No Regrets

Wed. Rot.: Scratched, Cleansed and In the News

We recently celebrated Answerjack's birthday at a little restaurant in Slavonice, a tiny, intensely picturesque town in far south Moravia.

The festivities included some Ukranian bubbly, which immediately caused everything, including my fully automatic digital camera, to go slightly out of focus. There's a reason the demand for Ukrainian "champagne" is so limited.

Slavonice was first named Zlabings by the German settlers who came to what was then a brigand-riddled borderland in the 1200s. They kicked ass and cleaned up; in the 14th century, Zlabings was a convenient stop on the main trading route between Prague and Vienna, a pretty little revenue dam in the commercial stream flowing down the highway. The town's fine, mostly monochrome sgrafitto-decorated buildings date from this brief time of peace and prosperity. Click for a close up:

 
Slavonice's sgraffiti (the word means scratched) go beyond simple figurative decoration to illustrate biblical and apocalyptic stories in serial strips along the facades of houses. The entire town can be "read" like a graphic novel. The specifics of Slavonice's post-prosperity narrative, while bad news for its population, did contribute to the town's frozen-in-time preservation.

First, the town's population was cut in half by the devastatingly destructive Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). Re-routing the Prague—Vienna route in the early 1700s accelerated Zlabings' decline. Without trade monies to fund change and modernization, the town stayed exactly as it was. More really bad news: it remained mostly German-speaking and deeply identified with Germany for hundreds of years. In the 20th century, gripped by the nationalistic fervor and really lousy judgement afflicting many ethnic Germans after World War I, the majority—70 percent—of Germans in Czechoslavakia voted for the Nazis. Zlabingians were no exception.

photo from Wikipedia

After World War II, nearly 3 million people of German ancestry were expelled from Czechoslovakia under an edict whose implementation included starvation, rape, plunder, and summary execution. Ironic, huh? This program of ethnic cleansing had the full support of the Allies. Zlabings lost 90 percent of its population and its name. The nascent Communist government moved Czechs and Slovaks into the abruptly vacated homes of old Zlabings/new Slavonice and promptly drew the Iron Curtain, sealing off the town from the West on three sides. For the following 44 years, soldiers with orders to shoot to kill patrolled the exceptionally lovely surrounding forests, and the town was again suspended in time until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. It's wide open now. Because of the EU, it's easy to hike or drive across the nearby border into Austria without having to stop or show a passport.

Last Saturday, the New York Times reported that Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus welcomed a compromise that would give the Czech Republic an exemption from the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights, which articulates the basic rights of all EU citizens. This pass wipes out the legal basis for property claims related to the Germans expelled in the 1940s. Vaclev looks happy!

And so does Answer-J: Pilsener and Ukranian champagne on the same day! Why not? It's his birthday!

Deer o' the Week, at the fine dining establishment where we ate in Slavonice...

And Sheep of the Week, little Rada's little lamb left behind after she, her mommy and her daddy house-sat our place in Marin for a bit while we were gone.

Bonus creepy-crawly, sighted moments after posting:

Bozhe moy! What the hell is this? It's clinging to the deck post outside the front door.

Whatever the critter, there's a bunch of them! Is it reproducing? I am so hoping they don't find their way into the house...

Wed. Rot.: Inside, Looking Out

Like everyone else, I carry a camera when I travel. I'm pretty conflicted about actually using it, though: the constant click and whirr of all those shutters at scenic spots is like a plague of locusts, and sometimes I feel like knocking out gently removing the camera from the compulsive photographer's hands and demand suggest kindly that he or she look at whatever it is in real time, at least to start.
I do like to shoot from our hotel window. Sometimes what's right in front is interesting and engaging, and sometimes it's a brick wall. You know, like real life.

This is what got me started: the view from our room the Albergo Accademia Villa Maravege, Venice. It's also a reminder of how much more organic and alive non-digital photos are.

In Bologna, Italy

In Assisi, Italy

In Riomaggiore, Cinque Terre, Italy

Assisi again. Technically, not from the window of our room; this is from the lobby.

I altered the image to use in this collage; the door opens and closes so the butterfly man can get out.

