We are rapidly approaching the eighth year living in our little house in Okubo. The place is holding up pretty well, mainly because we don’t have any kids to run around tearing things up and leaving little marks of love everywhere. Still, as we get closer to ten years, we expect that little things will start to crop up that need to be dealt with.

Houses in Japan have evolved more rapidly during the past thirty years or so. Fifty years ago houses were a luxury item, and they weren’t exactly built to last. Even today, it is far more common to knock down an old house built 30-40 years ago and start over when buying property. Probably the houses built these days will last longer. They have more strength and safety features, but in the end they are wood structures that are built for only one generation of living. This is due to culture as much as anything – old things are not as desirable here in disposable Japan. Since old houses have always been seen as falling apart it has created a market for new houses, and there is little motivation to build now houses to last since few people want a used house. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

House prices tend to drift downwards at a steady pace over time, so there is no market for fixing up houses and flipping them. The prices that don’t change or go up are the land prices, the piece of dirt sitting under your house may actually go up in value, although usually not enough to make any kind of substantial profit.

Our neighborhood was born about ten years ago, but between our neighborhood and the main road there are neighborhoods built a generation or two before. The closer we get to the main road, the older the houses (and their occupants) are. The oldest houses now are starting to empty out, and we’ve seen two get knocked down in the past year as the people who used to live there have either passed away or have moved to live with their children to be taken care of.  

It is a little sad to walk by these empty lots and think about all the hope and joy that was there when the house was built.

I had made a chance acquaintance with an older gentleman living in one of these houses. He was excited to hear that I was from America, and he brought out some ancient black and white photos of him on a ship sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The picture showed a man staring solemnly at the camera, but the older version showing the photo had a wide smile on his face as he recalled his trip to America. Now he and his wife are gone, and there’s just an empty patch of dirt for me to remember them by.

Life is a cycle, and soon enough I imagine those empty spaces might be bought by new families hoping for a good life in our little town of Okubo. In the meantime, it is just a little sad to walk through the withering outer edge of our neighborhood.

This being our third time to Thailand, and having spent each visit at New Year’s in Bangkok, we had a good idea of what we wanted to get out of this visit. 

Our first priority was to relax, eat lots of street food, and hit some of our favorite restaurants. Sightseeing – not so much. We didn’t want to really do much in the way of shopping either.  

So rather than cover our day to day activities in Bangkok, I’ll try to wrap it all up in one bite-sized package here.
We were definitely interested in seeing what the situation would be like in Bangkok since the King of Thailand had passed away in 2016. I had heard that the activity in bars, nightclubs, and sex districts would be curtailed during a year of mourning. From what we saw, things were getting back to normal, but still a little cautious. At one point we walked through the neighborhood of our old hotel, which is surrounded by lots of massage shops (both erotic and regular) and also near Soi Cowboy. Most shops were open, but they didn’t have lineups of girls outside trying to pull people in. Semi-open for business, I guess. 
Everywhere we looked there were memorial posters and signs for the late King, and even a few pictures of the next King. He will probably start to appear more and more prominently leading up to his coronation, but in the posters that we saw of him he looked more than a little nervous to be wearing the royal clothes.

Kuniko had found a new hotel down Soi 12, near the end of the avenue. Turns out it was almost next to Cabbages and Condoms, which is one of our favorite restaurants in Bangkok. That made it convenient to stop by anytime. We were also close to Asok station, which is a hub of shopping, street food and activities.  
The hotel itself was a little odd. The room and location were great, but there were lots of little issues that came up during our three night stay. Our WiFi connection was weird, so they had to send staff up to install a temporary access point while we were staying. Sometimes the lights would respond to the switches, other times they didn’t. And New Year’s Eve when we came back home late from partying apparently all the locks failed to respond to the guest’s key cards. Weird. But the price was right, the pool was quite nice, and we enjoyed our stay overall.

Usually when we stay in Bangkok we eat mainly at restaurants, and this was the first time that we really concentrated on street food instead. Thanks to the internet it was easy enough to track down good locations were street food vendors gathered. We tried all kinds of dishes, mainly noodles, salads, and rice dishes, and drank our weight in cold Thai beer. At first we ordered the regular sized bottles of beer, but by the end of the trip we were going straight for the big bottles.  

We found our favorite food stand of this trip near Thong Lo station, around Soi 38. At first we arrived a bit early, and we were the only customers around. We had bowls of noodle soup – one spicy with plain. Both had liberal chunks of grilled pork, won tons (fried and soft), and veggies. Mine had crab meat on top, too. The noodles and broth were just perfect, and I think we’ll never forget that place. We also ordered some chicken rice from an adjacent stall, and that was just as tasty as the Singaporean version we had earlier this year.

After eating there we walked down the street a ways and then circled back to head to our hotel. At the end of the street was a stand selling sweets. They had many open containers of sweet sauces and desserts, and I have never seen as many flies in one place as I saw there. The flies attacked the food like lions on a wildebeest, and we were glad we had already eaten down the street, otherwise we’d have lost our appetite.  

 
We liked the food stand that we tried so much that we ended up going there again on our last night in Bangkok. We panicked at first when it wasn’t there, but it turns out that on Mondays he moves indoors because they do street cleaning on Mondays. It was just as delicious the second time.

 
Another of our favorite restaurants served us a seafood salad that almost burned my tastebuds off. It was delicious, hot and painful, and I think we had to order another round of cold beers just to wash down the fire. I guess I had forgotten how hot Thai food can get. 
It was so much fun to explore so many different places to eat, and we generally tried five or so places a day. We ate only 1-2 small dishes at each place, and if it seemed really good we’d stick around for more. It was a good strategy for us.

