Some pictures of a brief stay in Bangkok

This is a statue at one of the temples in Bangkok, Wat Pho.



An example of some of the ornate architecture.


One of the infamous tuk tuks. These are little three wheeled vehicles that whisk people around town. Not as scary as the cabs because they don't go as fast.

There are a few more pics up on my flickr page, whose link is over in the side bar.

Comprehensive list of all the bizarre foods I have encountered in Japan

I thought that this might interest some of you, or maybe make your stomach turn.

Sashimi: sliced raw fish. not really that weird, since you can get this in the states, but I'm starting small. This also includes octopus, squid and clams

Ikura: Raw salmon eggs. Yuk.

Hot Sake with Fish: Already mentioned in previous post.

Sea Lantern: Some sort of urchin like thing that tastes like ocean water

Jellyfish: Texture is what you would expect, chewy. Technically not Japanese food since I had it at a Taiwanese place. Pretty tasty actually.

Chicken cartilage: You know when you eat a drumstick, theres that chewy stuff around the joint. They put that on a skewer and serve it as yakitori here. I'm not wild about it.

Raw egg over Japanese sweet potato: Raw egg is slimy. The sweet potatoes here are slimy. What's not to love?

Fermented bonito flakes: Bonito is a type of fish. They ferment it with a fungus that dries it out and allows it to remain edible for a long time. Looks like the shavings you put in a hamster cage, tastes pretty good.

Natto: Fermented soybeans. Eaten for breakfast with mustard and onions. Taste depends on where it is from.

Grilled pregnant fish: I can't remember the name of these right now, but they look kinda like sardines, except they are full of eggs. When served you get the entire fish; head, tail and all.

Sea snake: not so great

Tripe stew: Also available in the states. However the weirdness was accentuated by having it for breakfast.

Onsen egg: An egg, cooked in hot water direct from the earth. In theory this is an appealing idea. In practice, it isn't that far away from a raw egg. I can't stand to have my omelette runny, so I am not impressed in the least.

Lichen wrapped sushi: Not sure of the species, I think that it's a Leptogium, but definately some sort of cyanolichen. This was also served by itself as a side dish with a sesame sauce. Good.

Dried seafoods of various kinds: Popular as snack foods here.

I had the next four things all at one sitting while at an izakaya (Japanese style bar) in Kyoto.

Extremely fresh shellfish of some sort: One of the pieces contracted when I touched it with my chopsticks. Kinda chewy.

Fried crocodile: Not sure what else it tastes like, or why they were serving it for that matter. I guess because they can.

Frog legs: It really does taste like chicken.

And the winner for weirdest Japanese food....

Raw horse meat: It's served frozen. You dip it in soysauce with ginger and garlic. Pretty good, although it feels a little weird to admit that. It's going to be hard to say "I'm a vegetarian" when I get back to the states, although I do plan to resume that practice. They put meat in just about everything here, and I am a little tired of it.

For the record, I was offered and turned down whale at this izakaya by my host in Kyoto. I have a line that I won't cross, and that is it. Primates are also on the same side, as well as anything else that could potentially be an endangered species. I asked to see where whale was on the menu, so that I would know the kanji for future reference. It wasn't on the menu. You have to be able to ask for it. This is a highly political issue, and I suspect that maybe they shouldn't have been serving that particular item.

So there you have it. My adventures in Japanese food. Somehow, non of this has given me any sort of upset stomache. Although after the izakaya experience, I thought that I might. Probably more a psychological thing than effect of any food that I ate.

some long overdue pictures

This is the guy who was selling the toad oil up on Tsukuba mountain. I actually got to see the sales pitch(performance) on another visit and snapped this photo.


One example of the interesting mix of people that Tokyo creates: Very proper businessman shoulder to shoulder with some party girls who were nodding off. If you look closely at the one on the right I think you can see some drool.


The Northern Japanese Alps.


The obligatory dead insect photo. Not sure how I made it this far into the summer without putting one of these on here. This is Tilachlidiopsis nigra for those of you interested in such things. For those of you not interested just call it Neal.


The Hanabi fireworks. I don't know if you have tried or not, but it is quite hard to take good pictures of fireworks. Anyway.....


The pine islands of Matsushima.

In a weird twist, sushi used to be anything but raw fish. It was actually (yet another) fermented product. So instead of it being super fresh, with nothing done to it aside from the slicing, it was intentionally "rotted". Ahhhh Japan. Consequently it is quite tasty. The fish is on the other side of the rice cake, but that is a dried shrimp you see, not sure what the blue stuff is. Since this is Japan we are talking about it is probably something like flakes of dried sea slugs or the diced plumes of pheasant feathers. This was from the foray with the Amateur Cordyceps Club in Aomori.

