Mexico City, Taxco, Cuernavaca, Pátzcuaro, and Morelia

Mexico was good times. It's a good thing I decided to spend a full week in Mexico city (at it turned out 6 full days and two halves), as I really needed all that time to see all of the things I wanted to (even after having covered the pyramids on an earlier trip). The city really is enormous, and there are plenty of things worth visiting. There's plenty of stuff to see related to the pre-Columbian history, at least a dozen different art museums of note, and much other art en-situ (because murals are so big in Mexican art), and tons of great architecture and charming colonial buildings with noticeable tilts created over centuries as they sink into the swampy soil. I think the best architecture of all was in some of the high-walled, pimped-out houses I saw in San Angel, which I'm sure I'd never be able to afford.

However, as is usually the case, the markets were probably the most interesting thing for me. My very first day I went to the sprawling Merced Market, the biggest in the city. Got myself a bowl of caldo de gallina (laying hen? soup) and a quesadilla with cheese and squash blossoms. I think it was the squash blossoms that left my shitting my guts out for the next three mornings. It's just as well, I guess, as it was going to happen sooner or later, so might as well get it out of the way immediately. I should have known I was in trouble when I realized that she wasn't putting a layer of plastic on top of the reusable plates as is common, and saw here just wiping them off with a damp rag between customers.

While the Merced was the monster, the Mercado San Juan was definitely my favorite. This is a higher-end market where many of the city's top restaurants procure goods. And while is had lots of high-end product like fancy olive oils and very expensive exotic mushrooms like morels and chanterelles, it was still awfully grungy. You'd see four foot high pallets of dead rabbits being carted around, heads, fur, and all, and then see them one-by-one thrown up on a hook to hang while the butcher cleans them and breaks them down. There was a whole deer handing upside down, neck and head sprawled out on the dirty floor because it was too tall. There were also plenty of chaupulines (crickets), huge ants that I actually at first thought were dried bees or wasps because they were so big, and eggs, and maguey worms, with some pre-prepared tapenades for tostadas, if that's your thing:

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One interesting thing that I hadn't seen before is that the huge piles of dead and cleaned animals had had their edible organs left in place. Many of the pigs, rabbits, and goats would have their liver, kidneys, and another yummy bit or two just dangling out of them while laying in a pile.

The runner-up in interesting markets in the city was the Xochimilco market. Seemed pretty standard, but it had a few things I hadn't seen before: cows' pancreas and lungs, as well as fresh shark, often dangling from the hook in a fishmongers stall, and huge, 2x4 foot pieces of deep fried chicharron. I also got some good lamb barbacoa tacos and an amazing elote tamale while there. 2nd runner up was Mercado Jamaica, which is the city's main distribution point for flowers. With the day of the dead that week, is was interesting to see huge truckloads full of carnations emptying out in the parking lot.

Taxco was very charming and beautiful. And old silver mining town, it’s incredibly hilly and has lots of atmospheric back alleys to explore. It's definitely a busy place, though, with swarms of people in the old town and tons of the small combi buses and old white Volkswagen beetle taxis with front passenger side seat ripped out constantly zipping all over town.

There's a huge cave nearby that I visited on the afternoon while there. I think it tops the one from Slovenia as the most impressive I've seen, and makes a nice two-hour stroll. You have to go on a guided tour, during which the guide is constantly pointing out things that the different rock formations look like. He kind of damaged his credibility up front when he pointed out a 15 foot tall stalagmite and described it as an "asparagus". I wonder if there weren't kids on the tour if he would have called it like it is and stated the obvious, that it was a giant, erect penis.

Cuernavaca was also interesting, although the city itself doesn't have the charm of Taxco, I really enjoyed myself there. While walking home from dinner, I passed by a bar that looked pretty lively, so I decided to stop in. Within 20 minutes I was chatting it up with the locals. After another hour the karaoke machine came out. And thus it went.

I similarly had some good fortune making friends in Pátzcuaro. I met a couple guys in a bar that invited me to join them and their crew of about 15 or so people (14 dudes and one woman, an arrangement of architects, physicians, international businessmen, and other fancy-pants types from Guadalajara in town for the festivities that weekend) to watch the concert in the main square. Afterwards there were many mezcals.

The other highlight of Pátzcuaro was the noche de los muertos activities. Photos here: XXXXXX

The honor role of food items eaten on this trip include:

-Absolutely anything I put in my mouth in the ostionería I found in Mercado Medellín

-mojarra al mojo de ajo (deep fried fish with garlic sauce)

-aguachiles (a kind of very spice, soupy ceviche)

-cocteles de mariscos (seafood cocktails)

-pulpo diabla (deviled octopus)

-the mind-numingly good black mole with chicken I picked up to go from a dumpy little fonda and ate in

the bus station on the way to Taxco

-tripe tacos

-the bright orange, grilled marinated chicken in Tsintsuntsan

-the birria de borrego (mutton stew) and tortas (sandwiches) in the market in Pátzcuaro

-corundas (a Miometchoacana regional variation on a tamale cooked in a banana leaf) from the main square in Pátzcuaro

-atole (another Michoacan thing, a soupy, sweet, corn-based drink)

-chiles en nogada (something I actually got in a real restaurant)

-tamal de elote (sweetened corn tamale) from the Mercado Xochimilco

-tostadas in Mercado Coyoacan

-steamed borrego (mutton) barbacoa at the market in Taxco, as well as the roasted version I got in Mercado Xochimilco

Hands-down winner, though, was the deep fried fish from the Ostionería la Morenita in Mercado Medellín in Mexico city. So much so that I went there two days in a row at the end of my trip, and stuffed myself silly both times. I don't know why we can't get Mexican seafood like this in Chicago. Well, Rick Bayless does almost equally good seafood at Xoco, but I don't know why are mom-and-pops lag so far behind what is available in Mexico. I think on a future trip I'm going to need to find the owner of one of these places and join them as a business partner to open up a Chicago location. I think we'd be printing money. 

Champagne, Laon, Lille, Arras, Amiens, Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Haarlem, Delft, the Hague, and Alkmaar

OK, so I had no time to work on blog entries this trip, so we’re going to have to settle for one massive round-up at the end which I wrote on the flight home. I guess being so busy is the sign of a good trip.

Champagne was great. Reims is definitely a smaller town and the whole area is a lot more rural than I expected. Did a couple interesting tours, saw the cathedral, and had some good food. On one night I hit a Michelin-starred outfit were I got to select a cheese course from the most pimped-out cheese cart I’ve ever seen in my life. Other than that, I was trying to hit the French classics pretty heavy before I got into Flanders were I expected the food to be very different, so I was loading up on escargots, steak tartare, rilletes, and crepes. The most surprising thing was how damn hot it was—it was in the mid-nineties all three days I was there, and up to 99 degrees one day. Made for some pretty steamy sightseeing.

While I Champagne I also took a day trip to Laon, this very charming medieval town about 40 minutes away by train. Apparently I was getting somewhat off the beaten path in this case, as I got involved in a conversation with a local on the train on the way there, and whose primary topic was “Why are you coming to Laon?”.

After that it was on to Lille, a charming Flemish city in northeastern France. It was here that I started getting introduced to Flemish cuisine and the absolutely amazing beer (mostly Belgian) which comes from the area (more on that later). I really enjoyed Lille, despite a calamity with my laundry that the hotel created that pissed me off so much I decided to unleash my inner ugly American and let fly a torrent of yelling at the hotel staff in front of other guests because their failure to follow the very basic, yet extremely important, instructions on had given them on when I absolutely had to have all my clothing back which was likely going to result in missing my train connection the next day.

While there I also took a day trip to Arras and Amiens, the two really good-looking little towns in the area. Arras, like Lille, is in the historic part of Flanders, and it really shows. All the architecture really looks more Belgian or Dutch than French, although Arras wasn’t laced with canals like Dutch and northern Belgian cities are.

After Lille it was on to Bruges. It’s surprising how off the radar Bruges is for most Americans given the crushing amount of tourists there. The old town has Venice-like levels of tourists just completely inundating the city. They’re there for a good reason, though, as the city is really fantastic. People are friendly, too. I was fortunate enough to meet up with a young local couple that I ended up going out with for drinks on my last night there.

