Wednesday Weirdness: Avocado Sashimi

Turns out it's a thing.

I don't know about you, but when I think "interesting," I think "the history of the avocado in Japanese cuisine."

It may surprise you to learn that avocado is not native to Japan. It actually entered Japanese cuisine via California, where transplanted Japanese sushi chefs were looking for a cheap, palatable alternative to toro, or fatty tuna belly.

The Japanese, it turns out, are obsessed with toro, thanks to its rich, fatty flavor and creamy texture. But if you don't mind dropping the tuna-ish taste of toro, avocado is actually a decent approximation. Savvy chefs didn't have to think too hard about swapping out an expensive fish product with little or no distribution in the US for something that, in California, literally grows on trees. Everywhere.

Hence the California roll was born and subsequently transplanted back to Japan, where it remains the only staple of American sushi you can regularly find on the menu. Before long, the avocado took off on its own, popping up in a variety of sushi and non-sushi dishes. These days, reasonably priced avocados can be found in most grocery stores. In fact, they're typically cheaper than they are in the eastern US, and for us at least they've become an important staple as we've tried to trim our consumption of meat.

And avocado sashimi may be the single easiest recipe in the world.

1. Slice an avocado or two.
2. Squeeze a lemon wedge over top.
3. Dip in soy sauce with wasabi to taste.

 Delicious and nutritions.

Today's Lesson

アボカドさしみをします。

a-bo-ka-do sa-shi-mi shi-ma-su

avocado sashimi make

(I) make avocado sashimi.

Sending Money by Japan Post; Or, Carrying Loads of Cash

Pretty much every customs form in the world has a line where you, dear traveller, must declare whether you're carrying more than the equivalent of $10,000 US in cash or cash instruments. I used to wonder what kind of people just had ten grand on them. I mean, who carries ten thousand freaking dollars in cash? Maybe I've read too many Greek myths, but that just seems beyond insane - a level of implied hubris that's practically begging the universe to steal your stash.

So why am I about to show you a picture of Nana holding over $10,000 US in Japanese yen?

Instead of dead presidents, we have dead 19th-century Japanese intellectuals.

You see, Japan is a cash economy. You pay for your dinner in cash. You pay for your groceries in cash. You pay for your domestic plane tickets and your all-female musical theater revue tickets in cash. Granted, you have to go use a special ticket machine at the convenience store - but when you're done, you take the stub to the counter and pay. In cash.

If you're us, you also need reams of paper and a patient Japanese clerk.

I'd write a post about how we did this, but it basically involved printing out a bunch of stuff in Japanese, handing it to the guy behind the counter, and hoping for the best.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, for anything but entertainment, the Japanese are pretty technophobic. Scratch the surface of any business's filing system and it's dead trees as far as the eye can see.

Second, Japan is pretty safe. Petty theft is extremely rare, making loss the only common risk involved in carrying cash.

Third, the Japanese are fiscally ultra-conservative. While household savings rates in Japan have fallen from their boom-time peaks, the Japanese still save a lot of money, most of which they shovel into low-risk, low-return investments like savings accounts and government bonds. As a result, credit cards aren't nearly as ubiquitous here as they are in the States - and neither are the many credit-card-driven point-of-sale technologies that make American debit cards possible.

Finally, the government itself is extremely conservative when it comes to banking and finance. Good for dodging credit crunches and keeping the yen high, not so for providing high-tech infrastructure and customer service. And when it comes to international banking, it's almost medieval: most Japanese have little reason to send money overseas, so naturally the process is both expensive and viewed with suspicion.

This is a roundabout way of saying that, in Japan, most of the usual tricks for sending money home simply don't work. Paypal? Forget it. Online banking? Unheard of. You can go to your bank in person and arrange a reasonably fast wire transfer, but it's super expensive and there are a lot of annoying little regulatory hoops.

That's why most foreigners send their money home by Japan Post.

Now, don't panic - that's not quite what you think, though you are allowed to send cash by mail within Japan.

You see, Japan Post is also a savings bank. As a savings bank, they offer a "transfer" service that basically involves issuing a secure foreign-currency money order in your name, then physically mailing it to your bank, where it's deposited it into your account.

