Bar High 5, Ginza, and Sushi!

After we got settled into our ridiculous hotel room, we decided to head out to Ginza, which is the sort of place that would happen if someone could figure out how to turn the cyberpunk genre into a sort of air-droppable munition and then carpet-bomb the Champs-Élysées with it.

The first reason to go to Ginza was to have a drink in a basement.

There's a bar called "Bar High 5" which has gathered some attention in the last few years.

They are a tiny establishment in a Ginza basement, with a distinctly 1920s or 30s speakeasy aesthetic and a team of knowledgeable, companionable cocktail wait staff.

The staff will chat with you about what sort of cocktails you like and then ask a few questions and then a very, very, badass looking Asian woman (she's wearing one glove, a black surgical mask, and an understated suit with a bowtie and sporting the sort of haircut that says in her previous life she was a cyborg ninja) will go to work at the end of the bar without saying a word and three minutes later the best possible execution of what you said you were in the mood for just appears in front of you like magic. Do not make eye contact with the bartender. She makes drinks.  What happens to them is of no concern to her, and so you are of no concern to her.  The wait staff are friendly and everyone pretends she is not there.  Your drink will be perfect.

I started to wonder after the second round whether it's just that in all the parallel universes in which that woman has made a mistake, the version from this universe has appeared, and killed her parallel universe self, then returned, wordlessly, to this bar, by sheer force of will.

Anyway.

I started with Nikka Coffee Grain Whiskey which (and I was charmed by this) the staff recommended I drink neat rather than trying to suggest a cocktail for.  It was an excellent start.

After that, I asked for something with a Japanese Whiskey base and gave them a few framing statements. The thing they brought me was Japanese Whiskey, an understated Japanese Blackberry Liqueur with a peaty note to it, and a bit of Ginger.  It might have been the best cocktail I had ever had in my life.

Until 30 minutes later, when we ordered again and my second round arrived--Irish Whiskey based, with lemon, medium dry sherry, and a walnut liqueur.  It was glorious, and the nutty flavor lingered late in each sip, like a patient and attentive concierge or attendant, seeing to an unrealized need just before you've thought to voice it.

The reputation of that bar is well deserved, and worth every Yen, even at the Ginza-appropriate prices we paid.

Afterwards, we had a walk through Ginza.

Remember what I said about it being a sort of cyberpunk Champs-Élysées?  Here's what we stumbled upon, around the corner from our bar.

(it has come to my attention that these videos don't work, and I'm currently in a mountain town with terrible internet. I'll try to fix this problem tomorrow night.)

Oh, and here are the Bulgari and Louis Vuitton storefronts.

And yes, the Bulgari snake is a giant light display capable of animation.

Because of course it is.


Afterwards, we had sushi at a place the staff at Bar High 5 had recommended.  The tuna was so good it occasionally left me speechless.

We returned to our ridiculous hotel at the end of the night, full of sushi and excellent cocktails, well pleased with our lot in life.

Tokyo Day 2: Soup-By-Numbers

Since it seems my body has decided 5AM is a perfectly reasonable time to start getting impatient to start the day, and this hotel room is so extra that it has a Nespresso machine in it (more on that in a moment). . . I'm up and writing while pictures transfer from my camera to my laptop.

Day two, like day one, started the correct way, with pastry and coffee (potato and bacon in pastry crust on the left, and an apple green tea. . . soft bread sortof thing, on the right.  Both excellent!).

This time, breakfast was at a Lotteria, an establishment I'm well familiar with, being a sort of Korean cross between a Panera bread and a fancy burger king.  I was pleased to see they had a foothold in Japan and when I commented on it, one of my traveling companions told me, delightedly, that Lotte (despite being one of Korea's largest companies) was actually started in Japan.

Curious about the details of that, I looked up Lotte's founder this morning, and his life has been absolutely bananas.

Anyway.

We picked the Lotteria because it was between our hotel and the beautiful Ueno park, and a conversation over breakfast about political expression on Facebook and the cost of dissent continued and evolved (through topics like postmodern architecture) into a really pleasant discussion about government policy and minimalism, and eventually that came to healthcare policy and the struggle of being a libertarian that believes a single payer model might be the best way to run a healthcare system.

We wandered past the museum of western art while we were there, which was an absolutely miserable building which faced an even more dour edifice that turned out to be the Tokyo concert hall.  Both excellent examples of modern architecture that hates everyone within eyesight and doesn't care who knows it.

I did find a charming thing outside the museum of modern art though--Umbrella lockers.  A neat little idea for a museum in a place with very rainy summers.

While I might hate in in architecture, especially in it's postmodern form, minimalism in government is a subject near and dear to my heart, and it can be hard to find people who are actually intellectually curious about others that don't agree with them, and so it was nice to get to take a walk with people willing to evaluate their own assumptions, or at least listen to (and ask questions about) mine.

After our walk through the park, we collected our bags (we were changing hotels today, to an undisclosed location my traveling companions had arranged) from the lockers we'd used at the train station, and headed off to do laundry.  Laundry machines here can handle about 5 days worth of clothes for me at a time, and since I had about three days worth of clothes ready to wash, this seemed like a good time.