Overall, all the cities in Belgium were really impressive. In retrospect it is surprising how underappreciated they are by most North American tourists. While I only stayed in Bruges and Brussels, I day-tripped into Ghent and Antwerp, and both of those were great, too. The Belgian cities have it all—lots of history and beautiful historic buildings, great café culture with tons of charming places lining all the canals, good-looking people, fantastic beer, good food in large portions, and a clean and orderly society. Antwerp was maybe not so heavy on the canals and ancient building like Ghent was, but it more than made up for it with all the attractive pedestrian streets, the fantastic shopping, and the incredibly stylish people walking around. Antwerp also had what was maybe the most impressive building I saw on the whole trip, the central train station. In lots of ways Belgium (but also the Netherlands) reminded me of Austria in how they have a great blend of the southern European joie de vivre while also at the same time having a Germanic orderliness and productivity that makes for what appears to be a really appealing place to live.

Brussels was also a good time. It probably won the award for best food of any place I went on the trip. Lots of great seafood places. Mussels, mussels, mussels, everywhere, although there seemed to also be a lot of skate wing and the Belgian tomato-based soupe de poisson was also very common. I had to look far and wide for another typical dish, the eel in the green sauce—tons of places have it but it was often sold out as eel is getting hard to come by nowadays and they never get very much—but this one actually didn’t impress me that much when I had it. Of course, there’s all the beer and the chocolates. I think there’s a chocolate shop on just about every block in Brussels. Godiva is probably the most conspicuous representative, although there a plenty of other less internationally well-known outfits. I was buying my breakfast of champions from Neuhaus, myself. And frys, frys, frys, frys, frys, frys, frys, frys. I can’t understand why there are hardly any fat people in Belgium. They must eat a pound of frys every single day. Eaten with mayonnaise, no less. Deep-fried potatoes dressed with emulsified fat ain’t exactly health food. Frys with mussels, frys with steak tartare (which they call, in French, “American steak”, for some reason), frys with regular steak, frys with burgers, frys with Belgian  cheese, frys with salad, Frys with just a beer, whatever. I must say, though, the frys are pretty damn good. And health issues aside, the mayonnaise they have here is indeed a vastly superior condiment to ketchup.

A couple additional notable food items are the carbonnade flamade, the Flemish beef stew, and also the Flemish-style braised rabbit stew with prunes. Both turned my crank in a pretty major way, and I’m actually going to try to make them at home later. The shrimp croquettes didn’t dial me up in the same way. Most interestingly, I had gotten a tip from a friend-of-a-friend, a Belgian living in the US, that I absolutely had to try a Bicky Burger. This is a burger available in from little fry stands and food carts around the country. I did a little research, and it apparently consists of a deep-fried (yes, deep-fried) patty made of a combination of beef, pork, and horse meat (yes, horse) heavily slathered with a couple secret sauces, topped with fried onions, and eaten in a sesame bun. One of the two sauces was somewhat mayonnaise-like, and the other somewhat resembled a barbeque sauce. I personally found this recommendation to be a bit dubious, but against my better judgement one day I gave it a shot, and I must say, it wasn’t too bad. I may even go so far as to say I kind of liked it, aside from all the self-loathing eating such a culinary monstrosity induced after I was done.

Most surprising to me was the beer. I’ve never liked beer. Just never had the taste for it. I can drink Belgian Trappist all damn day, though. Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. While many of the Belgian beers have been the first that I’ve ever truly enjoyed, I can peter out on them after a couple. There so rich and filling, after a couple I just can’t get anything else in my stomach. Drinking one of the double or triple-fermented ales they make sometimes made me feel like I was drinking a donut. A very tasty, alcoholic donut.

After Belgium it was on to Amsterdam. The Netherlands was all it was cracked up to be. Incredible art in some off the greatest museums in the world, picturesque canals, fit, good-looking, friendly, and exceptionally tall people that speak perfect English riding bicycles everywhere, beautiful countryside full of flowers and cows, interesting architecture, and yes, marijuana shops and red-light districts full of prostitutes in windows. While there I was able to make day trips to Haarlem, Delft, The Hague, and Alkmaar. Every one was quite attractive and charming. The Dutch clearly have their shit together.

If there was any one critique of the Netherlands, it would have to be the local food. This was the first place I’d ever visited where I flat-out gave up on the local cuisine and started eating international food. There is definitely some great stuff: the cheese and dark bread is great, the pickled herring is, well, at least satisfying, and the Dutch pancakes are great. My favorite was the bacon and apple one I had on the first day. In addition, there’s plenty of Belgian-style fries, mussels, and cured salmon. Also, there’s lots of Indonesian food.  We can essentially say it’s Dutch-ish, since it’s everywhere due to the cultural and historical association with the former colony, and because you really can’t get it in most other countries. I ended up going to two different places for what they call the rice table, essentially a gust-busting delivery of about 10-20 different items you can sample.

After that the Indonesian food, though, things fall off the map pretty quickly. So it didn’t take too long for me to throw in the towel on the local stuff and start seeking out international cuisine. One day I went to Chinatown for lunch, one night I tried a Portuguese restaurant, and another day I actually went to an Afghani place. While the Chinese didn’t impress, the Portuguese and Afghani place were great. And of course, there are Italian and middle-eastern restaurants absolutely everywhere. So you can definitely get really good food, you just have to not bother trying to find stuff that is uniquely Dutch. I guess no place is perfect.

While the local food didn’t impress, the one thing that definitely did was the shopping (and not just for the magic mushroom or the ladies in the windows). The Dutch definitely have style, and I found myself being repeatedly sucked into shops that had interesting window displays. It seemed like leather goods were particularly popular there. I actually ended up upgrading my simple canvas messenger back I often carry on vacation for a more pimped-out brown leather version.

Overall, this ended up being a great trip. Next time I just have to make sure to do my own laundry.

Hiroshima and Fukuoka

After Kyoto it was on to Hiroshima. I again didn’t have any time to write. This time, I clocked the train at running up to184 mph in between stations. That may not be entirely accurate, though, since the app on my cell phone was having a problem maintaining a signal, which interfered with its operation. While running at top speed, I really didn’t seem to have a cell signal, either. It seemed like that train was running so damn fast that my cell phone couldn’t keep up a stable signal.

While here, I of course hit the historical monuments and museum to the atomic bomb dropping. I then took a day trip outside the city to Miyajima island in Hiroshima bay. This was a pretty neat place as it had lots of interesting shrines and temples, the most notable of which is the floating Torii they have out in the bay (which I think became the picture of the trip). It also had a nice hike up at the top of the mountain.

The very best thing about Hiroshima, though, was the okomiyake. At first I almost didn’t get this for lunch, since I had just had one in Nara a few days earlier. I’m certainly glad I changed my mind. This one was less omelety, with less of an egg batter. The other notable difference is that it included fried noodles right in it, and went a lot heavier on the vegetables (cabbage and sprouts). In essence, it was a bunch of stir-fried veg and noodles, which a batter-based crepe top and an egg-based crepe bottom. This guy only applied a single sauce, and then you could apply your own mayonnaise and bonito flakes. While the okonomiyake in Nara was good, this one blew it away. It cost $7, was a massive pile of food, and was likely the single best thing I had eaten the whole trip.

One of my suspicions was also confirmed in Hiroshima. I went to an izakaya for dinner the first night, and towards the end of the night got into conversations which the two chefs. We eventually got around to talking about food, and they started asking what I liked and didn’t. As part of this, I realized they had all kinds of things in stock that didn’t appear on the English menu. This is something I had expected for a long time, that the English menu (if they have one) is just standard items that they always have in stock, and that the specials and possibly some of the more interesting stuff they presume a gaijin won’t ever be interested in doesn’t even make it into the menu. I can’t say I blame them for this. It appears that outside of Tokyo and Kyoto, even that places that are recommended in Lonely Planted often will only get 1-3 foreigners a night, so it’s probably not even worth investing the time to have to translate and update the foreign menu every time it changes.

I also have figured out why so often I have such a hard time finding specific places. Many of the restaurants from my guidebook, and most all the places I get sent to on personal recommendation, have neither English signage nor have the name of the place spelled in romaji (that’s Japanese written with that Latin alphabet). More often than not, it’s just all Kanji, Katakana, and Hirigana chicken-scratches. (Yes, the Japanese have four different writing systems including romaji. I’m amazed kinds here are able to read before they get into high school.) Usually Google Maps will get me to wherever I’m going when I travel. It must be said, though, that Google Maps definitely does not function as well in Japan as it does in all the other foreign countries I’ve been to in the last four years. It can usually get me within a block of the place, but after that, if there no English or romaji signage, I’m left going sign by sign and comparing chicken-scratches until I find what I’m looking for. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, maybe not so much. Do these two sets of characters look that same to you?

