26 March 2006, night Here's what's been going on for the last 8 days: working, printing for the exhibition, shooting with my Voigtlander, developing at home, plus two restaurants in two days with Kumiko. On Friday, we went to Kobeya Kitchen, the second closest restaurant to our apartment. It was awesome. I've been there a few times before, but haven't enjoyed it as much. I was really happy with my filet steak, and their gimmick is unending fresh bread, so every few minutes a cute waitress comes along with a basket of several styles of fresh-baked bread and butter, and it's just really good. Kumiko got a very delicious soup, served French onion style in a hot crock with a crust of bread floating on top. The service is always good there, and the atmosphere is warm and homey and kind of old-fashioned, like it hasn't changed since the 70's. Kumiko says she used to go there with her friends after highschool and just order dessert. On Saturday, we went to Kumiko's favorite (and my near-favorite) ramen shop in Umeda. It'd been a long time between ramens and this one really hit the spot.
We're going to watch Lost tonight. We're hooked on that show. But Japan is in the middle of season one, while America is feasting on season two. Don't tell me what happens. Oh, yeah, here's one more thing: I went to see a doctor about my allergies, and he gave me some pills that just fixed me. Amazing stuff. I decided to opt for a blood test, to see exactly what I'm allergic to, and I'll get the results later this week. With the results, the doctor told me he can "cure" me. I certainly hope so, but as long as I have the pills I'm on now, I'll be happy. After his initial examination, he sent me off to breath some vapors through a special two-pronged nose piece. I don't know what that was, but I don't care, because I can breath through my nose now, and I'm loving life!
My name is in Nippon Camera and Asahi Camera magazines right now. Just a listing for the exhibition, but I was pretty excited to see it.
18 March 2006, mid-morning Allergies. I don't enjoy them. I'm on the nose-spray diet now. We recently bought a new DVD player at Costco. It's multi-region,so it can play our American discs as well as the Japanese ones. Unfortunately, it won't play our British discs because they're made for PAL systems rather than NTSC. I wonder if other DVD players can play either standard. The one we bought was less than 7000 yen (70 dollars), so I don't credit it as being the state of the art. We can finally watch The Avengers on the big (television) screen. I'm watching one of my favorite episodes now - "Man-Eater of Surrey Green" - about a plant from space. It just dragged off an expired henchman to feed on his enzymes. We're going to the movies tonight. I can't think of the title now, but something about a lion, a witch and a wardrobe.
7 March 2006, late at night Well, early in the morning actually. I wrote a long post before, but lost it all when the program froze, so I was discouraged, and have waited far too long to post an entry.
We had a wonderful trip to Sapporo via the Twilight Express. We had a four-person compartment all to ourselves, so we were very comfortably spread. The train was really cool. We didn't opt for the 12,000 yen dinner (typical French dinner with lots of negative space on the plate, hardly any food, just some bit of fluff in the middle and some sauce drizzled artistically across the plate) in the dining car, but we ventured in there for "Bar Time" at 8pm, and had some beers and some snack foods, and that was worth the price, because the dining car was so cool-looking and perfectly reminiscent of classic train journey movies.
Once in Sapporo (22 hours after our departure), we had a nice time making the typical tourist rounds, meeting up with Kumiko's ex-work friend Shinobu, and her cool husband, who shares some of the same interests with me. He's crazy about The Simpsons, loves airplanes, and sci-fi. But he's taken the sci-fi thing too far, because beyond loving the classic Star Trek and spin-offs, he also watches Star Gate, which is absolute crap. Nice guy though. I can forgive him for Star Gate. He paid for our dinner, so he occupies a special shelf in my gratitude room. We had a fantastic Mongolian lamb barbeque (Mongolian grill, Australian lamb) at the historic Sapporo Brewery building beer hall. We ate a lot of lamb between the four of us. I think it might have been one whole lamb. Poor little guy. Hopefully he never saw it coming and was frisky to the end. We brought back some lamb sausages from the Sapporo airport gift shop too.