Coming soon (hopefully) some pictures of Kyoto, the city I want to spend the last of my days in.

a quick one

Wow, two posts in the same day..... Anyway.

On my way back from Chiba yesterday, I was switching trains at Akihabara station. Yes, the same one where I encountered the drag queens. They weren't there this time, but there was some music going on outside that came drifting into the station. Now, I am a sucker for music in general, and street musicians in particular, so I wandered over and gave them a listen. It was a trio, two guitars and an upright bass. As I listened, I realized that I knew the song that they were playing. It was something by the David Grisman Quintet, from their first album. I was impressed and surprised, and it made my day in a small way, to find something familiar in a faraway land. I noted in the previous post that my time was rapidly coming to a close. The flip side of that is I have been here awhile, and the icy tendrils of homesickness have made the inevitable inroads on my heart. Not that I long to leave (far from it!!!) but I do miss the people and places that have shaped me and brought me here now. So, gentle reader (and some of you not so gentle. You know who you are!), know that you are in my thoughts and I look forward to our next meeting, where and whenever that may be.

Oh yeah, you can check out the band that was jamming here

Time flies

Wow, can it be August here already? That means I have about three weeks left of my stay here in Japan. It feels as though I have been here forever, and the time has flown by. And as the time has flown by, I feel increasingly more busy. The schedule that I have been trying to keep is ridiculous, to say the least. Here is the rundown from the 22nd til now. The 22nd I left for a collecting trip in the mountains west of Tokyo at a research forest owned by Tsukuba University. Very pretty, but the fungi just haven't been around, or maybe it is me but we'll get to that. Spent one night in the mountains up there at this place called Kinoko pension. A pension is a western style "penthouse mansion" type of bed and breakfast type of place. Kinoko is the Japanese word for mushroom. How could we not stay there? The owner has actually written a book on the fungi of Japan.

We returned from the mountains on Tuesday. Wednesday was spent dealing with the collections. Thursday, Gi-Ho and I dealt with some minor things around the lab, then ventured into Tokyo for a massive fireworks display. During the summer time there are festivals called Hanabi, where various companies play host to fireworks displays in an attempt to outdo each other for the best. All told the Hanabi we went to was supposed to have 14,000 fireworks, but I only counted 12,756 so I feel a little slighted. It was pretty cool to say the least, and best of all.... free.

After the fireworks we took the shinkansen north to the city of Sendai, which is on the Pacific coast. Got in around 12:00. The next morning it was off for some sightseeing at a little town called Matsushima (pine island). This city overlooks a bay where there are about 250 little islands all covered in pine trees. Very beautiful. The poet Basho visited here and supposedly wrote a very famous poem about the place, but I don't know what it is.

After that we continued up the coast by shinkansen to the northern most prefecture, Aomori. This is where we met Tsuyoshi (host researcher) the following day. From there we went into the woods. This is one of the most beautiful parts of the country that I have seen yet. The beech forests here are stunning, and not unlike the southern appalachians, which might be why I am so taken with them. We spent that night at an onsen resort. This is where we met the amateur cordyceps group I mentioned in an earlier post (no fish sake this time). We had an amazing feast that night, they tried yet again to drown us in sake, and then the next morning we went collecting. Again, they found more amazing fungi, which I probably completely overlooked. Now we are at Sunday. Monday, we took the shinkansen back to Tsukuba, and stayed in the lab til about 8:00pm or so dealing with all of the stuff that we found in Aormori. Tuesday we took a trip to visit some collaborators in Chiba prefecture, which is on the east side of Tokyo bay. Today is Wednesday and I don't have anywhere to go today or tomorrow, but Friday I leave for another collecting trip with the Cordyceps Group. I come back Sunday, and am going to leave on Monday for Kyoto, to meet with the southern version of the Amateur Cordyceps Group, and also do more collecting. I don't know how long I am going to stay down there, but since lodging will be free at someones guest house, I might take advantage of the opportunity to see some more of the city, which is supposed to be one of the best in all of Japan. This will put me back home (if it can be called that) the following Monday.

So, that would end up being three weeks of strait travel. Is it too much? Well, maybe a little. Do I care? Not a bit.

Now you see why there are no pictures up on any of the last couple of posts. I will try to change that in the near future. But you might just have to wait a little bit longer.

Typhoons, Earthquakes and Hotsprings...

Well, it has been entirely too long since I put anything on here.

