's Candies in Omotesando, and because everything is freshly imported, it's also freshly 165% more expensive. I asked how much the individual truffles would be, and we each got one even though they were almost $4.

We ate them outside a convenience store along with cheap, refreshing alcoholic drinks and talked about the Japanese economy. It was great.

Other stops included a Thai restaurant and a novelty condom shop. It's too bad there aren't any pictures of me, because I like the outfit I was wearing. Maybe next time.

Thanks for showing me a good time, guys!

While we were out I grabbed the latest issue of Metropolis, and look, they did an article about Lactose Intoler-art! Good for him!

On Sunday Hannes and I awoke to the now-all-too-familiar hell of knowing that we had to go back to Ikea to finish furnishing our apartment. We needed a few side tables, curtains (just using the typhoon shutter has been pretty annoying), some kind of bathroom shelving unit, and so on. Le sigh.

I've collected photos of quite a few of these now.

Kind of post-apocalyptic, right?

And finally, here's what I can only hope was our last post-shopping Swedish flat-packed furniture feast ever, because god damn. Neither of us ever wants to go back again.

But at least we got out and did things!

Warnemünde

2015-06-29T06:27:00.000-07:00

One of the several Germany posts from the beginning of the year I hadn't finished and posted yet, this one is from shortly after New Year's, when Hannes' parents took us to the waterfront.

This particular waterfront is a resort town and section of Rostock called Warnemünde, where the Warnow River empties into the Baltic. This was the first of no fewer than 957 things that were "...nice, but so much better in summer!" that I was of course very happy to see even if it was at the wrong time. It was violently windy, and we got painfully sandblasted walking down to the end of the jetty adjacent to the beach, but it was lovely.

"Ow!"

"What?!"

Hannes' mom's camera got sandblasted enough that it stopped working after this;

I'm glad I was able to get a few really cool pictures without such serious reprocussions.

These are by a fairly famous local sculptor named Jo Jastram.

Hannes' grandpa (maternal) - sort of a jack-of-all-creative-trades -

apprenticed under him up until they had a falling out.

Stupidly picturesque balance of primary colours is.. Well, you know.

A couple of the stalls on the boardwalk were selling bread, fresh-baked

in large stone ovens, right there. It kind of reminded me of San Francisco.

"Wait, I need to get a picture of this,"

"It's a llama. There's a llama right here."

Llama: |:3

They took us to a nice restaurant with delicious hot apple wine, an enormous

cheesy oven-baked vegetable gratin (which kind of seems to be the standard

German vegetarian option), and of course beautiful-looking seafood.

It was a pretty glorious afternoon. What a relaxing time that was! I'm glad a got my fill, because really, Tokyo has been almost nothing but stress and aggravation so far. Maybe it seems kind of soon, but I can't wait for the next seaside vacation Dx

Axel Stocks

2015-06-21T03:58:00.002-07:00

A few years ago I met and eventually posted about a uniquely stylish artist with a powerful presence I happened to meet at a bar in a town called Prescott, after my friend Carl and I had downed an entire bottle of cake-flavoured vodka in something like 25 minutes, gone out, and continued drinking there.

I made a post about an interesting Italian immigrant architect when I found out through my former high school painting teacher that he had died in 2013, because I feel like his experimental, environmentalist, distinctly-mid-20th-century-futurist conceptualisations are one of the defining qualities of the Arizona desert.

Then there was the dark period I went through at the end of my first year in Korea (that basically continued for the first half of the second), when I revisited the love I had for Russian literature and Tchaikovsky as a teenager and found out about a cool animator who fit very well into the whole motif.

I'd really hoped that there would be more posts about individual artists after doing that first one, but it hasn't worked out that way. I haven't even made a fashion post in moons possibly numbering in the double digits; it's practically a travesty.

But just now, through another artist I like named Paul Komoda (yes, Virginia, you do indeed have Facebook stalkers), I found out about another one, who was the former's mentor. Like Paolo Soleri, though, the only reason I know his name or have ever seen pictures of his work is that he's unfortunately just passed away.

His name was Axel Stocks, and I'm learning more about him through observing his friend and mentee grieve publicly over social media than the rest of the collective Internet can apparently teach me in its entirety, so maybe I should be appreciative of that and try to share the small pieces of his legacy that I can find.

What a bamf, seriously

When a true artist and eclectic dies in New York City, everybody should take a minute to notice and consider the cultural relevance of it. Though in this case I'd never heard of Axel Stocks before, I never made a post about Jimmy Mirikitani and still feel like I should have, so I'm not going to skip it.

Frustratingly, the Lower East Side Biography Project interviewed him as part of a series called Stemming the Tide of Cultural Amnesia, but their interviews are aired on a local Manhattan channel and none of the excerpts on YouTube include Axel Stocks. Komoda has posted a personal video or two from about 25 years ago, but I'm not about to take those. The main gallery that hosted his exhibitions, called Art on A, posted that he'd been missing for two weeks before he was found, which bears sad similarity to a story a close friend just told me last week about a terrible personal experience of his.

While the man's anthropomorphic, sometimes grotesquely sexualised sculptural jewelry pieces, sketches, and paintings rendered in his own blood might strike the average person as Satanic or otherwise darkly occult, the man himself thought that occultism was a load of shit and that the only true magic was to be made through art. Paul Komoda said that knowing him was the closest he could have ever come to being in the presence of an actual wizard.

In their article about his Bloody Genius show a couple of summers ago, Juxtapoz had some pretty hilarious praise for him as the "protégé of Salvador Dalí and jeweler to Axl Rose, this Axl [sic] has authentic Papal robes in his closet and cites Lady GaGa for saving his life".

Here's a piece he did that's clearly a slightly altered Harkonnen Chair...

... and here's him sitting in another one.

I'm not sure if he knew Giger, but it'd make a lot of sense if they'd at least met and gotten along.

And here's him with John John Jesse, the punk rock painter of usually-half-naked hot girls who's done album and poster art for Agnostic Front and cites a mixture of Art Nouveau and Pop Surrealism (among other, more pretentious things) as his influences:

Axel Stocks also owned no fewer than two "annoying" cockatoos that, from the very little I know, seem to have enjoyed perching on peoples' heads above all other worldly pleasures:

Ever seen a festering, blistered, saggy-titted butterfly before?

Me neither.

Ever seen or read Witchblade?

That's what these intricate, Bronze Age-looking pieces remind me of.

He seems like the kind of person who lived every day as interestingly as possible, and like he would've been awesome to know.

Craft(y) Project: Art Mail 2

2015-06-20T20:12:00.002-07:00

Took me long enough, but I finally sent out the second round of "art mail".

Since we moved here I've been having sort of a quarter life crisis, and I think the only solution is to be as personally fulfilled as possible, so I've been dying to get my shit from Korea and start painting again, but this is one of the two slow-moving projects I have to tide me over until I can sort everything out. Most of what I have to work with right now consists of clippings from free magazines picked up in train stations and sheets of packaging and cheap origami paper.

There's a town in Saitama called Moroyama with a cute second-hand shop run by a very nice older couple. Mostly they sell kitchen goods, everything is dusty, the lights often aren't on, and they open whenever they feel like it in the morning. Anyway, aside from newspaper, they also use large sheets of this silver Phoenix-printed orange paper to wrap breakable things. It also has an American southwestern vibe if you're thinking about it the right way, which is what I wanted for this envelope:

I sent a small handwritten letter, some flake stickers, and articles and clippings about music, art and fashion to this particular friend who recently left the Bay Area to reevaluate priorities and get some fresh air ("find himself" is way too trite and patronising) somewhere in New Mexico.

This next one was for a lovely, sweet Japanese woman I met and became friends with while working in Seoul. She dreams of returning to New Zealand - where she met her Korean husband - one day, opening a cafe there, and owning and raising llamas and sheep.

Originally I wanted to make a long, folded-up string of Alpacasso-inspired sheep and llamas that would accordion out like a shockingly lengthy bill in a cartoon, but after doing the first one, I realised I just wasn't going to draw that many, and cut it off at like 6.

Yeah, by the time I got to the one that was just a butt, my attention span was already spent, and I only made it to 5. I've disappointed my family, my country, and myself.

I made an envelope out of a lovely, thick, glossy flyer for an international gardening and rose show I'd been seeing at train stations in Saitama and threw in a second note on a cute bunny, some flake stickers, and paw-shaped gummies.

This next one's for a girl I went to college with and who I thought was still living in Aomori, until I messaged about her address and found out she'd been compelled by unfortunate circumstances to return Stateside. She's been working as a barista and doing freelance J - E translating on the side.

Being previously aware of her love for tea and cute things, the barista theme was kind of already in place and came together easily as a collage.