In Arcos de la Frontera, Andalucia, Spain

In Bucerias, Mexico

From the Hotel D'Avagour, Dinan, Brittany, France

From the Hotel Le Cep, Beaune, Burgundy, France.

From the apartment we rented at 7 Rue Livingstone, Montmartre, Paris...

Found a 1930's postcard with pretty much the same view. Cool.

From the Keoio Plaza Hotel, Tokyo

From the Hilton Financial District, San Francisco. That's my home town, but we were great consumers of SF hotels while we were living in the Sierra hinterboonies.

From the Hyatt Regency, San Francisco

We paid a small fortune for this view from an eminently forgettable hotel in Manhattan's Murray Hill ...

I like this version better.

From the Hotel Arigone in Olomouc, Czech Republic, just last Saturday.

From the Marriott across the street from the Prague airport, later that same day.

My favorite view of all, from the bedroom window at home this morning. I was up at the literal crack of dawn, still synched to European time and ready for a shot of Becharovka.

Wandering About: Prague

OK, let's get that Tourism Issue right out in front: Prague is indeed jam-packed with tourists. Even in the just-past-high season, the city is teeming with hordes of visitors from all corners of Europe and, recession or not, quite a few Americans of ages. To those bemoaning the undeniably daunting crowds, I have three words of advice: look around you. Everywhere you look there is something to delight the eye and engage the imagination: the harmonious  menage á quatre of gothic, baroque, art nouveau and art deco architecture, and evidence of the rock-ribbed integrity and sardonic sense of humor hat enabled a proud people to endure the serial seiges of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and emerge intact. A mere 20 years after the Velvet Revolution, Prague is prosperous, authentically restored, and as choked with tourist tschotkes shops as Venice, which has a 500-year or so lead on inserting a swift and skillful hand between the visitor and her wallet. Capitalism works. Unlike Venice, Prague has not been turned into a theme park, and it's easy to poke through the tourist facade to get a sense of how people live—and why they choose to live in this uniquely beautiful and cosmopolitan city.

The view from our hotel room...
There's lots more, but the ( only) downside of staying in a 18th-Century building with foot-thick walls is glacially-paced Wi-Fi; it's taken 15 minutes to upload each of these pictures. Yeah, it's tough. And fabulous. We're off for some pig knuckle, or maybe cassoulet, or sushi, or gnocchi. Definitely some slivovice, a new vice. And then to bed, and then on to the Czech countryside.

Wed. Rot. on Thursday: Scavengers, Predators and Pests

This saucy fellow hangs out at a lobster pound in Southwest Harbor, Maine, hustling handouts. Scavenger, predator or pest?

When in Memphis, we spend our Sunday mornings at Flying Fish: 2 dozen gulf oysters, a bottle of Pinot Grigio and the NYT. These aren't Marin Miyagis, but they're very tasty with green Tabasco. Preachers in general: scavengers, predators or pests?

Middle-aged guru wannabe attempting to co-opt your 10-year-old: scavenger, predator or pest? All three.

Families who eat bottom-feeders by the bushel: definitely scavengers. Here we are at Jessica and Johns place in San Francisco, after a feast of blue crab, a perverse preference in Dungeness country.

Murphy is famous because of this picture. No, it's not Photoshop'ed; he cornered the mouse on an amaryllis bud—a predator taking out a pest. Since it falls to me to clean up the remains, I guess that makes me the scavenger.

The most challenging scavenge ever: this was behind the refrigerator, waiting for me when I got back from vacation this week. Thanks, Murphy. Heads up if you click to enlarge: it's truly disgusting. Those little white things? Maggots. Who knew they could move so fast?

Some rats are neither pest, predator or scavenger. Manny the Rat here accompanied us on our cross-country journey when we were briefly exiled to Baltimore.

Here he is at Crater Lake, in Oregon...

...and enjoying some river or another in Idaho. This was in Manny's prime.

Alas, Manny is the latest rodent casualty, quietly going to pieces at the ripe old age of 10. Plus you can see he's got osteoporosis. We'll lay him to rest when Answer gets home.

Deer o' the Week: definitely pest.

And the Sheep of the Week, from the collection. This one is large, and lives on top of a bookcase.

Plus bonus collectible: a spawn of Manny. This one lives in front of our house in Marin County.