 

Me neither. I can see the resemblance, but I certainly wouldn't recognize these as being the same. I asked the guys in the izakaya about this, and they said it was because they are in different fonts. Uh-huh.

The last night in Hiroshima was probably the best, though. I went to a yakitori place and ended up meeting a local and his lady-friend visiting from Vietnam. Afterwards, they brought me to one of these small, hidden bars on the 4^th floor of an office building nearby where the proprietor made me some local “Hiroshima food”, which was essentially a sea-urchin and spinach bruschetta. With lots of sake. Good times.

I wrapped the trip up in Fukuoka. There’s not as much to see here in terms of big-ticket cultural sights, but it’s a large and very cosmopolitan city with great food, shopping, and good-looking women (or so I read). There’s some credibility there regarding the shopping, as I did pick myself up a nice new pair of shoes, which is something I’ve been looking for for quite some time now. The local specialty of tonkotsu ramen was pretty good, too, although neither of the two versions I had topped the ramen with pork belly I got in Tokyo.

I was only there a single evening, but it was certainly an eventful one. I went to a yakitori place on my last night, and as usual made some new Japanese friends and drank a little too much. After that, I checked out a local salsa club that wasn’t too far from my hotel. Not a bad scene, although it was pretty small, despite the fact that it was a Saturday night. Some of the dancers were pretty good, although the music was a little lame, and during the 5 songs they played while I was there they never played anything other than salsa.

Not feeling particularly motived to dance, I split. I did meet an American and an Italian expat on the way out. We struck up a conversation, and they took me out to a couple gaijin clubs in the area, which was kind of interesting. Both places were dives, and had your standard mix of meat-heads and drunk hos, just with a very international flavor. (I actually wasn’t aware Sweden had meat-heads.) Not being too particularly inspired by this place, either, I decided to pack it in and head back to the hotel at around 2:00 so I could get at least a little sleep, and maybe one last bowl of ramen, before my long flight they next day.

Overall, I have to say Japan has been one of the very best trips I’ve taken. It doesn’t have as much in the way of important historical sights or art as places like Italy, Spain, France, or England, and much of what is historical, such as the temples or shrines, are somewhat obtuse to me. However, this place is, bar none, the absolute greatest place in the world to go out and eat, drink, and be merry. I’ve never been to any place where the people are so friendly, and it’s what really makes the country special.

Kyoto, Nara, Ise, and the Redemption of Soba

I spent a whopping 8 nights and 7½  days in Kyoto, as it’s the cultural center of Japan. Similar to Tokyo, I was also planning on taking several days trips to take advantage of my unlimited-use rail pass and the incredible train system they have here.

Speaking of which, those Shinkansen bullet trains they have really do get you from point A to B in a big damn hurry. On my first Shinkensen leg from Tokyo to Nagoya en route to Takayama I actually didn’t seem like were going that fast. I found and installed a speedometer app on my cell phone, though, and found out that we were in fact cruising around at a top speed of 167 mph, which we were able to get to just a couple of minutes out of each station. I guess that shows you what I know.

At first I was very worried that Kyoto wouldn’t suit me real well. My first night there, I got some ramen that was tasty but definitely didn’t match the stuff I got in Tokyo (or even the two bowls I’ve gotten in Chicago, for that matter). Worse yet, I realized it was a chain restaurant (bleh!)! I got the sinking feeling that Kyoto was going to suffer badly from what I call the “Venitian disease”. This is what can afflict a city that is relatively small and gets so many tourists relative to its size that its local native charm is completely overwhelmed and driven so far underground that going there becomes more like a trip to Epcot Center than like a visit to a real, functioning community. Those of you that understand real regional Italian food and have been to Venice and seen all the soul-crushing picture menus printed in 6 languages with bullshit “Italian food” like spaghetti and meatballs, fettucine alfredo, and the cafeteria-style and location-inappropriate “ragu Bolognese” that is criminally served with spaghetti instead of tagliatelle will know what I’m talking about. In addition, the locals can become so jaded and callous to the hordes of tourists that as a foreigner it will be very difficult to have an interaction with locals that isn’t commercially motivated. Don’t get me wrong, the good food and authentic culture is there, it’s just that you have to get way off the beaten path and look really, really hard to find it. Throwing this on top of the massive language barrier that I have in Japan, which would add an additional level of complexity to finding the good stuff, I was beginning to worry.

Everything sorted out OK, though. The 2^nd night, with a little good advice, I was able to locate a very traditional izakaya near downtown and away from any tourist centers that turned out to be great. It was a typical dive with very good food, packed with locals. I didn’t end up getting in a conversation with any true Kyotoans, but I did end up eating and drinking with a Japanese businessman there for work from Tokyo. Being from Fukuoka originally, he was also able to give me advice on several good places to hit on my night there. The food at this izakaya was also very good. The big standout was the pork belly which was braised (apparently) with a mixture of soy sauce, mirin, sake, and ginger. It’s basically the same thing as Chinese red-cooked chicken. This may be a bit Kyoto thing, as I saw it on several menus around town.

I similarly had some great luck on night #3. This night I went to Ponto Cho, a street I was told has lots of traditional izakaya but also has a large quantity of other tourists. I found a place with no non-Japanese signage that was filled with what appeared to be locals and gave it a shot. As was common, initial reception was a little cool, but within about 40 minutes I was again swapping drinks and food with the guys sitting next to me. I ended up closing out the place with a couple young local guys, at which point they invited me to join them at a kyabakura. Kyabakura are a somewhat peculiar feature to Japanese culture. Known as “hostess clubs” in English, these are essentially bars where Japanese men go and pay pretty young women for very attentive conversation. You can see these in the big nightlife areas of any major city you go. Note: these are NOT strip clubs, and they are definitely not brothels. All the kyabajo (as they are called) are fully-dressed, and stay that way.

The concept of paying a 22 year-old girl to have a conversation with me seemed a little strange (normally, you’d have to pay ME to have a conversation with a typical 22 year-old), but I figured it would be an interesting cultural experience. It definitely exceeded my expectations. A couple of the girls actually spoke fair English and had sufficient life experience to hold a decent conversation for at least 15 minutes, at which point they would rotate out the girls. Nevertheless, my curiosity was satisfied pretty quickly, at which point I excused myself and one of my new buddies, gracious as always, insisted on covering my tab for me.

One great day trip I took while in Kyoto was in Nara, a former capital of Imperial Japan. Most of the sights there were pretty ho-hum, but the 15 meter-tall bronze Buddha statue housed in a gigantic old wooden temple building was pretty fantastic. What made the experience extra interesting was the active religious ceremony that was going on while I was there. I have no idea what it was, but there were hundreds of monks chanting and banging on drums, which made it pretty atmospheric even despite the hordes of Japanese tourists and school kids and other gaijin there checking out the statue.

The park that holds all the historic buildings in Nara is also populated with a herd of tame deer. It was mildly amusing to watch them descend on the young kids unfortunate enough to be holding food. The big downside, though, is that they were pooping all over the place. To my horror, I realized I was likely going to have to take my shoes off, in typical Japanese style, when I entered the shrine with the Buddha. Because things are so clean here this doesn’t bother me everywhere else, but I realize that if I do that here, I will almost certainly get some deer poop on my socks when walking around inside, as surely someone will have transferred at least a bit of the deer poop inside the building some way or another. I’ll then get deer poop in my shoes when I put them back on, which will then get transferred to all my other clean socks every time I put my shoes on for the rest of the trip. Having deer poop on my socks will inevitably lead to it being somehow transferred to my other clothing (say when I put on or take off my jeans), and even worse, getting it on myself, from which I transfer it to all my clothes as well as the other belongings. In essence, taking my shoes off in such close proximity to all the deer will surely result in absolutely everything I brought with me on the trip becoming enpoopified. As my mind is racing through the sequence of events that will result in me wallowing in deer poop the rest of my trip, I’m also deciding if I even want to go into the building at all. Maybe I could just check out the statue from the outside? I’m sure you can understand my relief when I found out upon reaching the building that you do not have to take off your shoes. Total enpoopification averted.

