We just had a great fly-by of the ISS, sweeping very quickly (almost 8km per second) from SWS to ENE. It is so big now (350 feet wide, apparently) that it is by far the second brightest thing in the night sky. It was amazing to stare up at it, knowing that mankind put it there and that there are humans aboard, including a Japanese astronaut right now.
Being able to track it from my desktop and then look outside and see it arrive right on schedule gave me goosebumps. What an incredible confluence of technologies.
Aya's father took us to an amazing onsen (hot springs resort) on the coast near Nanao City in Kanazawa Prefecture. There were private tubs on the deck and all sorts of stone baths facing the ocean view. Aya's uncle, Tadahiro, got right down to business with his favourite hobby. He wouldn't put the rod down, even when he was soaking in the tub. His perseverance paid off and the kitchen prepared the fish he caught as part of our dinner that evening.
Breakfast was waiting in our room when we got back from our morning bath. The little grill at top left is for charring the fish cake directly below it. The covered pot contained delicious, silky soft tofu in hot water (yudofu).
Sashimi on a wave of ice. Yes, that is gold leaf on the maguro.
Ta-dah! Steamed crab legs, a local specialty and one of Aya's favourites.
Here is a great example of Japanese technology's bleeding edge catching up with the ancient traditions, or perhaps vice versa. These delicious senbei crackers, individually wrapped of course, had designs printed on them in (hopefully) edible inks. They were all traditional icons like a spinning top toy for children, a "shi-shi" (lion-god) costume and so on.The one that grabbed our attention was the QR code printed directly on the cracker. You capture it with your cell phone and it takes you to a website (for mobile phones only) with promotions or other information. If you are interested, the link is http://m.daimaru.co.jp. The "m" is for "mobile" and means the page won't display on a regular computer.
Events with both family and friends took us to Sakai, Japan (just south of Osaka) for six weeks in April and May. We got set up with computers and internet access there and were able to continue working on projects, too, if not always as smoothly as we had hoped.
Here is the view from our second-floor apartment, facing west. The Nankai Koya line passes under the overpass on its way to Namba station. The sound of the commuter trains is somehow very comforting, especially when echoing over a warm spring night.
Kitsune soba for breakfast! Slightly sweet deepfried tofu in dashi soup with buckwheat noodles. And many salads with about one hundred ingredients each, including shredded crab, tiny translucent fish, bamboo shoots, cucumber, spinach, seaweed, sesame seeds, and skinny mushrooms.
Mario from Caffé Rustico gave us a pack of espresso ground coffee when he heard we were going away for six weeks. We thought of him and his wonderful café every morning when we brewed up our cappuccinos.
Ready?
Puffy pancake panic!Who is David Ayers?
We don't know, but we ate his pancake like crazy.
2 eggs 1/2 cup milk 1/2 cup flour 3 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt
Preheat oven to 425.Beat eggs, milk, flour, sugar and salt. Melt butter in an oven-proof frying or baking pan. Coat the pan with melted butter, mix the rest into the batter.
Bake it for 12-15 minutes, or till it's puffy-assed and golden. Don't open the door till it's ready or you'll kill all the puff!
Serve immediately with maple syrup or lemon juice and icing sugar, or strawberries and sour cream.
And the tallest cappucinos EVER.
*Minor adjustment to the salt amount and wording of the method. Much improved. So easy, so delicious, and so exciting!
A few weeks back, on a dark Monday evening while we toiled in the office, two of Vancouver's best and brightest decided it was the right time to push in our bedroom window, ransack the place and steal our shiny things. A Nancy Drew-ish neighbour, passing at the right moment, noticed that there was a lot more foot-traffic than usual through our window and sweetly called the police. We only became aware of what had happened when the good officers arrived, missing the loot-laden lads by just six minutes, according to our security cameras.