For New Year’s Eve we went across the street to the Westin hotel to sit out on their seventh-floor terrace and watch people coming and going through the Sukhumvit district. Despite there being a memorial observation, there were still a few fireworks and ceremonies around us. In the Westin hotel they had some singer rocking the night away right up to the countdown, and there were a few people getting up and hitting the dance floor. We didn’t quite time our sparkling wine correctly, but still it was nice to spend the New Year countdown on the town.  
 

After we went to bed, at around 3 am or so I heard some commotion from outside our hotel room door. I got up and looked out the peephole, and the hotel guest from the room across from our had partied a bit too hard and collapsed outside his door in the hallway. He probably couldn’t get his door open because of the keycard problems, and he was a little noisy talking to himself in a horizontal position. A few minutes later I could hear the hotel staff or police urging him up and into his room. In any case, he was gone when we left the next morning. 

Besides eating and drinking and swimming we did manage to get a massage, shop for some souvenirs for our neighbors and coworkers, and do a lot of walking in flip flops. Bangkok had changed a bit since we had last visited six years ago, but all our favorite places were still around. We had fun getting back in touch with the town, eating everything in sight and spending days next to the pool. It was the perfect way to wrap up a great holiday trip.

We rose pretty early the next day eager to walk some distance and see some sights. Our goal was 5 kilometers away, a golden temple called That Luan. We could have hired a tuktuk or taxi to take us there, but we wanted to burn calories and be hungry. So we hiked it!

Along the way we stopped for a more detailed look at the Lao Arch, and took a picture for a very strict Thai couple that wanted the picture framed “just so”. Past the Arch we walked past a food stand grilling a side of pork and homemade sausages, and we just couldn’t resist. We bought a bag full of meat, said no thanks to the rice, and then sat on a curb outside a BMW dealership and had a meat breakfast. The grilled meat really hit the spot – and we ate like a couple of starved barbarians. Who would believe we had like five meals the previous day?

We reached That Luan, but entered via an unconventional route. We walked across a huge parking area that I can only compare in size and scale to something that would be next to Disneyland. There were no lines for parking spots, just a vast paved area. Military gathering area? Backup runway for airplanes? Whatever it was, we walked across it and finally found our goal.

The gold temple is certainly gold, and it strikes you as something out of a low budget movie about the Pharaohs of Egypt. It was very unique, and once you get up close you can appreciate it a lot more – there were unusual details like gates with the image of Buddha bent into the metal wires. We walked around the perimeter taking pictures of the gold temple against the blue, cloudless sky.

There were other buildings in the area, but some of them seemed like they were closed for religious reasons that day. Some Buddhist monks in orange robes worked to set up a stage for some upcoming event, and there were even some guys trying to take our picture and sell it to us – which I imagine is a tough sell in the age of modern smartphones.

From there we walked back towards the center of town, with the aim to check out the bus station. I know the bus station isn’t a typical sightseeing area, but Kuniko had heard that around the bus station was a great place to buy sandwiches, and I wanted to try the Laos version of a bahn mi sandwich. It was a long walk to the bus station, and I was occasionally distracted by stands selling fried bananas or a guy roasting an entire pig on a spit. Finally we made it to the bus station, and it was a pretty wild place.

It made sense that the bus station would be a central hub of activity. There is no train system in Laos, and naturally the most affordable transportation would be the bus. Buses were pulling in and people were rushing onto and off the buses helter skelter. We walked down a curious side street near the station with food stands that sold food aimed directly at the locals, not us. Flies buzzed even more down this alley, and the floor was wet with what I think was water but could have been something else. There was a smell of blood, too – like a butcher was nearby.

Around the corner we found a row of sandwich vendors. They stood behind piles of baguettes and made up the sandwiches for people to take on long distance bus rides. We choose a vendor at random, and luckily the guy spoke enough English that it was easy to make the purchase. He sliced open the big baguette, and then used some kind of liver paste like you would butter or mayonnaise. Next was meat (some kind of bologna), lots of pickled vegetables, chili peppers, a generous helping of cilantro, lettuce, chili sauce, and fish sauce. Kuniko and I split one sandwich, and we just about inhaled it. We didn’t think we’d be able to eat something that big, but I am happy to report that it was no problem whatsoever. Delicious!

The hustle and activity around the bus station was the first time in a long time that I really felt like things were out of my control. Like we were surrounded by a storm and could do nothing to affect it. I never felt like it was unsafe, just that things were happening way faster than my mind could track them. It was a little breathtaking, a little scary, and a little exhilarating. Just what we need to really feel like you’re in a completely different environment and break out of your comfort zone.

On the way back to the hotel for a break we hit a tiny little restaurant just to buy beers. However, it would have been a shame to not try their noodle soup, and that was nice, too. I liked sitting there because we sat on the street, but still in the shade of some trees that they had planted just for that purpose. We rested our feet, washed down the soup with BeerLao and enjoyed the perfect weather.

Back at the hotel we took a nap on that hard bed of ours, because that was a luxury we rarely get during our normal lives. We lounged and napped for a while, and then went back out to to eat more. We had sticky rice and fried chicken meatballs with beer on an expat-popular street downtown, and then we moved on to the foodie paradise on Ban Anou to get some food for takeout. The noodle place that we had wanted to try wasn’t open that night, but we found a wide assortment of different foods to bring back to our hotel. We got an egg omelet, homemade grilled sausages with lemongrass, a coconut curry with bamboo shoots, and more. The takeout food was nice because the flies couldn’t follow us to our hotel room, and the room had a full kitchen so it was easy to reheat and organize everything.

It was our last night in Laos, as we were headed back to Bangkok for New Years and more street food. We really had a great time in Laos, and I’d recommend it to adventurous people interested in trying a real “Southeast Asia” experience on the cheap.

