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Any post on this blog that starts with a closeup of a glass of beer has to be a good post. This is certainly not the first and likely won't be the last post that's started that way. Shocker, I know! This delicious pint of Fuller's Black Cab Stout in the matching glass (the way it's supposed to come) was captured on film (or maybe not film, exactly)  and then downed lovingly at The Hydrant pub in London right near The Monument in 2016. Yummy! Give me English beer over any other nation's beer any day!

It's now been more than nine weeks since my cancelled trip to Costa Rica was due to depart but didn't, a casualty of the global pandemic we now still find ourselves in more than two months after I was supposed to board a southbound flight at Dulles Airport. Last week, I cancelled my second trip of 2020, a long weekend in New Mexico visiting a site that I should have visited 19 years ago but which I missed because I just didn't get how big the Land of Enchantment is. Go figure! I guess now it's going to be 20 years at least.

Since I've been grounded, I've been combing through my picture archives from the last almost seven years that I've been traveling in a deliberate way and writing about it in this blog. I thought it might give me some hope for the day I can go somewhere new on this rock of ours if I posted some pictures of a great past memory. I've been doing that on Twitter every day since March 26, the day I was supposed to go to Costa Rica. As of today, I'm up to day 65. I'm going to keep going until I take my next trip, whenever and wherever that might be.

Some of the pictures I've posted over the last couple of months have appeared on this blog. Others have not. For whatever reason, they ended up on the cutting room floor, likely because I either elected not to write about that day or moment in time that I took the picture or just couldn't find a way to work them into a post. I miss writing about traveling, so for this post (and since I'm not going anywhere right now), I thought I'd write a few words about some of the photographs I've unearthed this spring. They are presented in the order I tweeted them. And, no, I'm not covering all 65 days.

Hawaii (2016)

One of the most disappointing experiences we've had over the last seven years was in Hawaii. I know, right? Who'd have thought? I sound completely spoiled. But it's true. 

We decided to spend the better part of one of our days on the island of Maui in February of 2016 by driving from Kahului to Hana on a road appropriately named the Road to Hana. It's a twisty, turny highway right along the ocean front with tons of pullouts and scenic views and secluded hikes to waterfalls along the way. It sounded cool as hell, especially when we had rented a Jeep Wrangler to get there.

It sucked. Honestly for us it was almost a complete waste of time. Sure we enjoyed a hike into the woods but other than that it was literally just a drive to a hardware store. A long, long drive to a hardware store. And I really do mean a hardware store. That's what's at the end of the road. Seriously. And nothing else. We got there, were supremely disappointed and headed back, without stops on the return journey.

So why am I reminiscing about a day that was almost a complete waste of time? Because "almost" is the key word. Along the way we stopped at Aunty Sandy's, a roadside stand selling hot, fresh banana bread, for breakfast. We walked down to the ocean and sat while we ate our loaf of banana bread and looked out at the view above. If there's ever been a breakfast I've eaten with a better view, I can't remember it. We were literally in paradise. We got nothing out of that drive except that view. And ultimately, that was enough because I'm remembering it four years later.

Venice (2015)

If there's something every first time tourist has to do in Venice, it's take a gondola ride along the Grand Canal. Sure it's overpriced, too short and a little cheesy. A complete tourist trap in other words. We did it anyway. How could we not? The Grand Canal is one of the great boulevards in Europe, albeit the only one made out of water. We have a picture in our house of us in the gondola with our gondolier smiling giving us two thumbs up after our ride. It was completely awesome, despite the fact that it's a total tourist trap.

When I was paging through my old directories of past trips, I found the picture above, which shows a series of gondolas in the foreground and Andrea Palladio's San Giorgio Maggiore church in the background across the water. For me, that church and those boats bring me back to Venice instantly. They are enduring symbols of that city. To find a picture with both in them at once brought back the three days we spent there in vivid detail. This photograph must have been taken late in the day because the gondolas are closed up for the day and the sun is hitting the west side of the church as it is setting.

I loved Venice. I thought it would be flooded and overcrowded with both tourists and pigeons. It was none of those things. I could have spent a week or more just wandering around the canals and streets of this place. It's definitely on the would love to go back list. But then again, so are a lot of places.

Brú na Bóinne, Ireland (2019)

Every so often I write almost an entire blog post about a place and then discard it. My post about Brú na Bóinne from the end of last year is the latest one of these posts to be started and never see the light of day. Sometimes I lose inspiration about a post or can't find enough to say or am just forcing things and decide to give up rather than completing something that's not worth the time and effort. With Brú na Bóinne, it just came down to not many interesting photographs. 

I've been to some pretty ancient places over the last seven years or so. Prehistoric petroglyphs in the American southwest. All sorts of Roman ruins. Stonehenge. Machu Picchu. I never would have thought the most ancient site with construction at the hand of man would be in Ireland but Brú na Bóinne beats all those other places handily in the age department. 

What we saw that day in the Irish countryside was a passage tomb, a stone structure beneath a mound of earth that's stood in place for 3,200 years. Stepping inside this place and hearing our guide talk about the history of the place and its relationship to the solstices was just amazing. The amount of labor that must have gone into putting this place together so precisely must have been staggering.