Luckily they didn't get much, and very little that can't be replaced. They did miss some things by the merest good fortune, and they did luck into some things the value of which they haven't the smallest idea. But then, not having the smallest idea seems to be the predominant quality of their world-view. They probably think the hand-made Japanese lacquer box is plastic. Sigh.What really boils our bottoms is the wine. They managed to relieve us of a significant quantity (all) of our Foxtrot Pinot Noir 2005 and all-but-one of our Sandhill Small Lots Petit Verdot 2004(PDF link). The real crime, of course, is that they won't air it properly and most certainly will serve it at the wrong temperature and with the wrong dish. I predict their dinner will be ruined. Just ruined.Pardon me, sir, but is that Foxtrot Pinot Noir you're carrying? Sir is clearly in possession of a discriminating palate. We hope the wine's 16 months in French oak will not over-power the scent of urine in whichever dumpster Sir chooses to partake of this spicy vintage.Bon appetit!
Animated GIFs from the security cameras in the hall and stairs. The first one is paused on particularly revealing frames.
With no shortage of cafés (but a severe shortage of bars), Tunisia provided lots of opportunities for us to sit and sketch or catch up on our journals while slowly sipping glasses of hot mint tea. The tea is very sweet and in many places they will serve you "thé pignons" (tea with pine nuts) because it is four times the price of the plain mint tea you ordered, you cheap tourist bastard. We call this kind of thing "shaking the money tree". Any chance you get, just try to shake a bit of extra coin out of a tourist. There's always another one along soon.
To avoid this we looked for cafés where the older gents gathered to play cards and dominoes. These people were usually more interesting to talk to and were less nervous when they caught us sketching them. They were always amazed at Aya, calmly sitting in a café in the evening, enjoying her tea and writing in her journal. Whatever will women get up to next? Café in La Marsa, north along the coast from the capital, Tunis.
Aya's journal for the night, with comics of donuts and cats.
Keith's sketch of the café customers.
The lounge area in our La Marsa apartment, waiting for us to come home.
We quickly found that there is a wide range of Tunisian food, as one might expect. Most tourist restaurants offered bland, overcooked interpretations of Western "hotel food" or, more frequently, mounds of flavourless couscous with bits of mutton bones. This stand-by plagued us from one end of the country to the other as the backbone of the cheap-as-dirt tourist service. But by asking and following the locals one could find new, unexpected dishes that were well-made and delicious. One that we found on the first day in Tunis quickly became a favourite: ojja with merguez (above, beside good old fried chicken and chips). The ojja is tomato sauce with egg either on top or cooked in, and it is best when served with merguez, which are fragrant sausage-shaped meatballs. Fantastic and cheap, and could be found reliably across the country, unless we were in a tourist hotel, where they would never serve anything so flavourful...
We love restaurants where we can look through the pots on the stove and discuss their contents with the chef, and Mahdaoui was a perfect example, not too far into the Tunis souk and very busy. Above is a large pan of omelet-like tajine and behind it a very savoury fish stew, which was a bit too fishy for us. And then there was the large pot of sheep heads, halved and stewing in a turmeric-yellow sauce. The chefs enjoyed tempting us with it, knowing we weren't quite ready for it. But during our meal we realized that our squeamishness had put us in the "vast minority" of the customers. We were the only ones in the place without half a sheep's face on our plate, and those who did have one were clearly enjoying themselves, with jaws being torn away and chewed on with great enthusiasm. We came back to Mahdaoui a few days later and I was determined not to miss out on this local specialty. Eating a sheep's head, or half of one, is an experience of textures more than flavours. The flavour was "tasty Mediterranean mutton stew", but the textures were extraordinary to me. This is the list of things you get to eat (that I could find) on a sheep's head, and their associated textures:
Tongue: dense, firm
Jaw muscle: tender, fibrous like a chicken thigh
Eyeball: soft, gelatinous (mind the lens inside, like a soft fingernail)
Brains: very soft, somewhat like marshmallow
Teeth: you don't eat them, but they clack against yours when you are going for the tongue
Other fleshy protuberances: varied, with surprising bits of cartilage
I don't know that I'd be in a rush to order it again, but it was well worth it, and not only for the story.
