Laos. Wen and I had wanted to go for ages as we’d heard nothing but great things about it. Now we’ve been. Read on.
1.
Our plane has touched down and is slowly taxiing to the gate. The pilot won’t be rushed as this is Laos and the next incoming flight is at least an hour away. And the gate is really just a parking stall where you walk to the terminal.
The other reason he’s going slow is someone probably needs time to wake everyone in the airport up. I can picture a harried air traffic controller who has been rudely jerked from sleep by the expected arrival of our plane and is now scurrying down to a boiler room and turning a massive crank to wind up the airport experience.
In Ottawa, the airport greets you with ads for high tech and defense companies. In New York, banks and software companies vie for your attention the moment you deplane.
In Vientiane – the capital of Laos – the first ad you see is for the local beer. The second ad is also for said beer. The third ad is for a cellphone company. And then you’re in customs, where, if you’re a Canadian it bafflingly costs $7 more to get a visa than for any other country’s citizens.
The whole visa process, which, with its four person, three step process that seems geared more towards full employment than border security, is a gentle introduction to the fact that Laos is a technically communist but really just autocratic state.
Don’t let the “Democratic” in “Laos Popular Democratic Republic” fool you. There’s one party. Above it is a politburo that reserve the right to issue binding decrees and it’s headed by a brigadier general (some customs officers grimly wear pins with his image).
This explains some of the subtle differences you’ll find in Laos versus almost every other country in the world. For example, there’s immigration control on domestic flights and the streets are routinely cleared for police-escorted motorcades of 30-something bureaucrats.
2.
We immediately flew to Luang Prabang. We bought our ticket in the airport and it included an escorted walk from the international terminal to the open-air concrete bunker that masquerades as the domestic terminal.
The flight to Luang Prabang reminds you that Laos is the poor child of Southeast Asia. Shortly after takeoff you notice that there are almost no paved roads on the outskirts of Vientiane, save the ‘highways’.
As you pass over Laos’ beautiful mountains, you’ll see countless notches cut in the landscape. 80% of the population is subsistence farmers and they routinely burn the rainforest to clear fields. With a rapidly growing population (up by 1/3 to 6.2 million in the past 15 years), their grandkids are not going to be able to live this way.
After a couple of stomach churning and neck bending turns (I think Mas Wings pilots train in Laos) you’re on the ground and in arguably the prettiest city in Southeast Asia.
Luang Prabang sits at the intersection of the Mekong an Nam Khan rivers. Historically it was the capital of one of the three Lao kingdoms. In the 19th century the French forcefully united them and added the ’s’ to the country’s name. (Despite what my sixth grade geography teacher insisted, it’s pronounced ‘l-ow’, not ‘lay-os’.)
Since it was a capital, there’s an old royal palace. It contains a litany of old buddhas, royal detritus and gifts from foreign dignitaries. Their Asian neighbours gave carvings and silver goods; the U.S. gave pens, radios and a scale replica of the Apollo Lander.
There are no photos allowed because it is a royal palace and no mere layman can photograph royal goods. This rule extends to the royal cars.
In their garage, a set of aging Lincoln Continentals and even an Edsel and a rotting Citroën sit stoically awaiting royal return. The mere act of painting them white and having the king ride in them has turned them into treasures that can only be captured by official cameramen.
The odd thing about all of this show of respect to the royal family is that they ultimately got no respect from their countrymen. The war in Vietnam spilled into Laos (the Ho Chi Minh trail was mostly in Laos) with America dropping more bombs on Laos than were dropped in all of World War II (there are over 8 million unexploded bombs in the country-more than one per person) and fomenting a good old civil war.
The royal family was split in the civil war bit ultimately they all lost and the communists won. The king died in captivity and there hasn’t been a royal family since the 1970.
You wouldn’t know this from the fealty shown to the king at the palace. You also wouldn’t know it because there’s not a single sign anywhere in the museum that explains the history of the country. Nor can you ever get a Laotian to explain their country’s history. They just smile and say something like “as you know, Laos has a complex history.”
Besides the royal palace, Luang Prabang has a lot of Buddhist temples. 34 in fact, and that, combined with the colonial buildings built by the French earned the city a UNESCO world heritage designation in 1995. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that’s also the year they paves the main road in the city and tourism took off.
Luang Prabang is a reverse Potemkin village; it has a population of 200,000 but everything a tourist wants to see is found on a narrow isthmus of land between between the junction of the two rivers and around nearby Phousy Hill. The fact that almost no one lives on the far side of the Mekong or Nam Khan rivers and no buildings are above three stories reinforces this sensation.
This means that you can take in many of the temples, the royal palace (and the baffling carvings from local stories that are found in an adjoining temple), walk all the main streets, take a boat across the Mekong and still easily make it up the hill to watch the sunset.
3.
So what else to do? Besides sitting in the cafes and sipping coffee (Joma and Ancient Hotel are recommended) or taking a cooking class, you could go hiking or ride elephants.
You can actually do both courtesy of one man, Markus. He is a character who has transformed tourism in the area.
In 1998 he quit a going nowhere government job in Germany and moved to Luang Prabang to open a restaurant. In 2001, unsatisfied with what was offered, he opened Tiger Trail to provide tours (hiking, biking, etc.) that would highlight and preserve the local culture. This was followed a few years later by the Lao Spirit resort (a beautiful place 35km up the Nam Khan; the bungalows have some of the best views ever).
Then in 2008 he sold most of his shares and bought an elephant preserve where he saves elephants from the logging industry.
It was at this preserve that Wendy finally conquered a pachyderm. We got to ride them (both on a howda and on their necks). We practiced our mahout calls (seung seung to bend on one knee and get on; pie for forward) and fed them and bathed them. We also learned that you should always approach an elephant from its right; some are trained to attack on the left and they can be unpredictable if you walk behind them.
We also learned that Laos uses to called the land of a million elephants. Given that Laos is only two million square kilometers and elephants consume 200-250 kg per day in food, this was more likely hyperbole than fact.
We also learned that the first rule of being a mahout is to never trust an elephant. This was revealed several times when our elephants (more frequently Wendy’s) would suddenly stop, lumber off to the side of the river or track and eat despite all the efforts of the mahouts.
On a different day we did a seven hour hike up through the mountains that are opposite the elephant camp across the Nam Khan. Despite hiking in near continuous rain (it turns out August is the rainiest month in Luang Prabang) this was one of the best hikes I have ever done.
It started in low-lying rice paddies, climbed through banana and jungle-covered limestone hills into Hmong villages and mountain pastures.
And finally it descended down to the other great thing to see in Luang Prabang-waterfalls.
4.
I don’t know what you think waterfalls in paradise look like, but for me they’re near identical to the Tad Sae and Kuang Si falls near Luang Prabang.
The Tad Sae is approached from the river, where it spills forth from many places in the banks. As you climb alongside it, you encounter numerous swimming pools and possibly the occasional bathing monk.
