Unagi, daigaku-imo and age-nasu

Tokyo visitor guides tend to emphasize how the city is more experiential than monumental; that wandering the neighborhoods is the best way to take it in. The neon stoked parts of the city, like Ginza with its overkill of shopping, are definitely worth experiencing.

Go crazy.


 

Or you can try to find your way out of Shinguku Station, purportedly the world's busiest train station, and go to the the New York Bar at the top of the Park Hyatt Hotel and channel your inner Bob Harris from Lost in Translation.

It's Suntory time! They also offer Coppola wine.

The narrow lanes that survived WWII bombs and post-war rebuilding make a nice counterpoint. Yanaka Ginza is a perfect example. It took a little wandering to find it because it's hidden in a nest of other crowded streets that are also pretty interesting. It doesn't help that Tokyo isn't big on street signs. But you know when you finally stumble on it.

East entrance to Yanaka Ginza.

It's a working shopping street for locals and I arrived just in time for the evening rush. What made it fun for me was the street food being served up by every three steps.

Preparing my eel on a stick.

First stop: barbecued unagi, freshwater eel. It's not like chicken, but also not like fish. Maybe more like snake? I don't know. It's good though. 

Sticky sweet. Seriously, super-glue sticky.

Next: daigaku-imo, deep-fried yams smothered in a kind of simple syrup only different and sprinkled with black sesame seeds.






 
 

 

Greasy goodness.

Last and perhaps the best, age-nasu: deep-fried japanese eggplant. This version was stuffed with spicy ground beef and dipped in tempura batter before frying. That is some mighty fine dining.

Merry Christmas from Singapore

Is he sleeping or just wondering if he can get away with not wearing red just once?

Worse than durian?

Margaret admiring the inflorescence.



Singapore's first and only titan arum (a.k.a. corpse flower) is the first thing that currently greets visitors to the country's botanic garden. Native only to the forests of Sumatra, a short hop across the Malacca Strait from here, Singapore had to get the corm for growing this one from the Huntington Botanic Garden in California. (Seems Indonesia just won't cut Singapore any slack.) The inflorescence is popping out but it didn't smell like the rotting flesh of its fame. Maybe it'll turn stinky when to leaves begin the peel back. Hard to believe it can be worse than durian. 

I remember walking over to the University of Washington from the Safeco Tower with Dan Pedersen to look at the botany department's corpse flower in 1999. At the time, it was only the 37th blooming of a cultivated titan arum since the first in 1889. It looks like Singapore's will be number 133 for the botanists. Obviously, they've got this down. Soon there will be entire plantations devoted to the corpse flower and they'll be available from FTD. Perfect for those times when you want to tell someone to %$#@! off -- and durian just isn't enough.

Complete list of titan arum blooms in cultivation.

Complete list of botanists.

The fog of war

Room with a view, but no window screen.















This is the view from our bedroom with the window open. When we were apartment hunting we asked our agents, Sean and Li Leng, about getting screens. They both seemed puzzled by the question. "No one has screens in Singapore," Sean said. "There are no bugs in Singapore." As we looked around and thought about it, we hadn't really seen many bugs and it seemed everyone kept their doors and windows open unscreened.

How does Singapore do it? Door-to-door inspections and weekly "foggings" seem to be the winning formula. Here's last week's gassing at our building.  


A simple headache is all it cost me to take this photo.

  


















We also got a visit last week from the National Environment Agency. The inspectors seemed legit with their clipboards and matching polo shirts bearing the agency's logo, so I let them in. They looked around for signs of mosquitoes, but we were clean.

Turns out there was a spike in dengue cases about a year ago and the country declared war on the blood-suckers with typcial Singaporean thoroughness. According to a news release, during the first six months of this year 1,000 inspectors visited 3,142,332 construction sites, parks, vacant lots, businesses and private residences looking for mosquitoes. At that rate, they've likely seen every puddle, flower pot and pet dish in the country as well as inside our apartment. (If there's ever an outbreak of head lice, I won't be surprised if they inspect every resident's scalp.)

I guess you can't argue with success. The number of dengue cases is dropping and we don't have to invest in window screens. A win-win.