jidohanbaiki

convenience is everywhere in japan.  one can find virtually everything one needs within a short walking distance.  among these tools of convenience are the jidohanbaiki--a.k.a. vending machine.  usually found in multiples with dangling signs to catch your eye, this gem was straight-away outside of my door in a recent hotel.  so i could slip out of my room in robe and slippers, clink-clink a couple of coins, and relish the beverage of my election.

you can find a good number of other goods in such convenient machines on streets, alleys, and public corners.  sure, you can find a necktie!  or some pepperoni slices!  or a flower bouquet!  never fear, the judohanbaiki is here.

odango wa...anata o aishite imasu.

is it possible to love a food?  i mean, really love a food.  if that is the case, i'd say that i've re-ignited my old love affair with a shapely japanese morsel called dango.

plump round balls of gooey rice flour, grilled to perfection whilst lined up snug on a bamboo skewer.
laden in a sweet-savory sauce of sugar-soy.  it is light, it is joy, it is delicious.  nice to see you, old friend dango.

japan trip, visiting renewable and sustainable industries

received award from rotary international to spend four weeks in japan. will be meeting with a number of individuals within the renewable industries. sharing information on technologies, programs, and regulatory from the u.s. and vice versa. below are the cities that we will be touring.
View Larger Map after the exchange, i'll be headed down to southern japan, where we used to live. spend some time catching up with old friends and do some scuba diving while down there.

camping season

with the green season upon us, it is time to take inventory of the camping gear. rekindling with old friends: the self-inflatable air mat, stuff sacks of various sizes and colors, a cook kit with pans that conveniently fit inside one another like a russian doll, and then there are the remorseful woes that you suddenly recall and damn yourself for not remedying from the year before...


more specifically, i am now reminded of a camp stove problem that i was unable to fully troubleshoot late last fall. upon seeing the carbon-scored little widget with valves and hoses, i recollect a frustrated morning that camp coffee was unable to be made and a mere sputtering of fuel would intermittently cough out of the jets. obviously a clog in the fuel line or the like.

i monkeyed with the fuel line and disassembled the chassis of the stove to fully clean the gentle beast. reassembly happened, but fire did not.

now here it is spring camping season once again and i am going to give it another go on getting the stove up and running. let's see what happens...

goto-shi, nagasaki, japan looking for change?

in '02-'03, a. and i lived in goto-shi, japan. a beautiful, rural archipelago located in southern japan, situated a 4-hour ferry ride from the mainland and close to south korea.

the two of us made up 25% of the foreign population.

as one can imagine, this experience was very revealing, humbling, awe-inspiring, and life-changing.

our apartment was located 1/4 mile from the modest downtown of a city of 25,000. it was a 10-minute bike ride to the west to hit the green mountains and a 10-minute bike ride to the southeast to a secluded sandy beach for a sea of japan reprieve.

the island we lived on, goto-jima, also hosted ironman japanif you are training and looking for a good challenge, i'd highly suggest it.

catching up on some of their current local happenings, i couldn't help but notice a similarity in their city flag to another iconographic symbol we have come to know...



hmmm...

west coast field trip

 

5.5 hours in berkeley, california equates to a vegan escapade! breakfast from herbivore is pictured here. soysage biscuit, homefries, and a tasty side salad. deelish.

then came a bag of organic vegan donuts--honestly they were sub-par.

fine vegan gelato in the flavors of blood orange and bosc pear. delightful.

we finished off by visiting sarah kramer's fav vegan resta, cha-ya, which serves up all vegan japanese fair. quite a treat.

all in all, i accomplished the goal of tasting the local eats and acquiring a bit of a stomach ache from belly expansion.

berkeley has some fine haunts for the vegan-inclined.

voodoo vegan donuts

went to portland last weekend. had a good visit with all. it was fantastic to be back in the grey and wet with the old friends.

nhut quang vegan vietnamese restaurant was a belly-stuffer, a trip to food fight vegan grocery, and major highlight was a midnight trip to voodoo donuts in downtown pdx.

we scored 3.5 dozen vegan donuts from the a.m. baking cycle for a mere $7. smiles and sugar comas punctuated the remainder of the trip.

patchouliland

after a 4-day reprieve back in ol' b'more, we're back on the bus to mork & mindy-ville. we headed back east for a wedding, of which we enjoyed last night. spent some good quality time with the fam and caught up with a battery of old friends via vegan eats, coffee, & a wee bit of booze.

it perplexes me, the mental playground of revisiting shadows of your past.