The Kuang Si falls are substantially further from town and best approached by scooter. The voyage takes you along the Mekong, through villages of jeering children and is only occasionally interrupted by confused chickens or water buffalo. There is mercifully little traffic as the road ends at the falls.
The falls start out as a bear preserve that leads to a series of miniature falls and pools. You can swim here despite it being the rainy season however the current is so strong that you can’t swim against it. it is extremely depressing to try and swim somewhere and end up further back from where you started – particularly when if you go too far back you go over a waterfall.
In North America this would be the perfect drowning machine; judging from the lack of bathers, the Lao seem to have a preternatural understanding of what ’swim at your own risk’ means.
At the top of the last pool you come to the main falls which explode out of the jungle in a furious torrent of water. In fact there’s so much water that it cascades downwards everywhere. No rock is too small to become a sluice and water tumbles from all directions. It is sublime.
5
After a week in Luang Prabang we took the let’s-call-it-eight-but-everyone-knows-it’s-at-least-ten-hours bus ride to Vientiane. It’s only 400 kilometers but since you’re winding along mountain roads it takes forever (those mountains only end maybe sixty kilometers from Vientiane). Fortunately, the scenery is spectacular and, if you spent the extra $2, you’re riding in the “king of bus”.
I can’t emphasize how beautiful Laos is. I’m definitely going to go back one day and hike around Ban Bangkalo and Ban Lakha in Kasi district. Jungle-covered limestone mountains plunge into forest and fields; farmers’ paths crisscross everything.
5.
The bus ride gives you time (lots of time) to reflect on how undeveloped Laos is. On the entire journey I saw one factory: a cement manufacturer.
As you traverse the country you see the goods of the same ten Western brands. There is not one chain store in the entire country – although some local bakeries, coffee shops and convenience stores are creating their own chains.
The people here are incredibly friendly (perhaps the civil war killed their desire to fight) but the flip side is there’s absolutely no sense of urgency on the part of anyone. The whole country trundles along at the pace of a small town while it’s neighbours battle for 21st century economic supremacy.
In addition, the quality of the Laos government’s fiscal and monetary policy is open for debate. There are signs that the country has gone through some mean inflation.
The smallest bill is 500 Kip (a great name for a currency) but you will almost never see anything priced in multiples less than 1,000.
In one shop we saw the following homage to their first sale in 1998-note the 1 Kip note.
Similarly, in one temple we saw 20 and 50 Kip notes folded into icons:
6.
You may be noticing that everything I’ve mentioned is about either Laos or Luang Prabang. I’ve said almost nothing about Vientiane.
And that’s on purpose. There’s not much to see in the city. There are a smattering of various petty bureaucracies and a few concrete temples. Nothing to write home about – and the Lao even acknowledge it themselves.
The main boulevard outside the Presidential Palace leads to a concrete gate built in the 1960s:
Here’s the description attached to it:
But all is not for nought. It’s a nice place to while away a day or two in cages as you prepare for your next adventure. It also has fantastic sunsets along the Mekong. This is big sky country:
8.
There’s one other very interesting facet to Vientiane – the people. Not the locals (great people, but you’ve already met them up north), but a curious mercenary capitalist class.
The city is full of 40- or 50-something white guys who are slightly overweight, have a lean, ex-military look with short cropped hair and they frequently carry laptops.
They give the impression of being in Laos as it is the place where some obscure form of earth needs moving: a fiber optic cable needs to be laid; a satellite uplink station needs to be built or a series of microwave towers are going up. These guys feel like hired guns who honed their skills building out Europe and America and their swan song is now calling from Asia.
9.
Reading the above, you might get the impression that I’m negative on Laos or think that it is backwards. Nothing could be further from the truth.
It’s a beautiful country with unbelievably friendly people who are finding their own path in a complex world (and carrying some very complex cultural baggage). This is a also country where few people have any money but cellphones abound, you find satellite dishes in remote thatched communities and the locals have a nicer (and substantially cheaper) international bus service than most other nations.
10.
I have no hard data to back this up, but I suspect that one of the challenges Laos is going to face is that when your country moves away from agriculture, you just can’t get drunk all the time.
There are several hints that the Lao are perpetually getting wasted. When we took our cooking class the manual emphasized how important it is for the locals to drink whiskey with each other (ah, culture).
We asked our guide on our rainy hike where all the people were in the villages: he told us they drink whiskey when it rains.
And when we went to one of the waterfalls, a bunch of locals were having a picnic. Several Johnny Walker bottles littered their table.
I should mention that the local whisky (Lao Lao) is also filthy booze. I had a glass at one restaurant and it burned so badly that I poured it into a neighbouring planter. A mere whiff of this faux rubbing alcohol is sufficient to induce nausea.
11.
As mentioned in an earlier entry, Lao food is great.
We had a few additional great dishes. Fried bamboo with pork:
The Tamarind restaurant in Luang Prabang is incredible. Here you see their Ping Som Moo. It’s cured pork placed on a bed of garlic, then wrapped in garlic and barbecued in a bamboo skewer.
They also have an appetizer that lets you taste an assortment of local salsas and dips. You’re looking at jeow bong, jeow mak len (mild tomato salsa), jeow mak keua (smoky eggplant dip) and jeow pak hom (mildly spiced blend of coriander and garlic). It comes with khai pene: Mekong seaweed pounded into sheets and sundried with tomatoes, garlic and sesame
A few other recommended places to eat in Luang Prabang: The Blue Lagoon (thanks Colleen & Tom for the recommendation!) and Dyen Sabai (across the Nam Khan; they’ve their own free boat).
12.
A few random observations:
A)
Laotian has the same script as Thai. The Lao get Thai television and read it’s subtitled foreign movies plus listen to their tv shows. The result is that all Lao can speak/read Thai but not vice versa. Our hotel receptionist couldn’t explain why, rather she chalked it up to “same same but different”.
Incidentally, despite having a relatively lovely language, the Lao all answer their phone “hello” (versus sabai dee). It looks like this is one more culture that wont be adopting Bell’s desired “ahoy, ahoy“.
B)
While in Laos and Vietnam I was reading Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War and John Sack’s M . Both talk about the omnipresent red dust that covers Vietnam and turns to sticky mud during the rainy season.
It also exists in Laos. I went for a run one night and found myself covered in a thin reddish film. And don’t even get me started on what it’s like to hike here when it rains:
C)
When we arrived in Luang Prabang we took a cab to our guest house. The airport taxi authority decided that we’d share the cab with another couple even though we were going to different hotels.
As we talked to them I felt like I was talking to my doppelgänger; it could have been me if I’d made a few different decisions.
In order to understand this, some background on me. I used to be a consultant but didn’t like it so did something else and eventually wound up at business school and then lived in New York. The Internet has also made me OCD: whenever I want to know something I instantly look it up (unless dining).
