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Party at Izakaya Pontaro for Yuka’s bday

Cornholio!?

It has been a while since I’ve posted anything. Let’s just say I’ve been busy having the best travel experience of my life. I have a few posts brewing, and each of them will start off by reiterating how much I absolutely love living in Myoko Kogen (妙高高原).

Cast of Characters: Pontaro (“Pontchan”), runs Izakaya Pontaro; Yuka, Pontaro’s wife, also runs the izakaya; Sachiko, my Japanese mother at Hotel Moc.

Last night was Yuka-chan’s 56th birthday, and, to celebrate, they closed the izakaya to hold a private party for her. Pontchan and I were supposed to have a sushi making competition – Iron Chef: Myoko Kogen edition. The secret ingredient? Well, we didn’t really have a secret ingredient – wasabi, I suppose. But we did have $100 worth of sashimi-grade fish! Pontchan and I were supposed to compete, but, once the beer and sake started to flow, the competition disappeared, and I ended up making nigiri sushi for the birthday girl and her 6 guests. Part of the reason the competition evaporated may be that, being the only gaijin present, they enjoyed the novelty of having a gaijin make them sushi. Either way, it was super fun to learn how to make sushi and pretend to be a sushi chef for a few hours.

Pont-chan and I were behind the bar, working away, while Yuka and everyone else sat up at the bar. Yuka was done up nicely for her birthday. She was wearing a kimono, as she often does, but this was a very elegant one passed down by her mother. She became a little less elegant when I gave her a big pink wig as a birthday present, and Pontchan and I became much less elegant when the sexy aprons came out.

I’ve never made sushi before – not in Canada and definitely not in Japan, but, dressed in white chef’s clothes loaned to me by Sachiko-chan, I helped Pontaro prepare $100 worth of fish using a deadly sharp Misono knife. We had purchased the fish at a market earlier in the day; it was one among several errands we carried out in Myoko city that morning. Cutting up the fish was fun and not terribly difficult. You had to use a bit of imagination to get the right size and shape to come out, and I was chastised for using a sawing motion instead of making one continuous cut. It was so much fun that I recommend to anyone to give it a try. But don’t just get tuna and salmon. Get a variety of fish and try some flat fish (like hirame) – they are more interesting to cut and are delicious. I bought maguro and thought it would be popular, but, at the end of the night, there was mostly maguro left over.

With everyone up at the bar, I asked them each in turn which fish they wanted. In response, they would shout out the type of fish in Japanese. There were 12 different types of fish that we had prepared, and they were spread along the bar in small dishes ready to be joined with an oblong ball of rice. At the start I didn’t know which fish was which, but if I didn’t know, they would help me by pointing. I’ve been using flashcards to memorize Japanese words and phrases, but this was like a real-life game of flashcards. After about half an hour, I started to figure out which fish was which, but a single session of rote memorization doesn’t stick so I’ve forgotten everything except for maguro, tako, and ika.

In order to make my facsimile of a sushi chef more authentic, I was instructed to shout out “aiii yo!” when receiving a sushi order, and upon serving the fish, I was told to shout out “hey! oh match!” I’m not sure what either of these mean. Maybe I will ask Sachiko at our next lesson.

I tried to keep a mental note of each step Pontaro carried out so that I could make sushi again in the future. If your date made you sushi from scratch that would be pretty damn impressive, but then again, living Vancouver with all the inexpensive sushi around, maybe not.

How to make nigiri sushi:

Prep:

  1. Buy a variety of fish and keep them on ice.
  2. Make a lot of rice (optionally cheat and buy pre-formed Nigiri sushi rice balls)
  3. Put the rice into a flat-bottomed wooden bowl (sushi oke), pour in vinegar, and stir. Have your assistant fan the rice while stirring to keep evaporation up.
  4. Transfer the rice into a container and set somewhere to cool.
  5. Wash a cutting board and spray with ethanol.
  6. Find the sharpest knife possible and cut the fish into sushi-sized chunks. The cut should be one single continuous cut. Wipe your knife after each cut to remove fish oil from the blade. Be creative with the angle you cut at in order to get the proper size. Place the fish on a tray and keep cool.
  7. Prepare a bowl of cold water and vinegar. Dip your fingers in this to keep the rice from sticking to them.
  8. Prepare a bowl of wasabi.

The real action:

  1. Dip the fingers of your left hand in the water/vinegar mix. If you dip both hands, you won’t be able to pick up the wasabi on your finger.
  2. Grab some rice and form a ball.
  3. Flatten the ball in your palm of your left hand. The rice stays in your left hand until served.
  4. With your index finger of your free hand, add a dollop of wasabi (quanto basta).
  5. Put a chunk of fish on top and press with two fingers of free hand. Apply enough pressure so that the fish stays attached when the nigiri is upside down but try not to deform the fish.
    1. Ebi are a pain in the ass plus you should put two on each nigiri.
  6. Serve!
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307 ways to learn a new language faster

Tanuki!