First let me say that I survived all of the natural phenomena that Japan was subjected to over the weekend. In fact, I didn't even feel the quake. I actually didn't experience the typhoon either. And that is where our story begins.....

Monday (it is Tuesday morning here now as I write this) was a national holiday here in Japan, which means three day weekend in my book. I had some plans to go to a huge temple complex in the mountains outside of Tokyo, but those plans fell through for whatever reasons. On Friday, I was considering my options. It was supposed to be rainy (=typhoon). There were some offers to go to Tokyo and do some stuff like museum hopping and the like, but I have spent a couple of weekends in Tokyo now and was feeling like something a little more adventurous. During lunch I was mulling all this over, when I chanced to look at the TV set in the cafeteria and noticed that in spite of the impending typhoon, there were some spots on the map that showed at least a little sunshine. That was all it took. Upon returning to my office I started researching destinations. For a brief moment or two I was considering going to Niigata, the site of the earthquake, but instead decided that my destination should be the little town of Tazawako, nestled in the mountains of Akita prefecture.

And so I left, right then. Backpack full of nothing but the bare minimum, which for me means that I left my toothbrush back at the house. I swear, I could document my travels by all the various toothbrushes I have bought after setting out. "Here is my toothbrush from Hawaii. I bought this one after I got to Chicago. And this one here, this is the first one that I bought in Japan. I like it better than the second and third."

I arrived in Tazawako around 8:00 after a three hour Shinkansen ride. Took a taxi to the youth hostel and had an amazing home cooked meal for dinner. The following morning at breakfast I dinned with a couple from Yokohama that spoke English. They asked me to accompany them as they biked around the lake. An invitation I was glad to accept. Lake Tazawako is the deepest in Japan, -423m. This puts it right up there next to Crater Lake, and similar to Crater Lake, the water is a radiant blue color.

After that little adventure, it was back on the Shinkansen, destination: Kakunodate. Because the Shinkansen is just plain fast this little jaunt, that is a hour long bus ride, took all of about 20 minutes. Kakunodate is a town that formerly had a very large samurai population, prior to the start of the Meiji period (1868ish). Because of this, the town is full of some very old, stately homes, with amazing traditional style gardens surrounding them. These aren't like the places that you see in the southern US, the plantation homes with the ostentatious gardens, bursting with color. This is Japan after all. These homes exuded a quiet opulence, very refined, and seemingly self assured. In short, what I would expect a samurai to be like. In fact, the mood of the city here is described as being similar to Kyoto, which is a high compliment indeed (Kyoto is next on the list, if I can find the time.... but I digress). There is also the usual smattering of touristy shops and over priced food, but amongst these there is one of the most unique folk crafts I have seen. Household wares that have been covered in cherry bark. It really creates a stunning effect.

After I had finished having my way with the samurai, it was on to Akita city, the prefectural capital. My hopes weren't high, since the guide book describes it as an industrial city, but it was also noted as having a busy nightlife district, and is fairly close to the ocean. It was also only 30min away on the Shinkansen, so why not? Well, it really just isn't that great, that's why. The night life scene is definitely there, but not quite what I wanted. By that I mean I wasn't interested in strip joints, maid cafes (I won't bother to describe this unique phenomena here, google it or something) or gimicky looking bars full of businessmen. I ended up at a place called "Cell Block" which I though might be a hangout for biologists, but it turns out the wasn't the right kind of "cell". They were playing hip hop music and I thought maybe there would be dancing or something, a chance to mingle with some people a little closer to my age. Wrong. It was me, the bartender and two girls over by the window talking to themselves. Fortunately the bartender was super cool, although he spoke less english than I speak Japanese, which means he didn't speak any. It ended up with just me and him, throwing darts (and loosing badly, but he had the home court advantage) and drinking for free. Maybe Akita isn't so bad after all.

The next morning, after sleeping in a little bit (well, I was partying with a bartender after all) I set out in search of the Sea of Japan (or East Sea if you ask a Korean. Kind of a touchy subject). Wrong again. Don't misunderstand, the sea is still there, there just isn't an easy way to get there and all of the beaches are still closed. That was it. Time to leave Akita and find some hotsprings, or onsen.

And so I did. Another shinkansen ride back to Tazawako, a bus ride up into the mountains and then nothing but blistering hot water. This was in the Nyuto area, which has a ton of onsen all over the place. These resorts are very nice, but the only problem is they are kinda expensive, at least if you want to spend the night. I was starting to feel a little over extended in the pocketbook, so I inquired at the hostel back down the mountain again. Full. Thought about going to the campsite a little ways down the mountain, ahhhh but no tent, and for the amount it would cost to rent a tent there I could just about stay at the onsen. Hmmmmmm.....