stepping in the footsteps of your yesterday, reflecting on your own evolutionary path. in several respects, it is fascinating to feel the brunt of this confounding time-space derailment.

it had been well over a calendar year since returning to md. after a few hours, the synapses began to fire in the correct order, yet i stood beside myself in awe of how we are so easily swayed by life experiences to dictate our reality.

in this trip, i heard echoes of remembrances--so-and-so were robbed yesterday, such-and-such burnt down, this-and-that closed down...yet, these understandings of a reality, not necessarily my own in the current, are what have my mind skipping on the poorly articulated confounding plerplexion leading this post. it is concerning, yet fascinating how we adapt to different situations and accept them as reality--which can be drastic extremes of good and bad. i stumble on a memory of our old neighborhood in b'more occasionally--we were out for a stroll two blocks from our house one friday night. across the street was a cop talking to a guy slumped on a bus stop bench clutching his bleeding left shoulder. turns out he had been stabbed and they were getting a report as the minutes ticked closer to an ambulance arriving. we were curious, yet shrugged the man's injuries off and kept walking to our destination.

sure, what can you really do, you may ask. same city, two of our friends were inside their house watching a dvd. a series of gun shots punctuates their evening from outside of their home, followed by desperate cries for help. after a peek out the window, they go back to watching the movie.

how is it possible we can do this? it is survival, in many ways. evolution and acceptance, with a sprig of apathy and dash of nonchalant desensitization. in the same way I observed and associated spent junkies in my back yard as simply factors of my mundanity, i now see countless strips of bicycle lanes, soy lattes, and wafts of patchouli mildly interrupting my focused thoughts.

bus blogging

on the express bus headed south, despite nearing rush hour on a friday, traffic is modest.
busses are interesting public places. you can get a stong sense of your community demographic, the clothes that people wear, the language (or lack thereof) that we use, the way they interact & how group dynamic is altered due to the presence of certain personalities present, et cetera, et cetera.
on this particular bus, there are a wide range of ages present. no one is talking, yet a number of people are communicating--in similar fashion to this. the air is too cold for everyone. the lurching bus-sashay of the shifting gears and hard breaking stops is pronounced even further by the giant frame's response to the wear in the roadway.
ding. it's my stop.

japan

although our time in japan seems so surreal and unreal within itself. we continue to talk about our adventures on a regular basis. the year that we spent exploring the islands, cities, rich culture, and customs of such a beautiful place stands as such an amazing experience in our lives. we're so glad that we took the plunge and ventured off to the far east. the perspective we gained helps to propel us forward each and every day. the friends we met there are friends for life.

one of those life friends is deven, who has now recessitated his old web 1.0 blog that featured a sub-page that i put together and this story that i wrote about one sunday that we played in the sea of japan (or east china sea, depending on your political persuasion).

shee-kag-go

we went to chicago earlier this month and had a wonderful visit with my cousin jason. we dined out at the fantastic chicago diner, with the tag line "meat free since '83." soy milk shakes to drool over in your dreams.

we also went up to milwaukee to see auntie jill and stayed with her for the night. she has a beautiful bungalow house on the north end of town. it was so good to be with them again, we always have a good time.

interestingly enough, a. and i were taken aback by the humanness of everyone in chicago and milwaukee. random people talked with each other and not in a disingenuous way. this is a stark contrast to the gritty eff-off attitudes of the mid-atlantic region where you really don't engage into conversation with random folk. this was a breath of fresh air to see people smiling in public and fraternizing with one another.

to rate the chicago diner, i would say that the dagwood club and chocolate chip cookie dough milkshake i had was a definite 8.9/10 and these lovely little biscuits and tempeh gravy, soysage, and tofu scramble (with sunflower seeds) were holding a strong flight pattern at 9.2/10. yummy in my tummy!

good asian food store in philly

the 1st oriental supermarket just south of the italian market in philly is fantastic. mock meat galore for the junk-food vegan. and a clamorous selection of cookwares to stumble over with your eyes and feet.their hit counter seems to be inactive, unless it is their way of making you feel special, "you're #1, baby."

vegan scone

in a feeble attempt to finish up the manhattan vegan eat-out saga, i bring you this tasty and filling scone...
purchased from a small vendor with other assorted baked goods at the union square farmer's market, this flakey cranberry pastry was a fine complement to a day of wandering the streets. i tucked the hearty lump of dough in my bag and nearly forgot about it until unpacking at the hotel, where i perched upon the edge of my bed savoring each morsel and gazing down at the times square orderly chaos below.