We got up pretty early, partially because of the hard bed, and decided to go take a look around. Right away the streets of Vientiane reminded me a lot of Hanoi. Uneven, sometimes broken, and lots of holes to be careful of. We walked along the main road, into the morning sun, and took in the sights. Lots of shops were still closed, some seemed permanently closed, and there were plenty of cars on the road going into the center of town. We walked past a beautiful old temple painted with bright colors and elaborate tile work. We missed a major fountain landmark, because it was surrounded by food stands being built for the New Year celebration coming up.

After walking past the presidential palace (no pictures allowed), we realized that we needed to get some local money. Lao kip is hard to get outside of Laos, so we tried our luck at an ATM. Kuniko was wary of trusting the ATMs in Laos, because she had heard that sometimes they’ll eat your card and leave you stuck without it. We tried an ATM connected to a bank that was open and had customers going in and out of it on the premise that if our card was eaten we could at least go bug the staff about it. Luckily the card went though fine and we had 600,000 kip to spend. Woo-hoo!

Our first stop for sightseeing was Wat Si Saket, a temple that was surrounded by a courtyard housing thousands of Buddhas. The Buddhas were big, small, silver, white, damaged, intact, you name it. It was a very visually striking stop, and it turned out to be my favorite place to visit during our stay.

As we walked through the city we passed what turned out to be a graveyard. Little shrines to memorialize people were built around a grassy area, with a temple nearby. Some shrines were simple, others covered with flashy silver, all with a tiny picture of the occupant (?) – very interesting. It reminded me of our visit to Moscow and the graveyard we visited there with some ostentatious gravestones.

We walked to the center of town to see the Lao version of the Arc D’Triomphe – a beautifully Asian version of the French landmark. It was kind of the anchor of the town, and the first day we just took a few pictures from a distance. Vientiane is a small capital, and we wanted to save some sightseeing for the other days.

One interesting point about Vientiane was that they had crosswalk signals on most intersections, but they only seemed to be working about half the time. Sometimes there were signals but no buttons, sometimes buttons but no signals. Sometimes nothing at all. We soon learned you should just walk out there and keep your head on a swivel. Just like in Vietnam, at first it seems like suicide and by the end of your first day it is second nature.

With all this walking we were getting a little hot and thirsty, so we stopped at a small cafe for a beer and a snack. Our eating strategy throughout the rest of the trip was to stop at many different places, and try just one or two things at each place. We never ordered big at any one place, hoping that instead we could try a greater variety of things and have less chance of eating too much at a bad restaurant.

Our first cafe was a cool little place. It was a shop that was open to the front, and they cooked in an open-air style. We sat on plastic chairs at a plastic table, and were able to order from a menu that thoughtfully included English. The ladies cooked the food for us, and cats wandered in and around eating scraps that the staff had left them. The food smelled great – they grilled some pork and then put it inside some French bread with cheese and lettuce. The sandwich itself wasn’t exactly like a bahn mi from Vietnam – it was sort of like a breakfast version. Not so exciting, but luckily the food improved from there. The cold beer was why we there – and it went down nicely. BeerLao, the major (and maybe only) beer available was typical of Southeast Asian beers – light and easy to drink.

Back at the hotel we swam a bit at our pool, but it was just a few degrees too cold. The weather was warm but not hot, and I guess that the pool would be much more popular in the summer. After swimming for a while we retired the swim trunks in Laos.

At lunch we hit our first really good food stand. It was a tiny restaurant with a family living and working there, and grandma and grandpa sat in the back babysitting the infants while the rest of the family prepared our food. We had a great bowl of pork noodles, with a broth rich in roasted garlic, lots of rice noodles, big chunks of tender pork, cilantro and hot peppers, too. We also ordered some fried rice that we laced with blazing hot peppers and fish sauce – my god it was spicy. We were both sweating pretty heavily after the meal, and luckily we could wash everything down with cold beer.

While we ate in open air restaurants we could watch things happening on the streets. People were cooking outside, cars drove past and stray dogs walked by now and then looking hopefully at the food. There were many scooters on the road, just like in Vietnam, and people often pulled over to buy some food to go. This was not a rich country, but everyone we met was friendly – and nobody pushed us to buy anything or begged for money. It felt safe there, and the longer I was there the safer I felt.

Kuniko really impressed me, too. Sometimes we went to places that were definitely on the dirty side. Japan is a very clean country and we are used to very sanitized conditions, but Kuniko will go wherever it takes to get a good meal. She doesn’t mind flies buzzing while we eat or stray dogs lying under table while we ate outside. She is just as adventuresome as I am when it comes to good food. I’m lucky to have someone like me who will stop at nothing to find a delicious experience.

In the evening we went down to the Mekong River and watched the sun setting on the other side, and then explored a night market that is set up every night. Most of the market was selling goods, which we weren’t really interested in, but some places sold food. We bought a bowl of noodles served at room temperature, with cubes of strange meat (almost black, but with a mild taste) and a liberal dose of cilantro, peanuts, chili peppers and chili sauce. But it wasn’t until we walked north to the food stands lining the streets near Ban Anou that we really got an eyeful of culture.

This street had food stands lined up along one side, and they were selling all kinds of interesting things. Mainly grilled meats and river fish (folded in half and grilled whole), but there were also curries, homemade sausages, eggs on skewers (in the shell – how did they do that?), a stand with ten different kinds of noodle stir fries, and plenty of flies buzzing around. Each stand used fans to keep the flies away, and some stands had little electric motors that rotated big strips of paper – kind of an automated fly dispersal device. The smell of cooking smoke, the lights and all the great food – it was like foodie heaven.