Along with the handwritten notes, I specifically sent her articles (on a J-rock icon and super cute but adult recipes) in Japanese:

Oh right, duh, and more flake stickers, because who the fuck doesn't like cute stickers.

Finally, I realised I could put together this last one pretty quickly for a certain train otaku I know living in Kochi. He spent Golden Week in central Europe. When I found out several months ago upon telling him that I was going to Germany that he'd been learning German for a while and planned on going himself, it was a weird, totally coincidental crossing of interests and points in our lives.

So, naturally, I sent him the Japanese train system-related things I had and turned the Tokyo subway map into an (upside-down) ersatz German postcard asking about his trip.

Now that we're settled, I'm hoping to get the third round of these into the mail a lot faster, though working with such limited supplies after work and on the weekends when I'm not doing something else - like spending 6 hours at Immi or quitting my job - is slow-going.

Not only that, but making each packet something personal and fitting is a bit more challenging than I thought it'd be.

Thankfully, another friend I went to college with who's also been living here in Japan told me that she writes short stories as a hobby and gave me the unique idea of what exactly I should exchange with her, but a lot of others are still up in the air.

Part of this quarter life crisis thing for me, though, is my lifelong struggle with actually finishing the projects that I start, so this is going to go on for a while, damn it. Not only that, but I miss people, want to stay in touch, and want to do it through creative expression and the gradually disappearing joy of receiving something in the mail.

So, onward!

Song of the Sea

2015-05-27T19:42:00.004-07:00

TIL there's a melancholic Irish mashup of Ponyo and Brave based on Celtic folklore.

The screenshots I took are a little blurry because I couldn't pause the player I was using without having the playbar and other things appear, but I mean, wow. Everything in this movie was meticulously planned and gloriously executed.

It centers around the selkie - the Nordic and British Isles variant of the mermaid - who is half human and half seal. Like mermaids, selkies are also beautiful, haunting muses.

Wiki'ing the other two main elements of the traditional folklore so whimsically depicted in this visually arresting film led me down a pretty deep rabbit hole of medieval tales that I'll have to pursue when I'm not tired from coughing all night: they are the Irish sea god Manannán mac Lir and his mother Macha, who I learned a long while ago is actually a horse goddess. There's no shortage of cliche fantasy art out there depicting her, and apparently no limit to the things she's a goddess of, so I guess everything is fair game.

In this film Mac Lir has been deliberately turned into the solemn stone cliff atop which the main characters' lighthouse sits (appropriately enough) by his owl witch mother, because he sobbed and suffered so greatly after losing his love that she took all of his feelings so he wouldn't be in pain anymore. The father of the two children in the story and his aged mother (conspicuously drawn as owl-like as possible) are their parallels.

Watching these simply-drawn but genuine characters move about swirling, painted landscapes and rooms while living out and trying to cope with profound feelings of loss and resentment is deeply touching. I've made posts before commenting on what sometimes seems like the slow and tragic death of animation as a serious artform as a wave of generic CGI continues to wash over everything, but this animation studio is that lighthouse on the cliff, one of the becons in a creative night prolifically dotted with cold, mass-produced stars.

I would love to show this to a kid or kids I may or may not have one day; I felt like it was an instant classic. You can read a bit more about it and see some of the concept art here.

Interestingly, this comes from the same studio that did The Secret of Kells, and this summer, they're starting on an adaptation of The Breadwinner, the award-winning Deborah Ellis youth novel about an adolescent Afghan girl who poses as a boy so her family can survive in recently-Taliban-taken-over Afghanistan. It was quite good, though it would've been better if I could've found the two subsequent parts online as well.
Anyway, a departure from these Celtic traditions is really interesting and kind of unexpected. I'm looking forward to it.

Here's the trailer for Song of the Sea:

And the pleasant, soothing soundtrack, which you'll especially like if you're the kind of person who likes going into New Age shops where they're burning Nag Champa and playing Enya:

Inside a German Power Plant

2015-05-10T00:33:00.002-07:00

One of the last things we did before leaving Rostock was to take an impromptu tour of Hannes' dad's power plant. When I say "impromptu" I mean, "it had been mentioned numerous times but we decided to hurry over there spontaneously one evening while at his parents' apartment getting drunk because the weather finally cleared up enough for the view from the top to be worth seeing".

I don't know anything about power plants but I do like learning about how stuff works, and since coal-based energy production is kind of the only critical component of modern society that's also about to destroy us all (antibiotic-resistant strains of super bacteria probably won't get ALL of us before we're reclaimed by the sea, right?), it seems like an important thing to know more about.

Now, at the time, I was pleasantly surprised by the apparent efficiency of not only the plant's energy exploitation capabilities, but also of the way the various toxic heavy metals left over as biproducts of its extraction are filtered out and subsequently disposed of. It was a genuinely interesting and informative tour.

Now, at the time, I was also kind of drunk. Plus, I mean, a lot has happened since then. Like a week later we went to Berlin and from there we moved to Tokyo, where I had found and booked us a hostel and then a nearby shared apartment and also had a job interview, and that was just within the first four days. Forgot the details of that interesting power plant shit, yo.

I ended up asking Hannes to e-mail his dad to ask about a couple of basic things so I could write about the plant, because nearly all of the information you can Google (in English) about this sort of thing is American. The response got was a 16-page .PDF from one of his dad's coworkers, in English, all about the plant's history, stats, and functions. So now I feel kind of guilty for turning a couple of questions about arsenic and lead into a big thing, but, well, enquiring minds want to know.

So here's your basic security office and cooling tower. The plant's towers are visible from a considerable distance; this coastal area is very flat.

The steam that comes out of these towers (this is the scale model that shows how it's filtered and cooled) is surprisingly clean. I mean, the plant still releases tons of CO2, but at least it has a handle on toxic biproducts and waste.

The control room, obviously. It's badass and 90's action movie-looking, though.

Deep shaft is deep

Interesting emergency phone is interesting

Because this plant - which provides more than half the energy for the sparsely-populated federal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania - simultaneously extracts energy for both electricity and heat as a CHP or "combined heat and power" or "cogeneration" plant, it operates at approximately 60% efficiency. Calculations have apparently shown and it's claimed that CHPDH (the new letters stand for "district heating") is the cheapest and most efficient means of carbon emissions reduction at present.

So, 60% of the ~6.7 kilowatt-hours of available energy per kilo of the coal itself is pulled out and used. Wiki's example of what this ends up meaning is that, if you're talking about an average plant that operates at 40% efficiency, it takes about 717 pounds (or 325 kilos) of coal to power a 100-watt lightbulb for a year.

First of all: how shitty is that? I mean, everyone knows fossil fuels are bad, that we use them way too much, and that they make a few lucky people so disgustingly wealthy that we won't be able to transition away from them within the foreseeable future, but thinking about all this stuff really drove that example home.

I recycle compulsively, walk places a lot, and never want to own a car again if I can help it, but how many tons of coal have gotten combusted and released untold thousands of pounds/kilos of carbon dioxide into the air from my lifetime of frequent computer use alone, so far? It's hard to try to picture an entire hillside of dirty coal getting burned while I've uploaded and edited photos, typed this stuff, downloaded music, and if we go really far back, browsed Sailormoon Geocities sites.

Anyway, the formula to calculate the energy value of coal is pretty complicated and full of fancy chemistry abbreviations, but I figure 20% higher efficiency means about 20% less coal burned to achieve the same output, right? Really, if someone reads this and knows how it works, let me know. But if that's right, 20% higher efficiency means over 143 pounds or around 65 kilos less to power that one lightbulb for one year.

The Rostock plant's efficiency is impressive because of the long-term resource savings on a large scale. Plus it went online in late 1994, it's not even like it's new or anything.

To further put that in perspective, the global average efficiency level is only 31% (source). I was thinking that China and India probably drag it down pretty hard, but in 2007, the average efficiency of American plants was only 32% in 2007 (source). Not trying to decontextualise it or anthing, though; this is just one example of a particularly efficient plant, and I'm sure (or at least I hope) similar ones exist in the U.S. This article claims that the average efficiency of all German coal-fired plants was only 38% as of 2013. Booo.

(from the English version of the plant's informational .PDF)

The view from the roof was pretty nice; it's too bad we only had a Google Nexus tablet

with us to take pictures.

Aside from energy efficiency and production, there's the important matter of biproduct use and pollutant release.

I'm not sure how accurate this summation is, nor do I know how many U.S. coal-fired plants are controlled (fitted with expensive technology that keeps their air pollutant output much cleaner, like the Rostock plant) vs. uncontrolled because I just can't find the information, but some of the only similar, specific data I could find to compare with The European Pollutant Release and Transfer's information on the Rostock plant was from the Institute for Energy Research, which is Koch-funded. I was thinking it was useful until I got to a sentence that said something along the lines of, "the perception that air quality is getting worse is wrong, as shown by the EPA's data; coal power is cleaner than ever before".

