Saigon

At long last, I was finally able to take my much awaited summer vacation last week. That's right, summer vacation in the middle of December. I'd originally planned to take it in late September but, for a number of reasons (mostly involving anticipated work that never even actually materialized), it kept getting pushed back.

Yuki and I ended up spending the week traveling around Vietnam and Cambodia. I had originally planned to write all about everything we saw and did, but a week is a long time and I don't really feel like writing an epic post. The easiest way to do this is probably for me to split the trip up into chunks for each place we visited and just write a little bit about it. Also, I took over 700 pictures over the course of the week, so I'm only going to post the one's that I like best or are most illustrative. The rest will likely show up on flickr once I manage to work my way through them.

Right, so onto the story. We used Saigon as our central base of operations during the trip. I was told by a number of people before I went that "there's not much to do there, but the food is good". I was pretty skeptical about this at first, but now I have to say that it's not an entirely unfair assessment of the city.

Having been born a generation too late to have witnessed the Vietnam War unfold, the most interesting place for me was the War Remnants Museum, which had some old equipment around the building and a huuuuuge photo gallery inside. War is ugly business to begin with and the Vietnam War was certainly no exception. We also visited the Reunification Palace (formerly know as the Presidential Palace), where the war came to an end when North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates and seized power from the South Vietnamese government, but beyond being a historically significant site it wasn't particularly interesting. The half-day side trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels was worthwhile, if only to get an idea of how terrifying jungle warfare must have been.




Aside from that, there is a good bit of beautiful architecture from the country's time as a French colony, but not much else that really stands out. We checked out most of the places listed in our guidebook but weren't terribly impressed.






While I can't really rave about the sightseeing, I can't say enough about the food. From pho to banh xeo to street stalls, there is very little that we tried that wasn't delicious and dirt cheap. Most of our meals cost less than $5 for the two of us, including drinks. Though I found Vietnamese beer to be largely unenjoyable, we drank countless shakes made with fresh fruit and Vietnamese iced coffee will blow your mind. My only regret is not reading up more about Vietnamese food beforehand, as I think it would have made it much easier for us to try an even wider variety of food from street vendors.

One thing that you can't avoid in Saigon is the absolute flood of motor bikes. Forget looking at traffic lights, crossing the street is like a real life game of Frogger. Think you'll play it safe and stick to the sidewalk? Wrongo-pongo! Impatient drivers at the back of the line will often just hop out of the street and zoom up to the front of the line. I'm sure there are traffic laws in Vietnam, it's just that nobody really pays any attention to them.





Saigon was decent enough but it probably wouldn't make it onto my "Favorite Destinations" list. It's worth a couple of days if you're doing the backpack-around-SE Asia thing, but I'm not convinced it alone is a destination. Fortunately for us, we had plenty more on our agenda...

Getting Out of Town - Mt. Takao

Last autumn, Mike, Yuki, and I went down to Kyoto on a long weekend to check out the beautiful fall colors, but the holiday was on a Tuesday instead of a Monday this year, denying us that extra bit of time to really get out of town. However, Mike set up plans for the Michigan kids to get together on that Tuesday and take a day trip to Mt. Takao, a relatively small mountain about an hour away from Tokyo that he had been to in past falls.



As the date approached, however, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to join. I had played soccer on the previous Sunday, the first real exercise I’d had in something like four months, and my body was an absolute wreck. I honestly can’t remember the time I was that sore and even just walking was painful, so the idea of hiking up a mountain didn’t sound too appealing, so I decided I’d see how I felt that morning and make a judgment call.

When I woke up, I felt only slightly better than I had the day before and at first I was planning on sitting it out. But the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that I would regret not going. I usually work too late Monday through Friday to do anything outside of work and it seemed like a shame to waste a rare day off bumming around indoors, so I decided to suck it up and give it a go.