The lovely place that my traveling companions took me to do laundry is. . .one of those weird yet wonderful businesses that only makes sense in the context of the culture in which it originates.  It was an internet cafe, with excellent rates, free drinks, and . . .private rooms.  The necessity for desiring a private room to yourself when you live in tiny, shared apartments with family and neighbors at your elbow constantly makes perfect sense, and Customa Cafe is an absolutely great little business, for 900 yen I rented a private room so that I could video call some people back home (to listen in on my book club's discussion of an Icelandic saga) and for another 300 yen in coins, I got to do do laundry while I was at it.  In exchange I got a tiny comfy private room with a reclining chair, fast internet, and free coffee and milk tea from their machine while I was there for several hours.  The only downside was that my private room was brutally hot, because the Japanese concept of "comfortable temperature" is my concept of "f&%^ing sauna"--as they say, when in Rome. . . sweat like a pig, apparently.

Laundry finished and book club chat complete, we headed to a place that serves Tsukemen.  I say that like it's just another restaurant, but really, I was about to have my perception of Japanese food in general--and what good broth-based dishes can be in particular--permanently and irrevocably altered.

Tsukemen is deconstructed ramen--a modest bowl of very potent broth is served alongside a giant bowl of noodles, meats, and extras, and you extract items with your chopsticks from the big bowl, dip them in the little bowl, and then eat them.  You basically assemble a soup like experience with each bite.  The place we were going, Menya Musashi Bukotsu Souden, was one that my traveling companions had been raving about for two days.

 

Dark and ardent mutterings about the use of coffee in the broth creation, the difficulty in securing seats even at odd hours, and the importance of us going to this place had wound through many of our discussions about food over the past 48 hours, and so I was very curious.

A neat thing about Ramen here:

We got there at 1400, well after the lunch rush was over, and sure enough, there was a fair bit of standing around waiting, even with 17 seats, which is a pretty high number for a Ramen place here.

Fun fact about Ramen houses here--they don't have front-of-house staff.  You order from a machine near the door, which prints out little tickets for you, and little tickets for the 2-3 employees that run the shop.  The employees hand you what you ordered in exchange for your ticket after you get a seat.   The vending machines can vary from 70s era labeled buttons up to very modern touchscreens like this one:

While we waited, I took a few pictures, and watched them carve some of the best looking pork I've seen outside the southern united states (a traveler often overlooks, to their own detriment, the particular delicacies that their own homeland does to perfection, and I work hard to remember that southern BBQ belongs alongside other cuisines as involving some of the best meat preparation techniques devised by man).

This Cha Su pork was on the level of the best southern pork I've had. And it was served alongside a broth the like of which I've never tasted.

The "Burak" ("Black") broth is the one made with coffee, and at my companions recommendation I at that, with their Cha Su pork, rather than their Red (Spicy) broth base.

It was an almost religious experience.  I wish the pictures could convey more than just how good it looks.

It was rich and dark and warm and chock-full of garlic, perfect for a chilly day spent wandering the streets of Tokyo.

When we had (almost tragically, it seemed to me) finished our meal, we grabbed our bags and headed for our next hotel.

One of the things I haven't talked about much yet is how we're getting around--namely, Tokyo's absolutely intense Subway system.  My companions tell me that several of the lines are actually privately owned, often by department stores, which then build department stores directly on top of the busiest stations, to give themselves a level of vertical integration (haha!).  The train system is lovely, quiet and quick, and I've yet to wait long enough on a platform to even have time to wonder when the next train will arrive.

The Tokyo equivalent to Hong Kong's Octopus card is called a "Suica".  It's not quite as nice as an Octopus (you have to provide your personal information for recovery, rather than having the option of buying and using them semi-anonymously), but I do like that they print your name on them--it's a charming detail in such a giant monolithic transit system to have the machine print out something bespoke.

About our hotel:  My traveling companions were delighted not to tell me about the particulars (or even the name of the hotel, until we arrived) of our next location, and so they got to watch my bewildered response as we schlepped from Ueno--a chill district of good food, practical streets, and bustling train stations, to the edge of Ginza, where Hotel Andaz Tokyo awaited.

It seems that a few years ago, Hyatt decided that it wanted a brand of "Luxury boutique hotels with sophisticated style, locally inspired cuisine, and vibrant social areas with a kaleidoscope of local culture."  So goes their marketing, anyway.

So, city by city, it has been building Andaz properties all over the world that meet that goal. 

And my companions, cunning devils that they were, had secured us rooms there.

Andaz Daze.

Andaz Tokyo isn't so much a "hotel" as an oasis of luxury perched in the sky above Toranomon, a wealthy business district near Tokyo's center.

I didn't take many pictures there because it's not the sort of place you take pictures.  If we're close, and you're curious, send me a message and I'll send you a link to the MTV Cribs style walkthrough I did of my room.  I will say this: the pool area was nice.

So was the view.

(Yes, that is Mt. Fuji in the distance).

It wasn't just the aesthetics of the place that really set it apart though, it was the little things.

Like the fact that their pool locker room had a commercial-grade swimsuit water extractor. Also, every room came with its own Nespresso machine.

Anyway. it was bananas. Moving on!

Jet Lag Tag Along.

I have discovered the best scam.

It's the absolute ideal way to handle the first 36 hours of touring the other side of the world, when you're hilariously jetlagged and so delirious that, given your own cognitive abilities, the extent of your first day might be this itinerary:

"Try to go to a museum.  Go instead to a temple on a holy day.  It's closed.  Nearly fall down an escalator going the wrong direction. Lose a transit card.  Confuse a service person while you try to negotiate getting another one.  Eventually try to go to a museum, remember nothing you see even though it seems fascinating.  Accidentally order food you don't recognize and then, because you wind up with a thing you weren't expecting, be so embarrassed that you barely taste the food you got even though it's great.  Then go to sleep early and question whether or not you are actually smart enough to travel on your own."

Instead of all that. . . meet up when you arrive with two people who know and love the city you're traveling to.