Remember Super Mario 3? Tanuki!

In numerical order:

  • 7 Tips to Love Where You Are Right Now
  • 13 Things That Are Totally Going To Change You In Your 30s
  • 14 Signs You’re Really Happy (And How To Stay That Way)

When did the annoyingly formulaic title, X ways to be a douche, become so ubiquitous? It sneaked up on me like a brain tumor, growing slowly, until I was like, “WTF, it’s everywhere”. Anyways, here are far fewer than 307 ways to learn a new language faster.

  1. Quit your job. This really frees up a lot of your time for that new language.
  2. Buy a plane ticket to wherever they speak your desired language (but choose a city/town/village where they don’t speak English). You saved some money before carrying out step 1, right?
  3. Learn how to say beer please in your new language: you will probably be thirsty when you get there.
  4. Befriend your local pub, bar, cafe owner and visit them everyday and never feel bad about pestering them and speaking their beautiful language terribly. Alcohol establishments are preferred as they will quickly help you bridge the fear gap of talking, or yelling, in your new language.
  5. Talk to EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON. YOU. MEET. Old people are great. They come from a time when people actually had conversations so they’re good at it.
  6. Learn it on the pillow. Start dating a mother tongue in your new language. Make sure that they have no other language in common with you.
  7. Failing 6, find someone who is learning your new language and who doesn’t have any other language in common with you and date them, or, at least, befriend them. Avoid making friends with other English speakers. They are dirty.
  8. Don’t worry about being polite. Let’s be honest, you’re probably not that polite in your native tongue anyways and people expect foreigners to make mistakes. If you do happen to offend someone, pretend you’re Australian. Say Good-day mate and walk away.
  9. Exploit yourself. Figure out what makes yourself tick and exploit it. For example, if you seek validation in others, use that as a motivation to get yourself moving. Put yourself in a situation where you would be deeply embarrassed if you fail. If you’re competitive, find other people doing the same thing, make them your enemy and blow them out of the water.
  10. Drink plenty of water. This is just a good one in general.
  11. Don’t hesitate to masturbate. All that sitting and studying causes blood to pool in your nether regions. If the mood strikes you, go for it, but in the spirit of total immersion, pleasure yourself to content in the language of interest. An added bonus is you don’t need to feel guilty afterwards because, really, you kind of were studying.
  12. Don’t study all the time. That would be a seriously boring. Go for a bike ride, read a book, watch a movie, or, if all else fails, do some pushups.
  13. Yes, 307 is a prime number.
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Japan or the best place in the world to travel

It’s interesting how you can go from just meeting someone to being totally naked with them in the space of a few hours. Ladies, ladies, don’t get in a huff — your femen-centric minds are misleading you —I wasn’t with fuk-u and fuk-mi. I was in an après-ski onsen with some new friends I had made on the slope from Niigata city. Yes — dudes. Actually, I didn’t even know until today that onsen were segregated and nude. I figured it was just a big hot tub slash sake party. Well… life is a learning process.

Today was my second day of skiing at Myoko Kogen in Niigata prefecture just north of Nagano. I had just finished a nice conversation with an older man in his late 60s, who was retired, but working as a Japanese instructor, skiing during the winter, and playing tennis during the summer, when I went to see if I could get a private ski lesson. The guy at the counter didn’t speak English so so well, but a nice young woman was kind enough to help with translating. Note: she had a slight Aussie accent — it always cracks me up when ESL have a Scottish, English, or Aussie accent, somehow I just think they should all sound like Californians. Anyways, the result of the translation was come back later gaijin, but I ran into her and her friends, 5 of them altogether, while scarfing down a bowl of ramen on the slopes. She had learned English in Brisbane and spoke well, so we chatted up, and I skied with them from the rest of the day. It was loads of fun (たのしかったね), and then they invited me to go to onsen.

