Dear Restaurant

M and I were in a restaurant that should remain nameless, despite its rather sweet name. We were tired of going to Central and wandering about in the bubble, going to fancy foreigner friendly restaurants and paying enhanced prices for mediocre food. We decided to go to a local restaurant, in fact M had found one near the hotel earlier that day.

We stood in front of the restaurant for a while, staring at the menu with its mostly Chinese food, but a few Western specials like hamburger, and sandwiches. There is a dream of finding a great local restaurant. Two other foreigners were behind us also, debating going in, and appeared to decide not to as we went in.

I noticed a flicker of faces as we sat down (or perhaps that is the tourist sense of being stared at) but the attention was brief, and the faces went down back to their meals, mostly older couples, eating a familiar meal, one man alone eating from a bowl and reading a paper.

The waitress, a young girl, perhaps a daughter of the house, brought us a menu and tea and then returned to wait in her corner. The restaurant was quiet. The other foreign couple came in and sat behind us.

We picked through the menu and settled on a combination to make us both happy (I recall we avoided dishes with pineapple) and I looked over at the waitress and a flicker of darkness ran straight towards her, perhaps jumping over or between or around her legs and vanishing behind a sideboard or perhaps into a hole.

For a moment she was frozen and then she ran (later M said, "lifting each foot up into the air as if trying not to touch the ground") into the kitchen at the back, screaming and screaming and crying and for a long time we heard her loud sobs and cries and complaints and though I can understand no Cantonese I could hear her cursing her fate and rats and why had it happened again? and she couldn't take it any more.

After a little while the sound became inaudible, perhaps she became quieter or perhaps she moved further into the back parts of the restaurant. A few people looked up from their plates to peer back into the kitchen. M and I stared at each other. The single man, who was sitting in front of the sideboard where the rat had gone, looked around from his paper to see whether there was anything particularly horrible to notice.

After a little conversation M and I decided that we could just walk out as we had not ordered anything. The foreign couple behind us stayed, having not had quite such a clear vantage point.

The Princess Who Was Hidden Underground

Another story, The Princess Who Was Hidden Underground, this time from The Violet Fairy Book, on Goodnight Ada. The Andrew Lang fairy stories are all well out of copyright and are available on Gutenberg - though there is something to be said for owning the book.

Goodnight Ada

Click this link to subscribe to my podcast, Goodnight Ada, in which I read Fairy stories from Andrew Lang for darling Ada. The first story is "The Dirty Shepherdess", from The Green Fairy Book.

Here also are huge men having horns four feet long

At the start of June, my father comes to visit. I plan to take him to a sumo match. They are big folk, and if you would believe, it is all based on a diet of enormous quantities of cabbage soup. The all-you-can-eat restaurants frequently have signs saying "No Sumo" (or more literally, "Sumo Wrestlers are Politely Requested to Not Dine Here, Polite-Modifier(onegaishimas)", with a little cartoon of a man in a uniform with his hands crossed in the universal, "Sorry but no".

In Kyoto, of course, they are more polite and don't say "no" at all, just pause for a long time and say nothing until you get embarrassed and ask a different question, or leave.

serpents also of such magnitude that they can eat an ox whole

Harpers occasionally brings me wonderful things - the rules of Texas Hold 'Em, commonly asked questions by recruits at an Al Q-- training camp ("Is it OK to poison the well of Al I-- as they have held the name of the prophet in vain and have just come here to play cards all the time"), the diary of an Argentinean rancher in the US (cows really taste better if they roam free in the pampas, like Australian cows) and now pigs.

Pigs, it seems, in the 90s, were heavily marketed as being "the other white meat" to health conscious folk who had settled on eating only chicken and fish. Super lean, super-fast-growing new breeds were used to achieve this, though with an unfortunate genetic predisposition to extreme nervousness. Hogs were known to drop dead of fright on hearing a car door slam shut too close to the barn. (Representative from Monsanto says, "But if a customer loses one of our pigs, we replace it"). And pigs that die stressed produce acid in their muscles, which causes the meat to lose its form and taste bad.

Look out for greyish meat with clearish liquid pooling in the supermarket tray. The Japanese, it seems prefer their pork to taste good, and are willing to pay more for it. Look for meat that is darker (the darker, the higher the ph, the less acidic) and has a fine edge where it has been cut.

Mass Consumer Goods

In Kamakura, home to the Daibatsu (Great Bronze Buddha) we stopped in a variety of antique shops on our way through the temples. Coming from Australia, where the antiques only reach back 200 years (well, and then back through a further 40,000 but you are not allowed to keep those), I find the Japanese antiques fascinating. Every antique store has a vast collection of blue and white Meiji (1868-1912) plates. The country has been producing china for export to the world for centuries after all.

In a recycled kimono shop (that is, recycled into bags, placemats, fans, etc), I found a plate with a whale design. Not having ever known anyone to put a whale in a plate before, I bought it, quite happy.

The following weekend, in another antique store in Shimakitazawa, Tokyo, among the usual piles of old white and blue china, I found... the same plates! in fact, in a wider range of shapes.

Sakura Tourism

On a train today saw a girl, her pencil case titled "Personable Temps".

Java3D nonsense:

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2004/07/20/fluidiom.html

https://jogl.dev.java.net/