Postscript:

 

Murphy's catch of the day, discovered just after posting. He's an Alpha predator who can be deceptively endearing:

 

Does he look like a serial killer?

#

Wednesday Rotogravure: Fruits de Mer in Maine

Yum! Steamer clams in Maine. You have to unsheathe the probiscus-like thingie before eating, kind of fun in a weird way. Clams are just a warm-up to the ubiquitous and sublimely delicious Maine lobster, which is the foodstuff featured everywhere from roadside stands to 4-star restaurants.

The purest lobster dining experience is to be had at lobster pounds, no-frills sheds with holding tanks pumping saltwater directly from the harbor to keep the freshly-caught lobsters comfortable and perhaps under the impression that life as they know it might still go on.

You mark one or two for your dinner, they get weighed...

Then dumped into a numbered rope-net bag and lowered into a communal cauldron. The lobster guys call your number when yours is deemed done,give the shells a crack and hand you a paper plate piled with the crustacean that launched a million tourist tschotkes. You eat your lobster on picnic tables out back.

 

Long ago, the civic leaders of Maine must've gotten together to set incredibly high standards of authentic adorableness for the little fishing-and-tourism communities scattered like rough gems along the rocky coast.

Even trailer parks—the fabulous summer "cottages" near Bar Harbor and privately-owned islands in Penobscot Bay notwithstanding, there is real poverty in Maine—have great views.

No poverty here: cunning wee boats sailed by children, nascent yachtspersons in a lilliputian regatta.

The view from up there: this is the top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, near Bar Harbor. This is more or less the view that Martha Stewart has from her exhaustively photographed Skylands estate, which is nearby. There really was a Cadillac person, a French explorer (and poseur) who added a "de la" to his name upon arriving in the new world circa 1688. For a while he owned Mount Desert, then headed west to found Detroit.

Even the cows in Maine are art-directed and picturesque. This is a Belted Galway, standing near Thomaston, where Answerjack lived in the mid-70s.

This is the house, built in the 1800s, that is the source code for Answer's programming to rescue and restore old houses at hideous expense, then move on just as they become liveable.This one looks like it's held up pretty well since he left 30 years ago.

This is a sick plant, but lovely in the rain.

And a seagull, maybe on his way to yet another lobster pound, which is where we're headed for dinner, just as soon as I hit the "post" button."

The Art of the Feel

Playmobil Security Check Point
Isn't this a delightful toy? I wish I could take credit for conjuring it up in Photoshop but it's the real deal, manufactured by Playmobil and obtainable online and at brick-and-mortar toy stores. It's, you know, educational, intended to help our youngest denizens of a police state travelers learn about the ways of the real world. Adorable as it is, I'm afraid it falls a bit short of the mark as a tool to prepare the little ones for the excitement of airport security. What is wrong with this picture, boys and girls?

Well, our androgynous traveler is about to be taken into the custody of Homeland Security, just as I am every time I go through the metal detector. In my (recurring!) case, it's because the big hunk o' titanium where my left knee used to be sets off alarms in American screening machines. Little plastic Pat here is in trouble because of failure to remove shoes, jacket and scarf, despite instructive signs, TV monitors and the example of fellow travelers in that long, long line leading to the security checkpoint. Also, Pat's not holding a boarding pass. Oh-oh! The TSA person is going to have to make a judgement call about whether to shout out "female assist" or "male assist" for Pat's special screening. And we're a bit concerned about that scarf. Could it perhaps be a keffiyeh? Pat does have very dark hair.
OK, female assist. While we're waiting (and waiting!) for the TSA lady, we'll put Pat in a little booth of bullet-proof glass so she can watch her carry-on as it trundles out of the x-ray box. Don't take your eyes off your stuff, Pat! If someone else grabs it, you won't be able to do much about it because you are now In Custody, and if you try to bust out of that little booth you will be in Big Trouble.