I have a history with heat-related relaxation. James and I used to hit the sauna fairly often and have epic conversations — we also went to an amazing public bath complex, Stadtbad Neukölln, in Berlin, that is, just by the way, nude and co-ed. Open air hot baths in Budapest, hamamı in Istanbul, and onsen in Japan… the list goes on dear reader. This was my first time at an onsen so I didn’t exactly know the protocol. Here’s the breakdown: you get a big towel and a small towel; get naked and put your stuff in a basket; bring the small towel with you and leave the big one; head over to the line of stools, hunker down, and wash yourself with the provided shower heads; once you’re good and rinsed, pop into the onsen. This particular place had an indoor pool that was about 40 degrees plus another pool outside. Now forty degrees isn’t too hot but they did also have a 90 degree sauna, which is awesome. And for that après-onsen comedown, why not hit the manga library upstair? Yes, there were in fact 4 aisles of densely packed manga sorted by series and sofa chairs for reading. I perused the selection and while remarking on the breadth of manga available, availed myself to the comic with the most scantily clad and impossibly proportioned woman on the cover — to my chagrin might I add: it was entirely PG. The considerate producers of the manga comic did include the pronunciation of the Kanji in Hiragana, so I could at least pronounce the words even if I didn’t understand them.

To end another day of ceaseless suffering, I went to my favourite Izakaya, Izakaya Pontaro, literally stumbling distance from my spartan hotel for the third night in a row. The couple that run the place are very very very nice. The husband enjoys telemark skiing, the wife doesn’t like skiing at all, they have two dogs, and visit their hometown in Kyushu every May which takes them two days by car. After my prerequisite pint of super cold Japanese draught and a few of their superb home-cooked dishes, the wife reminded me I had wanted to order the sake sampler… well, OK, if I must! Three glasses of slightly distinguishable sake later, they poured another one on the house, I would like to say because they enjoyed our conversation so much, but probably because I was their only customer.

Japan truly is the best place on Earth to visit. Come one, come all, unless you’re Australian, then stay effing put.

* Instead of fuk-u and fuk-mi, I was going to reference Zen Zen Chigau and Uso Bakkari from Hitching Rides with Buddha but it seemed a bit obscure.

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Module II: Japanese

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OK let’s get pumped for Japanese! Here’s the plan for super happy fun Japanese learning:

Any suggestions?! Leave a comment.

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German: lessons learned

Surprisingly, at least to me, I’ve already been travelling for 6 months. My plan was to stay in Berlin for 6 weeks to learn some German and then move on, but, as it happened, I stayed in Berlin for 11 weeks, spent all of November cycling in the Balkans, spent a week in Barcelona, and two weeks in Istanbul during Christmas. Now it’s the New Year and I’m in Tokyo: time to reflect, to see what I’ve accomplished so far, to see what I can learn from my experience thus far, and to determine if this is what I want to do with my time.

The 2 months I spent in Berlin were great — I totally fell in love with the city. I’ve never been anywhere that felt so free, and, I know I know, all I keep saying is that you can drink on the metro. It’s just an example though. The city is so laissez faire, so un-German, that you can do what you want, dress however you want, be who you want, and, yes, drink wherever you want, including the metro. I mean they have kiosks that sell beer on the platform: fantastisch.

Berlin, however, does have its downsides: it’s a terrible place to learn German. The city is incredibly international. Besides all the Turkish living there that immigrated in the 60s & 70s, there’s tons of Spanish, I assume because the poor economy in Spain, and even of all the Germans I met, none were actually from Berlin.

The German classes I took in Berlin were pretty good, and incredibly cheap, but, while it was especially helpful for making friends, dear lord, did it drag on sometimes. German is a complicated language, but after 6 weeks of classes we still couldn’t really have a conversation or talk about the past. This was frustrating — the whole point of language learning is to communicate with others. Learning a language is a lot like strengthening a muscle, you have to exercise it, but if you can’t have a conversation, you can’t exercise, and while the knowledge may be in your brain somewhere, you won’t have quick access to it unless you practice conversing.

Also, while I think I have a great capacity for doing boring things, eg studying a language course book, even I get bored. That’s part of the reason I was so gung-ho to go on the bike tour. New places every day, new country every week, and lots of exercise.

So what did I learn and how will I apply that to learning Japanese? The ubiquity of English in Tokyo is much less than Berlin so that shouldn’t be a problem. At this point, I’ve decided not to take classes but to do self-study and find a private tutor. And to keep from getting bored, I’m going to ski. My sister was kind enough to bring me my skis from Canada, so I will head to Nagano during the work week to ski and study. Hopefully, I can find some people to converse with there for practice, and, during the weekend, I’ll come back to Tokyo to visit with friends and make the party. Sounds like a great use of time to me.

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what tear gas smells like

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By late evening Friday, the whole neighbourhood of Cihangir was under gas — the pepper gas that was dispersed at the demonstration on Istiklal street had drifted several blocks, so that even though I took a circuitous route home afterwards, I still had to cover my nose and mouth.

The demonstration was against the government corruption scandal that came out in the news a couple weeks ago. In the scandal, police carried out a raid in which they detained the sons of 3 government ministers for bribery related to large construction projects,  found a shoebox with $4.5M dollars in the house of the general manager of the state-owned bank, and detained several other prominent people. The government retaliated by firing several police chiefs claiming that the external forces, that is Gülen, are trying to damage the government.