So imagine how I felt when we got in the taxi and it turned out that the other couple – who are a similar age to us – are also from New York. We asked them how long they’d lived there and it turned out to be many years except for “a few years in Boston”. This is alumni jargon used by Harvard Business School grads to test whether their audience might be receptive to their unique schooling.
I then asked if either of them happened to know the population of Laos. She turned to him and said “I’ll bet you hate not having the Internet here to look this up.” A shiver ran up my spine.
And then she said “pretend it’s a case or an interview problem”. Only consultants would ask someone a silly question like “how many people are there in Laos” as part of a job interview; calling your work a “case” is to a trick to make it sound more important than it is.
At that moment I realized that this guy was me in an alternate reality (preppy American Lindsay?) and I had to flee the car before the world collapsed in on itself.
D)
One of the odd legacies of the French is that the Laos play petanque. You will literally be driving through the countryside and stumble upon a group of men playing the game on the roadside. Perhaps it’s because the game is so suited to the Lao pace of life.
E)
One night in Luang Prabang we were walking along the Mekong when the power went out. The city went black and then the massive, swift river began to glow with the night. Previously invisible against the town’s lights, it was now the only source of illumination. Then the power flipped back on and the moment was irretrievably lost.
F)
One final comment on monks. They abound in Laos and you see them everywhere. If you’re lucky, you’ll hear them drumming to the moon cycles:
It’s not that the prepubescent male Lao are remarkably pious, rather it’s about education. There are school fees in Laos (I don’t think the tax collection is good enough for the government to provide it as a full service; this is a country where places give their street address as “near the post office”) and if you can’t afford them you send your kid to a monastery to receive an education. When they’re old enough, they typically drop out of the monastery and get a job – with more skills than they would have otherwise picked up.
One of the joys of traveling is trying all the local cuisine. Wen and I took a cooking class in Luang Prabang Laos to get a sense of what food the local’s eat. (The class was at Tamnak Lao; very easy to find)
The class started with a visit to local Phoisy market to see what the local ingredients look like in bulk:
One of the local cooking sauces is Padak; it’s made from rotting fish so you can imagine what it smells like. It’s being gradually replaced with shrimp paste.
People buy this minced pork wrapped in banana leaves; it’s a poor man’s refrigerator.
Banana leaves:
Here’s a quick rundown on what we cooked:
Luang Prabang Salad – that’s minced chicken drizzled in mayo; beneath the veggies are salad leaves and watercress
Feu Khua – fried sticky rice noodles with chicken and vegetables. You fry the vermicelli and toss an egg in to create a pancake. You then chop it up, remove it from the heat and add it back to the rest of the ingredients after you’ve cooked them:
Chicken Larp:
Khua Maak Kheua gap Moo – fried eggplant with pork. Delicious and easy to make; recipe follows below:
Luang Prabang Jeowbong – a sweet and spicy but not hot chili paste:
It was a great day. Here’s chef Wendy with some of her creations:
And here’s the recipe for that fried eggplant; serves one person:
Ingredients:
60 grams pork
3 large spring onions (if small, use 3 extra)
1 Asian eggplant (long, not round)
2-3 garlic cloves
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
2 1/2 tablespoons oil
Directions:
Cut the spring onion into 2 cm lengths. If the white part is large, also cut in half lengthwise
Cut the eggplant into 3 cm lengths, then cut each piece into sixths
Crush the garlic in a mortar
Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in the work, add the eggplant and stir fry until it begins to soften and turn golden colour. Do not overcook and make eggplant too soft
Place the cooked eggplant in a bowl and set aside
Place the remaining oil in the wok, add the crushed garlic and stir until the garlic begins to change colour
Add the pork and stir fry until cook
Add the salt and sugar
Keep stir frying and add the oyster sauce, onion and cooked eggplant. Keep stir frying until the onions begin to soften
When I was a kid, I thought that ‘Yogyakarta’ was a stupid name. I mean, here’s an island (with the same name as the street I grew up on, hence the youthful interest) with a capital called Jakarta (birthplace of the American president!) and – on the same island – they name one of the cities almost exactly the same thing. Did they run out of names? It would be like if Toronto was called ‘Nottawa’.
But then I realized that the lack of original names applies more to Canadians and Americans (after all, how many of our cities are named after somewhere in Europe? Half of New York state seems to be named after Egyptian towns) than Indonesians. And now I’m in Yogyakarta (or ‘Jogjakarta’ – a name that would have endured even more contempt from a young Lindsay – or even ‘jogja’) and I’m falling in love with the city.
2.
It’s not immediately obvious why someone might fall in love with Jogja. It’s a city of 500,000 people with no landmarks. The first time you walk down the street there’s a 50% chance you’re going the wrong way as there’s nothing to orient yourself to.
Some of the sights in the town are downright forgettable. The water palace is a temple to the power of deferred maintenance and concrete brutalism to reduce even the most advanced cultures to nothing. You can walk the grounds and gaze upon brackish water and dirt masquerading as gardens.
Similarly, the sultan’s palace illustrates that mass production means we’re all sultans now. His collection of pottery is roughly akin to the gifts traded by middle class families at weddings (however, he did have a much nicer collection of palanquins than the average homeowner). Many a disappointed child roams the grounds of the cruelly labelled ‘palace’
It’s precisely this lack of truly majestic downtown sites that make the city so worth visiting. There are no grand buildings fighting for your attention so you’re forced instead to appreciate all the little things that make Jogja so great.
3.
As good a place as any to start is with a walk along the river. We wandered along the river between Juminhan and Senopati roads and had a great time.
You immediately notice a Javanese love for two things: flags and potted plants. The narrow, high traffic paths along the river’s edge are overgrown with flag-bearing standards and potted plants, creating an explosion of colour.
As you walk along the river, you’re greeted by some of the friendliest people I’ve ever met. Not a lot of foreigners come down here and everyone wants to say hi. Parents bring their children to say hi and kids follow you from the other side of the river.
As an aside, I’ve never seen a country where the media coverage of the population is so different from the population itself. If you just watch the news you might conclude that Indonesia is full of firebrand fundamentalist clerics launching hotel-and-then-hellbound suicide bombers. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This is a nation of people trying to pull themselves out of poverty and straight into a globalized 21st century. At times, walking along the river you’ll see how far there still is to go for one part of the population: there are public toilets and at one end there’s even a well.
4.
Another area that absolutely must be visited is Kotagede. The area is famous for two things, the first being silver.
If you go to H&S Silver, you can take a tour of their factory before buying 92.5% pure silver at what Wen assured me are prices about 1/3 of home. Make no mistake-despite all the work being done by hand, this place is a factory. The craftsmen have four months to learn their trade and then they pump out dozens of identical pieces a day.
However, it’s still charming to watch everything be made. I particularly liked the step where a local fruit is crushes to become the soap used to polish the silver.