I love this picture as a reminder of what we experienced that day but I also love it because it's about the most green photograph I've ever taken in my life. It's perfect as a memento of Ireland which shone so brightly on some days and disappointed us so badly on others. A day at Brú na Bóinne was not one of the disappointing days.

Mount Fuji, Japan (2017)

When I first made my list of must sees for my one and only (so far) trip to Japan, it needed some serious editing. There's often a dilemma with me between getting into one spot in a country super deep vs. moving around and seeing a lot at the risk of spreading myself too thin. In the end, I think I sort of split the baby on Japan. Mount Fuji made the initial list and survived the cut down.

There's not much to a visit to Mount Fuji unless you are intending to take a hike right to the summit, which in mid-May we weren't planning doing. We hopped on a bus for an hour or two and got dropped off about halfway up the slope on the north side. There's a store and some food vendors and (of course) a Shinto shrine but not much else. You just sort of do what you can until the next bus shows up to take you home or wherever the next stop is that you have a ticket for.

But there's something about Fuji. It's a picture perfect single volcanic peak and its shape couldn't be a more idealized cone shape. It's like a cartoon image but its presence and meaning in the lives of the Japanese is huge. It was important to me to stand on the mountain on my first visit to Japan. So we did. 

The day we were there it was about impossible to photograph the mountain either because of the cloud cover or we weren't standing in the right spot or there was some object or human in the way. This picture is my favorite of the day, taken from the front steps of the Komitake Shrine where I purchased what is now my niece's goshuin-cho and then half filled it with goshuin, the calligraphy and temple seal artworks that you can collect from each temple or shrine you visit in the country. To me, this picture reminds me of how cold and isolated and spiritual it was on Fuji and it also shows off the peak of the mountain which I love.

I can almost guarantee the reason why this picture hasn't appeared on this blog before this post is that it has a portrait orientation and plain and simple I usually use landscape orientation or square photographs in this blog. Today, that doesn't matter.

Roosevelt Island, New York City (2019)

I am pretty sure without really checking too closely that I've visited New York City more than any other destination in the past seven years. I don't think there's really any need to check. I just know it's true. Despite all the time I've spent in the Big Apple, I've only written one post about my experiences there, a 2015 visit to the Statue of Liberty's crown.

The reason for this is simple: we are usually in New York to do the same things we love doing over and over again and by that I mean Broadway shows, trips to Kalustyan's to stock up on spices and chutney and our new tradition of dinners of chicken skewers at the excellent, excellent Tori Shin restaurant in Hell's Kitchen. Simply put...New York is where we would live if we could afford to live in the manner we want to live there. We can't. So we don't.

Every so often I do something in New York that approaches post-worthy status. My trip to Roosevelt Island in the middle of the East River last year almost made it. As many times as I've been to New York, I'd never been there before last summer to see the ruins of the old smallpox hospital and Louis Kahn's Four Freedoms State Park, which was executed posthumously (and therefore in my opinion not the way Kahn would have done it; the great architects always tweak during construction). It's totally worth a trip.

One of the best parts of this day was getting to the island, which can be visited by bus, Subway or ferry. Or you can take the tram, which takes you above the city from 2nd Avenue to the middle of the East River. You'll get some killer views of the City as you ride alongside the Queensboro Bridge for the low, low price of a Subway ride. The picture above shows the tram approaching the Roosevelt Island terminal. Do this if you are in New York, even if you turn right back around and go back to Manhattan.

Ollantaytambo, Peru (2019)

Last year we spent about a week deep in the heart of the Andes exploring the cities and towns and citadels of the Incan Empire. Our trip took us from Lima on the coast of Peru up to the Incan capital of Cusco and then over to a spot where we hiked for a day to the royal retreat called Machu Picchu.

When the Spanish conquistadors "discovered" the Incan Empire in 1526, they took what they wanted almost from day one. The Incas proved no match for the Spanish from the very first engagement although it was really the horses that they couldn't compete with. A man who has never seen a horse before in his life is no match for a trained and heavily armed soldier on the back of a 2,000 pound animal. Almost every engagement the Spanish had with the native Peruvians resulted in a victory for the Europeans except one: Manco Inca's stand at Ollantaytambo, a fortified hilltop between Cusco and Machu Picchu.

Today Ollantaytambo is one of many sites with ruined but mostly intact Incan masonry structures, a testament to the timeless quality of Incan construction. And like some of those other sites, the remains of building at Ollantayambo are in what seem like the most remote and most inaccessible locations you can possibly imagine. 

This photograph of some abandoned grain warehouses is my favorite of our partial day stop in town. I appreciate the way these old buildings are just clinging to the most precarious of slopes and blend in perfectly with the mountainside. We didn't have time that day to explore these ruins but I got as far as I reasonably thought I could from our tour group to get a picture I thought I'd be happy with. And I am.

Kyoto, Japan (2017)

I know, I know, I already put a picture of Japan on this post. What can I say? Japan was simply one of the most amazing places I've ever been. I can't wait to go back. And yes, it's ahead of Venice. Way ahead.

It's difficult to describe all the ways I love Japan from my week and a half or so there in 2017. It's a place with so many details. Tradition. Respect. Humility. Incredible food. Gorgeous nature. Spiritualism. Cutting edge modern anything. Boozy late nights of karaoke. The markets. The temples. The bars. Cleanliness. Order. Speed. Crowds. There are so many sights and smells and tastes and sounds to take in.