We were overwhelmed by all the choices that night and decided to visit again the next day. We did buy some spring rolls to take back to the hotel later and eat. On the way back to the hotel we decided to have one more little dinner stop, and we finally ate Lao “larb” – a sort of native dish involving pork, sticky rice, and salad greens and herbs. It was quite good – better than I expected – and we ate it with beer as we sat on a shaky table on the sidewalk in the warm evening. Below us two dogs were sleeping, and we knew better to shoo them away. They didn’t seem to mind – they seemed to appreciate the smell of the food but didn’t really make any efforts to get any.

So it was an eventful day in Vientiane, and we certainly ate our fill. Everything was affordable – we ate and drank all we wanted and still only spent around $5-7 a meal (for both of us).

We got up right on time early in the morning and piled into Steve’s car for the ride into the airport. Julia’s boyfriend was coming in by plane after we left, so the timing worked out to be quite good. We made great time into Sydney airport, and we said some quick goodbyes as they dropped us off at international departures.

So now we were back on our own. It was easy to catch our flight out, and although it got quite bumpy near the end of the trip, overall it was an easy ride. I spent most of the time reading, and enjoyed two of Patrick Rothfuss’s novels. What a pleasure to read!

We killed three hours or so in Bangkok airport again. We have a lot of experience killing time (and beers) at this airport, so we knew exactly what to eat and where to eat it. It was just a 40 minute flight from Bangkok to Vientiane, the capital city of Laos.

On the flight we filled in a surprising amount of paperwork. During the past week we had been waiting for a confirmation from our hotel for the pickup at the airport, but we never heard back from them. We weren’t sure just how we’d get from the airport to the hotel, and the name of the hotel sounded a bit more like an apartment than a hotel, so we weren’t even sure there would be anyone there to check us in (similar to what happened to us in Zadar, Croatia). The suspense was building, flying into a new country, into the unknown.

In Laos, Japanese citizens are not required to have a visa, and so Kuniko went right through immigration. As an American citizen I had to buy a visa at the airport, using US dollars. I had everything prepared and ready, and the process was quite smooth. We got our suitcase, went outside the gate into the tiny airport, and luckily there was a hotel driver waiting for us with Kuniko’s name on a card. He drove us the short distance into town and we were relieved to find that we were staying in a real hotel with a real check-in counter and staff that even spoke English. Hooray!

Our hotel room was on the top floor of the six floor building, but we didn’t really have any energy to go out and explore the first night. We were arriving at almost ten pm, so we decided to go ahead and get some rest. The room was quite nice and certainly spacious, but it had some odd points. One thing was the shower was more like a closet. The shower door was an actual wooden door that you might found on the outside of a house – and I’m sure the water splashing will warp the door soon. The other thing that was notable was maybe the hardest bed I have ever slept on. I guess it is good for your lower back, but it was really, really hard. It took some getting used to.

We went to bed that night looking forward to getting to know the city a little better starting the next day.

Alyssa and Tim flew out early the next morning to go back home, and we slept right through it. Luckily we had said our goodbyes the previous night. Kuniko and Julia seemed to have the worst of the hangovers, but that didn’t stop Julia from suggesting a visit to the beach on Boxing Day.

We went to a nice beach (I believe it was called North Beach?) near Wollongong, and there were a lot of people out there enjoying the warm weather. The surf was pretty strong – I was surprised that so many people were playing out there in it. Julia and Steve went out and swam a bit, but Kuniko and I just relaxed and walked up and down the beach. Every now and then teams of skydivers would parachute in across the way, and they sure came in fast!

After a while at the beach we got back in the car, and then stopped at the supermarket on the way home to look around. Steve took us through the back door, and it was a pretty stinky shortcut. The supermarket was fun to explore, and we bought some tinned seafood to bring back as souvenirs for our neighbors, and some beer to restock Steve’s fridge.

In the afternoon Steve wanted to take us out for lunch at the Harborfront seafood restaurant. Since we had been eating lobster, prawns, bugs, and oysters the last few days it wasn’t a surprise that everyone ordered meat instead of seafood. The location of the restaurant (and our table) was perfect, with a nice view of the harbor and the boats docked inside. There were even people swimming in the harbor – I don’t know if I would swim in the harbors near our home in Japan.

The food was delicious, with lots of unique spice combinations that I could experience for the first time. We had some good local beers, and then a really nice wine with lunch. Our liver break wasn’t quite as long as I had expected!

After lunch we walked around the lighthouse which commanded an almost panoramic view of the ocean, and from the top of the hillside we could see storm clouds moving towards us from Mt. Kembla. Luckily we made it to the car before the rain hit us, and the rain let up after only a half hour or so.

For dinner on Boxing Day we drove a ways down the road from Steve and Brenda’s house and attended a pizza party with a twist. It was held at a community center that had a big eating area outside, complete with a large traditional pizza oven. The party was by invite only, but there were about a hundred people there. First, you picked up a pizza pan with a crust already rolled out on it. You put sauce that the host was kind enough to provide, and then you put whatever toppings you brought with you to the party. The host cooked the pizzas for you, and called out your number when it was ready. I guess it is an annual tradition, and it was fun to take part. The place was adjacent to railroad tracks, and a train hauling coal from the nearby active coal mine chugged through now and then. On top of that, the place had a miniature railroad surrounding it in a big loop, but the trains (about the same scale as Train Town in Sonoma) were out of action for safety reasons. It was an interesting place.

We sat under some trees and ate pizzas and drank wine with some friends of Steve and Brenda. They came prepared and pulled out more prawns to eat by the handful, along with some good wine. They made a nice pizza, too – no sauce, just smashed baked potatoes, olive oil and rosemary. Yum.