And this is key--make sure they arrive a day or two before you, so they are less jet-lagged and then just. . . release yourself into their care like a tired but excitable puppy.

On Wednesday night, since that was the end of their first full day, we went out to one of their favorite little Izakayas, which is a sort of Japanese pub that serves amazing bar food that puts the fried oysters and onion rings that pass for bar food in the US to shame.

The district we're staying in is Ueno, just on the edge of a formerly black market set of tiny streets known as Ameyokocho, which is a mixture of small bars and eateries and also a sortof former black market but it's cool it's mostly not a really a black market now.  As much.  We swear.

It also turns out to be a great place to get good food.

Doubly so when you're completely delirious and trust your traveling companions completely and they can just wave menu items at you and you can point and babble incoherently about monetary policy and cryptocurrency while you drink ginger soda cocktails.


This is how I discovered that one of the things you can buy in their favorite Izakaya is whole cloves of ginger BOILED IN BUTTER.

Which, if you know anything about me, you know was basically me winning the culinary lottery.

So then we went back to the hotel, and I went unconscious for about five hours hours and then at 3AM of course my body went HEY IT'S JET LAG DAY.

So I spent the next two and a half hours dozing in an out of consciousness and occasionally also playing with my camera phone to try to capture the picture that I used to test picture updates.

And then the day started where I just got to follow behind while my companions led the way.

They were excited to show me the town, so first we went and got pastry for breakfast (the Japanese equivalent of donut shops are surprisingly great at many forms of Pastry, and make a bunch of delicious ones.) and then off we went to a Buddhist temple which was a lovely chance for me to muddle through remembering how to take pictures with a DSLR (I'll try to sit down and upload some of those tonight).

After letting my K-1 put in work for a while, we did a little pre-planning for some shopping we have planned at the end of our respective trips, and then we were off to the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which is a really great museum housed in one of those ridiculous modern Late-Stage-Brutalism pieces of architecture that has to be seen to be believed.  I recommend you look it up--I was too busy feeling oppressed by the looming nature of the design to take a picture.

The museum inside was glorious though, with tons of super-information rich displays, neat interactive exhibits and beautiful little scale models of various buildings, some cutaway so you could see the construction methods employed.

There was also a lot of discussion about firefighting, because it turns out that all of Edo and early-Tokyo's beautiful architecture was really just carefully assembled piles of pure kindling pressed up against each other and waiting for a reason to burn down. . .and they were lived in by people whose idea of an appropriate light source was open-flame candles and lamps under pretty paper lampshades. . . so. . . it was in a near-constant state of combustion for hundreds of years.

It meant they invented some pretty cool firefighting equipment though: here's a 3+ man pump system.  One man aims, two men operate the pump, and the rest of the crew run buckets to them that are poured in through the top so it can operate continuously.

And here's a beautiful set of kimono that were on display.  If I recall correctly these were about 350 years old.

So then, starving, we headed east for while with a few stops for pictures until we found a small noodle shop that made really tasty Shio Romen (noodle soup with a sea salt broth with loads of thinly sliced onion on top) via a cool system where you ordered from a vending machine near the door and then sat down and the cooks made your food and handed it over the half-wall of the counter directly to you (I would later discover this is how all noodle shops in Japan operate).  It was a great pause in a day full of bracing walks in the cool and overcast Tokyo weather.  Is there a better combination than beautifully chilly overcast weather and noodle soup?  I argue that there might not be.

We finished up lunch, caught a train to Sky-Tree town, and bought tickets for the elevator to end all elevators, and up-up-up we went, to the top of the Tokyo Skytree. We spent the late afternoon there, talking and watching the dusk fall and the sun set and the lights of the city come on--the same way one should first experience the Eiffel tower, if you've the chance, and it was well worth the time and the money.

I've found over the years that the combination of glass and crowds and limited angles makes taking a picture that conveys much about what you experience on such an observation deck pretty futile, so you won't find any attempts at a panorama.  I did try my hand at a few limited shots of one particular angle where I could get up against the glass and do a little long exposure work.  When I post that picture later, try to imagine that view but in every direction as far as the eye can see, save towards the bay, where the city does eventually give way to water, and you've got a vague notion.  But you really can't imagine the contrast of grandeur and surreal sense of scale.  It's amazing.

Basically, you should go to Tokyo and spend your own sunset watching the city become illuminated. It's a magical experience and I can't recommend it enough.

Oh, side note, the Skytree observation deck was full of life-size statues of DragonBall Z characters for some sort of promotional event they were doing.  Because Japan.

Delirious and well-pleased, I followed my companions through the dark to Akiba.

"Akiba" is the cool guy way that Tokyo says Akihabara, now, similar to "the ATL" for Atlanta, or Mac-town for my current home.  It's consumerism in its purest form, especially when it comes to tech, toys, and entertainment.

It's full of 8 and 10 story stores that are shrines to tech with specialty shops sandwiched in between (like one that's a sort of radio-shack cemetery where you can buy every sort of discrete electronic component).  Every store is covered in giant ads for the latest Anime or Japanese video game, and the streets of full of young businessmen and bored-and-chilly looking young women busking for the maid cafes on the next street over.

We went to one department store where a whole floor was just Drones, Cameras, and other small scale electronics.  Not only did they have about as many flying drone options on display as an American best-buy has cameras, they also had an entire section for submarine drones, as well.  There was a huge section for VR in one store, and another that was chock-full of just action figures from every series ever.  There was even a lego section in one store that was about the size of a convenience store, just for Ninjago and Star Wars Lego sets, which was great.  One store had a gaming-laptop section that was borderline obscene, full of the over-the-top color choices on top of black chassis that has become the bizarro standard aesthetic in modern gaming hardware.