As we walked around Kyoto, which is the traditional capital of shogun-era Japan, I couldn't help but notice these red paper lanterns with birds on them. They seemed to be everywhere in that city as we roamed the streets and alleys in search of geishas or gyoza or street markets or temples. I took this picture because I wanted to find one of these lanterns in a store and bring it back and hang it in our home. We never found a paper lantern store. But this is still one of my favorite details of Kyoto.

Serengeti National Park, Tanzania (2018)

We've been fortunate in the last five years to have taken two safari trips to sub-Saharan Africa. We spent less than a week in primarily Zimbabwe and Botswana in 2015 to get our feet wet and then really did it right a couple of years ago by spending a week each in Kenya and Tanzania. The diversity of wildlife and the almost completely untouched environment is like no other place on Earth I've been.

In 2015 we didn't know what to expect. We were happy to see anything that we'd only ever previously seen in a zoo somewhere. Fortunately, elephants, hippos and lions featured heavily. In 2018, I went with a top 10 list of species that we hadn't been able to find on our first trip. I think we got seven of the ten. Maybe eight.

Never in my wildest imaginings would I have expected to find the birds in Kenya and Tanzania to be one of the more fascinating aspects of that trip. I've never been much of a birds guy (ostriches and storks and things like that don't really count here) but those two weeks in eastern Africa, particularly at Lake Manyara and Serengeti National Park, really opened my eyes and I fell in love. Who knew lilac-breasted rollers and carmine bee-eaters could be so interesting? The picture above shows four superb starlings. I love how the colors pop against the thorny gray tree (always with the thorns in Africa...) they are roosting in and I love that I got a group of four all in one shot. I have no idea how this didn't make my Serengeti post. Too focused on the wildebeest and zebras in that location I guess.

One day soon, I'm hoping that I'll be writing again about some new places I've visited. I have to find a way to do some low risk traveling sometime in the next three months and hopefully I won't be cancelling any more flights or hotels. I'll leave this post with a black-backed jackal at Lake Nakuru in Kenya. Haven't posted this one to Twitter yet but I'm sure it's going to be there if this thing goes on long enough. Stay safe out there.

Love The Shinkansen

It is rare that I devote an entire post on this blog to practical travel advice. In fact I think I've only done it once before when I returned from my 2014 trip to England. But in researching and then actually traveling around Japan, we found something that saved us a ton of money. So here's a post dedicated to the Japan Rail Pass. If you are headed to Japan, I'd look into this. It could save you a ton of cash.

Now, I've looked into these sorts of things before, specifically in continental Europe. The various train systems in western Europe participate in what's called a Eurail Pass, a multi-day pass that allows you hop from train to train around Germany, France, Italy and the like all for a single lump sum which varies depending on the duration of the pass you elect to buy. The pass is only available to non-European residents and you have to purchase it before you get there. I've checked this deal out more than once and each time have come to the conclusion that you pretty much have to be traveling long distances on trains every day to make it work out. I've always passed.

The Japan Rail Pass works similarly to the Eurail Pass. You pay a flat fee for either a 7 day, 14 day or 21 day pass and then are able to ride almost any train in the Japan Rail system as much as you want during the period the pass is active. The pass is not available to residents of Japan (just like the Eurail Pass) and you have traditionally been required to purchase the pass before arriving in Japan (although for a limited time you are permitted to purchase the pass in country, albeit at a higher fee). The Japan Rail Pass is similar to the Eurail Pass in most every respect except one: it's a better value.

Japan's iconic shinkansen, or bullet train.

Let's look at the economics using my recent trip as a guide. A 7 day Japan Rail pass retails for 29,110 Yen as of May 2017. That's a little more than $250 as of the summer of 2017. That appears to be a lot, but not if you run the numbers. We knew we were spending time in Tokyo before heading over to Kyoto for a few days then onto Miyajima via Hiroshima before returning to Tokyo. We also knew we wanted to take a day trip to Nara from Kyoto. Japan Rail covers all of these cities. That's a lot of train travel; we figured we'd be spending a lot on rail travel anyway.

A train ticket on the bullet train, or shinkansen, from Tokyo to Kyoto is 13,600 Yen each way. Yes, the Japan Rail Pass works on the shinkansen and that's a round trip cost of 27,200 Yen, which is almost the same as a 7 day Japan Rail Pass. Add in a round trip from Kyoto to Hiroshima at 11,090 Yen each way and we covered the cost of a 7 day pass easily with a savings of 20,270 Yen.

Pile on a round trip to Nara at 710 Yen each way; a round trip from Hiroshima to the mainland Miyajima ferry terminal at 410 Yen each way; and a round trip on the JR Ferry to Miyajima at 360 Yen round trip and my savings were up to 22,870 Yen which is about $200. You can also use the Japan Rail Pass on the JR trains around Tokyo and Kyoto and on the tourist bus that hits the high points in Hiroshima. We used all three and saved a bunch more Yen on I don't know how many train and bus rides. The savings just keep piling up.

One of the Japan Rail lines which you can use to get just about anywhere in Tokyo.

So I know what you are thinking. There's some fine print, right? Well, yes. Or no. Not really fine print. But there are what I'll call some stickier points you need to be aware of.

