The Quiet Ripple Defines The Pond

So this is what I ate over the last few days.

Lunch

Snack - octopus in kinda beignet

Sashimi Tokyo

Fish

Amazing Kimchi Ramen

Back in Okinawa
Soba!

Ueno Park also has art galleries. I went to the Museum of Western Art and did the whole thing in 25 minutes. I like to maximize pleasure by compacting looking at amazing stuff worth billions into a very short time. I glug rather than sip.

Gates of Hell by Rodin
He must have sold a fake to Stanford

A room of Monets - A bloat of hippos

I don't like sponge cake

I find it a great metric of how nice living now is that anybody can wander around rooms where priceless masterpieces are hanging on the walls.

A deceit of lapwings

It is an excellent collection covering essentially European art from 14^th to 20^th centuries. The place is almost empty – I suppose all the art lovers are outside drinking sake under the cherry trees.

There is also a special exhibition of some French guy called Hubert Robert of whom I have never heard. I do his bit in a record-breaking 6mins 27 secs.

Who he?

I am in Tokyo. It is cherry blossom time. The city celebrates. Because it is cherry blossom time not because I am here.

Hanami or watching flowers is a big deal and seems to be a wonderful reason to sit under flowering cherry trees and get shit faced.

It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want - oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanami

I get up very early and head to Ueno park – renowned for its cherry blossom. It is fantastic. Even at 8:00 in the morning people are hunkering down under a long avenue of very blossomy trees to have a great day. They play mah jong. They play cards but most of all they drink and have a great time.

I do not want to concentrate too much on the drinking as in my tradition this leads to raucousness and fighting. Not so in Japan as everyone seems to be in extremely good humor.

The trees are very beautiful.

8:00 in the morning

I stroll through the blossom and come to a lake. I watch birds. It is a beautifully sunny if chilly day. There are a lot of people on the streets. The Tokyoans are polite, happy and – God bless them – quiet. No boom boxes, no one shouting at children, no adolescents squabbling.

Originally, the purpose of hanami excursions was to ponder the transient nature of life, as the cherry blossom blooming season is so short. This concept ties in with Buddhist thinking about the nature of life. However, today, these parties are more about having fun and eating food while enjoying the beauty of the cherry blossoms than pondering deep thoughts.

On my way out I stumble across this:

I love Tokyo

I have noticed an interesting dietary evolution over the last few months. I now eat tuna and rice at least 2 times maybe 3 times a week. It is delicious and cheap. Tuna is very cheap here – you can get a man/woman sized slab of same day swimming around for 350 yen.

This is deep red sort of tuna of which there are many er sorts

I usually slice off a few er slices for sashimi and soak them in soy sauce and wasabi.

Mushy peas

In the meantime I have put rice into the rice cooker. Rice is totally delicious here. It has a base cleanliness and whiteness that is a pleasure to eat other stuff from on top off. It also comes in cool bags.

Rice bags and a cardboard box of awamori

When the rice is ready I cook the tuna in beurre noire and lemon juice for about 3 minutes in a heavy iron dutch oven thing.

Eat me punk

I usually have a salad.

Vegetables ain't food. Vegetables is what food eats.

Same dish with umi budo. Is there any writing more pretentious than food writing?
http://www.couriermail.com.au/lifestyle/food-wine/green-caviar-or-umi-budo-is-making-waves-at-out-tables/story-e6frer56-1225909207776

One memory of my 50s and 60s childhood that I hold dear is the joy of bread and dripping. Dripping is the fat and meat juice that exudes from roasting meat, usually beef and pork. It gathers in the bottom of the roasting pan and given time cools into a white surface with an underlying stratum of meat jelly. It is delicious on toast, on bread or on the end of a finger. Dripping disappeared from my life for several decades. I think because butchers removed excess fat from roasts. Not so in Okinawa where pork in revered and a big slab of fat and skin on pork joints allows me to recreate the roast pork of my youth. Crackling and dripping.

Breakfast

I realized that I have not been writing much and wondered why. Pressure of work? Er, yes but what’s new? Getting used to Okinawa? Well, yes but still a trillion things to write about.

The real reason is the very comfortable sofa, combined with  the 42 inch screen, combined with download facility.

Sean Fitzpatrick - he used to wipe his sweaty head on referees' shirts.

I can now download all Super 14 rugby matches almost instantly. I can settle on my leather sofa and eat fatty pork whilst watching the Crusaders play the Cheetahs. The best of New Zealand rugby against the best of South African rugby in amazing clarity.  Few scrums, fewer line outs, dazzling speed and handling. Wow!

Anticipation

So this is why I have not blogged so much.  I am couch rugby whipped.

Villain of the piece

March 17 is St Patrick’s Day. This is a festival that never really swum into my ken until I went to California. There it is big time with green beer, green grass, green whatever. The American influence has made it also relatively big time in Okinawa. Do they celebrate St Patrick’s Day in Ireland?

Brought here from Brazil by Okinawan diaspora

The Islanders – Okinawa’s best Irish Traditional Band – are playing. I set off and pass many beautiful trees covered with OTT yellow flowers. My learned sister informs me that they are Silver Trumpet Trees.

The sun is setting. It is a very soft evening. I stop to watch.

Stringed instruments, perfumes,
winecups, lips, long hairs, eyes - mere toys
that are destroyed by time, toys! Frugality, loneliness,
labour, meditation, prayer and renunciation,
ash that time will blow away,
mere ash!

It really was a spectacular sunset.

We then play from 8:00 to 2:00.  

What fun! These Okinawans really go for it.

Hooray for early christian saints

Let me introduce to you

How all occasions do inform against me to speed/spur? my dull colonoscopy.  People have been telling me to have one for years but I never got around to it.  Today I did.

The preparation start the night before when you swallow a huge dose of Japanese laxative, which comes in a bottle that looks as if it is for eye drops. You awake with only one thing on your mind. You then mix up 2 litres of slimy liquid and drink it. This keeps you very near the toilet all morning.

Lubricant

Off I go to the clinic place and get dressed up in charming Japanese robes which feature shorts with an un-laceable slit at the derriere. “No anesthetic!” I cry because I prefer pain to the hassle of getting someone to drive me home.

I lie on my side as a charming doctor inserts a Nikon D90 into my rectum and manipulates it around my colon until it reaches the entrance to the small intestine. In front of me is a screen on which I can follow the camera’s progress in real time.

It looks just like this.

Hai!

No pain – just a feeling of unusuality.

The movie is worth the money.

Clinic in Okinawa at 4:00. Notice the queues.