Note that H&S Silver does primarily traditional designs. For something more contemporary, check out Borobudur Silver. It’s not technically in Kotagede, but also has a small workshop attached.
The other interesting aspect of Kotagede is it’s architecture. It’s one of the best places to see examples of traditional Javanese architecture.
At first this feels like an exercise in looking at roofs.
However, as you get deep into Kitagede you can wander down it’s flag-covered alleys (totally safe; the high traffic levels would bring a smile to Jane Jacobs’ eye) you start to catch glimpses of the wooden shutters and whitewashed walls.
Occasionally you’ll come to an open door and catch a glimpse of life inside. From what I can tell, every house has a central courtyard and, more often than not, an overhanging roof (it rains a lot and violently here) that will be dangling at least one bird cage.
A word on the birds: the Javanese love them. They’re everywhere. You see scooters in the street with the driver bearing a covered bird cage off the side. Many businesses have them outside their windows. The trishaw drivers will flap their arms in bird mimicry to entice you into a short, overpriced ride to the bird market.
But back to Kotagede. If you go far enough you’ll eventually find the factory-cum-showroom of Monggo Chocolates, an artisanal choclatier. Try the Ginger chocolate; if you can’t find the place, you might find their chocolate at the local Circle K.
To get to Monggo you’ll also pass the royal graveyard and ruins of the old Javanese palaces. Along the way you can see the local market and dangling trees that have been paved into place.
On the way back you can gawk at the Javanese house of R Pesik. Apparently he runs DHL Indonesia and chairs some ASEAN development group; when not doing that he lives like a modern day Javan king.
5.
The other thing to see in Yogyakarta are it’s temples. About 40km away is Prambanan, the largest Hindu temple in the world. It’s been rocked over the years by earthquakes (most recently in 2006) meaning that a lot of it is being restored. Since the government appears to be using the same folks who built are building the Sagrada Familia, there are a couple of generations to go until the restoration is complete.
Prambanan is the main temple complex, but the property also includes the Menwu temple. This too was damaged in 2006 and is now held together by the same construction materials it was built with over 1,000 years ago.
Interestingly, the temple is Buddhist but the carvings here include Hindu gods. It looks there was a gradual transition away from Hinduism for the Javans.
6.
The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno is famous for one of his paradoxes. If Achilles is chasing a tortoise, how does he ever pass it? After all, it takes time for Achilles to move; during the time he moves forward, the tortoise also moves forward too; how can he catch up?
As you climb the many terraced levels of Borobudur, each slightly smaller than the previous, you’ll have time to ponder a similar paradox. Since each level takes a little less time than the previous, will you eventually come to a level that will take infinitely little time to see?
Or maybe you won’t think about this paradox at all because you’ll instead be mesmerized by the incredible carvings topped with buddhas that grace each of the lower layers. They’re amazing and make you grateful that someone at the UN creates these lists of protected world monuments.
As if the carvings weren’t enough, when you get up higher up the levels become a series of stupas.
Each contains one Buddha as this denuded stupa shows:
Borobudur is easily in the top 10 most amazing places I’ve ever been. Try to arrive at 3:30 so that you can be there for sunset. It took is two hours to walk each level clockwise once (you’re supposed to do it three time oh of respect, but we just ran out of time).
7.
To get to Borobudur and Prambanan I recommend getting a driver. It’s only about $45 for a driver for the full day and the odds of you actually finding your way are about zero. Also, you ten don’t have to negotiate traffic like this:
Your driver will also demonstrate a ritual that is presumably used to reduce corruption. All parking lots charge a flat rate and require you to buy a ticket on the way in. But you won’t get out until you give the ticket back to a different guy on the way out. Maybe it’s a way to reduce corruption; maybe it just means more jobs for the boys.
As you drive around, you may get a sense of how Indonesians love stuffing anything into a truck. At various times we saw the following in the beds of pickup trucks:
A giant bull
Horses
Hundred of chickens
Hundreds of pounds of sugar cane stacked high and wide enough that there was no way the driver could have seen anything
Indonesians have a keen sense of trucks as tools (vs. the North American badge of membership to the clan redneck).
You might also see some begging at streetlights. No one just asks for money at the lights: the Javan version of squeegee kids clean your car with a feather duster; some people ’serenade’ you with a tiny ukelele. And the ladyboys just dress up in their finest to surprise you.
8.
Jogja is also the first place in Indonesia where I’ve seen youth culture. The whole city is a (government-supported) canvas for street art. The emphasis is on figures and in contrast to North America, you do not see people scrawling their own tags over everything.
If American youth culture was once about cars, the malt shop and the drive-in, the Indonesian equivalent is the scooter and the Internet cafe. Everywhere you go you see scooters lined up outside them.
There are more scooters in Indonesia than people in Canada (and I don’t have any proof of that, but I’m sure it’s true). There are scooter garages where you can pimp your ride by giving it a new paint job or fancier decals. And choosing a fancy helmet is a sign of your personality.
The other place you can show your personality is at one of the youth-oriented clothing shops. Many are found on cuz road. Ironically, all look similar: one or two high contrast colours, bold signage and a plethora of stickers on the door.
In fact, this mimics a challenge Indonesia has: perfect competition. Every time someone has some success selling something, it seems like five other identical shops open up right next door. Witness these shoe shops selling exactly the same set of shoes:
Good for the consumer, but tough to really raise your overall standard of living.
9.
One thing that Wendy and I did was go to the mall (actually two of them).
Why did we go to a mall after flying halfway around the world?
Well, first, it’s Ramadan here and one of the few ways to get a solid meal during the day is to go to the mall (we weren’t alone; I quite enjoyed watching a woman in a hijab casually sip her coffee in public at the mall).
Secondly, when you watch how people shop I feel like you get a sense of who they are, where they’re at and where they want to go.
Here are some observations from our faux-shopping:
a)
The locals here have huge sweet tooths. The ‘jellied goods’ section is larger than the meats section of the supermarket:
b)
Pricing rules seem to be different here. Consider that the single serve Timtams below are cheaper per unit than a pack of eight:
c)
Wandering through the mall gives you a sense of how lax Indonesian respect for copyright law is.
We saw a ‘Polo’ store where not one good was over $20 and there was a sale on ’strippers’ (I’m confident they meant stripes).
RIM’s Blackberry is a popular target for the Shanzai producers. Here’s their official logo:
Now witness these knock-offs:
By the way, the fact that China and Taiwan can create functional knock-off cellphones should give everyone pause as to their coming economic might. Businesses are going to have to be very careful about what they offshore vs. what they keep in-house and secret.
d)
The Indonesian woman has her own unique concerns. Consider the whitening deodorant and shampoo bottle that features no hair (to be fair, 90+ percent of deodorant is not whitening and almost all the shampoo bottles show women with lustrous black-and only black-hair).
e)
All the banal Western brands are here, albeit with package sizes and tastes that cater to local flavours. Many packaged goods also come in single serve sizes (although you can only buy those at traditional hawker markets, not at the mall):
f)
Shopping at the mall shows how sophisticated some of the companies here are. If you use your special Citibank Visa to buy select stores’ private label brands you get 5% (!) cash back.