The first is the "buy ahead" rule that I've mostly discussed already. When you make the decision that the Japan Rail Pass is for you, you need to find someone who sells them because Japan Rail (which is a national company subdivided into six separate geographies) doesn't. Fortunately, there is a list of agents available through a link on their website. For those in North America, you can get to the list of your local agents by using the clickable link in the prior sentence.

What you will purchase through the agent isn't the actual Japan Rail Pass. You need to swap the coupon that you purchase at a designated exchange office. Fortunately, the Japan Rail Pass site also has a link to a list of locations when you can get the actual document. Allow some time for this and make sure your passport has a visitor's visa stamp or sticker. Without it, you cannot exchange the coupon you bought for the actual pass.

Finally, I mentioned earlier that you can take the shinkansen using your Japan Rail Pass and that's true. However, you can't take all the shinkansens using your Pass. There are a number of different types of shinkansen in Japan. The fastest are the Nozomi and Mizuho shinkansen. These you cannot take using the Japan Rail Pass. You'll most likely have to settle for a Hikari shinkansen, meaning instead of traveling at 170 miles per hour, you'll have to make do at a speed 30 miles per hour slower. I think you might be able to handle that if it means saving a couple of hundred dollars, right?

Waiting for the JR Ferry to Miyajima Island, which is included as part of the Japan Rail Pass.

A few final thoughts on this deal.

Google Maps is an incredibly useful app to get from point A to point B, even overseas. I use it a lot here at home to drive places I've never been before. You can also use it to figure out train and bus schedules. Only, it doesn't work that well for trains in Japan because it only shows you the fastest way to get to your destination. For a shinkansen ride, that means it shows you only route and time information for the Nozomi, which you can't use using your Japan Rail Pass. Seek alternate ways of figuring out how long rail journeys will take.

There is a train from Tokyo's Narita Airport to downtown Tokyo called the Narita Express. It costs 4,560 Yen for a roundtrip ticket. The Japan Rail Pass will get you on this train. If your 7 day or 14 day window includes your arrival day or departure day, use the Japan Rail Pass to get to or from the airport. There is a coupon exchange location in the airport. Remember to redeem the coupon for a Pass once you clear customs and immigration.

Finally, this pass offered us a ton of flexibility. If you want to reserve a seat on a train, you can; just take the pass to a ticket desk and get a seat. You can also just walk onto a non-reserved car if you can figure out the schedule on your own. On our return trip from Hiroshima to Tokyo, we knew there was a transfer required somewhere but didn't know where exactly so we made sure to check with the ticket desk and get some seats. 

We ended up with our first train being 62 minutes later but I figured trains probably ran every hour and if we hustled we could make the one two minutes from the time we were handed our ticket. I was right and we really hustled. The Japan Rail Pass allowed us to sit down in an unreserved car and shed an hour off our trip back to Tokyo. Couldn't have made that on the spot decision without the Pass.

If you are moving around in Japan and planning to take trains to do so, I'd look into a Japan Rail Pass. It may be the best $250 or so you'll spend.

Oishi

It seems like almost every trip I take gets some sort of food-related post. It seems logical to me; we gotta eat when we are on vacation and part of the fun of discovering a new place is diving into the local cuisine. Sometimes these posts are about specific dishes, like key lime pie or gelato or cheese; but other trips require a more comprehensive look at the wonderful bites I ate while on holiday. I've done this in the past with England, Hawaii and New Mexico although let's face it, any place I go is going to be tough to beat English food.

If there was a place dying for an overview post of all the great food available there, it was Japan. Most of what I've eaten in my life traces its origins back through western cuisine or comes from south of the border which is really a melding of European cooking with the new ingredients found in the new world. Japan is a totally different ball game; sure, I've eaten my fair share of sushi in the United States but there are so many amazing and strange flavors and concepts about food in Asia. My list of foods that I wanted to try in Japan was long. I mean really long. And spoiler alert: I didn't do all of them. So in recognition of my long list and what promises to be a long post, let's dispense with a verbose introduction and get right to it.

Convenience Stores

I get it, this is a strange place to start. But our first two meals in Japan were from convenience stores. Yep, of all the wonderful food available in Tokyo, we went to a convenience store for our first two noshes. Lawson Station. 7-11. FamilyMart. Doesn't matter which one you pick, there's some good stuff available on their shelves and in their coolers. 

Triangular sandwiches (always on white bread with the crust cut off). Rice balls. Onogiri (rice wrapped in seaweed with some sort of filling inside). Rice crackers (lots of rice obviously). Soft drinks you have never heard of. Beer. Snacks upon snacks upon snacks to pack into your backpacks for day trips. You probably can't go wrong. Well, maybe other than the salted plum onogiri. Trust me on this but just stay away from the salted plums in general. Not good. 

The photograph above is of my first breakfast in country. A chicken flavored rice ball wrapped around half a hard boiled egg and a very small can of Kirin Fire iced coffee, which honestly I bought because the can was cool but which woke my jet-lagged self up nicely at 6 am on a Sunday morning. I hardly ever drink coffee but the Fire was pretty good. I tried the Suntory Boss Cafe Au Lait the next morning which just about stopped my heart it had so much caffeine. I stayed away from that for the rest of the trip. I kept going back to convenience stores though. Wish our 7-11s were this good. 