When the TSA lady unlocks the door, Pat should look her in the eye and ask her firmly to take the suitcase off the conveyor and put it where Pat can see it during her screening. No, Pat, no! You can't touch your belongings! Not until you've removed the offending articles of clothing and been wanded front, back, and between your legs. Also, TSA needs to feel your breasts, insert a gloved hand between your navel and the snap on your jeans and compel you assume various stylized modern-dance positions. Ready?
As a frequent flyer with an alarm-activating fake body part, I'm in a position to offer useful airport security tips to Pat and other occasional travelers. I've been felt up by security personnel across the US, in Europe and in Asia. My favorite feel, hands down (as it were), is by black security women anywhere. In my experience, they are friendly, matter-of-fact about the intrusive aspects of their jobs and vocally appreciative of a smacked-down stick-straight 'do like mine. TSA personnel in the heartland of the US tend to be so goldurn nice it's easy to ignore the fact that one is running her hands up your thighs; at MSP a TSA lady gave me a genuinely sympathetic Fargo-esque "Aw, Jeeze"  when I was explaining about my gimpy knee.
Pat should be prepared for some pretty tough questioning if she connects through Germany: "And why were you in Italy? Yes, and what was your favorite painting at the Uffizi? Who was in your room with you when you packed your bag? What was your favorite painting at the Uffizi? Why were you in Italy?" The Teutonic feel-up itself is thorough, dour and dead silent.
Listen, Pat: if you're traveling with a husband-type, get a couple of things settled in advance. Make him promise to back you up if approached by a guy with a gun (Answerjack once challenged me when I told an armed National Guardsman at Newark, one week post 9/11, that I was born in Chicago; he mis-heard and thought I was being asked my destination, which was SFO). In a related vein, get him to agree not to insult anyone with a badge and a weapon; as foppish as those carabinieri look in their powder-blue caped uniforms, their Uzi are real, as we found out when Answer called one an asshole under his breath at Fiumicino. Consider traveling alone, Pat.
Make sure that you're OK exposing to the world whatever you've got under your jacket; no filmy camisoles unless you've embraced your inner exhibitionist and are not prone to goosebumps.  And for god's sake don't engage in chitchat about the safest part of the plane, particularly if you are a person of color.
I, for one, am keen to find a Playmobil Guantanamo play set for hands-on learning about another aspect of Homeland Security. I'd pop for rendition action figures, too. Until then, we'll have to augment our Security Checkpoint learning center with this educational toy:

Hey, a traffic cop with a radar gun and a sidearm! Don't speed on your way to the airport, Pat. And really, I'd re-think that keffiyeh. Have a good trip!

Bicoastal Bigotry

I live in the heart of a famously liberal county just north of San Francisco, but because I have an ailing mother in Florida and a husband who consults in Memphis, I've spent most of the past month in the South. It's been an interesting spot to ride out the electoral upheavals that have re-shaped the nation’s socio political landscape. The cultural divide between the Left Coast and the New South, once very wide, now seems much slimmer in ways that are good, bad, and flat-out ugly.
The good: Florida—comedian Rush Limbaugh's home state, bristling with McCain/Palin signs and bustling with pickup trucks bearing state-sponsored anti-reproductive-rights license plates—was carried by Barack Hussein Obama. The bad: back home in California—you know, that bastion of secular humanism and laissez-faire tolerance—The Church of Latter-Day Saints successfully re-cast a key state proposition to align with the Mormon agenda, and convinced the electorate to deny constitutional rights to a minority population.
 Now the ugly: in suburban Memphis, I was party to a casual display of racism so naked and extreme that even after hearing the phrase twice I had to Google it to believe it.
Answerjack was buying a used computer, dirt cheap, from a real-estate broker/substitute teacher who had bright burgundy hair and a shiny Christian cross around her neck. She met us at the door of her house, a tschotke-and-fake-foliage preserve steeped in the reek of cigarette smoke and plug-in air fresheners, and started yammering the instant we stepped over the threshold.
One of the hazards of Answer’s line of work is the sort of perfect stranger who feels compelled to Tell All about her or his experience in The Hospital. This good old gal was definitely that sort of stranger. She regaled us with the tiresome details of her inpatient detox from a 300-pill-a-month Xanax habit (“Doctors got me addicted”) as Jack disconnected the computer and I wrote her a check. As we inched toward the door, this sharp little pebble bounced out of the avalanche of verbiage: "weekends at the detox center were the absolute worst, because of all the jungle bunnies."
 “That’s odd,” I thought. “Didn’t 'jungle bunny 'used to be a racial pejorative?” In the context of her rant, I figured it was some unfortunately named drug reference. Then, incredibly, she said it again. There could be no mistaking that she was referring to humans, not pharmaceuticals.
Answerjack and I traded stupid white people looks. “Hey, you’re the one who’s been working in the New South,” my puzzled frown said to him. “In 2008, does anyone here really say words like ‘jungle bunny’ and mean it?”
“What the fuck?” answered Jack's stricken stare, quite clearly. We left in a hurry without smiting the stupid bitch, which I deeply regret. In the car I pulled out my iPhone and Googled the words, just to make sure their meaning hadn’t changed in the 50 years since I’d last heard them, on a grade-school playground. Yep, only one meaning.
My thought then was that the woman’s crude bigotry had to be some regional by-product of the notoriously unstable mix of religion and ignorance that we Left Coast types like to think is confined to the historically benighted South. Then I came home—to freakin’ California, people—and stepped into a state-scaled illustration of exactly the same sort of intolerance that I had found so horrifying in one dumb cracker a couple days before. In 2008, does anyone here really listen to words like “faggot” and "dyke" and vote in support of discrimination? Apparently, in 42 of California’s 58 counties, they do.
 