It was our last night in Australia, so we came home and Steve was nice enough to share a nice glass of scotch with us, and we sat around their living room talking about life in general and travel in particular.

We had a good time with the Coursey family, and they really made us feel at home while we were there. We hope to spend more time together with them in the future, whether it is in Japan or in Australia.

Christmas morning we all slept in a bit, owing to the festivities at the pub the previous night. About nine am we were having coffee and opening presents. Steve and Brenda seemed to like the sake cups we got them, they gave us an alpaca blanket, a Maori box, some soaps and bath salts, and a nice bottle of wine (that we got into later in Bangkok). It was really fun to see their Christmas traditions, too.

After cleaning up a bit we had morning Bloody Marys, complete with the big stalk of celery, and then got to work on a seafood lunch. I helped Tim shuck oysters to eat raw (they were tiny but delicious). I could tell that Tim has shucked an oyster or two in his life, while I just tried to keep from stabbing myself in the hand. One oyster turned out to be bad, and it smelled up an entire side of their home – nasty! Luckily we could air things out and it was OK to proceed. I grilled a few oysters (which was new to them) but only about half the oysters opened up, which was a little strange. We ate bugs, the strange, alien-like seafood that taste like lobster but looks like science fiction.

We ate outside on the patio, surrounded by “the bush” – the outback of Australia. Every now and then the Kookaburra birds would laugh in the distance, reminded me of the sound effects of the Jungle Cruise from Disneyland. They had wild parrots visiting the yard as well – it was so cool to see so much color in the trees around their home. Steve had cleared some trees around their house leaving them with an ocean view off in the distance – it was a spectacular place to sit and contemplate while sipping a cold beer.

After everyone had gotten in a nap it was time to get back down to eating. It was quite a feast – a stuffed turkey, ham, candied yams, potatoes roasted in duck fat, and a delicious stuffing (with sausage). We pulled on poppers with dinner, and wore the silly hats that were included inside. This Christmas tradition was new to me, but that’s what makes it fun.

We also played a game after dinner called True/False, where someone will read either a true or false fact off of a card, and the next person has to decide if it is true or not. It was fun to play, and became a talking point at various times during the rest of our stay. There were also some funny coasters with faces that you hung from your nose – making each person completely different from what you’d expect to see. Hard to explain but fun at parties!

In the evening we went over to Mary and Barry’s house, a neighbor down the street, for more food and drink. While we were in Australia at each person’s house they had put out prawns – boiled and easy to peel, and you scooped them up with your hand peeled them and ate them like popcorn. We had more prawns, sausages, Brenda’s pavlava dessert, and lots of wine. Kuniko got a little carried away with drinking and everyone was impressed how much more talkative she became. It was a fun night.

We went back to Steve and Brenda’s with them, leaving the young ones to party at Mary and Barry’s place. It was a great Christmas day – but we needed to recover some sleep and give our stomachs (and livers) a rest.

For winter holiday we decided to head back to Australia for the first time in a long time. We wanted to spend a little time with the Coursey family there, and also enjoy a warmer climate for a while. To get to Australia we would first fly from Osaka to Bangkok, a six hour flight, and then after two hours in the airport we’d fly on an overnight (ten hour) flight to Sydney.

But we almost shot ourselves in the foot right from the start.

At Kansai International Airport we arrived in plenty of time, and there weren’t any people waiting for check-in so we walked right to the front. Things went smoothly until the check-in staff asked if we already got our “ETA”. What the heck is that? Turns out, it is like an entry visa, and the Australian government charges $60 to all visitors. Ostensibly it is a security fee, but in actuality it is more like a visa. Anyway, we didn’t know about it (although we should have researched it) and so we had no choice but to apply for the ETA right there in the airport from our phones. The check-in staff said that we could get back in line once we had gotten the ETA. We stepped aside, and finished the online application in about five minutes – piece of cake. After applying, I received an email stating that my application is one of the rare cases that will require human approval, and I should check back within 12 hours to confirm the status. Uh oh.

With our flight to Bangkok scheduled to leave in two hours, it wasn’t looking good. Kuniko was in the same boat – so we went to grab some coffee and wondered if we might have to cancel the Australian leg of our trip if we couldn’t get the ETA. We sat waiting for an approval email – nothing to do but wait. Finally, I poked around on their online website and found a form that you could use to check on the status of an ETA. I checked my status, and I was approved. Strangely, I never received an approval email. Kuniko couldn’t check her status for some reason, so we took the information back up to the check-in line. Our backup plan was I would go on to Australia and Kuniko would wait for me in Bangkok sipping cocktails by the pool. Once we arrived back at the check-in there was a huge line, and time was ticking to get to the gate. We flagged down a manager who was nice enough to confirm that the ETA was approved, and then she let us cut all the way to the front of the long line to check in.

That was a big help, but it was still dicey getting through security – it was a big travel day, apparently. We made our flight, but it was a closer call than I would have liked. Once we sat down in our seats on the plane we could finally relax and feel like the holiday was beginning.

It was an easy cruise to Bangkok. We made use of the time in Bangkok to raid the airport restaurants and managed to get some decent food out of it. The flight to Sydney went smoothly, and I managed to sleep through about six of the ten hours in the air. It helped that we were sitting in the back of the plane so we could recline our seats guilt-free.

Steve met us at the airport, and it was good to see him again. As he drove us back towards his home in Mt. Kembla, we showed us some of the sights and it was fun to look around. It had been 13 years since I had been there, and I hardly remembered any of it. On the way back we stopped at the Overlook Hotel – a new hotel built on a hill overlooking the ocean and beaches near Wollongong. The style was a bit modern, and Kuniko and I decided to order some drinks once the clock struck 10 am (apparently they can’t serve alcohol until 10 am there). My philosophy on drinking alcohol while traveling is go ahead and drink whenever you feel like it. The internal clock is all screwy anyway, so don’t worry about what time of day it is. Steve joined us for a beer, and then we headed on back to his place to see the rest of the family.