Yakitori

Yakitori is simply pieces of meat or vegetables on skewers which are grilled and then dipped in or brushed with some shoyu (soy sauce based) liquid. It's simple and cheap and sometimes is used as a way to cook the parts of the beast (like chicken gizzards) that you just can't sell any other way at a restaurant. The appeal of yakitori was not in the taste of the meat or veg that we'd be eating (although I certainly hoped to get lucky there) but in the location and atmosphere of the joint we'd be eating in.

I'd seen yakitori restaurants on food shows on television before, tight packed bars in tiny alleys with thin open grilles between the customers and the server working the food and beer, and was dying to eat at one. On our first full day in Tokyo, we made our way to a place called Memory Lane (although we didn't know it was called that when we visited) which is about a five foot wide alley literally lined with yakitori place after yakitori place. Most are just open stalls right off the street that you need to squeeze into to get a spot at the counter and order some food but the more deluxe spots have a second floor accessible via a ladder. I'm not kidding.

At just after 5 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, you'll be hard pressed to find a spot at a yakitori restaurant for food in Memory Lane. We got lucky and spotted four people about to leave a bench with their backs to the alley and pounced on them (the seats on the bench, not the people). From there we ordered four of five skewers of food each along with some beer and watched them get cooked in front of us, smoke pouring off them at times after the flames below licked the meat or bacon wrapped onions or mushrooms cooking before us. A quick dip in sauce after being salted and done on the grill and we had our dinner. The chicken thighs were good, the mushrooms were OK and the onions were about the biggest green onions I'd seen in my life. Could have used more cooking. We definitely enjoyed the atmosphere more than the food. That's OK; that's what I came for.

We later discovered Memory Lane is also known as Piss Alley, so named because at one time there were no bathrooms on the street and I guess when you gotta go, you gotta go. That's been fixed now. Try to find more flavor than we did but go here for sure.

Sushi

If I had a fear about Japanese food, it was that eating sushi there would ruin my taste for sushi back home. We'd watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi before we left home along with some other food documentaries and were afraid we'd eat raw fish so sublime that it would leave us wanting something we couldn't possibly get back home.

I'm both disappointed and glad to report that didn't happen. Disappointed because I didn't have sushi in Japan that was so much more delicious than I can get here at home; glad because, well, I still want to enjoy sushi at home. And I still can.

We ate sushi in both Tokyo and Kyoto and had a little sashimi with our casual kaiseki meal on Miyajima Island. We didn't go visit Jiro Ono's place or anything like it because (a) we didn't have reservations and (b) didn't really want to spend close to $300 on one meal of sushi. That's per person, folks. The best sushi we had in Japan was at a spot next to the Doc Marten's store in Kyoto which I don't know the name of but whose sushi is pictured above.

Order a combo in Japan and you'll likely get some sort of presentation like the box shown above. Order individual pieces and you might get it dropped right on the counter where my pickled ginger is. I did a bit of both and ended that night with the best octopus (it had taste and was not rubbery), fatty tuna (so buttery but with some flavor and not just fat), uni or sea urchin (the creamiest ever) and eel (it was totally the crispy crusty edges that made the difference) that I have ever eaten in my life. You won't get grated wasabi to make some soy and wasabi slurry to soak your rice in before shoveling it in your mouth and that's OK.

A high end sushi place definitely stands out as one place that we missed food-wise on this trip. I'm financially richer for skipping it but I don't understand if I'm actually richer as a person for doing that. Perhaps next time. I still had some of the best sushi of my life.

Noodles

I have to confess I'm not much of a noodles guy. At one time in my life I used to eat a box of spaghetti at a time when I was in grad school but those meals were always all about the sauce which back then usually meant a whole jar of Newman's Own Sockaroni sauce mixed with a healthy amount of full fat sour cream.

So it was with a little trepidation that I so enthusiastically put noodles on my Japan list but they are such a staple that I had to. Noodles in Japan might mean tens of different varieties. It seems like each locality has their own special variant unique to that location. To make things easier for myself I stuck to ramen (which I'll generically classify as thin wheat noodles), soba (which I'll call similar to ramen but made out of buckwheat) and udon (which I'll just call thick noodles and which are shown above).

I gotta tell you, it's still all about the sauce for me, even in Japan, although sauce here might be better called broth which might be made up of a number of different ingredients to meld into something that is delicious. Yep, there are toppings you can get added onto your bowl of noodles like slices of pork or leeks or hard-boiled eggs or tempura pieces of shrimp or whatever else is on the menu. It's still, for me, all about the sauce.

The verdict? For me (and keep in mind I lack a good palate; hit me over the head with flavor please), the rich curry broth with a generous dose of fatty meat scraps and the sesame / spicy miso soybean paste broth were worth dreaming about again. Those represented my udon and ramen experiences respectively but I think I could have switched the noodles in both those dishes and been no worse off. Sure the pork was delicious in the ramen but it's still about the sauce.

If there's one thing to be said in favor of noodles, it's that they are extremely cheap. 1,300 yen (that's less than $12) got me a big dish of udon for me and my girlfriend along with a beer for me. Find some good sauce or broth and I'm good with these any day. But you gotta pick a good sauce.

Gyoza

I thought my food list was pretty comprehensive before I left for Japan. When I got to Kyoto I realized I had forgotten all about gyoza, or Japanese dumplings, when we stumbled across Gyoza Chaochao near the Kama River with a line out the door representing about a 45 minute wait. Gyoza got added to my list right there and then. The take out beers the place offered were helpful with the waiting.