Aside from the Buddha and the deer excrement, the other notable thing about Nara was the okonomiyake lunch I got on the way out of town. Okonomiyake is often described as a big savory pancake (although in my opinion it’s more of an omelette) that contains all kinds of seafood, veggies, and meats, and is cooked up on a griddle in the table right in front of you, slathered with two different kinds of sauces, and drizzled with mayonaise. I opted for the “special” option, which included octopus, squid, shrimp, pork belly, and beef. You then dress it up as you like with shredded dried seaweed and katsuobushi flakes (that’s the dried, fermented, skipjack tuna flakes that are so common in Japanese cuisine). Yummy. Upon eating this, I realized that okonomiyake is basically the same thing at takoyaki, which is a little fried dumpling about the size of a golf ball with a piece of octopus in the middle. It seemed like the batter and the sauces were all the same, and that you even dress it up the same way. (I was familiar with takoyaki as we showed up with a box of takoyaki as our offering when we went to the tranny bar in Tokyo).

I was also able to check out Osaka one night while in Kyoto. It’s just 30 miles away, so it was easy to pop in on the train for dinner. Fortunately, there’s a good neighborhood filled with izakaya right by the train station. I hit a yakitori place and made a bunch of new friends, although this was more of a mixed international crowd with and Australian guy there for work, an English couple, and a couple locals.

I also took a side trip to Ise one day. This is the location of the most important Shinto Shrine in Japan, so I thought it may be a good thing to check out. While culturally important, there’s actually very little to see there. However, the good part is that the 5 hours I had to spend on the train allowed me to finally get caught up on my blog. I’ve been badly behind on writing on this trip for a couple reasons. First the trains get you to wherever you’re going so damn fast that the time on those is usually fully-spent making detailed plans for my next stop and catching up a bit on critical emails from work, and I don’t have any leftover time to blog. Second, I just don’t ever have that much down time. Usually during vacation, I’ll have some nights on a trip where I finish dinner early and don’t have something social to do that sounds particularly interesting, and as a result have time to get caught up on my blog. That’s hardly ever the case here. There’s always so much to eat and so many people to talk to, that I simply haven’t had the free time on this trip that I usually do.

Other tasty treats worth mentioning I had will in Kyoto include the Japanese fried chicken and marinated Saba fish I had on Kyabakura night. Also I got some grilled beef tongue I picked up at a tempura place one afternoon. I do love me some tongue. The tempura at this place didn’t impress me—I thought it was too greasy—but the beef tongue, served in little slices individually grilled on a big pile of shredded cabbage with some of what I believe was a slightly spicy mayonnaise was pretty awesome.

Soba has also redeemed itself in a major way. Every time I had eaten it so far, it was just plain noodles which you dip into sauce. It’s good, but nothing special. However, I finally got around to having a hot preparation, and it was awesome. This was soba noodles with in a hot, presumably dashi-based broth, with a couple pieces of the sweet-pickled oily fish which is so common here, a squid cake, and fixings. It seemed easy enough to make, I may actually try it myself some time at home if I can find the right recipe and source the necessary ingredients.

Takayama and Kanazawa

Until this trip I really had no idea how mountainous and heavily forested Japan is. I read in my guidebook during planning that part of the reason that the cities are so big and dense is because 3/4 of the country has so many mountains and woods that the land is essentially unusable. I got a big glimpse of this when heading to Matsumoto. Not even 40 minutes outside of Tokyo on the train, and we were already in mountainous country. It was the same thing on the way to Takayama. I had to switch trains in Nagoya, but after doing that and leaving Nagoya for Takayama, the mountains got big and woodsy really fast. It was an exceptionally beautiful part of the country. The icing on the cake is that up in the mountains the autumn colors had started to set in on the trees.

Takayama was a very appealing city. It's an attractive place and is much smaller and more livable that Tokyo. It's also got some historic sections that are very quaint, traditional, and filled up with sake breweries. Probably the very best thing about the town, though, was the beef. Takayama is in the Hida region, renowned for its Hida wagyu beef. It's basically the same stuff as the better-known (at least in the States) Kobe beef. It's nosebleed-expensive, but man is it ever good. I've had some domestic wagyu beef before, but it didn't compare to how tender and rich this stuff was. The preferred way to eat it was as yakiniku, which is a Japanese version of Korean-style barbecue. For anyone not familiar with Korean barbecue, they just drop a big pot of burning charcoal in a hole in the middle of your table, cover it with a grate, and then you DIY grill it right there, along with some vegetables and other accompaniments. Being Japanese instead of Korean, you accessorize it differently and there are different condiments (no kimchi, use soy sauce and things like wasabi and sansho pepper, etc.). My preference was with just a touch of soy and wasabi. The beef was so incredibly rich it really didn't need much of anything. It's a good thing that it's so rich, though, as I can’t afford very much. It seems that the going rate for the stuff seemed to be about 1400 yen per 100 grams for what I think was meat from what we would call the rib eye (that works out to roughly $60 per lb, BTW).

Along with the beef, the mountain apples were also really good. They’re almost too big to eat easily out of hand, many being the size of a softball, but they were very good. This is a puzzling thing I’ve noticed about Japan—most things are modestly proportioned, be it meal portions, people, bars, restaurants, or houses, but all the fruit here is absolutely enormous. The apples are gigantic, I’ve seen Asian pears (much more flavorful, tender, and juicy than the sad Asian pears we get in the states, BTW) the size of 16-inch softballs, grapes are typically larger than ping-pong balls, and the figs look like they weigh about a quarter lb each.

After Takayama I hit Kanazawa. I promptly went from eating beef at nearly every meal to living off of nothing by fish. Kanazawa is supposedly a great place for seafood, so I was taking every opportunity to indulge in the local specialties. I had set myself up with a hotel right across the street from the city market, which was a great move. There was one sushi place there that opens very early which I was able to hit for breakfast on both days. The first day I got a spectacular-looking sushi bowl, which was basically a big pile of sashimi on a bowl of rice. All the fish was incredibly fresh, and the presentation was certainly top-notch, including a couple head-on raw shrimp and a scallop shell, but while good it didn't wow me and certainly didn't rate up to my market sushi experience in Tokyo. Wondering if it was the preparation, I got the sushi plate the next day, where they fully prep everything as nigiri sushi. It was again a nice meal, but I similarly wasn't wowed. I actually thought the chef put way too much wasabi in each piece. Still for the measly $28 I spent on the plate, it was quite a satisfying breakfast.

The better sushi I had in Kanazawa was for lunch on the 2nd day, where I went to a more widely-lauded sushi place. This was definitely a step up from the breakfast crowd, and excellent sushi, but it nevertheless didn't quite meet expectations. Granted, my expectations were probably too high. I went in expecting to have my mind blown, and while it was a great sushi meal, and a fantastic value, the mind was still unblown at the end of the meal.

Having come here, I’ve got a much better appreciation for the artistry in making sushi. At both of these places in Kanazawa, the fish was extraordinarily fresh and of good quality, but the end product, while very good, wasn’t phenomenal, and didn’t have the little touches that really put the sushi at Tsukiji market in Tokyo over the top. One other thing I’d note is that I’m feeling pretty good about the domestic sushi we can get. If you go to a top-tier place in the States, I feel the sushi is every bit as good as most everything I’ve gotten here at restaurants that are highly-regarded by the locals. Granted, for comparable quality I think we need to pay 2-3 times as much, but if you’re a sushi freak, you can take solace in the notion that you really can get the good stuff in the States.

Kanazawa was also a great little city. People were, again, extraordinarily friendly, and I had a fantastic time at the izakaya I went to my first night there. I’m noticing a recurring pattern at all these little izakaya I go to. The initial reception I get can come off as being a little bit cool and that it appears that they may not be excited about the idea of having a lone, overgrown (by their standards) gaijin in the place. They usually warm up pretty quickly, though. My best guess is that once I’m able to demonstrate that I know how to use chopsticks properly, have a basic understanding of Japanese dining etiquette, and know at least a little Japanese, they know they’re not going to be stuck with someone who is going to ruin the vibe of the place.