Here Phyllis Lyon, 84, and Del Martin, 87, gay rights pioneers and partners for nearly 60 years, threaten of the sanctity of marriage at their wedding in June 2008. Del died a couple of months later. If proponents of Proposition 8 have their way, this marriage, along with an additional 18,000+ marriages performed in California, would be rendered null and void. You can sign this petition if you think that's wrong.

We All Shall be Received at Graceland

What with the incredible revenue stream gushing out of Graceland, wouldn’t you think The King’s estate could’ve popped for burying those power lines?
For reasons I cannot explain, some part of me  wanted to see Graceland, and I strong-armed Answerjack into going there last weekend while we were in Memphis. You don’t have to be an Elvis fan to appreciate a pilgrimage to Graceland for the amazing cultural phenomenon that it is, although fanhood probably helps mitigate the “ick” factor of the site’s more baroque excesses. Graceland is often described as looking like a bordello, and that is indeed the strident top note sounded as you walk through the door. But in its entirety, the tour mellows into something deeper that the sum total of its irretrievably garish parts, and ultimately Graceland seems a mildly melancholic monument to a not over-bright guy  with truly terrible taste who was consumed by the Zeitgeist and now,  31 years after his death, is unable to take a day off.
It’s also a monument to a very clever woman’s excellent stewardship of the assets of her daughter, Elvis’ only child and heir. When the annual upkeep on the 28-room, 14-acre complex drained little Lisa Marie’s inheritance to single-digit millions, mom Priscilla harvested cash from the ready pool of pilgrims already milling about the mansion gates by opening Graceland to the public. Today it’s a national monument, and Lisa Marie is a very rich woman, although perhaps also not over-bright: she married Michael Jackson.

I was on a contrarian toot to locate some pocket of decent taste in Graceland, and this, on Elvis' dining room table, is about as good as it gets. It’s a nice classic mid-century monogrammed martini pitcher that I’d be delighted to find at a yard sale, even though I prefer my pear martinis shaken, not stirred. This is probably a good time to mention the uncommon number of built-in bars throughout the house. Oddly, not so many loos, at least not in the sections open to the public, an unfortunate oversight in a party house filled with wall-to-wall carpeting.

Graceland is a de riguer stop on the footsteps-of-de-Tocqueville tour for European intellectuals; just ask Bernard-Henri Lévy. It's a big mistake, though, to try to extrapolate from Graceland any insights into the American collective subconscious—it exists in its own peculiar universe, and Elvis worship is hardly confined to the U.S.

Case in point: Look closely at what Tamami (pale yellow kimono) is carrying in her right hand on the way  to the temple for Ravi and Megumi's wedding in Osaka last April.