We also visited a smaller town called Otaru, which is a really pretty tourist trap kind of place lined with old Western-style (Russian) buildings and overflowing with sushi. We chose a little out-of-the-way sushi shop which specialized in uni (sea urchin roe). It was the first place we saw, to be honest, and we were hungry, so we didn't really choose it. It chose us. And we were glad it did, because it was awesome. It was a family-operated place. The husband was the chef, and he cut up everything before our very eyes. It was the first time I'd seen an akagai (a kind of oyster) gutted. Blood poured out of it when he put the knife in. Somehow I didn't imagine shellfish having red blood, but this one sure did. It grossed me out to watch, but the finished product wasn't bloody. It wasn't that great either. Everything else, however, was great. I ordered a donburi (bowl of rice topped with stuff) of ikura (salmon roe), salmon meat, and fresh crab. It was an excellent choice. Just delicious. When I got down to the bottom, the chef saw that there was still some white rice but not much fish left, so he grabbed the bowl and heaped on another spoonful of ikura. He, like all the people we met in Sapporo, was just a really nice person. His wife was there too, with a baby stuck to her back papoose-style, serving us tea and taking the dishes away. She even took our picture with a digital camera, and printed it out and gave it to us as a kind of special service. It was great. The house specialty, uni, was also great. This was a special kind of uni, which is packed in sea water rather than dry, and I liked it much better. It was a Russian product. There's a lot of Russian influence in Hokkaido. It was raining the whole time we were in Otaru, but we still had a fun day.
One other experience was especially memorable. We decided on our last evening, that we might like to try a Russian restaurant, so Kumiko had the good idea of checking the entertainment magazines at the bookstore. We found that all the Russian places were closed on Sunday, but we came across a place that looked really good that served French-Moroccan food. We asked for directions and made our way out there. It had become a windy, rainy night, and we had a couple of cheap umbrellas that just got ripped to shreds on the walk from the train station. It was like Neptune's wrath on Odysseus. There were dead, skeletal, warped, mangled umbrellas littering the ground on the way. It was cold and wet, but pretty amusing. When we came back to the station we found more of the same. Umbrellas in various states of destruction along the stairs and overflowing from the trash cans. Oh yeah, the food was good too. After reading my diatribe against French food, you might wonder why we chose a French restaurant, but we saw from the magazine that the prices were reasonable and the menu kind of exotic. We had an onion soup which was really dark and rich, a salad of pickled vegetables (I love that kind of stuff), and the piece de resistance was the Moroccan stew which was pictured in the magazine. It was special. But there were two silly things about that place that reaffirmed my wariness toward French restaurants. First off, the waiter kept my beer bottle to himself, and would just use it to refill my glass when I emptied it, like he was pouring wine. Why would you do that with a 12-ounce bottle of beer? It was weird. Second, the first thing they brought us was just so silly. It was a shot glass full of bean soup with one little cracker stick next to it, and a little spoon. Can you imagine spooning about one ounce of soup from a shot glass? I'm not kidding. It was about three tiny spoonfuls. Overall though, a good experience.
I'd like to go back to Hokkaido in the summer.
I took my Franka Solida III to Sapporo, because my Super Ikonta hadn't made it back from Slovakian repairs. It still hasn't actually. The Franka is kind of a pain in the arse, though. It's really slow to operate. It has a rangefinder, that's not linked to the lens focus assembly, so you have to read the distance off the rangefinder, then take your eye from the viewfinder to match that distance on the lens focusing scale, manually set the speed and aperture, cock the shutter, then recompose the picture and shoot. I don't love using it, but of course I managed to take a lot of pictures anyway, some with my 35mm Fujifilm Klasse, which can be operated with one hand. I used it when I needed a break from all that meticulous operating. I really like the Klasse. I've developed most of the rolls now, and scanned a few, so I'll put up a Sapporo vacation gallery soon enough.
We had dinner with Paul and Jenny, Brian and Keiko, and John last night at Outback Steakhouse in Umeda. It was another great evening with really entertaining friends. John told Paul that he was "so old he owed Moses a nickel".
The Otaru sushi family
out-of-focus photo with Franka Solida III on Kodak Tri-X filmMARCH 04 APRIL 04 MAY 04 JUNE 04 JULY 04 AUGUST 04 SEPTEMBER 04 OCTOBER 04 NOVEMBER 04 DECEMBER 04 JANUARY 05 FEBRUARY 05 MARCH 05 APRIL 05 MAY 05 JUNE 05 JULY 05 AUGUST 05 SEPTEMBER 05 OCTOBER 05 NOVEMBER 05 DECEMBER 05 JANUARY 06 FEBRUARY 06