We all met up outside the train station at the base of the mountain. The morning drizzle had cleared up, leaving a cool but sunny late morning that was strongly reminiscent of Michigan falls. Most people take a cable car part way up, then hike the rest of the way to top, but we took a path less traveled that went all the way up. To be honest, it was a pretty gentle slope and not particularly strenuous until near the very end.



The fall colors weren’t the best, but it was nice just to be out of the city for a bit. The air in Tokyo never strikes me as particularly bad, but the fresh air at Mt. Takao was wonderfully refreshing. It just felt good to breath. The path we took was quiet and not at all crowded (a minor miracle anywhere near Tokyo on a holiday), allowing us to keep a slow pace, enjoying the nature and company.






It’s been getting colder around here lately and probably won’t be long before the idea of spending a day outdoors loses its appeal, so I’m glad we had a chance to get out. The scenery may not have held up to Kyoto’s last year, but it was a great day trip and it’s always a good time when the Michigan kids get together.

Dive In

After we spent a weekend in Hachijojima last March, I wrote about how Yuki and I had a chance to try scuba diving and really enjoyed ourselves. We sat on the idea of getting proper diving certification for a while but never really did anything about it until Yuki happened to find a place with good reviews that was offering licensing courses for a fairly inexpensive price (more on that in a minute…). Figuring that it would be a fun option to have when we travel, we decided to check it out.



The advertised price at the place was $150, but there were A LOT of strings attached. They really pushed people to buy their own gear (wetsuit, mask, snorkel, etc.), the idea being that owning your own gear would encourage you to stick with the hobby. Honestly, I think it was largely them taking advantage of a common tendency for Japanese people to have a hard time saying no when put on the spot (I had no such issues). If, however, you don’t shell out the $500+ for one of their gear packages, you’d have to pay something like $70 per dive session to rent it (x3 session = +$210). There was also a number of little administrative costs and knick-knicks that they make you buy which add up to another $70-80 or so. All-in-all, the total bill comes out to around $400, which is pretty much what it would cost at most other places in Tokyo anyway, so we figured we’d give it a shot. I wasn’t really thrilled about the way they kept trying to get us to buy things or sign up for stuff (if we’d said “yes” to all the add-ons, we probably would have blown through another $200-300), but they were excellent teachers and took good care of us throughout the process, so if you’ve got the will power to say no to all the selling, it’s not a bad shop to go with.

There are three components to getting your diving license:
(1) A paper test on basic diving technique and safety
(2) Diving practice session in a pool
(3) Diving practice session in open water

The test is easy: if you just read the little book they give you, there’s nothing difficult on it. I used a Japanese book and took the test itself in Japanese and still got something like 95%. To be honest, you could probably pass if you just read the first half of the book and use a little common sense during the test. The pool section is mostly focused on learning how to prepare your equipment and actually trying out the techniques you read about in the book. It’s pretty dry, but it makes everything easier to understand.

The open water diving is about learning to apply the basic techniques in a real life situation and involves four dives split over two days, with an option to split it over two weekends or stay overnight and do it all in one. We opted to stay over and make a weekend out if it.

Most diving tours I’ve read about go out early in the morning (though I don’t really know why), and this was no exception. We were on train before 6am in order to make it to the dive shop by 7am, with an hour and a half car ride from their to the diving spot.




Being early November, we were worried that it was going to be pretty cold, but we lucked out and had great weather. After our first two dives Saturday morning, we spent the afternoon lounging around in an onsen up in the mountains, perfect after a morning in the cold Pacific waters. We bummed around in our hotel, a cozy little place literally overlooking the coast, before heading out for dinner.




The coastal area is full of windy roads that snake through the mountains, giving us a great view of the sunset. For dinner, we ate sashimi at a little family run place way up in the mountains. Top class fish at a price you would never see in Tokyo, it was a joy to eat.

The weather wasn’t quite as good the second day, but still decent enough. Two more dives and that was it: licensed scuba divers! Now we can go diving anywhere in the world, something we’ll be taking advantage of on our upcoming trip in a couple of weeks. Can’t wait!

Before You Even Know It....