After wandering until our eyes started to bleed, we headed off to a tower that my companions affectionately call the meat palace, which is an amazing place near Akiba that used to be a butcher shop and now has a separate restaurant on every one of its 7 floors.  It's the sort of delightfully weird building--a giant neon cow face looms over Akiba from its roof--that makes Tokyo feel like Tokyo.

Sadly, the Yakiniku place we had in mind was closing up for the night, but thankfully the black market denizens like to stay up a little later, so we made our way back towards our hotel to a different Yakiniku place that was happy to welcome us in, tired and foot-weary, to a late and delicious dinner.  Kalbi beef, offal, short rib meat, and excellent roast all appeared at our table raw, and we spent the next two hours drinking dark beer and ginger high balls while we cooked our own dinner over the tiny gas grill embedded in our table top.

It was delicious, and we caught up on some old personal history over the meal in an environment that couldn't have been more perfect.  It was an excellent finish to a long day.

We crashed hard afterwards, returning to the hotel around 2300, and I slept soundly until almost 7AM, like a real human.

It was an excellent day.  

Tonight, I'll try to update you about all that happened this morning (Modern art! Political discussion! More pastry! Plus the brilliant Customa Cafe!)

Photo test

Here's the Tokyo Skyline.

If you're seeing this, I've found a direct phone camera - > blogger pipeline that works.

Also, on reflection, calling this the Tokyo Skyline is like referring to a macro photograph of my left ear as "my face." 

The scale of this city can't really be effectively conveyed with still imagery. 

Hello Tokyo

Delta flight 295 took off from Atlanta at 11AM, and I settled in just a little better prepared for the trans-pacific experience than I was back in 2009.  Maybe it's because my last major work trip was 2 flights totaling almost 19 hours of time in the air with a 5 hour layover in the middle, but this flight definitely felt easier than it could have been.  Hurrah for being prepared.

I had brought water and juice with me, and made sure to get up and stretch periodically.  I knocked a couple of movies off my to-watch list ("Ant Man and the Wasp", and "The Incredibles 2"--both very much cases of "does what it says on the tin.") and managed about 4 hours of nap time, which leaves me starved enough for sleep that hopefully tonight my body will succumb to a relatively full night of rest.

I cleared Immigration and Customs quickly, since I travel light and (it seems) I have finally learned how to answer the questions asked relatively succinctly, and wait--open faced and obviously hiding nothing--to answer the questions they never bother with if you look eager to answer them.

The signage and layout of the section of Narita airport that you are ejected into when you clear customs belies the notion that it serves 40 million passengers a year, feeling more like a regional transport hub.   It was charming, and I was glad that I apparently landed at a relatively un-busy time of day and year.

I queued for a train ticket to downtown, and sprung for the Skyliner--the fast train that would have me at Ueno station to meet The Cynic and The Artist in just 45 minutes.  It felt a little odd to voluntarily spring for the faster train and reserved seating, but there were a few good reasons for it, and I suspect a lot of this trip will be spent reminding myself that I'm allowed to spend a little more money than when I was stretching $4k to last two months the last time I was on this side of the world.

I'm writing this update from a tiny tray table, and musing over my options for the easiest way to attach pictures taken from my phone to these posts, considering that the blogger app apparently is not particularly good at uploading them.  Most likely I'll set up a folder I can push pictures to on google drive and pull them from there when I have wifi.  We'll see.   In the meantime I'm afraid you'll just have to suffer through my occasional thousand-word attempts to convey what I'm seeing.

Currently, what I'm seeing is dusk overtake the beautiful gray clouds of a winter day in the outskirts of Tokyo from the window of my train car.  I've got a delicious coffee drink and a Pocari Sweat snagged from a giant vending machine in the train station, and a soul singing with the joy of being immersed in the beginnings of an adventure. 

Damn, it's good to be back on the road.

Shake the Dust.

After almost a decade, I'm finally getting off the continent entirely for my own reasons again.

It's been a busy year, and I've been abroad more than once in a more professional capacity, mostly in Europe.  This trip is a little different--I'm headed to Japan for a couple of weeks.  The plan is to spend the time with two of my oldest friends while they excitedly drag me around to their favorite places, since they return to the Land of the Rising Sun every December.  I haven't picked nicknames for them yet, but I will soon.

At the moment I'm sitting in Delta's holiday lounge in Atlanta's E concourse--every December Delta puts together a lounge inside the airport for members of the uniformed services, which is nice since the USO is outside security and also since Ft. Benning's proximity to Atlanta means that the USO is almost always hosting a contingent of nervous 18 year olds in dingy civilian clothes and silly haircuts on the way to basic training, or even-more-nervous 18 year olds in terrible uniforms and worse haircuts leaving basic for their first duty station or a holiday break.

I spent a bit of time chatting with a Navy vet who now works as a civilian supporting projects out in San Diego when he's not working on the Newport News area while my phone boots up, and debate terrible coffee (nobody does really wretched coffee like military hospitality.  It's an acquired taste).  I decide against the coffee because I'm hoping to sleep on the flight over, though honestly I'm not sure I'll be able to, even without a window seat.  Too excited to be back in (what I hope is still) my element.

So I boot up my laptop and spend some time thinking about this entry.  I'm remembering how frank and florid I was when I last wrote in this format--trying to figure out if I want to be that window again, for you all, or if I'd like to try to class the place up a little.

Regardless, it's time to call my bank and confirm that they know I'm leaving the country, and then head to my gate for boarding.