So once in a blue moon, when we have savings to liberate from our zero-interest Japanese savings account (?!?), we have to go through a mildly terrifying ordeal that looks something like this:

1. Find your banking info. This includes the street address of your "home branch," which is barely even a thing in the US, but they have to send the money order somewhere.
2. Withdraw about $5000 from the ATM. That's not an extra zero - $5000 is the daily limit. 
3. Bike very, very carefully for the quarter mile between the ATM and the post office.
4. Fill out a goofy old form printed in English by an ancient dot-matrix printer.
5. Walk out the door and promptly forget about the fact that you just sent a five-figure money order across the Pacific.
6. Be pleasantly surprised and feel irrationally richer when the money appears in your US account.

And that's Japanese technology in a nutshell: we can use our lightning-fast broadband connection to check our balance on a different continent, but only after we've mailed ourselves a million-yen money order we had to pay for in cash.

How to get on an elephant

I am working on a post on our visit to Patara Elephant Farm, but the truth is a day like that really defies words. So here's some of the 360 photos and video we took that day to answer to the immortal question, "How do you get on an elephant?"

One of two ways. The most common way is up the side, standing on the foreleg and grabbing the ear.

My high school motto was "Strength and Grace." I got 50% right.

But if you're Justin, and you get a crotchety elephant named Mei Kham Souk (note: spelling is me being extremely creative), then she won't let you climb up her leg. You have to do the second way: climb over the head.

And hey presto! That's all it takes to go from landlubber:

to elephant jockey!

LOOK MA NO HANDS!

What, you want to know how to get DOWN? Oh, fine.Well, first, you tap the elephant on the head and say "Down," in Thai. Which I don't remember.

Then, over the head you go!

Then thank the elephant. They remember if you don't.

Try to get a good photographer. Then you can immortalize the 1/64th of a second in which you don't look like a total klunk and persuade everybody that this was normal for the day.

 

And that's all for today's lesson. Upcoming lesson include "How to feed your elephant," "How to bathe your elephant," "How to swim with elephants," and "How (and why) to smell elephant poop."

Brush with the law

Justin and I went for lunch today to Aslan Kebab, a great German/Turkish kebab restaurant about a five minute bike ride away. While we were there, an intrepid Fukuoka policeman came by and decided that he did not like the location where we'd parked our bikes. Okay, we can move them, no problem. But then he noticed while we moved the bike that my bike has a built in lock - and it's broken.

Yes, I said, sadly (in English because attempted robbery must be in book 2 of our Genki Japanese course.) Someone broke the lock on my bike at our apartment one night. We bought the chain lock to replace it.

Mm hmm, says the policeman, tapping the city registration number on the bike. And this is your bike?

Yes, it's my bike.

May I have your name, please?

Which is when I realize that the policeman thinks I stole my bike. 

There is a Chris Rock routine in which he describes being pulled  over by a policeman who is so convinced Rock stole the car he's driving that Chris Rock starts to believe it himself - "Maybe I did... Oh, Lawd, I done stole a car!" That was me, trying desperately to remember whether the bike was registered in my name or Justin's, and eventually becoming so disoriented that I might have been convinced I stole the bike after all. And in the meantime helpful the restaurant owner and random Japanese people keep popping out of the restaurant offering to help translate to make sure that I don't end up in the Japanese equivalent of Gitmo.Unless, of course, I had it coming.

Fortunately, the bike database people call back with the information that yes, the bike is registered to someone with a foreign name (not that he ever saw an ID from me to prove it was MY name) and I'm at liberty to go. But it does occur to me that this would be a great prank to pull on somebody: break their bike lock so they go around constantly under suspicion of bike theft.

Indiana Nana and the Temple of Heatstroke

As a history teacher, I really should have known better than to base any expectations of visiting Southeast Asian temples on the Indiana Jones movies. For starters, I'm enough of a nerd to know that no Indiana Jones movies were set in Cambodia and Thailand, nor were they filmed there. And even if they had been, Hollywood is infamous for getting just about nothing right.