Similarly, I was amazed when I dropped off $1.50 in laundry and was given a computerized claim ticket:
Contrast this with the scene elsewhere in Yogyakarta where brass weights are used to mass your fruit and ducks congregate outside the local cellphone retailer.
As Bobby Zimmerman said, the times they are a-changing.
10.
And now a treatise on drinking jungle cat poo.
Loyal readers will recall that in an earlier post I mentioned that I saw raw coffee luwak a.k.a. coffee made from civet poo – but that, alas, I was not prepared to try it.
Well, I am no longer a luwak coffee virgin.
When we were at the mall, the local Excelso coffee offered the coffee for only 65,000 Rupiah – about $7.50. This is the best price I’ve seen anywhere, so I thought I’d give it a try. When I ordered it, the waitress beamed with pleasure and gleefully told me that I was making an “economical” decision.
My joy rose when the coffee came; in order to prove that it really is jungle cat poo coffee, they provide you with the empty coffee bag attesting to its provenance. As I flipped through it, I felt like an otaku unboxing a phone.
As for the coffee, it was damn fine. It was one of the smoothest and lingering coffees I’ve ever had. I didn’t want it to end.
I’m also going to call it the second best cup I ever had. The best was the Kenyan at Clover’s Cafe in Brooklyn; the citrus infusions made the cup literally taste like orange juice by the time I got to the bottom.
11.
In closing, a few random observations.
a)
I’m sitting in a coffee shop writing this as a smooth jazzy bass line syncopates with the afternoon call to prayer. It’s an alluring sound that personifies the forces pulling at this society.
b)
There’s a cliche that white people find it difficult to tell Asian people apart. When I was a consultant, the new hires ha to make a comedic video and one year it featured two Asian consultants who worked 50% of the time by pretending they were each other. After the video was shown, one of the (white) senior partners walked up to a third Asian consultant and congratulated him on such a fine performance.
I’ve realized that the same applies to Asians with white people. At a restaurant in Prambanan, the waiter brought us the food of a different white couple. Twice. In a restaurant with only three couples in it.
The same thing happened at lunch again today except that there were only two couples in the restaurant.
c)
At the gas stations here, gas is only 50 cents a liter. Plus there are segregated prayer rooms for Muslims.
d)
Nobody walks here. There are sidewalks but they seem reserved for scooter parking or repair.
It might be due to the heat-which reduces Westerners to useless puddles of goo. It might also be a status thing (I’ve got a scooter!) as there’s still almost no one on the street at night.
e)
In addition to not walking, almost nobody wears shoes. At any given moment, 99% of the population is wearing sandals. The only people I saw wearing shoes worked at the mall.
f)
The quintessential local dish is gudeg (jackfruit) curry. I dragged Wendy to Lesehan Borobudur on Marlioboro road so that I could try some. It’s a great experience as you take your shoes off and eat on mats right next to the street.
Unfortunately there was no cutlery. Watching me try to eat my curry reduced locals to peels of laughter. Wendy’s blog has the definitive treatise. All I can say is imagine watching a child eat with a fork for the first time. It wasn’t pretty, bit it was hilarious. And delicious.
The other great dish to try here is Opor Ayam – a chicken curry in coconut sauce.
g)
The quintessential drink is a bandrek tea. A cousin is the kraton. Both are jasmine teas spiced with cloves, ginger, cardamon, cinnamon and nutmeg, served with a lemongrass stick as a stirrer.
h)
Yogyakarta has almost every type of transport known to man. Alongside such mundane forms as bus, taxi, train or the ubiquitous scooter are hundreds of trishaws (called becaks) and horse-drawn carriages (called andong). True fan of equine transportation may even find he odd jitney.
Alas, I found myself unable to take a becak as it brought back too many memories of my old job as a rickshaw runner.
i)
I’ve mentioned how people wanted to say hi when we walked down the river. In fact, as we’ve walked around town, lots of people have wanted to chat or have their photo taken.
I’ve come to the conclusion that having their photo taken makes people feel that they truly exist as someone outside their group of friends has noticed their existence.
These construction workers were adamant that we take their photo even though we have absolutely no idea who they are and will almost certainly never see them again:
Similarly, one day as we were walking down the street a guy asked us if we would pose for photos with him and his family. We did and I shudder to think of what story he made up behind the photos. But everyone’s happy now.
j)
Bali and Yogyakarta have given me one of life’s little pleasures: the discovery of a new fruit. Until I came to Indonesia I had never tried the aptly-but-unfortunately named snakefruit:
You peel away the interior to reveal two dry, smooth halves, each of which contains a nut. When you bite into each half they are very dry but also sweet. If you ever come across one, give it a try.
k)
And finally, a word of warning on traveling here if you are Dutch or French (like 90+% of the tourists). You may go native. Common symptoms are hirsutism and a propensity to batik or beaded shirts. Here is a subject:
Make sure that you travel with someone who is immune to this and carries the appropriate book of runes or spells to help you break out of Indonesia’s trance.
I took a Balinese cooking class to try to learn a bit more about the food here.
All the food is based upon one key sauce called basa gede or “basic spice paste”. From this paste, you can make a myriad of dishes.
Here’s an overview of what’s in the sauce:
25 shallots or 2 peeled onions; peeled and chopped
2 cloves garlic; peeled and chopped
7 large red chillies; seeded and chopped
5 cm galangal (laos); peeled and chopped
5 cm lesser galangal (kenkur root); peeled and chopped
10 cm fresh tumeric (kunyit); peeled and chopped. If using powdered, 2 tblsp
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
6 candlenuts (kemiri). Can substitute 3 tblsp almonds. Add more nuts if you want the sauce to be thicker
2 tspns dry shrimp paste. Can substitute 4 tspns fish or oyster sauce
1/2 tspn each of black and white peppercorns
1 pinch nutmeg; freshly grated or powder
3 cloves
4 tablespoons oil. Any oil except olive or sesame
1 pinch cumin or 1/4 tspn powder
1/4 tspn sesame seed
1/2 bay leaf
salt to flavour
Here’s how you make the sauce:
Mash everything except the oil in a mortar and pestle. If you want to use a blender, make sure to add a bit of water to the spices
Heat the oil at high
Add the pounded spice mix and cook for five minutes or until golden
Let cool before using
You can keep it in the freezer for months or use once cool.
It’s a versatile paste and the Balinese use the following rules for cooking:
Use x amount of any meat
Use 1/4 the mass/volume of this meat in paste. Count the paste in tablespoons
Use 1/2 the number of tablespoons in coconut milk
For example, if you were using a kilo of chicken, you’d use 1/4 kilo of paste and then the equivalent of 1/8 of a kilo in coconut milk.