Dessert was found deeper in the souk, with a very friendly pastry chef deep-frying date-stuffed cookie-things and coating them in honey and sesame seeds. Fantastic.
Tea outside a hammam (the stripes tell you it's a bath house).
The metal-working district of the souk. The din of hammering is overwhelming and there are huge amounts of chemicals being spilled around without a thought to environmental or personal health.
Each street has only one "charbon" dealer and it was always a robed and bearded devout. He sits peacefully, waiting until one of the endlessly-toiling metal-workers comes to pay for another bag of charcoal. The transaction is a display of power, with the worker having to offer compliments and platitudes and the charcoal merchant eventually, reluctantly, rising to fetch a pre-weighed sack from his stores and toss it onto the street. The "customer" picks it up and, with repeated thanks and little bows, backs away to return to his forge. In the photo Keith is trying to understand the roots of the monopoly. Turns out it's just as it looks.
Views of the souk, away from the tourist shops.
In the hat-making district we are shown how the classic fez starts off as a white knit touque, familiar to any Canadian. It is shrunk and made stiff by brushing and ironing, kept to a certain size by a terra-cotta form. When properly shaped, it will be ironed and dyed either black ("Libyan style" with a little knob in the center of the crown) or Tunisian red ("the colour of our independence").
A friend we met in Tunisia recently wrote asking why there were no photos on this blog of our time spent there. It is an excellent question, and one that can be expanded to ask "why no photos of Firenze? Or of Tuscany? Or Sardegna? Napoli? Sicily? Well, the easy answer would be something like "we didn't take any" or "we hate those places", but of course both of those are demonstrably, egregiously, parsimoniously false. In fact, it is because we loved all those places so much that we ended up with over 10,000 photos from our trip and our intentions to blog them just kind of collapsed under their weight in kilobytes.
"But," you cleverly point out in rebuttal, "get off yer ass you lazy monkeys." Well said, although we find your use of the colloquial "yer" repellent and citrus-scented. To meet the semi-fictional demand, we will now start posting photos and stories from our time in Tunisia and other neglected locations even though the order in which they appear may be both illogical and incorrect, temporally speaking. Here is the down payment on that usurious promise.
The Grand Mosque, Tunis. The mix of architecture throughout the Mediterranean region is one of its delights.
Entrance to the Grand Mosque, Tunis.
Shoe shiner outside Tunis train station. You might think that those exotic colours would be for women's shoes, but that is not necessarily the case in Tunisia. The fine, strong feet of both sexes were shod in leather shoes of all fey shades. On a related topic, in every restaurant we entered, even those described in the guides as having "masculine atmosphere", the only kind of wine we saw being consumed was rosé. Just saying.
An entrance to the Tunis souk.One of many. More photos from within the souk in the next posts.
Aya rubbed a big rib roast with rosemary, garlic and olive oil last night and threw it in the oven. It came out beautifully. We had never carved a rib roast before and in all the excitement we forgot to take any photos. But you can bet it was soft and red inside and that the drippings were used to make the most amazing Yorkshire puddings. The ribs came off in one slice and were gnawed on happily. It was a gorgeous feast, made even more so by the inclusion of this delicious Amarone by our treasured dinner guest. Long cherry and leather flavours, with all kinds of aromas as it opened up more and more. Plum skins, raisins (a sign of a successful Amarone), roasty-cinnamon-spice... it was all there. And speaking of wine, we had an unusual sensation on Saturday night. We had a bottle of Sandhill's Small Lots Petit Verdot 2005 and it was excellent, full and fruity, lots of black currant flavour and a long, long finish. We had heard the word "chewy" used to describe a wine, but always thought it was one of those ridiculous words that reeks of pomposity. The feel of this wine instantly popped that word into our heads, however, and we laughed as we realized it was the perfect description of the sensation. A little poking around (well, one quick Google search) revealed more references and definitions of this term. For the record, Aya made her first classic tourtière, with all the heady spices (she also made a bunch of small ones in tartlet tins for afternoon munching).