what to say of this random baker's scone? not too heavy as scones tend to be, not too sweet as some make the mistake of, but a nice balance of all weighing factors. 8.5/10

coffee and a snack in the west village

i stopped and had a cup of mud coffee, which was rich and flavorful, but not as thick as i would have anticipated from a tag-line like "mud." and then this little jewel at 'snice cafe.

a gigantic chocolate peanut butter creme sandwich cookie. oh, joy! although the cookie may have been a day past its prime, it resembled a huge homemade oreo cookie that harbored a hint of peanut butter. it's slight staleness complemented the afternoon coffee quite well, as i sat outside on a dilapidated bench at a small corner park perched off of 8th avenue in greenwich village. a nice humble-bumblers mid-afternoon snack for this sugar fiend. mud coffee: 8.0/10; choc. pb sandwich cookie: 7.4/10 (fresh would certainly earn somewhere in the mid-eight range).

crap lunch at zen palate in union square

this dish, called "rose petals," was described as "soy crepes with wolfberry seeds and vegetables in sweet rice ginger sauce, with taro spring rolls and brown & red rice."

soy crepes, i thought, giddyup! then they brought me this dissapointing dish...

the soy crepes were nothing more than unflavored yuba skins that appeared to have been boiled in water, then pan-fried in oil and placed atop a spare portion of steamed veg, set aside a scoop of mixed, gluey rice. now it was the lunch hour and they sat me near the door that wafted in cold air every few seconds as someone entered or left, not a big deal, but i wore my coat for the entire meal. this didn't piss me off as much as the inane banter that the two hostesses at the desk were swatting back and forth. at one point they were digging in their drawers and showing eachother what underwear they wore today. eff this place.

shall i continue the rant further? so i ordered a hot green tea, right. this is a modestly-upscale asian place, right? the waiter brought out a ceramic cup filled with hot water and a green tea bag resting on the saucer. call me a bitch-snob, but double-eff off. $1.75 for a tea bag and it isn't even made tea-bag proper (pour the hot h2o over the teabag). ugh.

the ginger sauce was basically a tangy corn syrup thinned out, but the taro spring rolls were contrastingly good to the rest of this meal. it could have been what i ordered, but i'd have to say i'll never give zen palate in union square another glance. keep walking. rating: 4.2/10.

two of three, and three of three

here we are with the post buffalo wing treat at the vegan bakery, babycakes. i picked up a ginger cookie that was quite good, but i could have made at home, and this chocolate iced chocolate cupcake top.
now, let me tell you something. they did something magical with this frosting that i have yet to place exactly how it was created. it was a thick, fudgey dollop of cocoa goodness that maintained a rich integrity with not too much tooth decaying sugar to falsely confuse the taste buds. it was pure blissful chocolate atop a light, fluffy and fresh cupcake top. vegan baking can be a bit oily at times, but this was anything but. i give it babycakes a 9.5/10 for these decadent treats.

onto one of my usual manhattan haunts, teany.co-owned by musician moby, the real thing to get on the menu is the vegan cheesecake. again, an otherworldly dessert creation in the big apple. this thing has the flavor so right-on, its almost scary. the texture is consistent and moist and sticks to your fork in only the way that cheesecake can. i ordered a teanychino on the side to help wash down the 4-berry slice. teany offers a chill environment that on a wednesday night, i was able to sit back and relish in a bite of my cake every few minutes while leafing through a strange magazine about appalacia.

after this 9.2/10 second helping of dessert, i decided to walk from the lower east side back up to my hotel in midtown. the walk took a hair over three hours and i got back to the hotel at 11:50pm, listened to some music and crashed. walking a city, in my opinion, is the only way to get to know it.

vegan roadshow

i spent most of last week in new york for work. i managed to hit the streets and wander into a good number of pre-mapped out vegan haunts. overall, i filled my craving for decadent delights with a soy-smacked smile upon my face.

over the next few posts, i will showcase the savory (and semi-savory) morsels with an attempt at an accurate review of each dish.

the burrito above was found around the corner from the office in a little joint called the burrito box. it was filled with grilled seitan, pinto beans, brown rice, pico, and lettuce tucked into a whole wheat shell. their hot sauce to ladel atop the handheld was medocre, not quite the burn that i seek. the girth of it had me nodding in awe and approval for the sub-six dollar price tag (nyc mind you).

the seitan was a nice treat. i prefer black beans to pinto, but the beans were subtly kissed with the right blend of seasoning. overall, i would give it a 8.3/10 points. if in the neighborhood, i'd frequent the place once every two weeks for lunch, but i wouldn't go too far out of my way for this one.