Justin's been to the Louvre, and I have not, and he says that the first thing that everyone always thinks when they see the Mona Lisa is that they can't believe how small it is. I don't think any of these people consciously sat around expecting the Mona Lisa to be a particular size; it's just that somewhere, unconsciously, we built an expectation of it. Similarly, I didn't take deliberate notes on movies to decide what I thought exploring around Thailand and Cambodia would be like, but I do think I formed some subliminal expectations in which movies played a role. So here are some of my expectations which were or were not validated by our travels.


1) Expectation: Creepy, dark, and underground. INVALID.

You know that scene, when the hero or heroine picks up a torch and heads into the dark building. He or she descends some stairs into mysterious blackness, waving a torch back and forth to illuminate carvings on walls, or holding it high to read ancient inscriptions. Part of what makes these places so creepy and atmospheric is the dark jungle, right?

Except not. Note how this gate in a Cambodian temple opens up into.... a SINISTER SUNLIT COURTYARD.

Must be a trap.

When you stop to think about it, the whole pitch-black-interior thing is very 20th century. Before electricity, you lit a room with daylight. Period. And if you didn't, and you used candles or torches instead, then you still needed some kind of ventilation to the outside unless you wanted to smother all of your worshippers - at least, the ones who aren't already dead because the weight of the temple caused it to collapse into your tunnels (see Cambodian Temple Architecture for Dummies for review on this topic). There is a reason that the dug-out underground facilities tend to be for dead people.

Wat U Mong is a forest wat (temple) in Chiang Mai, and it's famous for the fact that it's basically the only one with underground tunnels. Lo and behold, it is dark inside. Not as dark as it looks in pictures (the human eye is really amazing) but dark.

And yet a totally uncreepy entrance.

Naturally lit tunnels

Wat Umong Buddha lit with electric lights, skylight, and camera flash. In the 1400s they could only afford to do this on special occasions.

2) Expectation: A walk in the park. INVALID.

I expected that there would be walking. I can do that. And I knew I'd have to go up a bit. But I did not ever wrap my head around the sheer physical toll of schlepping up multiple sets of multi-story staircases which only occasionally had the benefit of a handrail. Sometimes the steps were so narrow that your feet didn't even fit going forwards and you had to climb sideways, like a crab.

Stairs. Why did it have to be stairs?

Did I mention it was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit?

I hate stairs, Jock! I HATE 'EM!

You can see Cambodia much more cheaply than we did - without the hired guide and van - but I wouldn't recommend it. If we hadn't had air conditioning to pop back into at the end of each temple, and the giant cooler full of water and ice packs, I don't know what we would have done. Certainly we would have had to visit fewer spots - which is what we did in Thailand, when we simply decided to pick a few representative temples and call it a trip.

Survival tactics

 3) There will be monkeys, and they will probably be evil. VALID.

Don't eat the dates!

4) Your best friend is your hat. VALID.

FABULOUS.

The sun in the tropics is brutal, especially with our skin tones. We both wear SPF 50 and top up every few hours and still get a touch of burn. I'm so pale that Justin has to use camera filters to photograph me in direct sunlight.

It's a defense against predators.

We bought our hats in the market in Cambodia. This may be a good time to point out that Justin is a great guy but the world's worst haggler. This is, I swear to you, a verbatim conversation about buying Justin's hat.

Vendor: You want a hat? This one is $8.
(Justin reaches for wallet)
Me: That's a bit much.
Vendor: $7?
Justin: No, $8 is fine.

Justin is not allowed to speak in marketplaces anymore.

My hat, which also started out at $8, eventually cost me $3. It tragically died due to smashing in my suitcase.

Also I fought a lion for it.

Fortunately, these hats are pretty generic, so I was able to replace it in Thailand with 99% the same hat, just without the beads around the brim. I've saved the beads in tribute to a great friend.

NO HAT LEFT BEHIND.

5) Your greatest enemy is not sun, or stairs, or sword. It is stomach. VALID.


A behind-the-scenes story tells that in Raiders of the Lost Ark, filmmakers had to convert a complex choreographed whip-and-sword duel between Indy and a local into the iconic scene where Indy just shoots the guy because Harrison Ford had diarrhea and couldn't film a longer sequence. Now that, we can relate to. And I don't think you need any more details than that.