I'm off to Japan!

Shopping in Stanley

I reached my hostel just before noon, and checked in without difficulty. When the hostel manager checked me in, she indicated a bed and said "ah, one other person. You have a girl this time." Ah Shan's mixed dorm is the kind of arrangement that--in my experience--is limited almost entirely to single men on their way between other places in Asia or taking the long hop between Asia and Europe. It's a bit rough and tumble, and not the sort of place you see a lot of womenfolk.

In fact, womenfolk in hostels tend to be a mysterious curiosity. Admittedly, I've had some great luck along the way, meeting good traveling companions like Melanie, but there have also been the odd girls that will check into mixed dorms but then never say hello, leaving an awkward silence in a room for an entire evening and the following morning, making you wonder if you really look that scary or if maybe they just assume that you won't speak a common language or perhaps they're mute?

Judging by the twinkle in the eye of my host this girl was the sort of likable person I would probably get along with, so I looked forward to meeting her.

So it was that even though Roger turned out to be a very nice guy, I'll always think of him by the nickname "disappointment". It turned out the girl had checked out that morning, and Roger was the only remaining guest. He was a pleasant, softspoken fellow with a soft torso and hair cut very short to mitigate a receding hairline. The oppressive heat had done a number on his UK sensibilities, and so he returned from his morning's excursion shirtless, making him look like the quintessential western victim of Hong Kong's heat and humidity. A sort of white gumby, slowly deforming in the pressure-cooker that is Hong Kong in midsummer.

If he's good at reading expressions, I'm sure he's wondering why the American stranger's face fell quite that far when he walked in the door. Ah well, win some, lose some.

We struck it off well enough, and I gave him a little advice on the easiest way to get back to the airport (bus, from where we happened to be) and headed out. I was hungry, and I had shopping to do.

I had intentionally resisted the urge to buy some things along the way, knowing that I didn't have the space or weight to carry souvenirs, and so I specifically managed it so that I could wait until my last day in Hong Kong to do much of my shopping.

I took the MTR out to the very end of Hong Kong Island, and from there a Green Minibus across the island to the tiny seaside village of Stanley, a tourist's village with a pretty well known souvenir market. There I bought gifts both small and large for several friends, and many of you will be receiving them as Christmas and Birthday gifts over the coming six months.

But before I did most of my shopping, I went hunting for food.

There is a long strip of tourist restaurants with names like "Cafe De Paris" and signs advertising Carlsberg and Heineken, all facing the waterfront. I walked along them glancing incredulously at prices and shaking my head. I suspected there was a place near here where the locals ate, and there was no way I was paying HK $100 for a dim sum sampler plate. At the end of the long line of tourist trap eateries I found a grungy instant noodle house nesting in a hole in the wall, and there I had vegetable and meat wonton noodle soup for $18--about US $2.50. It was delicious, though simple, and I felt a little better about my chances of succeeding in the market.

Hong Kong markets don't really do that much haggling anymore--I mean, some do, but most of the prices are already low and there really isn't much room to negotiate, so I only asked for small discounts when I bought several things together, and while this always resulted in some savings, it was usually only between 5 and 15 percent. I suppose I could have struck a hard bargain, played the difficult sell, and tried for more, but I liked the laid back, relaxed attitude of the shopkeepers and was more than comfortable paying the asking price in almost every case. I found most of the gifts I was looking for, although a couple of artists I had seen on my first visit to Hong Kong whose work I really liked were not represented there, and several pieces that I loved were far, far out out of my price range.

As I wandered I took time to view the waterfront. Stanley faces out towards the open ocean, on the far side of Hong Kong Island from the major city, and it's blatantly obvious at any given moment that Hong Kong's role as one of the major shipping centers of the world is still quite strong.

Eventually the afternoon's torrential downpour settled in, and I moved slowly from shop to shop, thankful for the tightly woven roof made of awnings and fabric and plastic that the shop owners string up to keep the sun and rain off their customers. Around six I finally headed back to town, waiting until a thinner band of the storm came through and the rain reduced to a light drizzle and I could make it to the bus stop at a dead run. I must have looked an awkward sight, with a road-weary face and worn clothing, two cardboard art tube rolls and a severely anachronistic samurai sword protruding from the bag slung over my shoulder.

I headed back to town, dropped my bags at the hostel, grabbed a few pastries from a bake shop for dinner, and took the MTR down to the waterfront for one last view of Hong Kong's incredible skyline. The rain had dispersed by then, and I happened to accidentally arrive just before 2000, which gave me the chance to wade through the crowds of tourists and watch the Hong Kong lightshow again.

The show was nice, but I found it better the second time around, since I decided to block out the Movie-Theatre-Introduction Music with Oh Dorian, which actually seemed to match the light show a little better than the stuff blaring from the Public Address system.

I headed back to the hostel around 9, did a bit of research and caught up on my internets, then turned in around 11.

Tomorrow was going to be two very short days.

Red Eye to Asia

One way tickets from Perth to Hong Kong are inexplicably expensive, and so I had booked consecutive (but cheap) flights from Perth to Singapore and from Singapore to Hong Kong, spending the entire night traveling. I've done it before, and since I wasn't changing time zones, as I was going almost due north for much of it, I knew it wouldn't be too bad.

I arrived in the Singapore airport just before 0300, and spent almost two hours finding out which terminal I was to be in. Allow me to gripe: Singapore has an absolutely ridiculous airport. It is a massive, sprawling thing that has four totally independent terminals, named 1, 2, 3, and Budget. There is a free shuttle bus from the Budget terminal to Terminal 2, which I took, and when I arrived there I discovered that the normal train between those three terminals was shut down, so I had to find out that there is another shuttle that runs overnight, then find it, then go to the wrong terminal, discover that my airline departed from somewhere else, and then go there. All told I probably walked five kilometers and spent an hour riding buses and going "well, where the hell is my flight then?" before I finally found it.