What can you make with this paste? Here’s a sample of some dishes we made.
Sate Lilit. Just mix the paste with some minced meat (you’re looking at pork) and grill on a stick (or lemongrass for more flavour):
Chicken curry:
Here are a couple of other dishes that use similar ingredients but not the paste. You can hack around in the kitchen and probably make ‘em just by looking at what’s in the picture:
Sayur Urab (mixed vegetables):
Tuna Sambal Matah. Just grilled tuna with some lime-soaked vegetables:
Tempe Manis. Sweetened tempe:
I took the class at Bumi Bali. Before the lesson, you go to the market where they show you all the different foods for sale.
It’s a fun experience, but the market’s not quite up to code. Fortunately, everything is washed before it’s used for cooking.
If the 20th century was the decade of the automobile, the 21st century is going to be the decade of the cell phone (yes, there were cell phones in the 20th century, but penetration tipped in the 21st. There were also cars in the late 19th century, but mass production didn’t come around until the 20th). That’s been rammed home to me here in Borneo.
When we went to Mulu park there was cell phone reception. You have to fly there as there are no roads. But you can use your phone. Similarly, the guides love to hike to the top of the mountains because inside the park they get better reception. (They did the same at Maliau Basin)
I also like that even the local taxi driver, who drives a beater of a car to the airport for $1.50 had a cell phone on his dash:
Even Mabul island – which lacks almost a single building that’s not made out of wood and has maybe a few hundred residents tops – had cell phone reception. Note the tower in the image below:
Moreover, not only are these people connected, they’re right on the bleeding edge of technology. Android phones are everywhere. Print ads that include an iPhone are almost as common as the billboards for those Android phones. You can check in for Malaysian Airlines via your cellphone or iPad. And you can buy all sorts of awesome wireless accessories, like the MiFi portable wifi hotspot.
People are also creating. Check out this cool app put together by a Malaysian developer:
It’s going to be a great century!
2.
Flying over Borneo is an amazing experience. I’m writing this (part of this) post on the plane from Kota Kinabulu to Tawau and looking at the mist filling the valleys between different jungle-covered mountains. There are also so many layers of cloud here – on the ground, bumping into mountains, soaring above your plane – that it’s incredible.
It’s a sensation and perspective you just can’t get from the ground.
3.
Flying also gives you a great chance to see how Malaysian Airways has personalized the experience to their own tastes. I love seeing the banalities of life played out in different cultures. Here are a few gems from here:
When you get on the plane, the greeting is “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and Enrich club members.” Wendy commented that it’s like a carnival.
The safety announcement on MAS Wings states that “we know you love your cell phone very, very, very much…” Yup, three “very’s”. Similarly, you’re asked “to take off your heels, even if they’re very expensive” in the event of an emergency landing.
Soft rock is played on MAS Wings flights. The soothing sounds of Michael Bolton and post-Genesis Phil Collins torment you as you long for the flight to end.
4.
And, if it’s MAS Wings, you will want the flight to end. Because MAS Wings has the worst pilots of all time.
Flying with them isn’t dangerous, it’s just that they mastered the science but not art of flying.
As a result, you get on a plane and it is constantly accelerating and decelerating. First your stomach is rushing to your feet and then your head. Your pilot pitches you forward and back in a tug of war to see who on the plane will vomit first.
At one point flying from Mulu (I think this is the “my first route” of Malaysian pilots) the pilot managed to combine an acceleration with a change in direction at the same time resulting in all the blood in my body rushing to my head at over 1G. Amazing.
(Editor’s note – our pilot must know I’m writing this as he just decided to hit the air brakes on us in solidarity with his MAS Wings brethren. He must be newly promoted).
5.
Malaysia is a muslim country, but in a much more laid back way than, say, Saudi Arabia. This is especially visible on the magazine stand. I doubt anywhere else on earth do you get such a variety of covers:
6.
Malaysians love to smoke. I’m impressed by the depth and breadth of their smoking.
They smoke before breakfast, while working, lunch, back at work again and then during and after dinner.
Nothing will get between a Malaysian man and his cigarette (and it’s only men who seem to smoke). I was in the shower in the jungle and when I looked at the divider between the stalls, someone had carefully rested a cigarette butt on the top. So yes, they even smoke in the shower here.
7.
If Borneo had a national football team, it would be Manchester United. Everywhere we’ve gone on this island it’s been Man U. Our ranger wore their shirt for three days. We stopped in a tiny restaurant on the way up to Maliau Basin and there were supporter flags on the walls. We passed cars with Man U stickers and in Semporna they were selling Man U footballs.
8.
The roads outside Tawau (in the East) are pretty bad; many aren’t paved. The locals rip around in Toyota Hilux (the Taliban’s favourite truck!) and have to wash them before they come into the city (it’s the law: no dirty cars).
The paved roads (like the one to Semporna) have a nasty habit of washing away. It’s the unintended consequence of cutting down all that rainforest to plant palms. They just don’t hold the water like the old jungle.
What’s the solution? Don’t cut down the jungle? Build better roads with, perhaps, gravel, below them rather than just dirt? Nope, just put a warning sign and a merge sign and some paint on the road.
In fact, maybe that’s symbolic of driving here in general. After taking a couple of long bus and taxi rides, I’ve come to appreciate that the markings on the roads are really more of a guide than a rule. Why should feel constrained to drive on the left (the British influence) when you could drive in the middle of the road or even on the right? And when you’re passing, as long as you miss oncoming traffic by a second or two you probably did a good job.
9.
I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘globalization’ and ‘westernization’ and ‘development’ while here. Semporna is full of open markets but nowhere were people happier shopping than in the Giant supermarket or the Guardian drug store. Over the next ten years, these chains will almost certainly put a lot of Semporna’s mom and pop stores/stall out of business.
But is that a bad thing? The locals get higher quality goods in a safer environment (do you really know where that market chicken has been?) and probably at lower prices. The chains may even be better for the environment as they’re much more efficient and potentially cut out some middlemen.
So globalization in that respect raises the bar for society.
A much more challenging situation arises with the local people here. I posted earlier about the Penan. Recall that they were forest nomads; of the 10,000 of them, only 300 still live in the forest; the rest farm rice. Palm plantations mean less rainforest to roam.
The same scenario is playing out in the Sarawak highlands around Borneo. The locals (I think the Kelabit) used to live in long houses and hunt; now they’re farming and their kids are moving to the cities.
Both of these cultures likely won’t exist in a couple of generations (when you hear the UN talk about languages/cultures going extinct, this is where it happens).
And that’s a shame. Survival of the fittest-style globalization and development is great when it comes to bringing people safe, high-quality consumer goods. It’s terrible when the price is the loss of entire cultures. I want to live in the world where the Penan can hunt in the forest and have six different words for the notion of “we”.