Barf.

At any rate, the numbers are pretty appalling. Even when you convert American short tons to metric tonnes - which aren't that different - the average uncontrolled coal-fired plant numbers for sulfur and nitrogen oxides, mercury, arsenic, nickel, and other heavy metals are many times, even ten times higher than those of the Rostock plant. And that's just most of the other shit, not CO2.
According to that source I'm not sure about, the average uncontrolled plant releases between 3.1 and 3.2 million tonnes of CO2 each year; the Rostock plant, 2.86. On the one hand, it's much cleaner and more efficient. On the other, it's still a coal-fired power plant. But at least those somewhat reduced emissions were also exploited 20% more efficiently, on average, and none of the waste products were (reported to have been) dumped into the water or soil.

The Rostock plant, like many others, also sells useable biproducts of burning the coal - such as gypsum for use in construction and road materials - and ships the remaining toxic leftovers mentioned and linked to above overseas, mostly to places like China. So that the Chinese can dump them into their water and soil instead, I guess.
It also maintains 90 small preserved areas in and around Rostock and is somehow responsible (the English manual really needs to be edited) for protecting a large area of natural saltmarsh as well.

All said and done, it seems like the coal-fired power plants in the developed world should all be at least as efficient as this today, and I think it's a travesty that they're not, considering the fact that we'd still be dumping almost the same unsustainable amount of CO2 into the air as we are today even if they were.

All Together Now

2015-05-06T02:22:00.000-07:00

Here it is, the "Goodbye, Korea!" post!

It's kind of just a compilation of the highlights of December, culminating in the last show we went to.

This is/was Amy and Patrick's band. She did some interesting improvisational stuff - like rolling around on the floor and taking off her shirt -that ended up on the cover of broke 19, the punk zine produced at varying intervals by a professional editor and lifer.

I'd come straight to the show after getting off work at 9 and was super tired.

Some awesome vegetable stew I made, complete with brown rice crackers and

pan-roasted pumpkin seeds.

I was told it wasn't snowy and didn't need to bother putting tracks on my boots.

-narrows eyes-

Right, sure.

This was the first snowfall of last year, on December 1st I think it was.

It was also the first day of my short stint at the Gangnam office, I think. It was.

The City Hall office was so cute and cozy and nice..

But they had to send me all the way to the other side of town to the shitty office instead after mine closed down -_-

Hannes' Christmas package from Germany was obviously great. Little did I know

that it was but a small taste of what was to come!

My Christmas package was pretty substantial, too.

I never did make pancakes and ended up giving the maple syrup to Hannes' dad to use on his kartoffelpuffer, because he'd always wanted to try it.

My mom also sent Hannes a Snuggie!

No joke, he had seriously been like, "You know what they should make? A blanket with sleeves. That'd be perfect", and instantly I thought of the shitty late-night infomercial from 15 years ago where the idiotic family at the football game looks like a gathering of druids.

We needed another blanket, too. The floor heating in my apartment was so grossly inefficient that I didn't use it, for fear of racking up bills in the hundreds. Going into my joke of a kitchenette was like going outside minus the wind, because Koreans don't believe in insulation. It got especially third-world that time the lightbulb burned out.

We had to sleep like this and could see our breath in bed.

Hannes' going away party for the unpaid internship he'd started when the one

he'd come to Seoul for ended turned into this.

Roasted dark chocolate sunflower butter

One more wheat-free order from David's Delicious Desserts - the

chocolate chip cookies were especially good!

I met Henry and Mr. Kang, the hilarious dudes from the Incheon lumber company

contract I'd worked all summer, at Everest for a goodbye dinner.

We had plenty of drinks and a really nice time.

Speaking of drinks, nothing screams "Christmas" like soju-melon milk..

And at last, the end-of-the-year punk show at Badabie.

We had an interesting conversation with Eddie thoughout the night, a cool guy who's one of the scene's fixtures. He'd always struck me as kind of a mystery, though Hannes had met him and learned a fair bit about him very shortly after arriving in Korea when he was sitting on a curb outside a venue and Eddie spilled out of a taxi and plopped down in front of him, already smashed from celebrating his baseball team's win that afternoon.

Eddie always loved running into Hannes because he'd studied linguistics and German, spent some time in Germany, and managed to surprise on more than one occasion with his proficiency.

I'm making it sound like the guy's dead or something, but actually, he just acknowledged the revolving door fact of life so characteristic of Seoul that we'd almost assuredly never see each other again. I ended up finding him on Facebook by chance - after all that time of not knowing anything about him or getting any contact details - when his wife joined my 'Wheat and Gluten-Free in Korea' group.

A drunken stumble through Hongdae to one of the cheap Korean BBQ restaurants,

because that's how it goes.

JP and Punkie (who are French and adorable when wasted) were with us,

and I feel kind of bad that I couldn't get a more flattering picture of them, lol

And of course, Patrick. I ended up seeing him and Amy again when I had them come over the night before we flew out to take apartment stuff I hadn't been able to sell, but this was our last time hanging out.

Like I mentioned in the Seoraksan post, I had some pretty dark and lonely times in Korea, but all of the bad shit that happened and the problems I had were mostly my own fault (which is pretty much true of everyone's problems, right?). It was personal stuff. There are a lot of things about the country I don't like or agree with, and I honestly just don't like nearly all aspects of the culture, but that doesn't make it a definitively bad place, and the negative aspects don't negate the positive ones. Just like any other place, there are some really awesome things, and some really shitty things. Most people are some degree of asshole, but a lot or others are good, kind, normal.

I've read a few reflective blog posts that similarly attempt to describe these kinds of conflicting feelings (about doing the English teaching thing in Korea, specifically), and I think you just kind of had to be there for it to resonate, though the general point is a universal one.

Maybe these juxtaposing things all conveniently fit into the atmosphere of the place itself, like it's just the predominant motif.

So typical of east Asia is that mixture of ancient and brand spanking new; kids sitting in the shadow of an ornately-painted temple while battling someone in another, equally strange land on their expensive handheld game console, that kind of stuff. Old ladies foraging for roots on the side of the road with kerchiefs tied on their heads and later getting take-out, franchise fried chicken. False exoticism out the wazoo.

Maybe it's because it's so much dramatically opposing shit trying to coexist. Either way, it was immature of me to complain constantly, even if both places I worked for failed and shut down and the last 3 weeks of both contracts were huge clusterfucks. It could've been at lot worse; at least I got paid and still had places to live.

Even if Korean-style dating to me is mind-blowingly absurd, and Korean weddings are even less personal than things literally mass-produced in factories and sold for slightly-too-high prices. I went on one date with a Korean guy who assumed he could just follow me home and try to get into my apartment, and after that I washed my hands of it, so none of that even applies to me. The cultural differences are too extreme and inherently incompatible for most people, and that's it.

Not believing in insulation or central heating is something I have to deal with in Japan, too, and I've just had to get used to it. The list goes on and on.

Moving out for the first time comes with countless unforeseen challenges, and going to the other side of the world obviously isn't one of the easier ways to do it. You can tell yourself you're open-minded, tolerant, and patient, but I ~~think~~ know I failed those tests many times while I lived in Seoul. It's different when it's your everyday life, and not just an amusing week-long vacation where you can write things off and walk away with vague, casual impressions of people, cultures, politics, traditions, and other interactions that've been largely decontextualised.

If nothing else, I firmly stand by the facts that 1) the excellent, simple, cheap public transit, 2) the insanely fast and easy ATM transactions, 3) the bibimbap, 4) the low low pries, 5) the casual outside drinking, and 6) the awesome combination punk/hardcore/other alternative scene are uniquely awesome and amazing. That and it's also one of those super safe places where you can, as a woman, walk down a dark street alone at night and feel no sense of menace or foreboding whatsoever.

All in all, I would consider going back to visit, especially since I never saw the major vacation spots of Busan or Jeju, and I'd tell most other people to consider doing the same. And I mean that.

目黒川花見

2015-05-05T05:23:00.000-07:00

It's been over a month now and I never posted this year's cherry blossom pictures.

Whaaaat.

My first cherry blossom season in Japan definitely didn't disappoint, even though we had also meant to go to Yoyogi Park but didn't make it (sorry Angie ><).
I had to go into the office to hand over additional paperwork for my visa application, and it just so happens that my new dancing English monkey company's head office is situated right on the Meguro river - which is more of a canal - in central Tokyo.
I convinced Hannes to come with me; he was reluctant at first, but immediately changed his tune once he looked down one side of the river from a small bridge we crossed.

There was a tunnel along the walkway back with some cute, nonsensical paintings on the walls..

And finally, we went back to an Indian restaurant close to the station with a cheap lunch special we'd noticed when we passed by. It also included tiny salads and drinks - iced coffee for Hannes, and mango juice for me.