"I've a reason to believe
We all will be received
In Graceland—" Paul Simon

Japan: Messengers of the Gods

Divine messenger at ease. He knows he's cool.
The beautiful, ancient city of Nara is chockablock with Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, and famously mercenary deer. Camera-ready attractions are conveniently clustered inside Nara Park, which is ruled with an iron hoof by a cartel of deer that has successfully leveraged the legend of one of their own bearing the god of a local shrine on its back into an entitlement  program that gives them the run of the place in perpetuity.
Signs warn that Nara deer can be bossy, and they are. Each year their pointy little horns are ceremonially sawn off and the stumps blunted to nubbins to prevent them from inflicting serious damage on sightseers. Enjoying protected status as messengers of the gods, they are free to work the crowds, aggressively soliciting shika-senbei (deer crackers) sold at stands throughout the park and terrorizing small children. Here the herd skillfully separates a little girl from her mother to shake her down for whatever she's got in her Hello Kitty purse. She's about to scream, but she's not going to bleed.
It's worth running the deer gauntlet to get to the treasures of Nara, which include the Daibutsu, the largest of Japan's large Buddha statues, appropriately housed in the world's largest wooden building—the Chinese-inflected Daibutsu-den, an architectural marvel whose vast dim interior is scented by the sillage of 1300 years worth of incense. The Kasuga Taisha Shinto shrine at the far end of the park is reached through a primeval pine forest so deep and dense that all sound is absorbed, and walking there becomes an act of silent meditation. Surrounding these major foci of worship are dozens of minor shrines and temples consecrated to various deities and spirits. Being in Nara is like visiting St.Peter's—you don't have to be a believer to be moved by what is evidenced there; you just have to believe in belief.

Answerjack and I are equal opportunity respecters. We light candles in cathedrals and touch the foot of Saint Peter in Rome. Jack's kissed the Wailing Wall, and we leave chocolate and whiskey at Marie Leveau's crypt in New Orleans. In Nara, we paid our respects to the Buddha and the kami with offerings of incense and yen. At a small shrine near Kasuga Taisha, our guide wrote the characters representing our deepest personal wish on an ema and we hung it on the shrine's fence, bowing in accordance to custom. We really meant it.

It would make such a heartwarming story if we had found a house immediately upon our return to the States. Not. In fact, the batch of newly listed houses that I stumbled through in a haze of jet lag and dismay constituted a nadir of sorts, the sorriest assortment of greed-driven failed flips, REOs and down-market staging yet. It is a measure of my despair that when I saw on Craig's List that an acquaintance was renting out guest quarters in the lower level of her house in the Bay Area, I was seriously tempted to give her a call, even though I know for certain that she is barking mad: the idea of moving there during what was shaping up to be an interminable  house hunt seemed, briefly, to be an improvement over making the 300-mile round trip schlep from the foothills every 4-5 days. The moment passed, thank heavens, and we found our house a week later.

  

Japan: The Things We Ate for Dinner

This is spiny lobster, one of the minority of foodstuffs that we could reliably identify. Yum!
The short answer to what we had for dinner is mostly, "Who knows?" We often had an imprecise grasp of what we were eating and were frequently floored when we figured out/were told what, exactly, we held quivering at the ends of our chopsticks. We were occasionally overwhelmed but never bored. Food in Japan is fantastic.

Japan's highly evolved culinary ecosystem is a reflection of  Japanese culture, where ancient traditions are endlessly refined, foreign influences are explored and adapted, and the constant interplay between ritual and re-invention produces some interesting dichotomies. Traditional or Western-inflected, everything on your plate is most likely fresh, prepared with thought and attention, and beautifully presented. Nothing is ever just plopped on a plate or splashed into a bowl.  Everything is worth at least a taste.

Here are a couple 0f bowls of udon, inexpensive prole food ordered at the height of the noon rush at a soba shop in a Tokyo neighborhood of skyscrapers and business hotels.  It tastes as good as it looks. Iterations of udon are endless and vary from region to region, but no matter what kind you order, protocol requires that the noodles be noisily—but not messily—slurped. This is the version I like best: there's a hard-boiled egg in there, along with seaweed and some unknowable and artfully carved roots, swimming in a light miso base.

Another lunch, another  neighborhood:  Answerjack is about to tuck into a bowl of sea snails at a tiny traditional Tokyo sushi shop. They have a powerfully chewy mouth feel and taste of the deep sea. Eating a bowlful is a commitment of time and a test of jaw strength.