This is where the notion of “Westernization” comes in. We take for granted the notion of “progress” – that every generation should have it better than the previous. Our tool of progress is technology: more, better, faster and cheaper and we’ve built our entire society around it; we regularly eat our old society to produce the next one.
And when our technology runs into cultures where nothing changes generation over generation (i.e., the Penan), it steamrolls them.
This is just a rant. I don’t have a solution to this (and it’s definitely not forcing people like the Penan to live in the forest against their will). Maybe all we can do is document these cultures and store their memories for when we’re ready to really appreciate them.
I’m sure some very smart people are working on this somewhere.
10.
Malaysians have a huge sweet tooth. You cannot buy any bread that is not coated in sugar. I thought that the Hong Kong bakeries used a lot of sugar, but here they even put sugar on top of their cheese bread.
11.
Speaking of food, here’s a quick rundown on what we loved:
a) Nasi Goreng. Fried rice. The staple of the Malaysian diet. Nasi Goreng Ayam (chicken) is a personal favourite. I never was able to figure out what the Nasi Goreng Kumpang (country style) actually was.
b) Mee Goreng. Fried noodle. The ying to Nasi Goreng’s yang.
c) Roti Ayam. There is a large South Asian population here and they’ve brought their food with them. This particular one comes from the delightful Al-Nafisah restaurant in Semporna. It’s a great place to get a tasty meal, surf the free wi-fi and watch a Bollywood flick. They also have Suntory Boss latte in a can!
d) Tosai (aka Dosai or Dosa). More South Asian influence:
e) Tawak. This is the local rice wine and it is strong. It is also deceptively smooth so if you have more than one glass you’re in for it:
f) Kopi (Coffee). The local coffee (and make sure you ask for it or you’ll get NesCafe) is delicious. It is some of the smoothest coffee I’ve ever tasted. The taste creeps up on you after you’ve finished your sip and then glides down the back of your throat.
g) The “local vegetable”.
Someone must have told the Borneans that tourists want to eat local food (they were right). As a result, many restaurants offer the mysterious but ubiquitous “local vegetable”. When we were in Mulu it turned out to be a sort of fern, sauteed with some garlic:
Note the fresh-squeeshed lime juice in the background. Another fantastic local treat.
h) Curry.
On the way up to Maliau Basin we stopped in a little restaurant where I had the following delicious curry (it had been cooking for hours) and a spiced hard boiled egg. Yup, it was breakfast:
The chicken curry is also fantastic:
12.
The call to prayer this morning came at an ambitious 4:45am. Shockingly early. Thankfully we had to be up at 5:15 for a flight.
13.
When we were in Semporna we stayed at the Dragon Floating Inn, a hotel on stilts. Every morning sunlight would reflect off the bottom of the sea and through the cracks between the floorboards onto the ceiling. It was like a private avant garde cinema.
14.
I received some change that included two different versions of the 50 Ringgit note:
The old ones contain a picture of a palm; the new one has an oil rig. Similarly, the 10 Ringgit note has a modern train, plane and container ship. This reminds me of how the Canadian bills used to show signs of proud industrial heritage. Lumber. Petroleum. I’m getting carried away…
Given that the latest versions of Canadian notes have poems and dead politicians, I wonder if I visit Malaysia in 10 years whether I’ll see the local equivalent.
15.
Let me close with one more dig at Malaysian Airlines (I know I should close on a positive note, but what the heck). It is left to the reader as an exercise to identify all the mistakes with the map below (from their inflight magazine):
(I have an eye for these things, witness this post from a few years ago)
If you find yourself in Kota Kinabalu one day after dark, you should head over to the night market. In the shadows of the Meridien hotel and on the flight path for the airport, you’ll find a market that’s been going on for ages.
Vendors from around the region come to sell virtually indistinguishable produce, spices, meat and cooked foods (my inner economist thinks this is one of the few examples I’ve seen of “perfect competition”). The sights are salivating and the smells are delicious.
Make sure that you go hungry as you can stop at one of the countless stalls and watch your dinner get freshly cooked for about $1. I had a fantastic mee goreng (fried noodles) and it came with a delicious soto ayam (spiced chicken broth soup):
The market runs every night – rain or shine – from about 6:30pm to 11:00pm.
One of the things I love about traveling is the opportunity to sample great food. We’ve been having some great experiences in Japan.
Soba
The Koru-mon Noodle House is a tiny little shack in Shinjuku. They specialize in soba noodles; try the “machine gun” for a slightly spicier dipping sauce:
Monjayaki
Monjayaki is a variation on a Japanese pancake. The ingredients are brought to you and then cooked (by your waitress or you) on a hotplate built into the table:
It’s great fun to watch. The waitress organizes all the ingredients into a pile on the hot plate. A lot of chopping ensues. The chopped ingredients are then formed into a ring around the hot plate.
The waitress then pours half the batter (it’s in the bowl, below the ingredients) into the center. Much mixing and folding occurs.
The rest of the batter is mixed in and you let it cook for a few minutes. After that, you simply scrape off the piece you want to eat:
We had our monjayaki in Tsukuda. If you go down Nishinaki Dori (the main street), you’ll find tonnes of great places. (You should also visit the nearby Sumiyoshi Shrine).
Okonomiyaki
The sister of monjayaki is okonomiyaki. If monjayaki is a pancake, okonomiyaki is a pizza. Except that it’s made of egg, not dough, fried and topped with barbecue sauce and mayonnaise.
To get there, you walk through the chaos of Shinjuku, dodge the touts of Kabuki Cho’s red light district, walk up a cedar lined alley and then climb the steep narrow stairs into a poorly marked upstairs restaurant. Here’s Wendy trying to leave:
The place seats 8, all at a bar. The chef is on the other side and boxed in all night. If you know what you’re ordering you buy a ticket from the vending machine and place it on the counter (don’t worry, if you’re clueless like us you just need to say “pork” or “fish”).
After a couple of minutes, a heap of steaming noodles topped with a few slices of pork appear. As you wait, you can contemplate what else you would order if you spoke any Japanese:
Diner Food
If you’ve ever lived in Toronto and worked in an office tower or visited a mall, you’ve probably seen an Edo Japan restaurant offering teriyaki. New Yorkers may have been to the lonely states-side outpost of Japan’s Yoshinoya; it’s in Times Square (and the only one on the East Coast).
What I didn’t realize until visiting here, is that these are the Japanese equivalent of a diner.
We went to one in Kyoto and after ordering you sat at stools, just like in a North American diner. It felt quite like a diner, except for the ordering – you did that from a machine (a la ramen above) and then brought your ticket to a stool to get your meal made. The nice thing here is that you could see the picture of what you were buying before you purchased it:
The actual meal was delicious. Miso soup instead of chicken noodle. A variation on the garden salad. An terikyaki with an egg instead of a club sandwich.