Wednesday Weirdness: Scooting Around Thailand

The picture of manhood is a dude in a pink helmet on a Hello Kitty scooter.

Yeah, baby.

On the one hand, maybe the rental agency was having us on. On the other hand, maybe this kind of thing just doesn't seem strange in these parts.

Luckily, having lived for two years in Japan, I'm used to both emasculation and driving on the left. (Though I'm still getting the hang of sitting on the right side of the car when I drive . . .)

On the whole, that little scooter was one of the best deals I've ever landed. It cost about $8.50 per day to rent it, plus another $6 or so to keep it filled up for the week. For each day, that works out to about 2-3 mid-range "taxi" rides.

In Chiang Mai, taxis (and sometimes police cars) look like this.

Add in the freedom of going wherever the heck we wanted at the drop of a hat, and you have a bargain at twice the price. Though I must say Thai traffic patterns leave something to be desired: it definitely got a little hairy from time to time, especially when there were a lot of people on the road. And I don't imagine it was good for me to be sucking down all those exhaust fumes for the better part of a week.

But despite all these drawbacks, by the end of the trip we'd become quite attached to our little bike. I've always threatened to buy a motorbike here in Japan . . .

Angkor Day 3: Ta Nei, Ta Keo, and Chau Say Tevoda

This is part of a series of posts on our March 2012 trip to Cambodia. You can see some previous posts here, here, here, and here.


Our third day at Angkor was also our most ambitious: after visiting three temples in the morning, we hit another three temples in the afternoon. As with each of our Angkor excursions, our agenda was determined by geography rather than chronology, so the day included examples from a variety of time periods in a variety of architectural styles.


Ta Nei


Ta Nei is a 12th-century temple built during the reign of Jayavarman VII. Ta Nei is among the least-visited sites in the Angkor complex: a small ruin tucked away deep in the forest, tricky to get to and extremely difficult to find. These are, of course, the temple's main attractions.

Yet another enormous termite mound blocking a gallery. Our guide compared termites to ancient Angkor: whenever  the king dies, they pick up and build a whole new city somewhere else nearby. Hence the profusion of termite mounds, old temples, and termite mounds within old temples.

In case you couldn't tell, I can't get enough of these ruined towers!

Action sequence in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

. . . go!

This lintel used to depict Buddha and his devotees. (Remember, Jayavarman VII was the Buddhist king who built the Bayon, with all the Brahma-Buddha-Jayavarman faces.) But Buddha's head was chopped off sometime after Jayavarman's death, when there was a big Hindu backlash against Buddhist imagery.

Aside from the many faces of Brahma-Buddha-Jayavarman VII, this is one of the only remaining Buddha carvings at Angkor. That's probably because it's so unusual: a somewhat non-canonical depiction of Buddha's escape from his controlling father's palace, during which Buddha steals silently away by galloping on the upraised hands of angels.

Ta Keo


Despite the similarity in their names, Ta Keo is pretty much the opposite of Ta Nei: much older, much larger, much more open, and in much better shape. Probably built sometime around 1000 AD, Ta Keo is a classic temple mountain - likely the first, in fact, to be built mostly of sandstone.

 Ta Keo also has some of the steepest steps.

Overall, the charms of Ta Keo are more about architecture than interior decoration. In other words, the view is stunning from both the bottom and the top, but a lot of the carvings are in pretty poor shape.

Forest, as far as the eye can see.

Chau Say Tevoda


Chau Say Tevoda was built in the mid-12th century, during the reign of Suryavarman II, the guy who built Angkor Wat itself. Like Angkor Wat, it exhibits a kind of classical simplicity, especially when compared to the more chaotic temples of Jayavarman VII.

Chau Say Tevoda only reopened to the public in 2009, after a lengthy restoration project led by the Chinese. This is awesome for two reasons: it still hasn't made it back into the rotation for most of the big tour groups, and the restored carvings are in fantastic shape.

All together now: Vishnu on Garuda.

Stay tuned for a final installment of temple touring, including the grandaddy of them all - the sprawling temple of Angkor Wat.