Saturday night just after 8pm marked the tenth anniversary of Aya's accident. It is human nature to regard the number ten as having some significance, and indeed it almost feels like a signpost or an official stamp. It's as though our inner experience has come into line with an external one, as though a notification came from some obscure government office saying now that this much time has passed, we are free to wrap up the experience in a box and move it to another section of our mental storage facilities, somewhere in the back, preferably under a leaky pipe that will rot the cardboard.
There have been countless times in the past ten years when Aya and I were discussing some issue of our lives and we came to the realization that the accident changed everything forever for us. There is no way around it. At the instant the car struck her our lives veered onto a course we could not imagine. We still went through our expected developments as people and as a couple, but every tiny detail was always coloured or stressed or affected in some way by the accident or its complex results. Aya's injuries obviously had clear effects. Her recovery from them, with its lasting limitations, were revealed slowly over time. The stress of the four and a half years of the settlement case with the insurance company certainly influenced things, often in very surprising ways. Even now there isn't a day that isn't influenced in some way by either the physical or mental results of the accident.
However, it has been ten years and Aya has shown all the determination and strength that makes her who she is. Here she is last September, doing half squats with 67.5kg. A lot of good people extended themselves to support and encourage Aya when she was in the hospital and during the many difficult times afterward. We know that things would have been much more difficult without those people and their efforts. We thank you deeply and hope you know how much your generosity has meant to us.
Some more images from the past ten years. Warning: they are sad.
Two CT scan animations of her leg (January 2002, three years after). The post that was inserted is clearly visible in both, providing support for all the bits.
A friend on the Strong Lifts forum expressed interest in getting one of these to add abdominal and core work to his 5x5 program. They seem to be riotously expensive where he lives and ridiculously cheap here, so we packaged one up and sent it to him for far less than what it would cost him. Such are the vague uncertainties of the global economy. He'll have it in a week or two, and then he'll be crippled with pain for weeks. That's the Internet for you; now you can reach out across the globe and cause a complete stranger to self-inflict tremendous pain on a daily basis. All the best to you Beppe! Start slowly and you'll soon be doing them like Vasko here.
I'm getting back into them after a long absence, so my form isn't like Vasko's. I'm doing them from a standing position (knees bent a bit) and rolling out to almost full extension now. Beppe is a strong man, so I've got to keep at it if I want to stay ahead of him. He also lives in Piedmont, which is the home of the amazing barolo chinato, a bottle of which we bought in Lucca in 2006. Through strict rationing, we have a little left still. Incredible. Hopefully we'll get to open a bottle with Beppe some day.
Anyone considering a move to Vancouver because of the temperate climate should consider the following view from our front window. And the back.That's supposedly our car, somewhere under there. The good news is that rain has finally arrived and we may be at the beginning of the end of this nonsense.
This morning we decided to make our regular style of cappuccinos after having had them with egg nog over the holidays. Because it had been a while since I'd made Aya a tall foam hat on her capp, I shook the hot milk in a jar extra long and spooned the resulting foam high, higher, highest ever. Aya's squeals were just what I had hoped for. But in the middle of the usual celebrations (continued squealing, tickling, hiding behind me and pointing at the coffees), the bread machine on the counter went "beep!" and started shaking its fat booty. The cappuccinos beside it immediately joined in the funky rhythm of the bread machine's gyrations, coffee sloshing gently in the cups and the foam towers trying to keep up, one step behind. Dancing cappuccinos! Technically they were too cute to drink, but we managed.
We just had a great fly-by of the ISS, sweeping very quickly (almost 8km per second) from SWS to ENE. It is so big now (350 feet wide, apparently) that it is by far the second brightest thing in the night sky. It was amazing to stare up at it, knowing that mankind put it there and that there are humans aboard, including a Japanese astronaut right now.
