2:10 p.m. - 2006-10-31
Matt Sintchak Is the Coolest Guy In the World
There are two reasons for this. Number one, he plays the saxophone, and everyone who's seen "St Elmo's Fire" knows that the saxophone is the coolest instrument; and number two, he not only drove us to O'Hare and dropped us off, he came to O'Hare again two weeks later to pick us up and drive us home. "Us" being Kia, me and Melissa, who happens to married to Matt and with whom Kia and I had shrewdly allied ourselves. In between Matt's delivery and pick-up, we flew to Japan with Yid Vicious for two weeks. It was an exciting trip. I'll report on some of that later if there's time, but meanwhile...
BURRITO NIGHT
Monday, October 9, Katori City, Japan. Actually, there were no burritos on this date, as we were in Japan. Instead, we had delicious, home-cooked, or rather home-not-cooked sashimi. This was our first meal with our host family, the Tokazakis. They're a very nice older couple who speak not much more English than we speak Japanese (none) with two grown children who we barely saw and a guest house. That's right, you heard right, Kia and I got to stay in a fucking guest house! (Melissa and the rest of the guys had different host families so I don't know if any of them had guest houses.) It totally had a bathroom and a kitchenette with a fridge full of those big Japanese bottles of beer (that one drinks from tiny glasses: strange) and futons and a bunch of Shinto stuff whose meaning we couldn't discern and one of those metal helmets with the big bent blade stuck to the front and a stuffed raccoon holding a sake bottle and wearing a coolie hat in a glass case and a stuffed tortoise and pictures of ancestors and lots of calligraphy all over the walls that we couldn't read and sliding paper doors but also sliding glass doors in case it got cold. We felt like we had won the lottery, host-family-wise.
The sashimi that we ate in lieu of burritos was fresh and delicious, served with rice, miso soup and sake. In addition to enjoying a meal that I wouldn't dare try at home for fear of dying, we also began to glean the complexity of Japanese manners and the voracity with which they preserve and maintain their age-old food culture. My first slip-up was when I grasped a particularly slippery piece of tuna with chopsticks and, and, it sort of, kind of, slid out of the chopsticks and onto the table and I was hoping no one would notice but of course both Tokazakis were watching us like hawks and there was much commotion and talking in Japanese and probably Kia laughing at me and before I knew what was happening my fine pointy chopsicks were taken away and I was presented with the easier to handle wooden restaurant kind. After that there was no more sashimi dropped but my awkwardness with eating rice with chopsticks did not go unnoticed. More commotion, and I was given a spoon. I wondered, with some unease, what would happen if I fucked up with the spoon. Luckily, I had THAT under control.
During this whole incident, the hosts' first priority was obviously trying to make me feel as comfortable as possible, me the giant (to them) doofus with the big cloddish, chopstick-rejecting hands, unschooled in the Japanese way, pathetically unable to feed myself properly. This is what hosts do. But under the simple hostliness of their actions, I sensed an undercurrent of something like annoyance. It wasn't directed at me personally, but at the lapse in dining decorum. Japanese dining is very codified, and the conventions that dictate how to eat something appear to be as or more important than what's actually being eaten. And so, Japan Rule Number One: Schlub eats with chopsticks the wrong way, schlub has them taken away.
Slip-up Number Two: Neither Kia nor I were eating fast enough. "No good?" our host mom asked, looking perturbed. "No! Good!" we replied, reassuring her. "You eat slow. No good," said host mom. We resolved to pick up the pace. We ate lots more food than we would have normally. We were either reassuring host mom or adhering to some arcane rule we didn't understand but that the Japanese were born understanding. Probably both. We were probably on our way to contracting gout as well. After much eating and drinking of sake, we enjoyed some little bit of non-language-oriented conversation with host mom and dad, mostly making arrangements for the coming days of showers, breakfasts, and getting picked up and carted around to play in schools in the area. Eventually host dad got up and wandered off (owing to too much sake, according to host mom), and we toddled off to our guest house.
Best. Burrito. Night. EVER!
Monday, October 16, Kyoto, Japan. If we were going to find burritos in Japan on a Monday, this would be the night. Melissa, Kia and I were free of our delegation responsibilities (getting taken from place to place and listening to hundreds of speeches) and on our own in lovely Kyoto. Kyoto seems a cosmopolitan place where one would expect to find food from all over the world, good or otherwise (case in point for "otherwise": we found a Shakey's) and we had the run of the place, and Kia's very good at finding things in strange cities. Alas, we got split up early in the evening and on my own I don't have the moxie to scour the streets of Kyoto for a taqueria. So, while the ladies went off to their spa treatments, I hung around in our room watching Japanese TV, much of which is dedicated to showing extreme close-ups of food being prepared, then being eaten (correctly) by someone, usually an attractive young woman, who upon tasting the dish goes into ecstatic paroxysms, because Japanese food is so good. I think that night I ate some trail mix and drank a couple of tall boys, then fell asleep before Melissa and Kia came back. I guess you could say I'm not the "make the most of your time abroad" type of traveler.
Monday, October 23, Pasqual's, Madison, Wisconsin, USA. Back and severely jet-lagged. We were both extremely groggy from sleeping not enough and at the wrong times, and we almost didn't go out for burrito night. But then I argued that going out for burritos would be a step toward readjusting from our punishing excursion back to our normal routine. So we went to Pasqual's because Kia hadn't been in a long time. We both got chicken burritos, but Kia got CAJUN chicken, which she said was mostly just oversalted. Mine was okay. Mostly we were just basking in one another's company. We had had a dumb argument the night before, having more to do with our tiredness than anything else, but we'd made up and the Japan trip hadn't somehow ruined our marriage and we were (are) very happy to be together.
Second best. Burrito. Night. EVER!
Monday, October 30, Antojitos el Torel. I think that's the name. It's a tiny, tiny hole in the wall, mom and pop (or at least mom) place close to our house, on Cottage Grove Road. The lady who was running the place was very nice, and after she took our to-go order she brought us chips and salsa while we waited. I ordered chicken, Kia ordered chorizo. While we waited we sat at a table, ate chips and salsa and watched hilarious Mexican television. I couldn't tell what was happening. Someone was pulling a scam on someone involving a car. And a sweaty middle-aged man kept running in place, looking really harried. We'll definitely be coming back to this place. The burritos and rice were good and had a discernable home-made quality, rather than a stuff-emptied-out-of-a-can quality. Probably the refried beans were canned, but so what. We got them home and hit kind of a snag: my burrito was full of sour cream. I'd asked for mine with everything, not thinking about sour cream. On the other hand, Kia's wild about sour cream, an ingredient lacking in her burrito. Can you guess what we did, can you, can you, can you??? We TRADED BURRITOS and had a great burrito night, maybe the third best ever!
NEXT: All about our trip to Dubuque! And, if there's time, something about Japan.