The market in Kanazawa was amazing. I think I spent at least 6 hours there over my two days walking around and talking to vendors, sampling stuff, eating grilled scallops and sea snails right out of the shell, and taking photos. The most dramatic thing in the market was the freakishly large crabs and maitake mushrooms they had everywhere. Seeing this I’m thinking, “MMmmmmm, good soup”, so I figured I needed to go out of oden my 2nd night there. You can think of oden as basically a Japanese take on pot au feu where all kinds of proteins, starches, and veggies are boiled together and you’re served a plate of the pickings you want with some of the broth and a hit of outrageously spicy Chinese mustard. I went to the highly-recommended oden place in town, though, and no crabs or maitakes to be seen. The white-shelled sea snails (baigai) and other shellfish seemed to be the big thing, but no crabs. Granted, the fact that the 2 foot long crabs I saw in the market were being sold for between $60 to $100 each might have priced them out for such a simple dish like oden. Ditto for the maitakes, which you can think of as a Japanese equivalent to porcinis, and are priced accordingly. In retrospect, I think I needed to find a place that was serving nabemono (Japanese hot pot) rather than oden, but at the time I really didn’t understand the difference.


At the market I encountered quite a few things that were challenging even for my palette. One or two of these was even included in the omakase meal I got at the izakaya my first night there. There’s one set of vendors in particular that sells all these strange-looking vats of soupy seafood stuff at the market. I’m not sure what you’d call this stuff collectively, so I simply refer to it henceforth as the “freaky shit” (FS). A lot of it appears to be uncooked squid or cuttlefish products. The most common are these tiny little whole, uncooked baby squid which I’m guessing have just been marinated in soy sauce for a while. I think the salt in the soy draws out their own juices, so what you’re left with is this dark brown semi-gelatinous, mucousy soup of little baby squids. I had gotten a small plate of this at the izakaya the night before, and I must admit I was choking it down. Ryan no likey. I think I do prefer it to the other signature product at the FS table, though. It was difficult to understand the full explanation as the FS guy’s English was pretty lousy and we were mostly communicating with sign language, but my best understanding on this one is that it’s long, cut-up pieces of raw squid (they kind of resemble short, fat noodles) marinated in a reddish-pink sauce that I believe is all the guts, brains, and contents of the digestive tracks of the squid, presumably minus the ink sacks (otherwise it would be black). Again, Ryan no likely.

There were many other additional vats of gooey, soupy things at the FS table, but the lone other thing I could identify was some kind of raw squid product where the squid were marinated in their own ink. “Aha! This is for me”, I thought, as I love cooking with cuttlefish ink and I’m perfectly fine with raw squid, so long as it’s not swimming around in a soupy mass of its own entrails. They guy gave me a sample, and while I wasn’t choking it down like the baby squid marinated in its own bodily mucous, I didn’t exactly ask for seconds.

Tokyo, Nikko, Matsumoto, and Kamakura

Tokyo was fantastic. Much of the city is exactly as I expected: flashing lights everywhere, hordes of people every waking hour of the day, and a constant hum of activity. And the food is absolutely awesome. All of it. I had pretty high expectations coming in, and it’s easily met them, and then some. The food scene got off to a good start when I went to the Tsukiji fish market my first day in. I wasn’t planning on this, as I thought I’d need to rest up for a couple days after my extremely long flight. Tsukiji is a wholesale fish market, not a consumer market, so all the action happens when most normal people are sleeping. The main event at the market is the tuna auction that occurs every morning where they auction off all the 800 lb fish they caught the previous day for tens of thousands of dollars each. The rub here is that the auction starts at 5:30, they only allow 120 people to attend each day, and it’s first-come-first-serve for tickets. I didn’t expect to be able to drag myself out of bed in time my first day there for this. My jet lag was a lot more severe than I expected, though, and I found myself awake and staring at the ceiling at 3:00 AM that first morning after just 4 hours of sleep, so I figured I might was well get out of bed and try to hit the tuna auction the first day. After cleaning up and catching a $40 taxi to the market, I was able to arrive at 4:30, at which point I was told all the tickets had sold out 15 minutes ago.

At first I wasn’t sure what they hell I’d do for the next 4½ hours until the main part of the market opened up to the public for browsing (tourists aren’t allowed in until 9:00 AM). However, I quickly realized that if I wanted to enjoy the other quintessential Tokyo experience the market had to offer, getting outrageously fresh sushi from one of the two hot sushi bars located inside the market, I’d have to get my ass in line. I found my way over to the two places with some new friends I met that also couldn’t get in to the tuna auction, and we queued up. It actually appeared like the timing would work out well, as we were told it would be a 3-hour wait to get into the 12-seat place we wanted.

Normally, even my own patience and desire for great sushi would be put to the test by a wait that long, but since I had nothing else to do I figured, why  not? It actually ended up being a great experience. I got in a few great conversations with an interesting and international crowd (made new friends from Singapore, Taiwan, Colombia, Portland, and LA in that time), and the sushi was definitely some of the best I’ve ever had. It was certainly the freshest, all of it having been hauled out of the water in the past 24 hours. One piece, the red clam I got, was actually still alive and moving around on its little brick of nigiri rice when I ate him.

In addition to my early-morning sushi breakfast I got at the market, I was also able to score the high-end sushi blow-out I was hoping to do in Tokyo. I was able to grab a reservation at a two-star Michelin joint in the fancy Rippongi Hills district. Granted, it was at noon on a Sunday, but beggars can’t be choosers. I think we can call this the gaijin seating, as everyone there was a foreigner. My overall reaction: meh. It was awfully good, but relative to the substantial amount of money I dropped, I was underwhelmed. It was also extremely rushed. The entire meal lasted for only 36 minutes. I could understand that if I were at the dive at the market with a line of people around the corner waiting to get in, but I certainly don’t expect that from a place with two Michelin stars. I think I’d rather get back in line at the market if I wanted more sushi.

I actually realized on the train out of town that in the 8 nights and 7 days I spent in Tokyo, those were the only two times I had a sushi meal. Yes, there’s a lot more to Japanese cuisine than just sushi. (There were a couple other times where a single serving of sushi was a part of a much larger meal, but those really don’t count.) One of the more notable things I was eating instead of sushi was the ramen. I had three different bowls of ramen I can remember, all of which were great. No, these are not the sad, little re-heated bricks of plastic you ate when you were in college. Real ramen has hand-made, fresh egg noodles, and is basically a noodle soup with an incredibly rich broth, usually made with a combination of meat (often pork) and seafood, and has all kinds of extra goodies in there like some veg, mushrooms, big chunks of pork, eggs that were hard-boiled in the broth (much better than you think), etc.

Speaking of noodles, I also had an udon meal and soba noodles a couple of times, as well. These are fine, but definitely don’t turn my crank like the ramen does. I think I have to try udon a few more times, though. Part of the problem with udon may be that I’m not sufficiently skilled at accessorizing the noodles and applying condiments. Another honorable-mention, something that is good, but doesn’t keep me up at night thinking about my next score, is the tonkatsu. This is a pork-cutlet that’s breaded with panko and deed-fried, and then served with a pile of crispy cabbage. Definitely a very satisfying meal, but not something I get massive cravings for.

What was hands-down the greatest meal I had, though, and was quite possibly one of the best vacation experiences in general that I’ve ever had, was the yakitori place I went to that was featured on Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”. I had already been to one yakitori place (that’s grilled chicken on skewers, BTW), which was very tasty and a lot of fun, but I wanted to see how good this stuff could get, so I hunted down this place from the show. It took a lot of research and some hoofing, as it’s not even in Tokyo proper. I actually had to take the subway to transfer to a private rail line to get way out in the suburbs to find this place. But man, was it ever worth it. The chef breaks down whole chickens grilling them right to order. The chicken is incredibly fresh, which it better be, because some of the items are served medium rare, rare, or even just seared with the entire interior completely raw much like you would do with a high-quality tuna steak. Yes, we’re talking about chicken here. Unlike most yakitori places, he also uses no sauce whatsoever. It’s just chicken, a little salt, and the grill. And holy crap, was it fantastic. I got the omakase, which included skewers of your standard breast with Japanese leeks (like a scallion), skin, medium-rare thigh, and if I recall correctly, cartilage. He also threw in a liver for me since I was asking him about it when I saw him cooking one. The best part was the experience, though. I had called ahead for a reservation, and he sat me right in front of where he was cooking so I could watch the artist in action. Bear in mind, this is a guy that is 68 years old, and has done absolutely nothing aside from grill chicken for the past 40 years. He doesn’t cook steaks, he doesn’t make soups, he doesn’t prepare vegetables. He grills chickens, full stop. Given the focus, I think he’s achieved chicken-grilling perfection. The guy is an outright artist at breaking down his birds, and it was a lot of fun to watch. He’s also one of the friendliest guys I’ve ever met, and was talking and joking around with me all night. The tiny little place became an outright party pretty early into the evening. After 3 bottles of sake, 5 plum wine and brandy cocktails, a lb of chicken, and another lb of grill smoke absorbed into my clothes, I realized I had been there 4 ½ hours and that the train system was going to be shutting down in 15 minutes. I paid the bill, staggered to the station, and somehow was able to catch a train back into the city, making what I think was likely the very last connection to get me home. Good times. After making it back to the hotel, I collapsed on the bed, and woke up 5 hours later, still partially drunk, all the lights on, in my clothes and with my contacts in, still reeking of that delicious chicken. I realized then just how bad my jet leg still was at that moment when after a night like that I still couldn’t sleep past 6:00 in the morning despite having been in the country for a full 6 days.