Thankfully, the layover was four hours long, so I had enough time to check in, grab some breakfast (a sort of Singapore Signature dish -- noodle soup with curry seasoning, Prawns and Tofu. Not bad, but it felt like airport food), and head to my gate.

There, I found my second complaint against Singapore's airport.

One of the things I've made a habit over the past couple of years is to always carry an empty water bottle through security with me, then fill it from the water fountains inside the departures area. It saves me the several dollars that water inevitably costs inside the airport and helps me feel a little less like I'm getting fleeced. I used to carry a full one, but of course the modern regulations have done away with that option.

Singapore has a holding pen at every gate that is entered by going through security. This is kinda nice in the sense that security is widely distributed and you're less likely to miss your flight because you're standing in line, but a PITA for me, since it means that my empty water bottle does me no good, as there are no water fountains in that tiny seating area between metal detector and causeway.

I realize this is a really small thing, of course, but it irked me, and so it stuck in my pre-dawn mind and I decided I'd gripe about it here.

I caught my flight with plenty of time to spare and reached Hong Kong in the midmorning.

Also: interesting bit of history and politicaly geography. I'm skipping across the surface of the western hemisphere like a stone, but every place I strike lately is a former British colony. Weird, huh?

Parkour, Kung Foo, And Kangaroo

The next morning we rolled out of bed around 10ish and chatted about politics and religion over breakfast. If you're as controversial in your views as people like Geoff and I tend to be, you get used to not minding when the disagreements are thorough as long as they are reasoned (if not rational) and polite. I learned long ago between being the Christian on the Smoker's porch and being the drinking, cursing outspoken critic in my bible study groups that pleasant disagreements are not only feasible, but desirable, and it's obvious that along the way Geoff has learned the same lesson through his own experience. Thus we could broach topics where we differed wildly and still find plenty of common ground and move on.

After breakfast, we wandered out to the back yard. The objectives of the day were (1) show each other stuff to give an idea of what training had been like (2) teach Daniel (Joe's son) how to throw his new football American-style, and (3) maybe do a little parkour at one of the parks in the area.

So it was that Geoff and I spent an hour or so showing different applications, working muscles long left to atrophy and mindsets covered over in the dust of forgetfulness. We talked about lessons we'd learned, and I tried to remember enough of one of my old forms to give him an idea of how nasty and full of applications they had been. It was a rough approximation but he got the idea. For his part he showed me a few of the more obscure strikes and some of the cool stuff he'd always liked from his art. Along the way I took a few photographs that weren't of him kissing his knees. That is probably the best one, there.

At some point Joe wandered out into the backyard and the conversation moved to Gymnastics for a while, a subject at which I have always been terrible. Joe on the other hand is pretty damn good, and would occasionally tease us in our stiff-old-man movements by throwing a cartwheel-handspring or somersault into our peripheral vision. Eventually Daniel came out and we went through the very very basics of punches before he lost interest and we sent him to find his football.

Due to a fellow named Scott, that I knew long ago, back before I was in college--(when dinosaurs ruled the earth, as I would say to my Mercerian friends)--I've always had a halfway decent spiral throw, at least over short distances. He decided one day (with Scott's usual mixture of singlemindedness and decisive action) that I should know how to throw a football, and he taught me the entire mechanic in just a few moments and drilled me on it until it was ingrained.

So it was I found myself halfway around the world in an Aussie's backyard, teaching a five year old the same basic rules. Fingers on the laces. Hand behind your ear. Let it roll out straight.

I'm a pretty good teacher. I know that sounds arrogant, but I've been tutoring, guest lecturing, and assisting in and out of classrooms for almost a decade and I base my opinion on the feedback I've gotten and the results I've witnessed. Still, this kid has to be a natural. In five minutes he was throwing a nice spiral at least five yards with decent accuracy, and could catch the return throw 9 times out of 10. It's a pity you can't use such a throw in Australian Rules Football, or he'd make quite the quarterback someday.

Since we'd been mixing in discussion of another physical activity we enjoyed, a sort of casual parkour sidebar turned eventually into a sojourn to the public park, Joe drove and the four of us wound up on the grounds of one of the local schools, quiet on a Sunday save for the handful of family samplers out letting their kids play on the various playground gear.

We made an odd quartet, Geoff dressed like a Bogan (the Aussie equivalent of a redneck, as best I can tell), Me in baggy surfer shorts, Daniel running from place to place whenever we looked away, usually to be found doing something challenging or a facsimile of whatever we'd been doing a few moments before, and Joe dividing her attention between making sure her son wasn't in any real danger and keeping up with us, a challenging grin on her face and "anything you can do I can do better" attitude that proved absolutely correct when it came to the gymnastics part of our adventure.

We spent some time on various jumps and climbing things, and eventually found a sort of handleless, sharply angled carousel in a big sandpit that made for a half hours entertainment as we screwed with each other while each person tried to walk on it as if it were a mouse's exercise wheel. That devolved into tussling, which became Joe having a go at choking me out. Historically she's always hung pretty tough with Geoff's friends, and has incapacitated a few of them along the way, leaving behind a wake of embarrassing injuries and submissions. Geoff tells these stories with the glowing pride of an older brother, and they are pretty hilarious. She's strong and quick and knew the basics, and went straight for the throat as best she could. However, but I've been mangled by Jujitsuka, Aikidoka, Judoka, Kuk Sool Instructors, and plenty more besides, so I wormed out of the choke and cheated.