And then later there was more iced coffee on the roof of our sharehouse, because why not.

Actually, I had a soy milk tea that was super disappointing and could've used a lot of sugar.

We haven't had money to do much since we moved here (just taking the goddamn train somewhere gets expensive), but this one definitely got filed under 'good day'.

Bad Doberan and Heilegendamm

2015-05-04T01:21:00.000-07:00

The next little daytrip we took shortly after arriving in Rostock, after the kerzenscheune, was to the nearby town of Bad Doberan. And before you have a chance to think it, yes, of course I threw out the obligatory, "Can't we go to Good Doberan instead?".

Toward the end of our time there I was pretty upset that we didn't even get to Denmark, much less Sweden or Poland, but those would've just been really short, expensive trips anyway. Relaxation and comfort were the underlying themes of the whole extended break, and I wouldn't trade all the obscenely delicious and yet still mostly healthy food, lazy days watching documentaries on YouTube, or things that we did do for anything else.

We just popped into this cafe to see if they had a nice coffee selection and to take

a couple of pictures because it was so cute.

Quaint. As. Fuck.

This impressive 16th century church - of former Cistercian monastery, I guess - and its undulating crown of roosting birds was a candidate to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but for some reason it didn't make the list. Although it apparently is one of the most relevant brick gothic structures in the Baltic Sea region. /TIL

Love this one.

The house equivalent of those Mexican wolf boys.

This and the next few are of a museum, but we didn't go inside because we had to catch the train. Actually, I'm not sure it was even open.

Since I started working with children at the end of 2012, I've been reading kids' and young adult classics that I somehow missed, such as the works of Roald Dahl. I've always really liked the movie versions of Matilda and James and the Giant Peach, but I think Danny, the Champion of the World is my favourite book of his. I've never seen the movie with Jeremy and Samuel Irons, though.

Anyway, point is, this reminded me of how Dahl had an old gypsy caravan in the backyard of his house and fixed it up as a playhouse for his kids.

This was a super cute house, which goes without saying in any and all of the Germany posts. I kept asking Hannes to take pictures because I had a major issue with bitchy resting face that day, which you'll see didn't clear up at all.

This one burned down. With the sun setting behind it, it looks like a scene from The Last of Us or something. For the record, I just watched Hannes play it because it felt like a movie.

I don't know jack about games ._.

At first I thought this was the Molli train we'd come to ride.

Dude's all like, "Le sigh, ze life of a German train conductor iz lonely.."

Turns out it was this one. When they say "narrow-track something or other I'm not a train expert", they're not kidding! Look how little the tracks are! Aww.

What's another synonym for 'quaint' I could use for small-town German stuff?

Told you.

His glorious flaming locks blend in with the charming wood interior.

The defining characteristic of this small village is that it has this exclusive seaside resort, which hosted the 2007 G8 Summit.

It's such a small town that, if you walk for several minutes in any given direction, you're not even sure you're in it anymore.

Actually, when we we walking away from the resort and toward the one cafe we could find (which was, somewhat weirdly, in a very fancy hospital/clinic), we saw a lone seagull stomping in the middle of a field. I imagine he was flushing insects out of the mud or something, but it was just so fucking weird. His whole body was still except for his silly stomping feet. We stood and stared for a minute. He stopped and looked at us, then turned away slightly and continued stomping.

Here's a fine and glorious example of one of the times when I really went to town with things I have no business eating. But we hadn't had lunch and I was really hungry! T_T

Those chocolate balls are especially amazing. It's like if chocolate cake and a truffle had a baby, and the whole inside is just strong rum. So it's called rumkugeln. Like, omfg.

I don't have any more Abrams lens flare jokes or comments left in me; you get the idea.

Really like this one.

The steam it threw off was impressive, and seems like it'd be pretty inconvenient to drive through. You can see it better in the video at the bottom.

I just wish my camera hadn't run out of battery before I could video adorable downtown Doberan!

Many aspects of this day made us feel like we were in the past, and we'd just been having a conversation about what the romantic era of popular luxury rail travel must have been like when this mofo drove by. I was like, THE YEAR. WHAT YEEEAAR IS IT?!

It pretty much goes without saying that I'd recommend this slightly obscure detour, right?

Weekend (5.31.14 - 6.1.14): Hiking Seoraksan

2015-05-03T02:56:00.002-07:00

It's the penultimate Korea post, yaaaay.
After this there are a couple more from my second trip to Japan last year (Hannes' visa run), the college Romanian adventure I've to this day been unable to satisfactorily put into words, a couple lengthy ones about artists I never finished from about 3 years ago, and then, bam, I'm finally caught up to within less than a year before now!

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Anyway, I left this one alone for a year because I didn't feel like thinking about this guy I had dated for about a month, the same summer that I met Hannes. Actually, the first time I met him outside a show at Club Spot, I was with this guy, Ryan, who said that Hannes looked like Stephen Merchant. I laughed and agreed, but assured Hannes - who didn't know who that was - that he was definitely more attractive, just in case he Googled the guy later and felt disappointed.

I met Ryan at HBC Fest, when I broke away from the people I desperately needed to be away from toward the end of that very dark and lonely period of my time in Seoul to go see ...Whatever That Means play with Patrick and Amy (who'd just gotten back from New Zealand).

This was also the last time I ever got to hang out with Jules before she went back to the States. I slept through her going away thing because of our ridiculous split schedule. She's so cool, and I hope I can think of what to make and send her in the mail soon!

I want to think I'd seen Jeff and Trash's band play once or twice before this, but maybe not. I hadn't gone to more than a few punk shows in Seoul before last summer.

During the show Jeff had been advertising this one dude in the front as painfully single, and that dude ended up being Ryan. He approached me, we started talking, hung out for the rest of the night, and the next day he took me to my first-ever soccer game, at Olympic Stadium, and introduced me to all his friends.

I had a clumsy conversation in Spanish with an Irish chick, who was equally hungover/drunk, and continued drinking (cider) throughout the game. We stood the entire time, and talked to a young Korean guy who was writing an article for a local magazine about the somewhat notorious group of foreign fans that goes to all the FC Seoul games, Los Diablos Blancos. He took a group picture that I ended up in, but I never saw it.

Outside the game I ran into one of the Berlitz managers from another office, and we had a short conversation about how shitty and hungover we felt, and how we were both wearing the same clothes from the day before. After the game, we went to Shamrock and Roll and Ryan bought me dinner and more drinks. I had an interesting conversation with one of his other Irish friends about animal cruelty, because the owners of that bar not only insist on playing the worst music ever at an unhealthy volume, but also subject a large and too-thin labrador puppy to it by keeping it in the hectic, crowded place and letting it walk around to beg for food.

That was just the first weekend.

After dating for less than 2 weeks, he asked me to come away with him for the weekend.

I was like, sure.

He's stupidly active, maintaining a constantly high energy level by using a perfected mixture of alcohol, dietary supplements, and vitamins. Really into cycling, and hiking. I was a little worried about keeping up with him on Seoraksan, one of Korea's most impressive mountains, but I'm proud of the fact that I managed to and had a good time to boot.

At this point I just needed to start getting out, meeting people, and enjoying myself again.

Living at the oil refinery in the middle of nowhere (see the Misty Mountains Cold post) during February had been helpful and therapeutic, but when I came back to Seoul and finally settled into my own place, it was the beginning of an awkward spring that felt like I was just waiting around for my time in Korea to be over.

We stayed in a hotel (well, motel, really) just inside the mountain preserve area, and took a long walk the night before we went out hiking all day. There were a bunch of pretty white moths around. I let one climb onto my finger, and then it just lazily walked around my arm and wouldn't let go, even though I tried to shake it off. Ryan thought I was super weird for adopting it for part of our walk.

There were some other things, too, like the fancy resort we passed and decided to walk into just to take a look at their lobby and bar, then running full-speed down their steep driveway back to the road; sitting in a swinging seat outside the one convenience store that was there, near the motel, drinking; and not the first or last time he was extremely insulting and condescending. In this particlar instance we had been talking about invasive plant species, and he was impressed the way you'd be impressed when your dog caught a peanut you tossed at it that I knew what caulerpa taxifolia was.

Anyway, that's enough backstory. I'm just feeling reflective today.

Onto the subject and photo dump at hand!

This park was easily one of the most impressive places I saw in Korea, if not number one.

We chose a short-ish hiking course that I think was supposed to take 2 or 3 hours full-circuit, probably taking into consideration the time people would want to spend at the awesome temple carved into the cliff at the top. We powered right through it and finished it in, like, an hour and a half.

Pretty badass, right?