Back at home we met Brenda, Alyssa and her boyfriend Tim, and Julia. It had been several months since we had seen Brenda but a lot longer since we had met their daughters. It was fun to see how they had grown up. Tim was a great guy, too, and Kuniko and I both struggled to figure out his accent sometimes.

We had a welcome lunch at their place, with lots of seafood, ham, and salad, and then settled in for the visit. For Christmas Eve dinner we all went down to the local pub to share in their neighborhood tradition. Lots of their friends were there, and everyone ate, drank, and talked – taking up a whole section of the large pub. Kuniko and I talked with as many people as possible and had good conversations about life in Japan, Australia, Donald Trump, and more. Luckily there was plenty of wine to drink and food to eat – I had a pork belly that was delicious and Kuniko had a rump steak that was really big. Big servings here, too! The wine we had that night wasn’t so impressive, but Steve brought out some good stuff later on that compared much more favorably.

After a nightcap of limoncello and some fresh fruit we went to bed with visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads (or something like that).

It is officially halfway through my school term, and that means winter break is here. Just in time, too – I could use a little refresh in my schedule.

On Tuesday during one of my classes I was standing up talking with my students and when I stepped to the side I felt a little click in my ankle. It didn’t think it hurt that much at the time, but later after the students left I realized that it did in fact hurt – intensely. It wasn’t a sprain – there was no swelling and no vigorous activity to cause it – but it sure felt like a sprain. I was walking with a pronounced limp the rest of the workday, and I barely could walk to the station and home. At home I iced the ankle but there was no real effect, and both Kuniko and myself were worried that I’d be on crutches for our holiday trip.

Wednesday morning it seemed that sleeping and taking weight off it improved the ankle, but after walking to the station in the morning it was back to hurting pretty badly. I limped from the station towards my office, but after a hundred steps I figured it was better to call a taxi and rest my leg for the trip. I gimped up to my office and sat down, and figured that at least I’d have lots of time in the airplane to rest my injury. In a truly horrific moment of bad timing, I entered the office at the same time as one of the ladies who works on my floor, and she has a permanent leg problem – see walks with a limp every day. We came to the door at the same time, and so I had to limp next to her as I walked to my office. I hope she didn’t think I was mocking her – maybe I’m just being overly sensitive but I really felt bad. Luckily she has more experience walking with a limp and she passed me pretty quickly. She didn’t look back as she left me in the dust.

At lunchtime I consulted a website to see if there were any stretches or movements I could do to speed recovery. One site recommended some light ankle movements and I started with those.

Suddenly, while rotating my ankle, there was another click. And then I felt wonderful.

So everything is OK now. I can move completely without pain, and what I thought was a sprain was probably just a ligament that was a little out of alignment. My daily bike rides probably cause some repetitive motions that could lead to this stuff happening, so I’ll need to take more care doing warm-up and cool down stretches.

Getting old isn’t easy – I’m going to have to take a little more care with this old body. My mind is still like a nerdy teenager and it hasn’t quite accepted that my body isn’t the same.

So now we’re on track for our trip, leaving Friday morning at 11 am from Kansai Airport, we’ll first fly to Thailand, change planes and then fly on to Sydney to arrive on Christmas Eve in Australia. We’ll spend a few days with Steve, Brenda, Alyssa and Julia, and then we’ll shuttle off to Laos for a couple of days and wrap up our trip in Bangkok eating street food and getting massaged.

I’m looking forward to more travel – it seems like years ago that we were trekking through Eastern Europe. See you in 2017!

Here we are with another weekend full of delicious food.

Since we are pretty careful about what we eat during the week, it makes sense that we tend to go a little nuts on the weekends. It started on Friday night – after work I met Kuniko in Kobe to do a little bit of last minute Christmas shopping. After our shopping we had some time to kill before our restaurant reservation, so we stopped in another restaurant a few blocks away to have a drink. The place was named memorably – La Boozy Cafe. Although we just ordered an appetizer and some drinks the menu looked pretty good – lots of nice meats to choose from. We sat at the bar in front of the chef as he cooked, and he asked us lots of questions about what brought us here. We mentioned that we had reservations at the restaurant down the street because they have some special truffle dishes, and he dug into his refrigerator to let us smell the truffles that he had in stock.

Sensing a chance to bring us back some other night for dinner, he made a simple consomme soup with grated truffles and served it to us on the house. It had a nice aroma, but I thought that the truffles were a little wasted on the soup. We also ordered small plate of ratatouille that was better than I expected. We may or may not go back, but the staff were certainly friendly and that counts for something.

Our main event was at an Italian bar/restaurant – a sister restaurant to a place we tried a few years ago but dismissed as stuffy and overpriced. This place had a much more casual atmosphere, and we sat on high stools and looked out over the back streets of the Kitano district, with lots of noise and excitement in the tiny restaurant. We ordered up a carafe of red wine, a fritatta with black truffles shaved over the top, a dish of risotto with white truffles on top, and then a roast breast of duck with black garlic sauce. For me, it was all about eating the truffles, and the restaurant did not disappoint. They weren’t shy about using lots of truffle, and the intense flavor really showed well with the comparatively mild fritatta and risotto. While eating the truffles I had the feeling similar to somebody who has tried a fine wine for the first time – this could end up being an expensive food to love. The duck was quite good, as well – they roasted it perfectly with plenty of pink still inside so that it was as dramatic on the plate as it was on our tastebuds. Great restaurant, great experience!