One other night I was able to grab something closely related to yakitori called horimonyaki. This time you’re grilling beef organs instead of chicken parts. Reading the menu was certainly entertaining. There were things on the menu such as cervical canal, stomach, testicles (of course), several different types of intestine (upper, lower, etc.), rectum (!!!!!), and spinal cord. Pretty tasty. I didn’t ask if they had any rectum in that night, though.

In my estimation I think Japan has supplanted Italy as the best single place in the world to eat. What puts them over the top is the bento boxes. These are essentially pre-prepared, cold box lunches. It’s unbelievable how good some of these $10 take-out boxes can be. The very best ones are available in department stores or other high-end markets near the train station. I’ve never actually looked forward to the opportunity to get a boxed lunch before. When it comes to food, the Japanese simply do not screw around.

A couple other interesting things about Japan. First, there are no trash cans. Actually, it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say there are none, but suffice it to say they are pretty thin on the ground. Even in places like train stations and public parks I’m often completely unable to find a trash can anywhere. This apparently isn’t a problem, though, because there is also no trash. None. Anywhere. Ever. Apparently the system works, although sometimes it’s annoying to have to carry my trash around with me for 2 hours until I get back to the hotel and can dump it in the trash can in my room.

People are also extremely friendly here. I’ve never been anywhere where the locals were so open to striking up a conversation with a lone traveler, often a lengthy one where we end up hanging out and drinking for an hour or two. The highlight here was the gang I met at the first yakitori place I went to. We chatted through our chicken, sharing food and drinks. Afterwards, they (a group of office workers consisting of two women and one guy) invited me out to a “gay bar”. We went, and the gay bar turned out to be one of the minuscule little Tokyo bars that only seat 4-6 people in total, we were the only guests (no more would fit), and what made it gay was the fact that that the hostess was an aging drag-queen that had been on Japanese television back in the 60s.

Yes, the toilets are all as fancy and elaborate as the stereotype. At the hotel I was staying at in Tokyo I popped into one of the nicer, more expensive empty rooms which was left open one day, and the toilet looked more like an interstellar spacecraft than something you take a piss in. It also had a stainless-steel mounted wall panel with more controls on it than a Boeing 777. The toilet in my room is a little more basic, although I do have to say the heated seat is a nice touch. Even public toilets in restaurants and parks even have extra bells and whistles. You do find some squatty-pottys at dive restaurants and junkier some public locations, though, which I find kind of amusing. You either get a fancy toilet with at least some extra functions, or have to squat—you never get the in-between, i.e. just a regular walking-around typical North American toilet.

While the Japanese are huge into the toilet technology, the same cannot be said for the hand-drying tech. Many, many places, even in fairly decent restaurants, provide nothing for you to dry your hands. No paper towels, no hand dryers, nothing. It’s a little strange to go to a bathroom that has a bunch of fancy toilets and stalls but then leaves you drying your hand on your pants as you walk out.

While in Tokyo I made a couple side trips. I’m doing many day-trips because the train system is so fantastic that it makes is very easy to visit other cities from a central home base. The first was to Nikko. I checked out some temples, did some hiking, was interviewed by a Japanese television crew, and generally spent the day getting rained on. What made the day, though, was that I was able to score an old-school kaiseki meal when I was there. The so-called restaurant was in the middle of this perfect little Japanese garden, and it was precisely the kind of meal I really wanted to have at least one of, but wasn’t sure I’d be able to get while here. The meal also allowed me to scratch off a couple additional things off my must-eat list, including matsutake mushrooms and fugu (pufferfish). Another side trip was to Matsumoto where I checked out the castle, but was annoyed because I didn’t plan correctly and wasn’t sufficiently well-fed. The last big side trip was to Kamakura where I spent the day checking out temples (and also got a good meal out of it).
 

Lucha Libre and Zacatecas

This week I went to one of the bi-weekly Lucha Libre events, which happen every Tuesday and Saturday. Lucha Libre is like wrestling (WWF style), with two significant differences. First, most of the wrestlers wear masks. I’m not entirely sure why. Going into the Coliseo, I actually saw a wrestler entering the stadium, already with his mask on. .The second big difference, apparently, is that lucha libre is all about the crowd. The fact that there are wrestling matches going on in the background is really more of secondary importance. It appears that the primary form of entertainment actually occurs by different parts of the crowd yelling and screaming insults at each other, and to a lesser degree the wrestlers.

The crowd actually breaks down into two segments, the downstairs (abajo) with the theater-style seats which are are all essentially at ring level, and the upstairs (arriba) where there are open, unassigned, bleacher-style seating, and which you need to access from a separate entrance. There’s a clear economic divide between the two areas with the pobres (poor people) sitting upstairs, and everyone else downstairs. It’s these two groups which pass the entire match hurling insults at one another.

I was seated in the upstairs. On this particular night, there were actually many more people seated downstairs the upstairs, but it really didn’t matter. It’s clear that the upstairs crowd gets a lot more bang for their buck in terms of noise. I was seated right in an organized group of guys that are apparently regulars at this event. Their ring-leader, and distinguished 66-year old man in bifocals that went by the name of ‘Ghepeto’ (I don’t think that’s his real name), said he’d been there every single Tuesday for years. He had a crowd of buddies, most all of which were in the 25-35 year old range, that formed their own very efficient epithet-hurling machine. Most of them were wearing matching T-shirts, the front of which had the masked head of a luchador and read, roughly, “Whores – those that sit below” (Putos los del abajo). The backs read, “To be 1000% poor is not luck, it is a gift from God. --- Your mother is my whore”. You can tell they made them themselves as they each also had an individualized name on the back. Some seemed to be real names, but others included nicknames such as “Potato Face” and “The Little Rooster”.

The entire two hours of the event was thus a back-and-forth between these guys and the crowd below. The guys upstairs had a vast repertoire of vulgarity-laced chants, most of which I couldn’t make out. In between renditions, they’d single out individuals sitting downstairs and start hurling insults en masse. The downstairs was much less creative, usually replying with the simple chant (translated again), “Poor people, poor people, go <> your mother”.

Despite being outnumbered nearly five to one on this particular night (apparently a big soccer game pushed down turnout), the upstairs crowd dished out a lot more then they received. Everybody seemed to have a great time, though.

Over the weekend, I went to Zacatecas. This is a colonial town about 5 hours northeast of Guadalajara. At first, I wasn’t too impressed. The town seemed very slow, and in the daytime definitely didn’t have anywhere near the character of Guanajuato. However, the city really came alive at night, with people pouring into the main street through town. It also got really stunning, as the lighting on all the old colonial buildings looks really dramatic on the pinkish stone buildings, and most particularly on the façade of the incredibly elaborate baroque church.

Guanajuato

I checked into Guanajuato for a couple days this weekend. It’s a pretty nice little colonial town, with lots of winding, atmospheric alleys lined with beautiful old buildings. It seems like there’s a beautiful park with sculpted trees and a Florentine fountain around every corner in the old historic section. Apparently, all the luxury came from the colonialists that were funneling all the product from the local silver mines back to Spain. My guidebook said that for 250 years, the La Valenciana mine at Guanajuato alone provided a staggering 20% of the entire world supply of silver. There was some serious cash floating around, and it’s plainly evident if all the opulent old colonial buildings.