Next we decided to go to Ulsanbawi, a distinctive granite precipice jutting out of the mountain range. This hike was quite a bit harder, and I was springing from rock to rock like a goat to keep up with Ryan. Toward the end of it, when you actually get to the base of the rock formation, there are also quite a lot of stairs that I can't say I really enjoyed, but the views were worth it.

It's so smooth and contrasts to sharply with the sky and trees, it almost doesn't look real.

The defining characteristic of hiking Ulsanbawi is that there's an 800 to 900-stair staircase bolted into its side that leads up to the top. It's seriously ridiculous to even look at, and I was legitimately tired at this point and had already tried to talk Ryan into going back down before we'd gotten a look at it.

After giving me crap about not quitting after we'd already come this far and so on, he took one look at the sheer rock face and the absurd stairs - the moment's equivalent of that ancient rope bridge in Indiana Jones - and just said, "Nope".

Turned right around and started back down.

I was like, thank god.

On our way back down we ran into a couple of Dutch girls who asked how it was. I asked if they knew about the stairs or had seen them, and they hadn't. They already seemed a little apprehensive about going all the way, and I told them they'd probably change their minds the same second they laid eyes on them.

Before leaving, we decided to take the cable car up to the dragon spine's highest peak before leaving. The walk back to the hotel alone was a good 4 or 5 miles, and even a guy who's got a lot to prove to the world knows when it's time to call it a day.

If you didn't infer it from his reaction to the precipitous stairs of doom, Ryan is terrified of heights. I scared the shit out of him by running toward the edge you see here and then stopping short. He couldn't get anywhere near it or look over the side.

It's one of those things that photos don't do justice to.

It's also totally insane that they let so many people - including little kids - up here with no supervision, guardrails, or anything when on the other side of the spectrum they have to make simple, easy hikes into paved roads with fences, stairs, and convenience stores.

Before leaving the next day, we went to nearby Sokcho so we could drink while looking out onto the sea, and so that Ryan could get his ojingeo sundae (squid rings stuffed with veggies and things and fried in egg, the same thing from the cute hand-drawn sign above) fix, since it's the regional specialty of the northeast coast.

I was crazy enough to be one of the maybe 3 people on the beach to get into the water, which is intolerably icy to all but people who grew up with that kind of thing even in June and July.

I'm not sure what these are; some kind of edible sea squirt?
They just look like human hearts.

Even though it wasn't an ideal situation, I'm so glad I got to see Seoraksan while I was in Korea. I highly recommend it. It's supposed to be especially breathtaking in autumn, and I kind of wish Hannes and I had gone back to see it at that time of year, too.

Rügen

2015-04-26T02:11:00.002-07:00

This large island just off Germany's northern coast and its chalk cliffs were one of the things Hannes wanted to take me to see, and Stralsund, where the bridge connects to the mainland, is a pretty short drive from Rostock. Actually, it was one of the last things we did during that glorious, glorious two months.

People had told us that the oceanium (not just an aquarium, but also an ocean museum) there was the thing to check out, so after some difficulty figuring out where they'd hidden it, we parked and walked to it.

What is this, fucking Middle-earth? Just take us to the oceanium, okay?

It's a, um...

Yep.

A neat coral reef-esque mostly-plastic ceiling installation

"Not sure if jellyfish..."

He comes with a built-in suction cup. I'm a little jealous.

TIL

20,000 leagues of awesome, right?

I want... to believe.

- X-Files theme in background -

Aw, and he said he didn't like sea critters.

-X-Files theme abruptly changes to Part of Your World-

Sometimes they have expensive classical piano concerts in their large open sea aquarium room thingy.

And wait, wait... There are penguins on the roof.

That king of the rock penguin craned his head all the way back and let out the loudest, most jackassy call just as we were about to go back inside because it was freezing.

Golf clap-worthy, I thought.

The huge room with the scale models of huge sea beasties, relaxing whale calls, water surface lights projected onto the ceiling, and big plastic beach chair things you can sit/lay on is also pretty nice.

"Mom! Mom, he's touching me!"

I'm considering compiling a collection of photos I insisted on taking before eating in which Hannes is just staring longingly at his food. He had a beer-battered burger and fries (it was a brewery) and I had spinach mushroom crepe thingies (that I shouldn't have eaten, but what else is new).

Finally, we headed out to see the shore and the white cliffs. We had a GPS in the car, but it had quite literally steered us wrong before and wasn't much help on the island, so we ended up parking in a free lot a few miles' trek from the shore.

I wish the cool combat boots I'd bought online for the winter didn't have hard plastic bottoms and therefore weren't super slippery, because there were intermittent roads and paths made of huge stones smushed into the ground throughout the woods. With any other shoes they'd be fine to walk on, but of course, I had some awkward/uncomfortable/difficult thing going on.

Regardless, though, the woods were chilly, silent, and peaceful.

This is his disappointed face.

There are a number of different beaches to see, and we had obviously picked and laboured to one of the less-impressive ones.

"Hey. Hey. It's not all it's... chalked up to be, is it?! HA."

Still nice, though. I took a white rock shaped like an egg.

I absolutely love this one.

And Urban Outfitters absolutely loves this one.

On the way back we were talking about how shitty it must've been during the Middle Ages. I mean, you know, you're a traveling merchant or something and you're not sure how far away the next town is; it's getting dark. You're not really sure if you heard wolves in the distance, but you know they're around. In those days there were bears, too. And drop bears, mofos hanging out in the trees waiting for people like you, so they could slit your throat and rob you. Terrible.

I liked these prickly acorn nettle things that landed right side-up.

This old abandoned security fence entrance thing had a creepy WWII vibe.

"Here, I wanted to take a picture of you in here."

-closes eyes-

"Okay, yeah, um, sexy pose works, too..."

And finally, the most hilarious street name in all of Germany that I saw while I was there.

Japanland: Osaka

2015-04-25T18:03:00.000-07:00

The last stop on my Super-Affordable First Tour of Japan '13 was Osaka.

I'm just gonna go ahead and get the obligatory Glico Man picture out of the way:

Don't get me wrong: the teenage me of ten years ago who used to spend a considerable amount of time on filthy, unreliable city buses to get to the Japanese market on 67th and Bell to rent kids' videos, talk with the nice clerks, and try new snacks would've died to go on a vacation that involved seeing the actual Glico Man, and not just the one on the tiny candy box.

Zac - who had come down all the way from Kochi for the weekend and was staying in a nearby capsule hotel to act as an awesome guide - Faith, and I wandered around Dotonbori for a little while. We somewhat drunkenly tried to feed the Dracula statue outside this adorably macabre bar a Butter and Soy Sauce Dorito, but he wasn't having any of our shit.

Little did I know that Japan has over 6,000 of these decorative manhole covers alone, not to mention other, smaller drain covers, and those housing water supply connectors for fire hoses. Gotta find 'em all!

The next day started with Zac taking us to El Pancho, which I bet would be perfect for a large get-together for dinner and drinks, but it also really hit the spot for lunch.

I don't remember how much these mini tostadas and the pretty normal-sized margarita were, but I definitely don't remember being outraged or dissatisfied.

- heavy breathing -

Whenever I go back, I'll take a video of this very cutesy, lively vending machine.

Didn't even ask how much the Venus costume was T_T

And these, these things right here, will eat a hole in your wallet if you're not careful.

It's easy to forget that coins actually have monetary value in Japan, so after several minutes of popping 100-yen coins in, you're like, "Oh fuck, I just spent like $9 on nothing".

...

... No words, just feelings.

Extremely inexpensive vending machine swag, plus gifts.

Knew I couldn't afford anything, just took a picture before leaving instead. That shop boy is like, "Please."

Zac took me to the Green Mall, because I'd seen pics of it online and thought it looked amazing:

Well, it's nice, but not really a destination of its own. I'd recommend going to the top for the view if you're going past it, though.

And they do have a pretty alright statue of a giant freaky chicken god, so..

Chelsea came all the way down from Mie to drink and hang out that night and the next day.

They decided on a popular kushikatsu (fried things on skewers) chain restaurant, and my adherence to a gluten-free diet once again abruptly subsided for a joyous evening of indulgence. It wasn't even vegetarian, beause Zac and Chelsea were popping different meat and fish things into the oil, too, but oh well. It was decadent, there's no other word for it.

You get 90 minutes, and for an extra 8 or 10 bucks you can add all the alcohol you can drink to your food experience, which I've since learned always adds up to an embarrassingly large number of skewers. Even if you only have vegetables and get salad on the side it's going to be over 9,000 calories anyway, so it's better to go full bird and be as obscene as possible.

Obviously Zac's post-eating face, and my outrageous dessert creations of fried mochi and marshmallows dipped into the chocolate fountain and covered with soft serve and maple syrup. Also, another bar with a weird statue.