After dinner we walked back towards town, but in keeping with our tradition of doing things in threes we decided to make one more stop. Recently I found a restaurant review of three restaurants in the Kobe Motomachi area, and we had already tried two of them – so we thought we should complete the trifecta. The last stop was a place called The Rib Lab. I love ribs – I can’t get enough of them – and fortunately ribs have been making headway in Japan in the last few years. The Rib Lab was a pretty upscale, trendy restaurant with a stylish interior that included a giant photo of a topless woman eating ribs that dominated the dining area. This place is definitely for adults.

I know you are probably thinking, “Ribs? Topless women? This has got to be a home run, right?” Unfortunately we were disappointed with The Rib Lab. First, the cardinal sin – the ribs were tough and chewy. Slow cooked and tender pork short ribs – sliding right off the bone – these are what I wanted to eat. Instead we got tough rib meat that had been overcooked (maybe charred with a kitchen blowtorch?) One of the cool things about the restaurant is that you can get ribs with lots of different flavors – maybe 10 flavors to choose from, but it was hard to enjoy the flavor when chewing through charred meat.

The second problem with The Rib Lab was the price. Here you pay by the rib – about five dollars per short rib. For a guy that can sit down and eat twenty ribs without effort that makes The Rib Lab less than a satisfying experience. It is much better to walk down the street to our previous discovery, Bo Tambourine, and have a rack of ribs for a quarter of the price. Nice try, Rib Lab, but you’ll have to do much better to get my business.

So anyway, it was a learning experience, and we were both glad that this rib restaurant wasn’t our main event for the evening. My truffle craving was satisfied and it was “mission accomplished”.

Saturday we went over to the Fukumi’s house to celebrate the Christmas season. Last year we hosted the Christmas party, and this year the Fukumi family volunteered to host the party for the first time. Their place looked great – they had put up a big white Christmas tree, and everyone had brought some small little presents to put under the tree. As usual, dinner was excellent. We started off with champagne, and on the table was plenty of bread and a ragu style meat sauce to spread on it. We also had a big chef’s salad, a porcini mushroom risotto that had a real intensity to it, and two roasted chickens from Costco that made a big impact when they hit the table.

Everyone was enjoying lots of beer, wine, (and Scotch) with the meal, and I think that we ended up drinking into the Fukumi’s personal wine stash – a couple of Benziger wines were opened as well. During the dinner we played with Hiroka who was happy to be the center of attention. I spent a lot of time with him playing with Lego blocks, and we built some different animals together for his “zoo”.

At the end of the evening we all exchanged presents and it was fun to see what we had gotten each other. I got a scarf and some gloves to keep me warm during these cold mornings – good news! We went home around midnight after six hours of talking, eating and drinking. It was a great party, and we were really happy to spend part of our holidays with our neighbors.

But wait, there’s still one more day of eating! Sunday morning we packed up all our Christmas packages to send off – one to San Diego, one to Florida, and one to Hawaii. We drove into Kobe and stopped at the central post office to ship them out. Good luck packages! I hope all your contents make it through customs OK.

While in Kobe we wanted to hit the big 100 yen store so that Kuniko could buy some holiday decorations for her school. Before that we stopped at Luke’s Lobster to eat a lobster roll and a crab roll. This was Kuniko’s first experience to eat a lobster roll – and my first experience to eat at Luke’s. It was really, really delicious. The bread they use is the perfect texture to support the lobster meat, and it was made with a light mayo so that it didn’t overwhelm – not overly tangy like Japanese mayo can be. The size was perfect as a snack, too. We’ll be back!

For the drive back we stopped in at Horai 551. This place is a popular Chinese food shop that is known for their steamed pork buns (they are the size of baseballs) and we also got a set of six shumai to go. The shumai are twice as large as what you get on the street in Hong Kong, and chock full of meat and garlic. I am still burping garlic the next day after eating those. Wow!

Back at home we did a little shopping for dinner, because apparently we were thinking about eating again. Kuniko wanted to test a recipe for our next party with Yoshi and Mamiko, and I wanted to try an African chicken recipe. We did a little shopping, and then came home and started cooking. It was fun to work in the same kitchen on completely different recipes. We sipped white wine (Secreto Sauvignon Blanc) while cooking, and then served up some pretty intense dishes. Kuniko’s dish was spiced potato, sausage, egg and cream layered into a casserole and baked. We liked the balance of the different flavors, and we decided we’ll make some tweaks and serve it again for our guests next week.

My dish was from a book that I finished recently (David Lebovitz’s The Sweet Life in Paris) and it was chicken coated with saffron, turmeric, cinnamon, paprika, salt and pepper and then braised in the oven for about an hour. It was topped with apricots and roasted almonds, too. Definitely something new for us, but I liked the balance of the spices and trying something out of the ordinary.

So we’ve still got lots of leftovers to work on, so healthy dinners will have to wait a few days. It was totally worth it to eat well and enjoy some new foods this weekend, but I am really looking forward to that exercise bike tonight!

It is the dawn of December and it looks like I’m starting to catch a cold. As a certified optimist, I know that it is good to suffer through a cold now and get it out of my system before we travel here and there for the holidays. I’m doing all I can to fight it off – gargling iodine medicine, washing my hands ten times a day, drinking liters and liters of water while I work. We’ll see how effective these regimens turn out to be.

Early December means the mad dash to wrap up our Christmas shopping and try to get things in the mail as soon as possible. We’re in pretty good shape, actually, but there are still a few little things here and there that we’d like to add in to complete the packages we’ll be sending. Luckily we found a post office open 24/7 in Kobe, and that’ll make things a lot easier.