Contemporary
In Tokyo we ate at a nice little place in Harajuku called Mother Kurkku. It was the least Japanese restaurant Japanese restaurant we’ve been to yet. The (smoke free!) second floor dining room had a double height ceiling (I think it’s a converted loft) and glass walls.
Plus, the wait and kitchen staff were all female.
The menu is very simple; there are only a few things available (pork, fish and spaghetti – there’s an Italian food fad going on right now [seriously]). I picked the pork, which was described as “pork boiled in broth”. Here’s what it looked like:
Maybe you can tell from the picture – that’s basically bacon. This is bacon boiled in stock. And it tasted great. I would never think to cook it this way; now I may have to add it to the repertoire.
Cheap
Japan is not on the backpacker circuit as it’s not known for its low prices. However, you can eat surprisingly cheaply here if you want.
Every city has a set of cafeteria-style noodle houses. You grab a tray, pick which broth you want with your udon noodle and then maybe grab a piece of tempura (friend chicken sounds so much fancier when you call it tempura).
However, these are not crappy udon noodles. For instance, the place that I ate at had it’s own noodle machine in the front. It was only a matter of minutes between when the noodles were made and when they were served to you:
Octopus Balls
The Japanese love their octopus balls. They’re served as a meal by themselves or sometimes as an amuse bouche. They’re also surprisingly tasty – and this from someone who hates most seafood; they’re a nice mix of crunchy and rubbery – great texture.
But don’t take my word for it; check out how much Wendy loves ‘em:
Every day the Tsukiji fish market processes 15% of all the fish that is eaten in Japan. Tourists can visit, although it’s getting a little tougher. You used to be able to visit the tuna auction (starts at 5 am), although you now need to call ahead for a permit.
Wen and I headed over around 9 am (the market starts at 3am; it’s all over by 11am) to see what it was all about.
The first thing you notice is that when you get off the Tsukiji subway station you can smell fish. It permeates the earth around there and hangs in the humid air all day long. If you don’t like the smell, do not under any circumstances visit the market.
The market itself is ordered chaos. It’s set up as an arc about a central point and all the trucks carrying fish enter/exit through there. It’s got its own traffic cop – and it’s also where you enter; watch out for the trucks.
From there, a series of long warehouses are where the loading and unloading occur. Carts and specialized trucks are used to ferry the fish to and from the actual market:
The market is arranged as a series of aisles along the arc. Each aisle has a store out front and a utility alley behind it to replenish the stocks:
They have been serving up fish here forever. The floors are actually line with cobblestones:
In the market, you can buy any sort of fish or sea creature imaginable:
The size of the fish cuts are incredible. You can also see how some of them were flash frozen mere hours before in a boat out in the Pacific:
Equally interesting is watching the people who work there:
If you go, be sure to check out the market about two blocks away. There’s no hall, rather the streets are just a series of covered shops on the first floor. They sell all sorts of interesting wares and cooked foods:
Wen and I were exploring Hamarikyu-Teien garden and went into their oh-so-cute teahouse:
Here’s the view from the other side:
Inside it’s a traditional tea house; just tatami mats on the inside:
They serve exactly one type of tea – green – available hot or cold. I had the hot, Wen had the cold:
For the sake of us foreigners, they provide a set of instructions on how to properly drink the tea. We had fun following it; here’s a synopsis:
Eat the little cake first. To eat it, place it – and the paper – in your left palm.
Use the wooden knife to cut it in half or quarter it. Do not eat anything until you’ve cut it.
Use the knife to spear the halves/quarters and eat each individually.
Then take the tea bowl in your right hand and place it in your left palm. The design on the bowl should be facing you; make sure that when you place it in your palm it is still facing you.
Using your right hand, rotate the bowl – in a clockwise direction – through two 90 degree turns so that the patterned part faces away from you
Rub the lip of the cup with your fingers and then clean it with a handkerchief or tissue paper.
Drink the tea in three or four sips; there should be no foam left in the bowl
We’re starting to get a feel for this city – although by no means do we understand it. Two themes are emerging.
First, Japan is a nation of nerds. Japan’s love of ritual and too high population density seem to have led to people being obsessed with ‘the best’. People express themselves by dressing to the nines (after all, no one will ever see your apartment) and publicly demonstrating their commitment to practices that show just how committed they are to what they do.
Sometimes this is awesome, as shown in this popper in Yoyogi park:
Sometimes it’s a little misguided. These girls are lining up to eat brunch on the patio of “Eggs and things”. They’ve decided that they are committed to recreating the North American preppy look and all its associated social habits:
The other things we’ve realized is that Tokyo is a fully modern medieval city. After the city was destroyed many times in the 20th century (first earthquakes, then firebombs), they could have rezoned all the streets (think New York’s Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 or Haussmann’s renovations of Paris). However, they chose not to, and two things become evident.
The first, is that Tokyo is a series of layers, all piled upon one another.
Highway over train over road:
Building upon building upon building, all trying to reach the sky…
The second interesting aspect of this is that the lack of planning means that experiences simply occur; randomly next to one another. For instance, today’s walk took us to the “super skyscraper” district of Shinjuku, through a park with ancient temples; very different styles of people watching in Harajuku and Shibuya and finally exploring the love hotels of Dogenzaka. All contiguous; all very different.
Here are some photos.
The atrium of the Sumitomo Building.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building; it’s supposed to look like a microchip (obvious, right?).
The view from the top:
We witnessed a Japanese wedding inside the Meiji Shriine of Kamizono-Cho park:
We did a lot of people watching there and in Harajuku and neighbouring Yoyogi park (a surprisingly fun Western-style park replete with runners, skateboarders, saxophone players, beat boxers and dancers):
In Shibuya, we marveled at the wall of people crossing the street. This is probably the only place in the world where its’ fascinating to just watch traffic:
From there, we got a kick out of the different themes and unintentionally inappropriate names of the love hotels in Dogenzaka. You can book them to “rest” for 4 hours or “stay” overnight. They’re actually a legitimate way to stay at a reasonably priced hotel in Tokyo:
Finally, we had a hilarious dinner in Shinjuku, We wandered the streets and found the cutest izakaya on the back streets. There was just one downside: nothing was in English.
We asked the table next to us if they spoke any English. It turned out that the chef could say “meat” and we knew “sashimi” and “sake”, so that was enough for a full meal. The food was amazing; the sashimi below came served with the fish it came from. And after the meal, the waitress (who, along with the restaurant thought it was hilarious that we were eating there – particularly when we ordered a second round of sakes) came out in the street and bowed to see us go.
We also learned a couple of cool things about Japanese eating culture at the restaurant. If you’re a local there, you can buy one of those huge bottles of sake and they’ll put a charm around it’s neck to indicate it’s yours. It’s then on ice (or heated) for you the next time you visit.
Also, the waitress put a sake cup into a box and then poured the sake into the cup, over the brim and filled up both the cup and the box. You’re then served the combination and it’s like getting two glasses in one, refilling your cup from the box when finished.
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