I'd found this kickass-looking bar while Googling called Space Station, and we tried to go, but it's very small - as in, like, the size of a large master bedroom small - and was super busy. They have various consoles at the bar and all around the place that you can use to play vintage games, and the dark blue neon lights really do make it look like an 80's vision of a space station inside. I can't wait to go back.

We ended up finding this other bar with a ceiling of bras, and the crazy Israeli bartender (bottom left) tried to get us to exchange ours for drinks. After some private group discussion, we came back with the consensus that our bras were significantly more valuable that a single cocktail, but that maybe we'd return wearing cheap ones and humour him at some later date.

This bar was also extremely tiny, and at one point we smelled something really nice, and noticed that this guy was up to some new wacky hijinx, managing somehow to cook a large pot of stew behind the bar, where there were no fixtures or anything. He was occasionally tasting it from the ladle and offered us some between serving drinks, but we politely turned that down as well.

Partly because he was Israeli, Chelsea ended up having a really amusing conversation with some other guys about how awesome it was to be Jewish, and then we talked about different genres of hardcore. It was a good night, especially because I was able to remember how to walk back to the hostel.

My last day in Japan that year was a very warm (especially since I had to carry my backpack again, as I had been in Kobe), pleasant one. We went to Osaka Castle.

My favourite thing from inside was this really cool historial reinactment thing they had, where you look into small square windows onto a dollhouse-esque diorama. Holograms or projections of actors then play out the scene within the "room". There are several to go around to on one of the floors, and I've definitely never seen anything like it anywhere else.

There was also the observation deck, of course.

... and Dippin' Dots, because it was toasty. Chelsea and I shared some pineapple or something; I can't remember exactly, but this right here is a good snack stand.

We decided there was just enough time for the Osaka Pokemon Center before I had to catch my plane. Kids in a candystore, it was. I grabbed a few small things, mostly as gifts, and I (predictably) haven't used the adorable nail stickers to this day.

My plane also looked pretty cool on the runway, but I couldn't stop to take a picture, so it came out super blurry.

I think I hit all the essentials: Dotonbori, fried food, getting drunk, the castle, the ultra-cute stores, even the manhole covers and the Pokemon Center. Posting this has made me feel super nostalgic about my first trip to Japan, and I can't wait to actually start making money and to have my (well, our) own place here.

Craft(y) Project: Art Mail

2015-04-24T20:38:00.000-07:00

The fact that the amount of storage space in all of my linked Google accounts is no longer unlimited, that I've reached it, and that Google now wants me to pay for more completely killed my desire to post anything on here after a prolific couple of months of unemployed blogging. Maybe I'll move to WordPress?

Before I do, though, I want to share a great idea and project I found out about through Allison, or dear detective, who I met (not irl) through Poupee Girl shortly before it shut down: art mail!

Her mixed media creations, handmade stamps, little paintings, bundles of paper ephemera, and interesting fonts make for something anyone would look forward to receiving via old-fashioned snail mail. For some reason it struck me as brilliant, though it's a pretty clear and obvious way to stay in touch with everyone. Occasionally saying "Hi" with Facebook's messenger somehow just doesn't radiate warm fuzzy feels, or involve recycling snippets of things you've stowed away like a compulsive squirrel. Which I totally do.

On weekends and in the evenings (because Hannes still hasn't been able to start working yet and we don't go out or do anything to save money Dx) I work on bits and pieces, since there are more than 10 people I'd like to get stuff out to, and I don't have any of my crafty stuff. Right now it's just packaging and things I've cut out from free magazines and flyers from the subway, plus the coloured pencils, origami paper, and glue stick I was provided with for my new job.

The first thing I finished and sent out was a Mother's Day package in a springtimey envelope that was partly a response to the awesome giant Easter package I got...

... complete with a simple, childish card (well, I tried) for mom, and a postcard-style one for my grandma.

I was going for a 1950's look, and I think I managed it.

One of the other things my job provided me with was a miniature pink strawberry-patterned Daiso laundry basket to use for playing games, and the pink heart was actually the tag from that!

Hopefully I don't run out of storage space before being able to post about a few more of these.

Schloss Schwerin

2015-03-15T22:50:00.000-07:00

After a couple of weeks in Germany, Hannes' friends Nico and Andrea (and their adorable daughter) took us on a day trip they'd planned and promised to us while we were still in Korea, to the capital of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Neither had ever seen the "floating castle" that sits in the middle of it and now houses the state government, even though Andrea was born there.

They always have tons of people over at their house, and we'd come over the night before for dinner, drinks, and socialising, which is a euphemism for "Nico and Hannes staying up until 5 playing FIFA".

Their adorable dog Pasha woke me up early the next morning by touching my lips with his whiskers.
He wanted to snuggle and made himself comfy (by sticking his butt in our faces).

The views out the 3rd floor loft windows

So everybody was pretty much completely dead for the scenic, long-way drive to Schwerin, though I was just super relaxed.

Once we got there our quest for a bathroom took us to a nice restaurant, and we ended up having lunch there, even though the entire dining table at Nico and Andreas' had been completely covered in food for a 9-person breakfast of lords shortly before.

We all looked away for about 15 seconds, and that huge packet of ketchup ended up all over her shoulder.

Before we left she had to go to the bathroom, and it took forever. When she and her mom finally came back she proudly announced, "Hey everyone. It took so long because I took a shit."

Cue parental facepalm, adoring laughter.

The castle itself was predictably magnificent. My camera also, predictably, died before we actually went inside. Not cool, camera. Not cool.

I love this one!

And this one! Super cute.

I pretty much went into magical childhood nostalgia Disney Princess Mode as soon as I saw the castle. The first half of the outer grounds we walked through reminded me of The Swan Princess. I know that one wasn't Disney, but I also know that someone else remembers it. ... Right?

Aww, it looks like a scene from a movie. Though I'm pretty sure what was to become a ubiquitous, resounding chorus of, "... but it's a lot nicer in summer" started in earnest here.

Found Atlantis, all y'all can stop lookin' now

Once inside I was relegated to using my Toshiba Camelio, which is a cute little handheld HD cam that isn't really meant for taking photos. You know all about it if you're one of the 20 or so people who reads these posts.

I finally bought a real digital camera while in Germany, partially because I wanted to take advantage of the good exchange rate (1:1.15 then, 1:1.05 now), and that's the one that died stupidly fast on regular AA's.

... Because it takes AA's.

When everyone was looking up at stuff

When everyone was looking down at stuff

I really, really liked this conversation chair

#BBM (Big Beautiful Mermaid)

This is a portrait of the guy the obligatory castle ghost, Petermannchen (copying characters doesn't work with Blogger's formatting and idk the umlaut key codes, sry), is based on.

He's obviously not dangerous, unless you trip over him I guess.

Ermahgerd, the Beauty end ther Berst lehrbrehry

This is the throne room, in case you weren't sure

Mostly we just laughed our asses off at these ugly mofos and their stupid pantaloons. These ones were the most normally-dressed noblemen I could find.

Awww.

We were about to leave, but then decided to stop into the castle's cafe for a coffee. The latte machiattos in Germany are great: big, tall glasses of mostly frothy steamed milk.

Hannah had herself a bowl of chocolate ice cream, and thinking that it sounded about the same and that the meaning would be pretty clear, I asked, "Is it good?" with a big smile. She stared at me, then looked at her dad helplessly with her oversized spoon in her mouth. He translated, she nodded slowly. I said that, maybe the next time, I should just give a questioning thumbs-up, and she could give one back, since that's more universal. Her dad suggested she do it, and without letting go of the base of the dish or the spoon, she decided to try to give a thumbs-up while holding the spoon, face covered in chocolate, and it was super derpy and adorable.

Parental facepalm, adoring laughter, etc.

It also looks amazing at night, if you were curious. It was really cold that day and it had just started to snow little tiny flakes as we were leaving. It was perfect.

Cute Shit: Ridiculous Korean Foods & Snacks

2015-03-14T03:18:00.001-07:00

There are plenty of them. Scanning through all of my photos for Dunkin' Donuts pics, I realised there were a few more sets of interesting ones I could use for similar posts. Per James Franco in The Interview, FEAST YOUR EYES.

This is one of those ingeniously simple million-dollar ideas everyone wishes they came up with and marketed successfully first. Honestly I feel like most things in Korea make no sense, but this is just brilliant. Maybe it's as simple as someone having been inspired by a rogue Seinfeld rereun? The world may never know.

This one isn't quite as brilliant, but it's a really good deal if you take the time to make it right. This box of 5 fat sticks is 2000 won at The Daiso, but DO NOT make it with hot water. It tastes like trashy, trashy garbage water with little soggy cornflake chunks. No. Make it with milk in a saucepan, and add two stick packets of sugar. Bam.

Purple taro milk tea? Delicious. And full of calories. One of my favourites after those purple (though they're not always purple, sometimes they're legit vegetabley) sweet potato lattes. Other delicious milk tea flavours you can find at various cafes include Earl Grey, rose, honeydew, and winter melon.