The town is built up in the mountains, and is sprawled out in the valley with some of the narrow alleys climbing steeply up the hillsides. I actually got a fairly decent workout walking back to my hostel every night. It wasn’t too steep on the streets until the route crescendoes with a straight uphill climb of a bunch of stairs about 50 meters into an alley. The city also has a maze of tunnels under the center of the city. They apparently redirected the river a couple hundred years ago into all these tunnels which are now used as the through-routes for traffic and many of the buses. Because of all the history, the great architecture, the warren of tunnels, and the winding, twisted nest of old streets, alleys, and tunnels, the town is a joy to just walk around. It can be challenging, though. Thank god I had a data plan with my iPhone—I can’t imagine how many times I would have gotten lost without Google Maps.

The big hubbub while I was there was El Dia de Los Muertos, the religious holiday where Mexicans remember their deceased family by going to the cemetery and decorating their graves. It was a lot different than I expected. I knew there was going to be partying in the town, but the party extended right up into the cemetery way up in the hills. For one thing, tons of food vendors set up right outside the cemetery, almost as if there was a street fair going on. People were dressed pretty casually, too. Most surprisingly, there was live music. And we’re not talking about solemn, pouty, weepy crap here. They were playing a kind of peppy, upbeat stuff that would feel right at home in a cantina. The most amusing thing about this is that the bands that were there were clearly not playing to the live crowd, but to the deceased. A couple times I saw a band arranged in a semi-circle around a particular spot on the layered, vertical sarcophagi on the walls, facing the sarcophagus and playing with their backs to everyone at the cemetery that actually had a pulse.

Most graves were decorated with flowers or other kinds of arrangements for the deceased one might have in the use. If the grave had them, bouquets of flowers would be placed in stone vases built into the grave. However, the majority of the people that couldn’t affort this used leftover large 32-oz cans from pickled jalepeños. (BTW – you can tell that La Costeña brand is the clear market leader here in Guanajuato.) The graves I really enjoyed, however, were decked out a la el Dia de Los Muertos with all the skeleton iconography and with all kinds of additional swag left, Egyptian-style, for the deceased. This could include anything the deceased enjoyed, but common elements I saw included opened cans of Modelo beer, Mexican torta sandwiches, oranges, apples, candy, roasted peanuts, shots of tequila, bottles of Coke, pastries, packs of cigarettes, bags of pumpkin seeds or chips, and some special sweet bread they cook for the holiday.

 

 

In addition to all the stuff at the cemetery, there was also plenty of stuff going on in town, as well. Lots of people had altars constructed for them, with flowers, but also decorations make from rice and beans, oranges, apples, and lots and lots of skulls. There was also a lot of street art, almost invariably featuring skeletons or skulls. One of my favorites was a picture of a skeleton in a pair of heals, a bikini, and a big floppy hat, hanging out at the beach. And everywhere ladies were selling little skulls make out of sugar, skull chocolates, skull-shaped lollipops, etc.

One of the other interesting aspects of Guanajuato was the Mummy Museum. Yes they have a mummy museum there. These aren’t millennia-old mummies, though. These mummies are the petrified corpses that have been taken out of some of the above-ground sarcophagi in the cemetery to make new space. Most of them seem to have been deceased between 80 and 150 years ago. Upon removing the bodies, they found the dry air and particular climate of the place kept some of the bodies exceptionally well-preserved, so they stuck them in a museum. The thing that struck me about this is that the museum is right smack next to the cemetery. When I went it was filled up with Mexican people presumably there for el Dia de Los Muertos, too. So you’d have a Mexican family, with their young kids in tow, hit the museum, and then likely afterwards go say 'hi' to Abuelito and Abuelita, mummifying away in the cemetery right outside where these petrified bodies were pulled from. Okaaaayyyyyyyy. I’m not much of an anthropologist and I’ve still only spent a grand total of 11 days in the country, so I’ll quote what my guide book had to say about this:

“This popular place is a quintessential example of Mexico’s acceptance of, celebration of and obsession with death; visitors come from all over to see disinterred corpses.”

Well, all-righty, then. Note that if you’re faint of heart you may want to skip these in the photos, as some can be pretty disturbing.

I’m banging out this post as I travel back to Guadalajara on the bus. The buses here (at least the ETN ones) kick ass. They’ve got massive bucket seats that recline about 55 degrees, have full-leg foot rests, wifi, private entertainment centers for every seat, provided snacks and drinks, and better bathrooms than I’ve ever seen on a plane, even in first class. It’s a great way to watch the Jalisco countryside wiz by. It’s pretty nice out here. Lots of rolling hills, dotted with little farms growing corn and their little conical piles of harvested corn left out to dry. It’s making me feel like some taquitos when I get back into Tlaquepaque.

Guadalajara

Four days into Mexico, and things are looking good. So far, I've got 6 hours of Spanish tutoring under my belt, and it appears that I'm going to really be able to up my game while I'm here. The place I'm staying at is also great. I've got a room in the house of a lovely older Mexican woman, Señora Alicia. I use the term house loosely, as it's really more of a complex. It's essentially a big, hollow square structure surrounding a beautiful garden with a half dozen trees that grow avocadoes, papayas, guanabanas, limes, and figs, and with a bunch of plants including tomatoes, epazote, yerba buena, Mexican oregano, and rosemary, among others. I've got what is essentially the upper level of a coach house on the opposite side of the garden from the main home. It's not the Four Seasons--the bathroom can get pretty dank, the wifi is extremely spotty, and the bed is pretty hard, but all things considered, for the 23 bucks a day I'm spending for this and the three included meals, it really can't be beat. And that food is pretty good. Señora Alicia cooks for me most of the time, and everything is fresh and tasty. Nights like tonight, though, where the señora is at the church working the food bank she organizes, Señora Sylvia, her housekeeping assistant that helps her when she has guests, is cooking for me.

The house is pretty big and has three other rooms in addition to my own. Right now it's just la Señora, myself, and her nephew who is hardly ever around. It's a good thing I like her a lot as her as we have a lot of alone time talking at meals. Apparently four other students from the school will be joining us next week, though.

The house and school are both located in Tlaquepaque, a city which is part of the larger Guadalajara area. It has much more of a Mexican village feel, as opposed to the big city, and is really charming. This is a relatively upscale part of town, and it has a beautiful square with things always going on. The big thing at the moment is the Fiestas de Octubre, some kind of Catholic whatnot that I don't understand. Also going yesterday was some kind of thing for the Virgin Mary. Whether or not these two things are related in any way, I couldn't tell you. I really didn't know there was anything special until I went to the main square in Tlaquepaque yesterday and there was all kinds of craziness going on, with ethnic dancers and kids cracking whips everywhere (which I made sure to steer way clear of). I checked out some other parts of town, and by the time I got back, most of the dancers were gone, but they were replaced with a group of four wackos that were sitting on this square lazy Susan looking thing at the top of an 80 foot pole. Each was tied by the ankle to the pole via a rope that was wrapped around the pole a bunch of times. They'd then fall backwards, scuba-style, off the lazy Susan, which would then start spinning around in circles, whipping the four dudes around the pole as they gradually descended to the ground, all whilst they were playing some kind of flute instrument. What all this has to do with the Virgin Mary, I'm not really sure, but it was neat to watch.

In addition to the wacky dancers and the crazy pole guys, there are also all kinds of street food vendors out. Again, whether this is an October thing, a Virgin thing, or just a general Mexico thing, I'm not really sure. I think it's actually likely a combination of all three. The other thing I noticed yesterday was the non-stop mass services. There are two gorgeous old colonial churches right on the square, and is seemed like there was a perpetual surplus of asses in pews. Looked like standing-room-only in a lot of occasions, actually, and I got the impression some guys were back for sloppy seconds. And all this is going on with all the crazy dancing and Yucatan guys flying around on poles right outside the flung-open doors. Apparently the priests are accustomed to competing with a bunch of background noise. I presume the perpetual church services were a Virgin thing and not just a regular Mexico thing, as I find it hard to believe that even Mexicans go to church that much on a regular basis.

 

I've hit most all of the historic stuff in the city already. If you want details, check out the photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/tunafishandgrits/Mexico?authkey=Gv1sRgCM7yv8aax46vXw#

 

I’ve been getting pretty good food outside the house, too. On Friday night, I hit what is supposedly the big place to go if you want fancy-pants, modern Mexican food. Got a great stuffed chicken breasts with some kind of Mexican herbs, huitlacoche (AKA corn smut), pineapple, and whatnot.  The real star of the weekend, though, was the birria de chivo, a braised goat recipe, that I got at my new favorite restaurant, La Birrieria de Las Nueve Esquinas in downtown Guadalajara. I love me some goat, especially when you jazz it up with fixings and make tacos out of it with fresh, house-made corn tortillas which are piping hot right off the griddle. I actually liked this place so much that I went back on Sunday. This time a got the cochinita pibil, which is native to Yucatan, not Jaliso. But I don’t really care—it was still damn good. I could sit around at that place, eat, and watch the women there bang out fresh tortillas all night.