The gyoza I am used to eating here at home are typically filled with pork, chicken or vegetables and I usually keep some ponzu sauce (soy mixed with citrus) on hand for dipping. Gyoza Chaochao turned all my ideas about these dumplings on their head. Mushroom: good. Curry: really good. Pork: OK. Onion: OK. Tomato sauce and mozzarella: interesting. Ginger: amazing.

I'm maybe being a little harsh with my ratings here. All these gyoza were perfectly crispy on one side and soft and well cooked on the other. We ordered them along with some pickled cucumbers that made us order a second dish of them and the table was equipped with four sauces (soy vinegar, miso, chile oil and some kind of spicy paste) to dip them in.

Gyoza Chaochao is a bare bones place. A small bar wrapping the frenetic food prep area with a few wooden tables scattered along the back and side walls. Ordering is quick and ordering seconds is definitely not frowned upon. I think I could have kept popping these things into my mouth along with more beer for a while. I'll say it again: the ginger ones were the best. And I can't believe I think that. They were just out of this world good.

Strawberry Pocky Sticks

I have many food weaknesses. And drink weaknesses for that matter. I suppose some people that know me reasonably well know what some of these are. One of my more obscure weaknesses is for fake strawberry flavor. And so even though Pocky Sticks can be picked up at 7-11 or FamilyMart and so are technically a subset of convenience store food, they get their own category because they are just so freaking good.

Maybe I should start with explaining Pocky Sticks. Think cookies baked into long thin sticks. They are then dipped in either chocolate or chocolate with coconut or green tea flavored icing or whatever it is or the same stuff just in fake strawberry flavor. I love these things. Compared to my other fake strawberry weaknesses like strawberry iced donuts or strawberry Harry and David maltballs (which actually require you to buy the neapolitan flavor which really only has 1/3 strawberry), Pocky Sticks feel almost healthy. I'd buy them all the time if they had them at U.S. 7-11s. And a box is less than $1.50. I brought two boxes back. Yummy!!!

Nishiki Market

Yes, the picture above does indeed show sparrows on a stick. Yes, the little bird sparrow. The same ones we have in the United States. The cutout picture of a sparrow above the actual product helps, right? 

Nishiki Market is not exactly a food. I get that. But in the same spirit that allowed me to put Hilo Farmer's Market in my Hawaii food post, I'm making the same exception for Nishiki Market. 

Walk away from the Kama River in Kyoto and navigate the mostly-gridlike but sometime maze-y covered passages of the city and you might find yourself at Nishiki Market, a five or six block long stretch of food stalls selling cook at home meats and vegetables and other things edible but also featuring an incredible array of foods available for takeout. Head over there at about 10 a.m. and you might find something good to nibble on for a late breakfast or early lunch like we did in our first day in Kyoto. There's some good stuff to be had here. 

Raw fish? Yep? Octopus? Got that too in both large tentacle and baby-with-head-stuffed-with-quail-egg form. Red bean paste buns and sweets? Yes and yes. Pickled everything? Yes, you can find that here. Eggs? For sure. Chicken? Oh yes. Nuts and sweets? Yes and yes. Anything you can think of eating on a stick or with your hands or with chopsticks in Japan (that's important), I think you'll generally get it at Nishiki Market. Even sparrow on a stick. 

My brunch that day? Two kinds of omelettes (I'm chowing down on one with onion and chicken in the top picture of this post). A piece of conger pike eel on stick. Samples of cookie-like things with dried peas and dried broad beans. Some pieces of fried chicken in a cup. About a half a roasted chestnut. Some tuna sashimi on a stick. And a yuzu flavored kudzu starch bun filled with adzuki bean paste. This last thing was amazingly delicious. It was basically a citrus flavored gel wrapped around a sweet bean paste filling. I'm sure if I were to go back to Nishiki Market, I'd mix things up. There's so much to browse and sample here. 

Tofu

You didn't think I could get out of this post without talking about tofu, or coagulated soy milk pressed into solids (yummy!!!), did you? Forget everything you think you know about this food for a moment. I also understand that the photo above looks a bit unappetizing or exactly what you might expect tofu to look like (the tofu is the whitish mass towards the bottom of the food) but hey, it was dark and this stuff was good.

If there's a place to eat tofu in this world and have it taste good, it's Kyoto. They are supposed to have the best in the world. To make sure we slid all our chips into the center of the table on this one (I mean it's tofu; we need the best chance we can get) we picked what is allegedly the best tofu restaurant in Kyoto and splurged on a multi-course prix fixe meal (or omakase in Japan) at Tousuiro. A walk down a dark alley to a spot with two lighted paper lanterns, push aside the curtain and enter the door, shoes off and you are ready to be seated. We had to take an outdoor seat, which sounds wonderful and it was, except we had to sit on the floor. 200 plus pound late 40s American men sometimes don't do well on the floor.