It's not just milk tea, either: milk comes in all kinds of flavours. Melon (like this one) and stawberry are the best ones to use as mixers for soju once you get so sick of its chemical horribleness that you can't stomach the taste anymore. There are also banana, coffee, and chocolate and cacao varieties which, it's important to note, are totally different. If you're American, skip the cacao. It's pretty disappointing.

Teensy weensy super light cheesecake (or "Cheese Souffle", from Paris Baguette)? Glorious.

This was also pretty glorious: the best convenience store cup bingsoo (milky ice with red bean, in this case with some soft serve on top and something like 650 calories) I could find.

Yeah, I mean, just, fancy cream cheese and hot dogs any time. This one's also courtesy of Paris Baguette. :|

These are traditional Korean rice cookies. While ususally wheat-free, they may not always be vegetarian, as I think some contain gelatin. They look like little crunchy pastel poops. :3

I had never seen golden kiwi before; it's delicious. Have you?

... Oh. Well, I hadn't. And it's, uh, yeah. It's really good.

And at the best of times, it's around $7 for 8 of them. At the worst of times, more than $10.

But I bet you'd also never seen... BAM! Golden watermelon! Hah!
These halves are about $9.

Behold, the insane nature of the ubiquitous and obligatory Chuseok gift box. Spam is also a popular one. It's basically crappy, everyday goods packaged in a box that isn't even that nice and sold for many times the normal price, because everyone expects gifts in the same format, so it's super easy to rip everyone off. That's 9 apples for $70 and 12 for $90.

Tornado potato! These are just a single potato cut into a ribbon, stuck on a skewer, fried, and then rolled in a powder of your choice, usually in a flavour like chili, cheese, or onion.

I may be all about the purple veggie-based drinks, and I've had purple potatoes, but I've got no idea what these crazy acid peas and rhubarb radish dealies are up to. Probably no good.

Hey! It's that delicious wartime ration everyone loves! Just gnaw on it until you absorb enough calories to survive the current leg of your lengthy sea voyage, another night in the snowy trench, et cetera.

"Remember that great snack we used to eat back in the 50's, when there was nothing else?"
"You mean that hardtack shit we ate because there was nothing else?"
"Yeah! Don't you miss it sometimes?"
"No, dude. No. There's nothing nostalgic about it. Horrible memories, images. The things I saw..."
"Oh. ... Well, I brought some! To have with the beer!"
"... ... Get the fuck out."

What cracked me up about these was the terrible packaging, nevermind the odd flavour. Look at that big boring washed-out yellow blank spot between the logo and the picture of the food. Look at that fucking "yogurt". Seriously, it was like somebody told an unpaid 19 year-old graphic design intern two minutes before the final design needed to be sent to someone else that they needed some kind of label on that jar so people would know it was yogurt. "yo-gurt", he typed unenthusiastically into the milky void that metaphorically resembled his future earning potential, not even bothering to center it.

The Korean teachers at my first job used to blow remaining budget that probably turned out to be stolen government money on ordering snacks, without asking any of us what we might want. One time they ordered a box of anchovies, and this is how it came. Just a box of anchovies. Why bother putting that little sheet of paper on top? They weren't even in a plastic bag.

Ah, rice pizza. It's a bit hard to see, but because of the black rice in the dough, it has a purple hue. I call this the best gluten-free pizza I've ever had, though in Korea it's just considered a cheap-ish option people wouldn't necessarily want to advertise, and with no concept of cross-contamination or food allergies or intolerances, nothing can be certified wheat- or gluten-free.

I was upset the first time these cheap fried chicken assholes fooled me with this at first glance. That's not funny when a bitch is hungry, yo.

Aaaand still not Mexican food ><

Golden Weekend (5.3.14 - 5.6.14): Suncheon Bay

2015-03-13T23:59:00.002-07:00

The final leg of my solo Golden Week sojourn into Jeollanam-do last May was Suncheon Bay, the third spot on CNN's Most Beautiful list I'd decided to check off.

Taking the first bus to Suncheon from Naganeupsong because I was sick of standing around with a heavy backpack and sweating wasn't the greatest plan ever; we managed to get stuck in a traffic jam between rice paddies and just sat there for a while. When we got to the bay, I realised I'd once again underestimated a tourist attraction on a major Korean holiday, and that I needed to find a place in the city of Suncheon itself to stay. So, I ended up waiting for another bus after being waved off by a few different pension owners.

I was totally famished and settled for some deeply nourishing fast bibimbap in Suncheon before searching for a place to stay. It took quite a while, but I ended up finding an enormous, multi-story jimjilbang that was also a gym and spa near one of the main stations (after accidentally wandering into the prostitute district).

Because the bay wetlands are one of the world's five largest tidal flat habitats

(fascinating, right?), they seem to do their best to be eco-friendly.

For how much they ride bikes, though, the folks around here sure are lumpy..

Seriously, you don't even know how much I miss these. It's always $3.50 - $7 for all of this.

I wish I'd been able to take a few pictures inside the enormous bathhouse, because the interior decorating was massively Asian. It included but wasn't limited to a steam room made to look like it was part of a mountain, and dragons. Kinda reminded me of Spirited Away.

That was all in the group sleeping area, though. In the baths, because this was a smaller and more obscure city, I was ogled more than usual, and a group of four or five (obviously naked) little girls ranging in age from maybe 4 to 7 all gathered around me and got awkwardly close to stare into my eyes.

You know, while I was sitting on a little plastic stool washing myself.

It was cute.

While on my sleeping mat on the floor (which is super comfy, especially when a small walkway naturally forms right next to your head), I decided to go full bird with the whole experience and read this for a while, which I'd taken from work. Not surprisingly for a patriarchal country with suicide deeply ingrained in its culture, most of the tales end with a beautiful young girl killing herself for the good of others.

Because of how many godddamn people were crowded into this place, that many were snoring very loudly, and the fact that a steady trickle of them kept stepping uncomfortably close to my face, I slept for maybe 4 hours. I can't remember at what time I actually got up to leave, but it must have been like 5.

I'd learned from experience that it was never too early to arrive to an outdoor park or other like destination, because there would undoubtedly be dozens of Koreans in their horrible matching hiking uniforms - toting selfie sticks and visors - there already. This ended up ringing true again, because of course, it was a major holiday.

The crowd dispersed quite quickly because the ecological park is so big, but I was pretty upset that the boat tours were already sold out for the day by the time I got back from trekking all around it. At least I'd had somewhere to leave my heavy backpack this time.

I took a roundabout way in, first walking around the periphery of the park, remembering The Great Fail Fortress of Naganeupseong. No such luck here.

I think this one looks like a stock photo from a tourism website.

These wooden walkways snake all around the park, so that you can get close enough to see the mudskippers and ghost crabs without disturbing the reeds. That small mountain in the foreground is the one I hiked.

I love crustaceans. These little fuckers were really cute.

I did my best to video the critters, doing whatever critters do:

Here's an example of how I was using two different cameras (trying to get used to a borrowed DSLR for the first time) and why there are so damn many pictures.

There's that trademark Abrams lens flare we all know and love

The light was reflecting off this water in such a picturesque Disney kind of way,

but I just couldn't get it.

These traditional burial sites are a common site all over Korea, and especially in the country, where families have lives on farms and plots of land for generations.

Thanks, life metaphor hiking guide

I was born and raised in the desert, cut me some slack

This was outside the visitor center building that I recommend not exploring, because it doesn't actually house anything. I can't even remember if there were bathrooms and vending machines. Onward!

That's the sea out there, if you weren't sure

The view was really impressive, so I took a sort of panoramic video of it:

I'm no longer upset about missing the boat tour. Any nature documentary-esque factoids I might have acquired would've all been in Korean anyway.

Before I left, I stopped into the small ecological museum. There was a cool fountain, a mudskipper teapot that I seriously, actually want, and this great statue of a Swiss Army crab atop an appalled cartoon blowfish.

Really. I love earthenware stuff (as you already know if you read Golden Weekend Part 2).

"omg seriously wtf get it off"

Ah, I forgot one in my Konglish sign post.

Here's the fancy (and pricey for Korea, though I don't remember how much it was now) train I took back to Boseong, because it was the only way I knew to get to Gwangju to get a charter bus back to Seoul. It also kinda reminded me of Spirited Away.

While the train ride was pleasant enough to video, the way there was more scenic. Plus, even though I thought I was beating the traffic by coming back a day early, it ended up taking 6 1/2 hours from Gwangju, and as tired, stinky, and still loaded down with that backpack as I was, I ran all the way through the Express Bus Terminal and miraculously caught the last train back to my stop. Phew! A cab from there would've been too expensive, and this semi-staycation was all about not spending money.