Last Thursday was exactly two years from the day I moved to Tokyo. Honestly, when I try to compare now and then, it makes my head spin. So much has changed in that time that it's difficult to put into words. In some ways, my life has become much more complicated than it was in those first few months, when everything was shiny and new. In other ways, it has gotten much simpler in that there's a certain repetition and most weeks end up looking more or less the same.

I'd vaguely been aware that the date was approaching, but it just sort of slipped my mind, something that is happening more frequently as of late. I struggle a bit to keep other things in my head and the days have started to just sort of blend together lately. It all just sort of flies by before I even notice. I feel like I've reached the finish line every time I make it to the weekend, only to realize that I haven't planned a damn thing and am left scrambling to come up with something. Needless to say, a number of them end up feeling wasted. My team leader at work has told me I should take more days off, but the company's vacation policies make it hard to take any meaningful time off, so I just keep grinding it out.

But that's just a bunch of excuses and whining, which I'm sure nobody really wants to hear about. I've got a number of adventures I want to go on in the next twelve months, so I'm just going to focus on making that happen. I need to mix things up a bit and explore. I think it would be good for me.

I'll throw a little food into this post, just so it doesn't end a total rant. The potato wedges were lightly coated with vegetable oil, salt, pepper, and garlic powder and cooked in the same try as the chicken legs, allowing them to turn golden brown as they half baked, half fried in the runoff chicken fat and juices. Freakin delicious. The chicken just got a little salt and pepper, then got baked until the skin was super crispy. The corn soup in the back there is Campbell's from a can. Don't judge me; we all get to cheat every now and then. A bottle of chardonnay to accompany it all made for a satisfying Saturday night dinner. Not a bad way to celebrate a second year.

It's Never Too Late To Learn

Chili isn't something I ate often growing up and I'm not even sure if my mom ever made it (to be fair, back then I probably would have refused to eat it anyway). As such, I really had no idea what was supposed to go into it or how to make it, but Yuki wanted to have it for dinner, so I decided to see what I could do. I looked at a few recipes online and found that there was pretty much no "standard" basic recipe, so I pretty much just winged it. At first I thought I'd measure the spices I was putting in, but I ended up tinkering with it so much that I just gave up on keeping track. For spices, there was a bunch of chili powder, a health dose of cumin, a fair bit of garlic powder and cayenne pepper, plus dashes of salt, black pepper, and oregano. To give it some mass, I included a pound of ground beef, a diced medium-sized onion and carrot, 1/3 each of yellow and red bell peppers, a can of kidney beans, and two cans of diced tomatoes. Hefty stuff. Mixed together, it was allowed to bubble away gently on the stove for a little over an hour.



Obviously that is far too much chili for two people to eat in one sitting, but we were in luck. Peter Traylor and his girlfriend Mari were passing buy and called to ask if we wanted to meet up. As they hadn't had a proper dinner yet, we invited them over to Yuki's for a light dinner and drinks. I grabbed some Coronas, which went really well with the chili, Yuki picked up some tortilla chips (also not easy to find in Japan) and the four of us spent the evening hanging out together.

Before we new it, it was time for them to catch their last train home, a long long ride out to Moriya. I've gotta give props to Peter for making the haul into to Tokyo to hang out with us as often as he does. It's time consuming as hell and certainly not cheap, but he's always a good sport about it and it's always a better time for having him there.

Lunch Out - A Nu

Yuki and I like to indulge in a fancy lunch every now and then, as weekend lunch specials offer one of the few bargains to be had in Tokyo. Last weekend, we went to A Nu, a French restaurant in the Hiroo district, to (belatedly) celebrate a year of dating. Their dinner courses start at more than $80/person and go as high as nearly $200, but there lunch course costs less than half of that at $35. Obviously $35 is hardly a cheap lunch and the portions are smaller than at dinner, but the quality is still top notch.