It is difficult to tell the difference between a demonstration on Istiklal and a normal Friday night — the street is always just so packed. But this was definitely a demonstration: people were chanting. I remember seeing an older man in a trench coat walking steadily towards the square, he didn’t look like the riotous type, but he pumped his fist into the air firmly and shouted out rhythmically some words in Turkish. I saw boys no more than 15 with patterned handkerchiefs covering their faces like train robbers. The crowd was a total mix and they chanted and pumped their fists and some held political flags.

I was about 300 meters back from Taksim square — the centre of it all — with the mass of people moving forward towards the square steadily. From here I could see the police trucks in the square spraying water cannons at demonstrators. They have water cannons mounted on top of what resembles a large Zamboni and a camera so they can aim it from within the truck. At some point I saw what looked like a red laser coming from the square — I have no idea what it was. Then fireworks, Roman candles, started going off in the square.

I walked towards the square with the mass of people until there was a bang of a tear gas canister and a wave of people started running back in retreat. After this, police that I had seen stationed earlier moved in from the rear of the protest. They came in so quickly that I didn’t even notice them until they were about 20 meters away. About 4 of the police broke from their formation and moved in towards a group of people standing near a storefront. I’m not sure if the people were doing anything, maybe they were spray painting or something, but the police had them cornered against the wall and shot at them with paintball guns using pepper spray ammo. At this point, everyone ran pretty quickly down a side street. Most people had their mouths covered, either with their hand or with a scarf.

I decided it was probably time to head home so I went down a parallel street just one block off Istiklal. It was a restaurant-lined street and I was surprised to see everyone eating outdoors like nothing was going on, even the hosts were out pestering passersby to check out their menu. The only sign that anything was up was that there was a kid at the end of the block selling particle masks for 5 Turkish lira (about $2.5, what a markup). Business as usual.

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Castellers de la Vila de Gràcia in Barcelona

I had meant to meet up with Mariona, whom I met in my german class in Berlin, earlier in my short trip to Barcelona, but, as it happened, it was my last day in Barcelona and we hadn’t had a chance to hook up. She had invited me to check out her castelling practice and, due to a mix up of street names between Spanish and Catalan, I arrived just as they were finishing. Mariona is a part of Castellers de la Vila de Gràcia, a group that builds human castles in the Catalan tradition. The photo I took at their practice shows a castle 3 stories high but they go as high as 8 with the top two levels being children.

Afterwards we hung out in a piazza and talked about bike touring. Mariona had started a tour from Berlin heading West with the hopes of getting all the way to Ireland however she had to stop while in Germany because of really bad weather. I give her a lot of respect for her effort and courage in what she completed. While James and I stayed in BnBs, hotels, and hostels, Mariona went alone with a tent and relied on couchsurfing for accommodation, and while James and I had +$1000 touring bikes, Mariona had a 40€ bike she bought from Kottbusser Damm bridge (read stolen) that didn’t even have gears! OK, it had gears but the derailleur was stuck in 1 gear.

I also have to give her respect for adhering to the principles of the travel weasel (see Will Ferguson’s Hitching Rides with Buddha). The travel weasel always accepts offers of hospitality, no matter how generous they might be, and is happy to depend on the kindness of strangers for just about anything. Mariona was able to finagle free accommodation and meals from couchsurfing, including some packed lunches for the day ahead, and was able to trade smiles for bike repairs on a couple occassions. Well done!

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Barcelona not Black Sea

It was an easy decision. We were hanging out in our gracious host’s, Carmen, abode in Deva, Romania. We had caught the train here from Craiova, our second city in Romania, where we had woken up to find the city covered in snow, and we hadn’t been on our bikes since. We had spent 4 days with Carmen in Deva and also visited her family in nearby Alba Iulia during the national unity holiday, and now it was time to continue on but we weren’t sure where. Each day was getting colder and further into the negatives and we were still a long way from the Black Sea. At some point James said ‘I’ve got family in Barcelona’ and I said ‘done, let’s do it’.

We decided we would take the 9 hour train ride to the capital, București, spend a couple days there and then fly to Barcelona.

Now we’ve been in Barcelona for a few days visiting with James’ family, a nice couple with 4 cute kids, living the expat life just outside Barcelona in Esplugues. Both James and I had been in Barcelona around 2009 and we’d both been to Sagrada Família but as it is always under construction, with a completion date of 2026, we went to check out the progress in the last 4 years. Sagrada Família is truly amazing. It has such a unique style of architecture that combines a love of nature with exercises in ruled geometry. It is the most beautiful man made structure I’ve ever seen.