I regret not buying that stupid overpriced handmade mudskipper teapot, though. And I'd definitely recommend all three of my Golden Weekend stops to anybody who enjoys getting out of town, places of historical interest, and walking around outside.

Drag and Burlesque at Itaewon's Moon Night

2015-03-12T02:27:00.000-07:00

While I was looking back over a lot of my old posts from when I was still in college and then from my first year in Korea to make sure I hadn't missed anything I might want to share, I realised that one of my very first weekends there was, indeed, conspicuously absent. As was a post about Pride Day 2013.

Korea was such a complicated mixed bag for me, and because I've been feeling nostalgic and wanting to revisit warm, comforting memories now that I'm in uncertain and unfamiliar surroundings, now's as good a time as any.

It might've even been my very first weekend there. One of my coworkers invited me out with her and her girlfriends. Seems kind of random, but my first happy (or evil, I look kind of sinister) group pic from the wild ride that was the Seoul Train is with a group of fairly close-knit South African expats.

I got the impression that the privileged, white, Asia-travelling sector of SA's population is fairly small, and in kind of an ironic generalisation, they do all seem to know each other for the most part.

We met up at Braai Republic, the immensely popular South African pub in a back alley of Itaewon. I learned about the joys of Hunter's Dry and Hunter's Gold cider, creamy spinach, slaw, and sweet potato. Yes, you can fill up there as a vegetarian.

The show itself was low-budget and amateur, but even now I'm surprised and impressed that they were able to put one on at all in such a conservative country for such a limited audience. Although, shitloads of people are there teaching English now, and there are the ubiquitous loud drunken military guys.

She slowly popped all the balloons on herself, though no one was interested in seeing anything underneath because she was so skinny.

I remember the highlight of the show being this chair dance, which culminated in the birthday cake being destroyed completely by her crotch.

The following summer I went back to Moon Night with more or less the same group, It wasn't just any day, either: it was the day of the extremely small Gay Pride Parade, which was a pretty short affair limited to a tiny circuit of the trendy, liberal, Hongik University area, and we were going to a drag show that night.

Again, I'm still surprised that any of these things exist in Korea, an extremely homophobic country. A lot of older people refuse to hear about equal rights and alternative sexual lifestyle issues at all, citing Christianity as their reason, and some go so far as to deny that any homosexuals exist in Korea. But wait, it gets better. If you read my post about the 2014 Pride Parade and protest, you'll know that some go further still, blaming the West for introducing homosexuality to Korea, along with its good buddy, AIDS.

I mean really.

My plan for that day was to 1) get my hair cut at Hair&Joy, immediately adjacent to the parade route, 2) watch the parade, and 3) linger or drink or whatever until it was time to go to Itaewon for the drag show.

Aaand it hasn't been this blonde since.
I blame air pollution and a lower UV index.

This doesn't sound complicated, but it certainly ended up being so for the grossly incompetent stylist at Hair&Joy. I'd read many online accounts of how Korean stylists have no idea how to cut or style Western hair, and hadn't gotten a haircut since the previous November (this was early June) out of fear that someone would fuck it up horribly. And I mean, Asian hair is totally different, so I get it, but someone had to know, right? Online reviews praised this place and its English-speaking stylists. Plus I was working in a government-owned building that flat-out refused to turn on the A/C at all, all summer, so that it was literally into the 90's in the offices and classrooms (a constant 32 or so) and extremely humid to boot (with wasps), so my hair hadn't been dry since May. It had to be done.

It took the guy over two hours.

Over.

Two.

Hours.

I had brought along three, count 'em three, printed colour photos of myself with the haircut I wanted again, my old faux hawk. He studied them carefully and said he got it. Longer here, shorter here, thin it out so it'll stand up.

Nope. He just kept snipping bits off, even when it got to the point where I was saying,

"No. No. NO. Don't cut that any shorter, I told you-"

-snip-

"......"

An intense look of disillusionment on my face, my icy gaze ricocheted off the vanity mirror into his soul, and the verdict was, "I look like a K-pop boy".

He was like, "No, you don't look like... -smirk- Okay, uh, well... Maybe you do a little..."

K-pop boy or middle-aged lesbian, I wasn't sure, but in a cruel twist of fate, in my so-appropriately androgynous state, I had missed the fucking parade.

Let this be a lesson to anyone who goes for a haircut in Korea. Ye be warned.

Anyway, I think I had some patbingsu to cool down - that summer I had to limit myself sometimes to 3 frozen things per day just to keep going - and killed time before going to the show.

I think it started almost two hours late, but that it was an intentional tactic to let the place fill up and force people to keep buying drinks while waiting, so, fair play, because it worked. I'd forgotten to charge my camera and it died during this opening monologue, but what I caught was still worth sharing:

I remember this guy being a hell of a singer

And I remember being a little bit jealous I didn't have outfits like this as a teenager

This sloppy, drunk motherfucker right here stole the show. There was a K-pop hit at the time about being a style/beauty queen, and the first line of the chorus goes, "Be-ko-zu I'-mu Mi-su Ko-ri-ya~" and this is the song that she, in her makeshift curtain dress, giant crappy Christina wig and socks with pumps, decided to sing. I was practically in tears and genuinely wishing that this person were Miss Korea, because of how much more interesting that would be than the widely Internet-circulated photos of identically plastic-surgeried robot women.

Not everyone was in costume, it was a great mish-mash, constantly unexpected

This chick's cool set reminded me of the hula hoop rave girl I'd seen at the Scandalesque show back in Phoenix, and made me miss my good friend Angelique. I'd also much rather have this on video, of course, but oh well.

This was also a great set, with a very passionate, talented ladyboy performer.

These girls were a hot mess, but I blame the super-delayed program schedule for their level of drunkenness and applaud what they managed to pull out of their asses

Mizz Noxema Jackson, is that you?

Good times. I hope they're still putting on shows like this; it's important for people to fill these kinds of niche markets, even if they're not exactly super good at it.

Oh! I almost forgot. That night my coworker and I slept in what has to be the most expensive jimjilbang in Korea, right in the middle of the foreign district.
These public bathhouses are pretty terrible unless you're too drunk to remember that you're in one. You shower publicly while all the Korean woman stare at you, and then sleep on the floor with a whole bunch of other people, with a rented prison getup and a weird little brick thing as a 'pillow'.

Gluten-Free, Vegetarian Recipe: Beluga Lentils

2015-03-10T21:45:00.003-07:00

This was our Valentine's Day lunch :D

A shapeless black mass may seem like kind of an odd choice for a romantic meal, but we both love lentils, and hadn't been grocery shopping. I'd never tried black (or "beluga", because of their resemblace to caviar) ones before, usually opting for red, but they were pretty nice.
The other main part of this is sweet potato. Because it's dark and starchy, it's probably better suited to autumn and winter than very early spring.

To make this the way I did, you'll need:

1 package (approx. 400 grams) black lentils
2 small-medium sweet potatoes
2 medium-sized carrots, or one very large one
~3 celery stalks
1 medium-sized red or white onion
~4 cloves of garlic
Vegetable broth or broth mix
A splash of red wine (we used a really, really cheap one and this came out very sweet)
Fresh or powdered dry rosemary
Parmesan cheese
A sprig of fresh parsley and grape tomatoes for garnish and colour

If your lentils are not pre-rinsed, rinse and sort them in a colander. The instructions on the package we used said they only needed to be cooked for 20 - 30 minutes, but unless they were just talking about a pressure cooker, this was a lie. Soaking the lentils first is probably better even if you're under the impression that you've bought conveniently quick ones.

Mince the garlic and chop the onions, carrots and celery to the desired size, as if starting a soup. Because I wanted this to be chunky and varied in texture, I left them larger than normal.
Sautee together in olive oil. If using sprigs of fresh rosemary, throw them in now so that the heat of the pan releases their delicious, delicious juices.

After a few minutes, add the lentils. Mix everything thoroughly and cook for a couple more minutes before adding a dash of red wine.

Having peeled the sweet potatoes and cut them into small, bite-sized pieces, you'll want to throw them in now, adding another dash of red wine after everything's been mixed thoroughly again.

Cook until the pan starts to get dry, then add vegetable broth of your choice until everything is just covered. I would recommend something tomatoey. If using dry powedered rosemary like I did, put some in now along with salt and black pepper, depending on how seasoned your broth is.

Put a lid on your large cooking apparatus and add small amounts of vegetable broth, water, or more red wine, if you're feeling saucy, as needed. All told, this'll probably take like 45 minutes.

When this was finished, I added more powdered rosemary and a healthy sprinkle of parmesan to each bowl, mixing it so that the cheese would melt, before sprinkling a little more on top and adding the garnish for colour.

On a toasted, gluten-free ciabatta roll? Oh yes, please.