This stack of crunchy, raw brine shrimp was pulled off the conveyor belt of dishes produced by the sushi chefs at the same place, just after a fellow diner politely prevented Answer from making a dipping paste from the green powder in front of us at the counter—it wasn't wasabi as we'd assumed, but matcha. Unlike some of the restaurants where we ate, this one had an at least partially translated menu: see the "DORINKS" listing under the plate?
I'll mention again that we ate fugu as a segue into the politically incorrect  portion of this post. No excuses for what's coming up: we knew what we were doing, having hired a guide through Bespoke Tokyo and requested an excursion to restaurants serving dishes we were not likely to find in the U.S. or Europe.

This is our  first stop, a restaurant in an alleyway in Tokyo's Shibuya neighborhood. This is definitely a no-translations-or-pictures-on-the-menu kind of place, but even for those who can't read Japanese, the  sign signals the specialties.  The name of the restaurant is "Octopus and Whale," and that's what is served.

First course: whale sashimi, mixed with red miso and served with daikon. That's Akiko, our quadra-lingual (Japanese, English, Flemish, Dutch) guide in the background, and some artisanal shocho in the midground.

The second  course: thin slices of octopus (a long-time favorite) and smoky whale bacon (there's a stray leek there, too) that you char tableside over a charcoal brazier; it's served with a couple of dipping sauces, one soy-based and savory, the other slightly sweet with flecks of red pepper. Shabu shabu comes next, with more whale (tongue and other bits, surprisingly and attractively pink), this time simmered in a pan placed over the burner to the right of the brazier. Shabu shabu is the dish that prompted Bill Murray's character in Lost in Translation to ask wryly: "What kind of restaurant makes you cook your own food?"

Bill, think about what it might mean in Japan to not cook your own food. This is the main course at the next restaurant,  another off-the-tourist-grid no-English-spoken joint, coincidentally across the street from the outer wall of the Olympic Village, which in its previous incarnation was the Washington Heights military base where Answerjack lived as a child. The restaurant's logo is a stylized horse in full gallop. He's running for his life.

This artful display of rumor-thin slices of scarlet-hued  meat is a tour of equine anatomy: our hostess explains which cuts come from where, and Akiko translates. Tonight we're sampling the neck, the rump, the flank and a bit of the noble beast's heart. The translucent, shell-pink slices on the plate above are pure fat, from the neck; while the entire spread of horse sashimi is a great delicacy,  horse fat is considered a particular treat, loaded with collagen, which we are informed exempts it from the rules governing the health risks of indulging in other fatty foodstuffs like lardo and blubber. Nothing on the table is cooked:  horse is eaten raw, served with an array of sharp and salty condiments to contrast with the meat's slightly sweet flavor: grated radish, shiso leaf, incendiary mustard, potent aged tamari. It is, as you'd expect, very lean and chewy, and it definitely satisfies our mandate for food we are unlikely to encounter in the United States or western Europe. It's also quite filling, what with the chewing workout, and so we decide to skip the next stop, live sushi, and proceed directly to a bar & art gallery that provided one of those exquisite moments of  simultaneous yeah-OK-I-know this/no-this-is-sui-generis moments that provide some of  the keenest pleasures of traveling.

Ohana Gallery  in Shibuya-ku Tokyo shares both concept and make up of core constituency with the  Hotel Biron in San Francisco's Hayes Valley.  Answerjack and I were married at the Biron; our children have various ongoing forms of commitment to the wine bar and the owners' other businesses; and we  love the owners, whom we consider members of the extended family. We settled in at Ohana with the house specialty of hand-brewed plum sake, and it felt a little like home. By tacit agreement we spared Akiko our observation that the bar also felt a little like the Russian Vodka Room (great house-infused spirits, but no art) on 52nd Street in New York, where on an appropriately icy night one February we witnessed an altercation between Town Car drivers that left  blood on the sidewalk but ended with all parties tossing back shots inside. On this mild  April night, with a steady downpour  releasing the scent of  sakura blossoms everywhere we went, we raised our glasses to toast the ways in which so many of life's experiences reference each other, however tangentially, and to the incredible good fortune of being well-fed, slightly hammered and very content in one of the world's great cities.