Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.

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Japan, day Three

aka: Food that goes crunch in a most unpleasant way.

Yet another story 'bout the vacation. More will be up shortly.

Saturday 06/30/0:

Carlos, Beth, young Jacob, John and I met Lisa and her husband Joe for breakfast. Joe is as kind and friendly as his wife, though in a very crusty and curmudgeonly kind of way. A description which may not make much sense I guess, but it does. Trust me.

After breakfast, Carlos drove John and me over to Ginza to have a look around and see what the fuss was about. It rained off and on that day and it was also fairly hot. Which gave us a good excuse to duck into some of the stores to both cool and dry off.

Before leaving for Japan, my friend Akiko told me that I absolutely MUST visit a department store and go down to the food level in the basement. She had suggested Mitsukoshi and it proved to be a good choice. There were displays, shelves, kiosks, tables and walls all filled to bursting with food and it was all beautiful. Extremely beautiful. A "this looks too beautiful to eat," kind of beautiful. It was also all very expensive as well.

We saw some of the fabled 10,000 yen cantaloupes on display there. They looked perfect, but were they really worth over eight hundred dollars? I somehow doubt it. The fruit section also had grapes (~ten bucks), peaches (~forty bucks) and some "cheap" not good enough to a be a gift to give to someone important melons (~sixty dollars). All of the produce looked perfect, but again, I'm certain that I would not have paid that much for perfection.

A friend of Carlos had joked the week before that it was jelly season in Japan and there were many elaborate displays of even more elaborate gelatin (actually agar I think) desserts. Elaborate "jellies" are a traditional gift for this time of year, or holiday, or event, or something. Calling the desserts elaborate is a severe understatement. Imagine small transparent half globes filled with carefully arranged cut sections of assorted fruits. Again perfect is an adjective. Expensive as well. They did taste good though.

I didn't buy any, but I did accept a sample, which brings up the next point, samples. The majority of the stands were giving out food samples and I ate a lot of 'em. I had jelly stuff, really good chocolate (REALLY, REALLY, GOOD, chocolate), assorted candy cosas, little bits of bread, little bits o' chicken and unfortunately a Chinese, fried, seafood pancake thing.

The pancake thing tasted good at first, with a salty, smokey, seafoody kind of flavor. Then there was an unfortunate crunch. It was not a good crunch, but rather a bad, very bad, I have no idea what the heck would crunch like this kind of crunch. The pleasant smokey/seafoody/salty flavor went away and was replaced by a not pleasant, very bitter taste and the thing kept on being crunchy.

I started imagining that a grasshopper or some other large type insect would taste and feel this way, which was not helping the situation. I tried not to think of what was in my mouth and just swallowed the last bits of it.

John thought that I was abusing the entire sample idea, since I wasn't going to purchase anything, so I didn't get any sympathy from him. Carlos just laughed and told me that was the reason that he never ate anything unless he knew exactly what was in it. I headed back to one of the chocolate venders and got some more chocolate to get rid of the nasty bitter flavor.

It was a gift giving holiday season (forget the name of it) and an entire floor of the department store was devoted to gift packages. It was crowded with tons of folks filling out personal gift lists and checking out other folk's personal gift lists to make purchases for them. The idea being that you spend X amount of money on someone and in return, they spend X amount of money on you. At the end of it all you''ll end up even, sort of. Instead of the money you started out with though, you now have a bunch of stuff lying around the house. Whatever.

The rest of the store was pretty much what you would expect from any upscale department store, so we left as soon as the rain let down some. We wandered around Ginza for a bit and had lunch at fast food tempura chain. They had a veggie bowl, so no problems there for John. It was the first time that I had ever eaten lotus root, pretty good. Although, most things would taste good all fried up. almost ;-)

We went back to the apartment relatively early, which was fine since I still wasn't used to the humidity. I spent a lot of the trip feeling like I was about to melt.

We met some more friends of Beth and Carlos at FugiMamas, a "pan Asian" cuisine restaurant. It was in Harajuku or Aoyama (I'm not quite sure where one neighborhood ended and the other started) and the place was filled with well dressed, youngish, trendy, folk. All smoking heavily. Heavily.

Despite the smoke, we had a pleasant evening talking and eating really good food. Good way to end the day.

More later

nico

note: After hearing the crunchy and not in a good way story, a few of my friends have suggested that I may have eaten crab brains...

...yum.

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