The appetizer (I had a tuna tartar topped with diced apples and celery) was decent enough, but nothing spectacular. I thought the celery overpowered the apple a little and there was a bit too much of both to really let the flavor of the fish come through. Far better was the fact that they provided a constant supply of probably the best baguettes I've tasted in Tokyo. The crust was crackly, the center warm and soft, and there were slices of delicious butter with big flakes of salt on top. I think I ate a loafs worth...


The fish dish was grilled onagadai, a firm white fish, served with an eggplant basil sauce, which looked eerily like baby food but tasted ok, and a really cool foam of basil-infused milk. To be honest, the fish was good enough that I'd been happy to eat it as-is, but the foam made things interesting.


The meat dish, roast duck with a beet sauce was a real winner. The skin was crispy, the meat tender, and the sauce matched it deliciously. Bonus points for presentation, with super thin circles of bright red beets dotting the plate. There was also an onion "sauce" that looked and tasted like they'd just minced up an onion and given it a couple of whirls in a cuisinart: after trying a couple bites, I ignored it and the dish was a billion times better for it.

The desserts were fairly common desserts served in a creative way. In their tiramisu, the mascarpone cheese was solidified like a meringue and floated with little coffee tapioca pearls in a creamy soup that tasted like cream and lady's fingers.


For the Mont Blanc, the cream was also solidified like a meringue and sat on top of a chestnut mousse.


Since we were celebrating (and it was only an extra $5), we decided to get an extra dessert, picking caramel cheesecake with a cognac-orange sorbet. I was surprised by how strong the cognac flavor in the sorbet was, but it balanced the creamy cheese cake, which was excellent on its own as well.


Fancy restaurants rarely serve large portions, but if I just wanted to stuff myself I'd just go grab an $8 bowl of ramen. I go for food made of top quality ingredients combined and prepared in ways I would never have though of myself. In fact, I rarely walk away from one such meal without thinking just how big of a difference good ingredients make. I couldn't care less about eating organic, going local, or whatever other trend is popular at the moment, but knowing how important it is to get the good stuff makes me understand the nuts blowing through half their paycheck at whole foods and farmers markets a little bit more.

Where The Gaijin Roam

In Tokyo, the triangle of Roppongi, Azabu, and Hiroo is home to the vast majority of the Western expat community. Many foreign companies have their offices have their offices in the area and most employees brought in from overseas prefer to live nearby. Most of them speak little to no Japanese at best, but are generally very well paid by their employers, so restaurants and stores are more than willing to accommodate them.

Yuki and I were having lunch in the area this past weekend (more on that in a later post), so we thought we'd walk around and check out the area a bit. There was a mom helping her daughter learn to ride a bike, a cafe with twice as many foreigners as Japanese, and a park full of American and British dads playing sports with their kids.


But the real gaijin jackpot is the National Azabu Supermarket, the single most American place I have ever been in Japan. Many Japanese stores will offer versions of foreign products produced domestically by Japanese brands, but not here. Everything was labeled in English and they had a number of brands you'd find in the US: Tide laundry detergent, SunChips, Tyson chicken. It was a bit nostalgic and I picked up a few things that you rarely see in Japan: hamburger buns (damn do I want a proper burger...), a pie crust (will definitely be making pumpkin pie this fall), and cherry coke (and will probably shell out the ridiculous prices they charge for a pizza around here so I can enjoy the ultimate junk food combination). Honestly, I find myself missing things from back home more and more often these days. It's nice to know that there is a way to get my hands on some of those things.


That night, I cooked up some freakin delicious chili and planned to tie it in with this story. But I got home late tonight after having picked up some beautiful ground Australian beef on the way back from work and I cooked myself a hamburger, using the buns I mentioned earlier.

I won't pretend it was perfect.
It was cooked in a frying pan, not on a grill.
It wasn't medium rare, bordering closer to well done.
It wasn't even that big.

But it tasted like beef should, it was juicy, and it was homemade. I ate it with just ketchup, the way I have for just about every burger I've eaten since I was little. It was magnificent and it made the world seem a little bit more right...