Well I had a sleeping bag. And is that an old shed over there? Problem solved. And so I spent the night listening to the wind spun off from the typhoon whipping through the trees, lying in an old tool shed up in the mountains of Japan. The next morning I awoke with the sun to hear birds singing (and some little critter rummaging around), the wind had died down, and I took a little stroll through the forests before catching the first bus back down the mountain. The views from the bus of Lake Tazawako were stunning, since the clouds had broken up and the sun was shinning through. And while I was chatting with some Finnish backpackers in front of the train station, sun bearing down, hearty breeze sweeping away the last of the clouds, there was a major earthquake about 200km away or so. I had no idea about the details of which until I saw the reports this morning. It feels like a small world sometimes, but don't be fooled.

Voyage to the mountains

Last weekend I had my first trip to one of the rural areas of Japan. My host and Itook the Shinkansen (bullet train) north to Yamagata Pref. The Shinkansen, one of the fastest train systems in the world, is a pleasure to ride. It goes about 300 km per hour, or nearly 200mph, so you get where you are going very fast. Not only that, they serve beer. Ahhhh Japan.....

Anyway, we spent the night in the city Yamagata, and then in the morning, after a breakfast of onigiri and miso soup, met members of the Tochukaso Circle, or Amateur Cordyceps Group. Japan is a very fungus loving culture, and this group is an extreme example of that. The members of the group that we met we locals of the area, which is crucial from my perspective, since my nascent Japanese language skills only allow me to do things like order food and exchange pleasantries. Couple this with the fact that the people living in the area speak a unique dialect and I would be hard pressed to find my way into the remote parts of the mountains alone. The degree of separation from Japanese spoken there, versus that spoken in the Tokyo area is beyond that existing between, say, Maine and Florida. In fact Hosoya-san, my host, could only make out about 80% of what some of the people were saying.

The ride into the mountains took us through some agricultural fields, the majority of which consist of rice paddies, although there is also a lot of forage crop, grown to feed the cattle for which the area is famous. They also produce a lot of cherries. I bought some of them and they were good, but fresh fruit is a commodity in short supply, due the low amount of land available for agriculture. I paid 1000 yen, which translates to about 10 bucks. The cherries were good, especially because it had in fact been awhile since I had enjoyed any fresh fruit, but they're a far cry from what they grow in Oregon (sigh...).

I've been out collecting my fungi in the states before. Over a two week period, visiting five states, my labmate and I were able to collect about 200 individual specimens, representing 17 or so species. I felt ok about those kind of numbers, since the conditions had not been totally conducive for the growth of the fungi. To say that things are different here, would be an understatement of profound proportions. In the span of about four hours, 10 people were able to locate 244 individual specimens, representing 24 species. When I heard those numbers, my jaw dropped and I wondered if perhaps I had chosen the wrong profession. Maybe I should go into accounting or something. However, I shouldn't be so hard on myself, since the leader of the group has been scouring the forests in search of these things for over 40 years.

That night we were treated to a fantastic spread of food. Many new things to try, including some wild foods, like fiddle head ferns and mizo, which is a plant that tastes a little like celery (incidentally, you should ask a Japanese person to say "celery" some time. The "l" and "r" sounds are combined in this language so it comes out sounding like "cerlerly". Pretty funny really. Anyway...)

In addition to the wonderful food, I also had the most interesting culinary item since arriving. Sake is a drink that is sometimes served warm, this is no surprise to most of you. However, my new friends in Yamagata have developed a new twist on this. While heating the sake, they put fish in the kettle. The result is a drink where the evaporating alcohol hits your nose first, with a pungent fishy odor hot on its heals. It seems to me a bit like drinking the water that you drain off of canned tuna, or maybe sardines. I wouldn't say you should refuse it if ever offered such a concoction, it wasn't bad. But maybe this is one trend from Japan that should stay in Japan.

The following morning, was another introduction to new foods. Tripe stew. Tripe is a very tender meat, but not exactly what you want to have first thing in the morning, especially after a night spent slurping fishy sake. However, everything was set right upon leaving, since we stopped at one of the local onsen. Since Japan is on a pretty active subducting plate boundry, there are a multitude of hotsprings sprinkled throughout the mountains. Onsen are hotsprings that have been built up a little bit to form tubs and such. The perfect thing for a body tired of stooping through the brush and negotiating poison ivy (will I ever be free from this scourge of a plant?) and steep slopes looking for tiny fungi.