I'll admit that I haven't eaten a lot of tofu in my life. In fact, most of it has probably been in soups from Chinese and Japanese restaurants. I'll also admit that the tofu we had in Tousuiro was delicious. It came in dish after dish of tofu-focused plates. In most cases (and I think this was the key here) it was mixed or flavored with other components. The tofu with garfish shown in the photograph above was really flavorful but the best was the pea tofu and corn tofu that came with my very first dish. The texture of most all of the tofu we ate that night was like a farmer's cheese - creamy and chewy with a course texture but soft. I'm not sure if all tofu in Japan tasted this way but if it did, I'd eat it a lot more. Worth a small splurge on this one, although I'd pass on the sitting on the floor thing. Ironically, that cost extra.

French Pastries

Before we left for Japan, we met an incredible number of people who had been to Japan and got lots of advice about what to do and where to eat. One of the strangest pieces of advice we got was that we had to eat some French pastries for breakfast because somehow I guess the Japanese love the French and French food. There was no way I was going to eat French food in Japan. No way!

Sometimes things just don't work out the way you thought because there we were our last morning in Kyoto getting some French pastries to go in the Sizuya bakery near our hotel before we boarded the shinkansen (or bullet train) for Hiroshima. That was the third morning in a row we had eaten at Sizuya. No way, huh? Nice resolve!

So what's good? Well, the yellow iced donut looking things in the picture above are filled with cantaloupe melon flavored cream and they are good. The things to the right and below of the donuts (not the hot dog-looking thing; the yellowish oval looking things next to it) are some sort of warmish croque monsieurs and they are incredible. Ham, cheese, bread and some sort of not solid but not runny béchamel sauce on the top. Three mornings in a row I ate these before heading out sightseeing. Don't pass this up.

Sake
 

Sake, it seemed, was destined to be my great disappointment in Japanese food and drink. I had these visions of getting an introduction to sake, or what is sometimes called rice wine even thought it's brewed like beer, before heading to Japan and then really indulging in the stuff when I got there. I thought I'd be hanging out in sake bars with the locals discovering everything there is to know about the stuff.

Too bad I don't like it. I tried. I had sake at a Japanese restaurant in D.C. before I left home and my mom even bought me a couple of bottles to practice with. But it was the sweet sake that I bought at sumo my first day in Tokyo that killed almost all my appetite for discovery here. I guess the sweetness was OK but when I got down towards the bottom of the can there was a lumpy texture like rice pudding. No thanks.

But if there's one thing in life I can be persistent about it's alcohol and being in Kyoto, where they have brewed sake for centuries in the Fushimi section of town, I had to give it one more shot. So after a day of exploring temples in Nara, we hopped off the JR Line and made our way towards the Gekkeikan brewery, a place with 380 years (!!) of sake brewing history in hopes of finding some local sake joint.

We didn't find what we were looking for. But we did find a makeshift stall outside the brewery set up for after work Friday happy hour, although we ended up being the only ones there. Some pointing and holding up fingers got me through three cups of sake, two number ones and one number three if I'm remembering it correctly. Now this could be the worst sake in Japan for all I know but to me it tasted good and it was some smooth drinking. No sweetness, no alcohol flavor that you can get sometimes with sake and a taste of roasted chocolate on the last cup I drank redeemed my sake quest in Japan. Back to beer after that though. You can never go wrong with beer.

Okonomiyaki

One of the things that is really important to me when I'm traveling abroad (or at home for that matter) is to seek out local food specialties. In the west of Japan, okonomiyaki or a Japanese pancake (what in America we'd call a crepe) is apparently the thing to get so we made it a point to seek one of these out when in Hiroshima, which is about as west as we got while still being in anything resembling an urban center. Lucky for us, there's a district in Hiroshima where you can pretty much get nothing but okonomiyaki.

If there's theater in food preparation in Japan, it's probably to be found in a high end sushi joint, where you can watch the sushi master delicately craft each piece of nigiri from the most carefully prepared fresh fish and the perfect amount of sticky rice, maybe a little wasabi and a sublime wash of soy. If there's budget theater in food preparation, it's got to be okonomiyaki.

I don't even know how to describe the process of constructing one of these things so I'll just launch into it. It all starts with a circle of pancake batter spread on a flattop grill followed by a sprinkling of seasoning or maybe some herbs. And that's about as normal as it gets.

Next up? Cabbage. And when I say cabbage I mean about a half a head of cabbage. Get ready to eat because this thing is going to fill you up for hours. After the cabbage comes the bean sprouts and then some cobwebby looking things that I'm mostly sure weren't actual cobwebs but I couldn't be positive. Add some peanuts, what appeared to be crumbled rice cakes and top with a few strips of bacon or maybe pork belly. What you have at this point is a close to Mount Fuji sized mound of food cooking away on the grill top. See above if you need help.

That's when the protein (in my case shrimp) and the noodles come out. They get cooked alongside the cabbage etc. mountain after it is flipped (so the pancake is now on top of the whole assemblage). Eventually, and pretty quickly by the way, the whole thing is going to come together as a single ensemble. But not before an egg is added to the mix for some extra nourishment. Look, there's always room for eggs, right? Oh, and some sweet and umami okonomiyaki sauce on top to round out the flavors. I mean, what's an okonomiyaki without okonomiyaki sauce?

As a mid-day meal, this experience was pretty intense. Once it gets to your table you are presented with some chopsticks and something that looks like a trowel that you would use to spread grout to cut the whole thing. All the ingredients meld together to create a meal unlike anything I have ever had before. Hot, sweet, earthy, eggy, filling and satisfying. This was also perhaps the most memorable meal from an experiential standpoint we had in Japan. And yes, I ate the whole thing and gained a few pounds.

