The Great Japan/China Trip: Tokyo, Day 1

Our first full day in Tokyo wasn’t very action-packed for me, since I was waiting at the hotel for Kamiyama-sensei and Tomo to come, but that was a nice change after feeling like I needed to be doing something ever since we had landed at the airport. When I woke up that morning, I decided [...]

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Setting a Good Example

Tonight, Mark and I went out to dinner on the way home from work, and experienced perhaps the most scrupulously polite service I have ever encountered. We owe this all to Tim.
Tim was our completely silent trainee waiter, assigned to follow our waitress around and not even get to hold extra plates while she passed [...]

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A Waste of Good Chocolate

Yesterday, Mark and I went to the mall. Our purpose was to allow Mark to torture the clerks at the Williams-Sonoma story by having them open up the fancy knife case and then stand there while he tested the chef’s knife from each of the 8 different good cooking knife sets, overanalyzing each one with [...]

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Meditative Orange Peeling

It was when I lived in Japan that I began to eat clementine oranges in the winter. Actually, maybe they were a different type of mandarin orange there, but they were about the same size, and never had a label attached to them that I could read, so they are, to me, the same thing. [...]

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The political history of food

More from Oracle Bones, on the historical baggage our innocent take-out dinners can carry. The author is accompanying his Uighur (Chinese minority) immigrant friend on delivery rounds in DC:
Many customers were lawyers working late; they came down, bleary-eyed, fumbling with wallets and purses. None of them looked at us twice. It would have been a lot [...]

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