One thing I've learned more and more as my knowledge of Martial arts stagnates with the absence of training and slowly ferments is that certain arts have certain mentalities, and the arts I have studied have a certain devious grace to them. So when I got a free hand and had my throat protected, I brought it around her shoulder and, with it still covered in sand, shoved it across her jaw, getting sand in her face and down her shirt simultaneously.

She coughed and spat and let me go, and I scrambled to my feet laughing and helped her up, thinking of Aaron performing a similarly dastardly attack by merely smothering me (something I had never expected or considered until he did it) during a session at Knoxville fest about five years back. Geoff laughed at us both, me turning my pockets inside out and his sister shaking sand from her hair, and I laughed and said "See? What did I tell you? K. S. uses whatever is available." Years later, it seems I haven't forgotten that simple lesson, at least.

We found a couple of really cool playground items that rotated in bizarre and interesting ways, allowing you to form a sort of spinning swing, the momentum of which you could control yourself by how you moved within them, and spent a significant period playing with them as well as climbing them and performing various jumps and talking about life and how to whistle. I showed Joe the whistle my mother and sister and I learned, and it brought back memories of sitting on the top of our giant van on the fourth of July in Texas, many years ago, and picking up the trick by experimentation and spending a quarter of an hour making ridiculous noises before if finally clicked.

Eventually, we headed back to the house, because Geoff had plans to make dinner.

I took a shower and repacked my bags while he did prep work, then I came in to help finish preparing the Mashed potatoes.

The meal was Mashed potatoes, Broccoli and Cabbage salad, and Kangaroo.

As he cooked Geoff explained to me that most people's misconception that Kangaroo is inedible and tough is based on the fact that it's almost always overcooked. The only real way to eat it is seared, and completely rare (for those in need of a definition: the center is still cold and the meat is almost blue).

He had marinated the 'Roo in Wine, Pepper, and a splash fo beer, then made a reduction of the remaining marinade, and the flavour was fantastic. The texture was perfect, soft and smooth and incredibly tender. I couldn't have asked for a better last meal for my time in Australia.

After dinner, I said my goodnights to Daniel, and my goodbyes to Geoff, and Joe took me to the airport, as she was headed off to meet Peter afterwards and Geoff and I had both been drinking with dinner.

I arrived in plenty of time to check in, read a bit, and then climb on board my flight to Singapore. The next thirteen hours would be spent in transit, and at the end of them, I'd be back in Hong Kong.

Marine Museum and a Missed Flight.

Every hostel stay seems to have it's moments, and that night was no exception.

I turned in around 11, and walked into my dorm room to find a very undressed (she was left in pants and a camisole) English bird standing in the center of our room. Sometimes a little bit of curmudgeonly behaviour is rewarded by a glimpse of beauty along the way for no particular reason, and this was one of those moments. I tried not to raise my eyebrows too highly and instead gathered my things for rituals of tooth brushing and preparations for bed. It turned out she and her traveling companion (whose names I forget) had just arrived from Cannes a few minutes before.

Mark and Dominic, two fellows who were staying in (Dominic because he didn't feel like going out and Mark because he was hugely jet lagged from having just arrived from the UK 24 hours earlier and going out to the pub the night before) turned in shortly thereafter, and the five of us chatted for twenty minutes or so before we all decided that we were invested in the sleep aspect of things.

Of course, we were awakened by the returning revelers around 3AM, most specifically a fellow who had apparently been pranked by having a fridge put in his bed (?!). Of course, when you're that hammered everything is as serious as the afterlife and he stood in the hallway and bawled bloody murder for probably ten minutes while his friends tried to calm him down and get him to bed.

After an hour of tossing and turning I fell back asleep and woke up around 9.

Dominic and I finished off most of the remaining breakfast ingredients I alluded to earlier, and the resulting mushroom and onion omelet and hash browns were damn tasty.

I did laundry, repacked my things and dropped them in the storage room, then headed for downtown. I had one last day and the wildlife exhibit and marine museum had my curiosity.

I wandered down the wharf and passed the wildlife exhibit with only a pause to confirm that it was about $32 AU and I hadn't little interest in paying that to go to a miniature zoo, even a neat one. So it was that I didn't see a Koala or (live) Kangaroo during my time in Australia, but that just means there's more reason for me to come back, I suppose.

However, I crossed over the Darling Harbour bridge and discovered a gem in Australia's National Marine Museum.

It was a mammoth building with it's own docks outside, with decommissioned battleships and submarines and a replica of the Endeavour (Captain Cook's ship). For a price, you could tour the ships outside, but the museum itself was free. I threw $3 AU in the donation box and wound up spending nearly 5 hours there, I felt like I should have gone back and donated more before I left.

Among the many permanent exhibits of Australian Sailing and Longshoreman history, there were several really fascinating displays and a couple of great temporary exhibits as well. One of the cool things in the extensive exhibit on the history of the Australian Navy, and how it's evolved over time largely independent of the British Navy which was content to withdraw when it had business elsewhere and leave the colony to shift for itself, which made the Australians naturally uncomfortable, and so they basically hand-built their own fleet.

In fact, the government of Australia actually invited The Great White Fleet--Teddy Roosevelt's personal "Fuck you" to Japan--to come visit and tour Sydney harbour, and the government made a huge celebration out of the visit, and used it to drum up public support for their own Naval ambitions, which they would proudly tour through the same harbour themselves five years later, and which would prove invaluable during the first world war just a few years after that.