Japanese Curry

If there's a meal I crave now that I'm back home in the United States, it's Japanese curry. There are two ironies here: (1) This is truly an adopted food as opposed to being a native dish; curry apparently made it's way east to Japan from India courtesy of the British. And (2) we ate our lone meal of Japanese curry at a fast food restaurant, the available-almost-everywhere-and-sometimes-even-24-hours-per-day CoCo Curry. Yes, you read that right: I crave Japanese fast food.

Not only is Japanese curry delicious, it also defies the attractive food is the tastiest food axiom that honestly I kind of just made up. This is one ugly plate: a circular dish with a flattened semicircle of white rice in a half moon shape on one side and the other flooded with brown curry gravy. Add some toppings for some more taste and texture but honestly I think the chunks of meat and veg you can choose as extras make it less pleasing to the eye. But, man...is it tasty.

At CoCo, your meal is totally customizable. Start with the sauce (I went with beef curry) and then the quantity of rice (I stuck to the standard 300 grams). Next choice? Spice level. I went with 3, which was perfect for me and I love spicy food; you can go up to 10 if you want and I can't imagine how painful that would be. Grab some toppings (fried chicken, corn and potatoes for me although the potatoes turned out to be potato salad on the side) and you are ready to go. Quick and hearty with a great curry flavor with heat that builds as you eat. I could go for some of this stuff right now. If I ever go back to Japan, I'm eating two or three meals at CoCo.

Eel

We splurged twice for food in Japan. Once on tofu and once on eel. Our destination for our eel meal was the almost 200 year old family run restaurant Nodaiwa, which we found close to the Tokyo Tower after learning how to handle a katana for an hour or so (but that's another story).

Nodaiwa looks and feels like it's a couple of centuries old. The decor is traditional and intricate and formal and the presentation of the dishes matches the building's appeal. We had a quick sit in the lobby of the place while we waited for our table to free up and we smelled and watched. After ordering, we were presented with several dishes: a bed of rice in a beautiful lacquered wooden box with two side dishes of pickled things and a small cup of eel liver soup. You read that last part right.

While the eel liver soup disappointed on flavor a bit (it was watery and I didn't dare eat the two livers at the bottom of the cup), the eel which was lovingly coated with sweet eel sauce that had seeped just a bit into the rice below did not. Nodaiwa apparently only cooks wild caught eel and apparently the discerning diner can tell the difference. I guess I'm not experienced enough here but it tasted pretty darned good to me. There was a smoky barbecued flavor beneath the sauce that I found very satisfying. Not Japanese curry, but probably worth the splurge. I'd recommend checking this place out.

And just like that we are done with Japanese food for this post.

Wow that was long. I'm not sure I've explored more different foods ever on a trip. And yes, as I stated earlier in this post, we actually didn't cover everything on my list. Missing? Some sort of food at an izakaya and a kaiseki meal, neither of which are foods but are instead types of restaurants or meals.

Izakaya are basically Japanese pubs, places to drink sake and beer that also happen to serve bites of food. Kaiseki are elaborate multi-course (like a dozen or more) meals prepared in a specific sequence using local and seasonal ingredients. We sort of had a casual kaiseki (meaning all the food is there but delivered at one time) at our hotel on Miyajima Island but I'm not counting that as checking the box. Something to go back for next time. As well as plenty of CoCo Curry.

Goshuin

Yesterday I posted my impressions of the many Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines we visited in Japan in May of this year. Part of that post covered the goshuin, or temple seals, that you can purchase as a memento of your visit to each site. These souvenirs are not objects; rather they are individual works of art that the temple monks or calligraphists combine with a stamped image to commemorate your visit. 

Each goshuin you purchase is recorded in a stamp book (or goshuin-cho), which becomes a unique record of your time in Japan. It is unlikely that your goshuin-cho is identical to any other. Even if you visited the same temples and shrines in exactly the same sequence on exactly the same days, the people creating the calligraphy noting the name of the temple or shrine and the date of your visit would have to be exactly the same to create two-of-a-kind goshuin-cho.

If I stand a chance of instilling my love of travel in anyone in a future generation, it is my niece, whose birthday is today. I am passing my goshuin-cho to her today in the hopes that she will both appreciate the 12 goshuin I collected this year and one day fill the book on a trip of her own to Japan. Just so we all know exactly which goshuin came from which site, I'm posting pictures of each one here and identifying its origin. Enjoy!

Note on the pictures below: the goshuin-cho is filled from right to left. Therefore I have listed the goshuin on the right of the picture first for each image. I get that it's confusing. I thought it was important to list the goshuin in the sequence received.

Komitake Shrine, Mount Fuji.

Hanazono Shrine, Shinjuku, Tokyo (right); Fushimi Inari Shrine, Kyoto (left).

Gozendani Hohaijo (prayer area), Fushimi Inari Shrine, Kyoto (right); Todaiji Temple, Nara (left).

Kasuga Shrine, Nara (right); Kohfukuji Temple, Nara (left).

Gangoji Temple, Nara (right); Kinkakuji Temple, Kyoto (left).

Daigoji Temple, Kyoto (right); Kiezu-no-Reikado Hall, Mount Misen, Miyajima (left).

Itsukushima Shrine, Miyajima.