Honorable mentions go to the place I went Saturday which, which made food from Durang. I also had a decent molcajete de camarones on Sunday, a bubbling hot bowl of a thick tomato-based sauce with shrimp in a Mexican-style mortar heated over the fire so that is cooks the food just by plopping it in there. I’ve gotten some pretty bad-ass ceviche tostadas and an octopus cocktail during class breaks, too. From other street vendors I’ve also been able to grab some grilled corn on the cob made with crazy purple corn with kernels the size of marbles, and coconut juice drank straight out of the fresh coconut (just like in SE Asia). Next on this list of street vendor food is the deep-fried sweet potatoes I’ve been seeing, which are both nauseatingly greasy-looking and yet incredibly compelling at the same time, and the ubiquitous torta ahogada.

Rome

I had a big agenda for Rome:  

1. Cacio e pepe (an cheese and pepper pasta made by emulsifying pasta water, oil and/or butter, and cheese)
2. Bucatini alla Amatriciana
3. Pasta carbonara
4. Tripa alla Romana (Roman-style tripe) (that’s cow intestines, for you knuckeheads out there)
5. Codo alla vaccinara (braised ox tail with celery)
6. Carciofi alla Giudea (deep-fried Jewish style artichokes)

These are also things that simply must be eaten while in Rome. I’ve had the carbonara before (and I also make it myself), but everything else would be new. Oh, I also wanted to go to the Borghese Gallery, Trastevere, and the Jewish Ghetto while I was there, too.

I made pretty good time, and was able to tick off all the items on my list. The ox tail and carbonara, were great, and the rest was varying degrees of tasty. On top of the to-do list, I also covered deep fried squash blossoms stuffed with cheese and anchovies, and pollo alla Romana, neither of which was special. The thin-sliced beef tongue with mustard sauce from the wine bar also gets and honorable mention, although that is not a typically Roman dish. The Cacio e Pepe I actually had to take two different stabs at. The first time I had it was at the hidden place without a sign in the Jewish ghetto. The fried artichoke and fiore di zucca there were great, and the taste my pal Christian that I met there gave me of his meatball with peas was phenomenal, but the cacio e pepe was a huge disappointment. It was dry, like they had just cooked noodles and sprinkled cheese on. There was no emulsion, and really no sauce at all. Not only was this not what I was expecting, it wasn’t that great. Having already filled up on two different fried antipasti, I didn’t even finish it all so I could save some room for my secondo (more on that later). So the next day I went back to the fancier place with the good carbonara and codo I had been to the day before, hoping they would have a better take. This place came through. The sauce was tasty, light, and had a perfect emulsion, making it not too thin, and not too thick, heavy, and gloopy. I’ve been experimenting with this dish at home, and this definitely gave me the standard which I’m shooting for. I was also able to pry some intel from the waiter on how they prepare it, so I can better replicate it at home. There are a couple minor differences in approach between theirs and mine, so hopefully I can tune mine up a bit.

I find that people appreciate the amount of interest I show in the local food, and that’s what sparked the conversation with Christian at the place in the Jewish ghetto. We ended up having a lively chat, with him translating the admonitions I was getting from the waitress for not finishing my cacio e pepe because I was saving room for my meat course. I was able to follow the conversation a bit in Italian, and asked Christian to confirm that they were in fact talking about what I big pussy I was for not cleaning my plate. He informed me, “No, this doesn’t translate directly; in Italian you don’t call someone a ‘big pussy’, you say they are a ‘half pussy’”. So I’m apparently a half-pussy. These linguistic differences really are charming, aren’t they? I guess I should get ‘half-pussy’ carved on my tombstone.

Walking out from lunch, I then got the most quintessentially Roman moment of the trip as Christian, who was in town on a business meeting from Parma and was dressed in a suit, went to refresh himself in the fountain in the square. Seeing well-dressed business men giving themselves a spritz in the public fountain just isn’t something you see in Chicago.

So that wrapped up the trip. Lots of good food, no new Italian shoes, and met lots of new people. Meeting all the new people was great. Maybe I’ll have better luck with the shoes next time.

Firenze and San Gimignano

In Florence, I saw what is quite possibly the single greatest thing I had ever seen in my life:

Porchetta!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And not the half-ass porchetta I’ve made by wrapping a pork loin in a large sheet of skin-on pork belly, but a honest-to-god whole deboned pig body with the head still on rolled up in its entirety like a huge, pig-headed torpedo. Boom!!!!!!!!!!!! It was pretty tasty, too. Note quite so impressive, however, was the steak Fiorentina. It was pretty much a plain, not particularly high quality steak. My expectations actually weren’t all that particularly high, but I figured it would be a crime to have come to Florence twice and still never had it. All my Italian peeps had always said that while lots of our vegetables are bullshit, we do have better steak than in Italy, and I can see why. It wasn’t bad, but when you’re 22-euro steak is significantly outshined by the bruschetta with cavolo nero and white beans you had for antipasto, you’re not really getting your money’s worth. Other meal highlights were a tripe salad, porcini soup, and grass salad I had for lunch on Saturday, and the pizza that Caterina’s cousin Guiseppe took us out for Saturday night.

San Gimignano, was a pretty cool little place, but lunch there was a disappointment. I was jazzed to hit this fancy-pants restaurant my gourmet travel guide had written up, but it didn’t quite live up to the billing. The town definitely did though—very picturesque, and very, very touristy. The bus ride out there and back was also a nice way to check out the Tuscan countryside and to help out a group of Malaysian tourists with travel trip for a future trip to the US.

Aside from not coming through on the bistecca alla Fiorentina, Florence also failed to deliver on the shoes. I basically had two high-level objectives for this trip. 1: eat and drink and much good stuff as possible. 2: get some stylish Italian shoes. I’ve been looking in every major city I’ve been to so far, and nothing. They’ve got lots of nice stuff, but not items that are my style and what I’m looking for. Leather goods are big in Florence, so that may have been my best shot. Only Rome left at this point.

Bologna and Ravenna

Rolled into Bologna after Turin. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on some tagliatelle al ragu. It didn’t disappoint. I also had the milk-braised pork loin I was dying to try. I had tried making this at home, and had screwed it up in fine fashion. Never having actually eaten it prepared by anyone else, I wasn’t really sure what the actual target was, though. It turns out I didn’t screw it up nearly as bad as I thought. More surprisingly, I discovered that my Bolognese sauce holds up pretty well against the standard.

The next day, I took a day trip to Ravenna. The big attraction there is all the old Byzantine-era mosaics scattered across a couple old religious sights. They were certainly something. Most notable in the frescoes was Jesus’ full-frontal nudity in two different baptismal scenes. The savior had some pretty impressive abs, but let’s say that his another endowments were somewhat less impressive. One would think the son of the all-powerful being that created the universe would be hung a little lower. Jesus’ junk aside, the mosaics were pretty impressive, particularly considering their age. Most were clocking in at around 1400-1500 years old.

The next day I caught up with my friend Caterina in Bologna. The major part of the plan was to check out the market. My gourmet travel guide had really trumpeted Bologna as THE place for food-geek shopping. I must say I was a bit underwhelmed. They had some pretty beautiful little shops (one in particular had some of the prettiest pancetta I have ever seen pressed old-school style between a couple tree branches), but nevertheless it didn’t quite live up to the billing. I personally found the market in Padova to be more impressive. It was still worth checking out, though.

Other eat-treats I had in Bologna included the gnocchi al gorgonzola, and a roasted rabbit. I was actually dying to try the coniglio (rabbit) alla cacciatora, but apparently they only make that in the winter. Ditto for the ossobuco. Major downer. I was thinking I was going to miss out on the stinco di maiale, too (slow-roasted pork shank), but luckily I was able to find it at another place. And it rocked. It wasn’t as good as the skin-on roasted pork shank with kraut I had in Bolzano, but whenever you put a whole roasted pork shank in front of me I’m going to be a pretty happy guy.