One of the intriguing visiting exhibits was "Exposed--the History of Swimwear" which I have a twofold interest in. On the one hand, I swam quasi-competitively as youngster, and rather enjoyed the experience, and find the current "Fastskin" controversy intriguing. On the other hand, I'm also a human male over the age of 12, so a fitting bathing suit on an attractive woman will always be a visual I appreciate. To quote Garrison Keillor (who was quoted in the exhibit) "A girl in a bikini is like having a loaded pistol on your coffee table - There's nothing wrong with them, but it's hard to stop thinking about it."

I was surprised and impressed to note that the human body factored into the exhibit to the extent that they included the iconic William Claxton photograph of Peggy Moffitt modeling Rudi Gernreich's famous "monokini" of which 3,000 were sold and only a handful ever worn. I was to realize later in the other exhibitions on swimming that the female breast is apparently not something that the museum felt should be avoided if it factored into an exhibit, and spotted several other images (mostly Australian beach-and-swimming-related-art) that also had nipples a plenty. I've dutifully reprinted a low quality image of the monokini photo (which is a fantastic photograph from a technical and asthetic POV as well) here to voice my support for this mentality. What I've come to realize is that I think nudity and alcohol are in the same category here. If they are treated with respect, but also with a casual admission that they are facts of life and not to be considered shameful or unhealthy, we'll probably be a lot better off as a society.

Other intriguing displays included the Darwin Exhibit ("Journeys and Theories" or somesuch) which was a really fascinating overview of Darwin's travels around the world aboard the HMS Beagle. One thing I found fascinating was that the captain of the ship for that voyage would go on to become one of the first proponents of using barometers to predict the weather, and to advocate their use by ships at sea.

There is a "United States of America" gallery that contains a bunch of gifts from the Smithsonian, most interesting of which is a display of journal excerpts and photographs from a 19 year old Yankee that sailed to Australia from New York on one of the last tall ships near the turn of the 20th century. His photography is remarkable (though occasionally out of focus) and his writing is blunt, simple, and fascinating, and these materials provide a compelling view backwards into a world now long gone.

There is also a boat built out of beer cans, which is seaworthy. Turns out that Darwin runs a beer boat competition every year, and it's encouraged some really remarkable creativity over the years.


I finally left the museum around 4:30, took a train back through town, swung by Harries for another delicious meat pie, this time with mashed potatoes AND mashed peas, and the collected my bags and headed to the airport.

I walked up to the Virgin Blue counter around 6:15 and told the lady I was checking in for the flight to Perth. She had my passport by then and said it was odd that she wasn't finding me on the passenger manifest. I asked what day it was (that always being my biggest fear) and she laughed and said the 1st. Ok then, I wasn't completely wrong. She said the flight was at 7:55 though, and tha concerned me, because I thought I remembered it being at 7:30. Finally she searched for my flight details and found my original booking, and discovered that I'd been on the 5:30 flight (now, of cours, long gone).

"Oh, shit" I thought to myself. "Really?" I said, trying to play the innocent passenger card while I wracked my brain for how I'd managed that one.

Then I hit upon it. Throughout this trip I've been drilling my use of Military time, which has served me very well throughout, but in this case it had sunk me. The flight I'd thought was at 7:30 (and had converted in my head to 19:30) was actually at 17:30, and I'd simply misread the booking. I'd made an assumption based on the duration of the flight and the time changes and the fact that I knew when I landed, and assumed that 7:30 made perfect sense. In fact the flight time was two hours longer than I expected. My face fell but the very helpful girl pointed across the concourse to a customer service desk and said I'd be able to change my ticket there for a $50AU fee.

Well, $40 US wasn't too bad, and in fact was easily absorbed by my budget, so I schlepped across to the desk and explained my plight to the girl there.

She pulled up my flight details and looked concerned. "oh, actually. . .the kind of booking you had can't be exchanged once you miss the flight. . ." (OH SHIT. RED ALERT.) "I mean, if you'd been here but not had time to make it to the gate. . ." she trailed off, not wanting to say "you're about to have to buy a new $250 (or god knows how much more) ticket if you want to fly tonight".

I played the innocent traveler card again and pointed back at the check in desk from which I'd just been sent. "Oh, I didn't realize. I mean, I just talked to her and she had said that I'd be able to transfer to this flight for a $50 fee since there were open seats. . ."

They played phone tag, waving at each other across the concourse and talking briefly and the customer service girl (who obviously wanted not to charge me an arm and a leg) confirmed that I was some TLA that basically meant "was here on time but couldn't make it" (a complete fabrication they were both happy to maintain for my sake, thank the maker). As a result, I was on the next flight to Perth with very little economical pain or inconvenience.

I phoned Geoff to explain and he laughed at me. "How the hell did ya manage that?" and I told him briefly and said I'd call when I landed to find out if he was still at work or back at the house.

While I waited for my next flight, I sampled a local treat: Arnott's. The big seller are "Tim Tams"--a chocolate coated cookie that is the common companion of tea. In this case though, it was a mint cookie not unlike if a Devil's Food Cake cookie and a York peppermint patty had mated. Imagine a grown-up version of a Girlscouts' thin mint and you've got the idea. They were great. I ate the entire package before I reached Perth.

When I landed, I found him at home. We sat and talked and drank for a bit, then went to sleep with plans to spend a little bit of the next day at least sharing technique, doing a mini-Knoxville-fest, both knowing we'd be frustrated by the experience since it's been so long since either of us trained, but wanting to get the chance to convey at least the vague outline of what had, once upon a time, been conveyed to us.