December 1st is also the day for winter bonuses in Japan. I am lucky enough to be in a position to receive one, and it makes the holidays a little easier having an extra cushion in the bank account. Unlike many Japanese people I don’t count on the bonus as part of my budget – a bonus is a bonus to me – but many of my students have already spent that money using credit cards last month.

One of the things I’d like to do with part of the bonus money is buy a truffle. I’ve been big into truffles lately but I’d really like to hold an actual truffle and see what it is all about. Truffle oil and truffle salt are fine products but that is like making an evaluation of wine by tasting wine-flavored chocolates. So I’ll probably buy a small truffle online and hope that it is in fact a European truffle (when likely it is an overpriced Chinese truffle). For about 6000 yen there is not that much risk, so later once the holidays blow over I’ll make the plunge.

This weekend is our first holiday party (we’re hosting two this year, and joining the Fukumi’s for another) and so I had better get my holiday ham skills ready. Our little oven has been making odd squeaking noises lately, and I have the feeling that this might be the last season for the little white hotbox. We’ve had our eyes on a replacement, but of course there are no big American-sized ovens available for some real baking power. One of the small sacrifices about living in Japan, I guess!

We didn’t plan on it, but it ended up being a burger weekend, and it all started with a stop at Costco on Friday after work.

While shopping through Costco looking for meats and other essentials for our December parties that we are hosting, we stumbled on something slightly unique. Costco was selling large size hamburger buns. It’s easy to find regular sized buns in Japan, but the homemade burgers that we make overwhelm the tiny little buns – leaving lots of burger meat and toppings on your plate in a big mess. So we were pretty excited about picking up the buns – a package of six – and I changed my weekend dinner plans from carne asada to burgers.

Saturday was a beautiful day, and I spent most of it at home relaxing. I walked Kuniko to the train station since she was attending a festival held at her university with friends, and I did some shopping for the burgers. I bought all the toppings we’d need – and some German beers to drink with dinner.

Saturday’s beautiful weather had me outside grilling two big patties, with a little indentation in the middle to avoid the “bulge” in the middle of the patty. I put on some Colby cheese at the end to melt on top, and then we topped the burgers inside on our plate with tomato, red onion, and smashed avocado.

And they were delicious! They were nicely browned, with plenty of juices inside and pleasantly smoky flavors from being inside the grill while cooking. This is my usual method for doing burgers at home, but since good buns are hard to find it had been quite a while since we’ve had them.

We each had one big burger, rubbed our full stomachs and were in a kind of cloud of burger bliss. I looked over at our Costco package of buns – still four left – and then at our toppings, with plenty of leftovers for another go. So we decided to go ahead and do burgers on Sunday night, too. The only problem was the weather. Sunday was forecast as rain all day, and it turned out to be true.

Recently I bought a great book by Kenji Lopez-Alt called The Food Lab, and in it he makes a lot of American classic dishes while doing scientific experiments to understand all the different factors and decisions that could influence the final taste of the dish. His section on burgers was really interesting, so this weekend was the perfect chance to experiment. One section described how to make a good “smashed burger” – and since this method was on the stove and not on the grill, that took care of the weather problem right away.

Sunday night I rolled up another two big patties, this time in kind of a ball shape, and heated up the cast iron skillet. The idea behind smashed burgers is to squish the meat ball that you’ve made into a patty in the hot skillet to maximize the contact of the meat with the hot metal. This causes lots of brown crispy surfaces, making for some complex and rich flavors to go with the crispy crust.

It was surprisingly easy to do since I was lucky enough to have the skillet, and a stainless steel spatula to hold the meat down. According to Kenji, smashing should happen just in the first 30 seconds of cooking to retain the juices of the meat – smashing too long means a dry patty. Ours turned out great – we really liked the crispiness of the edges and the juiciness of the meat. The only thing we missed was the smoky flavor of the grill, but it was a trade-off I was willing to make. Overall we prefer the grilled burgers, but we’ll definitely do smashed burgers in the future, too. It’s nice to have burger options!

So it was a very happy burger weekend, and we’re back to healthy dinners this week. The colder weather has converted us from cabbage salads to Japanese nabe – just as healthy and filling but a lot warmer.

Just like in other countries around the world, the election of Donald Trump to the office of the President of the United States was big news in Japan. In the lunch cafeteria of the factory where I work the TV was tuned to election news, and Trump clinched the presidency right around lunch time. My students were pretty surprised. The news media here had Clinton heavily favored to win, and so it really caught everyone off guard.

I was also surprised. I don’t live in the United States anymore – I live here in Japan, a country with plenty of its own political and social issues. I never expected the United States to elect someone like Donald Trump to its highest office, and during the past two years I was asked by my students occasionally if I thought Trump had a chance to win. “No,” I said, “the American people know better than to hire a reality TV star as president.” Clearly I misunderstood the will of the American people. I don’t think anyone was cheated and I don’t think there was a rigged election – the American people got the president that they wanted.

These past two days I have been asked by each of my students, during their one-on-one classes, just exactly what happened that Americans picked Trump. I have twenty five students, so I have to explain what happened twenty five times. It ain’t easy! But if you look at my students’ expressions, you can see the real question behind their words: “What the fuck are Americans thinking?”

For Japanese people watching American politics from afar, they really don’t have an opportunity to dive deep into a candidates policies and understand their political convictions. They have little background knowledge of the candidate besides the short clips played on the evening news. Truly, what they see is what they get. They understand that Trump has inconsistent opinions – what he says today might contradict what he said yesterday. They see that he uses vocabulary at the elementary school level, that he cuts off and shouts over his opponents, and seems incapable of careful, measured thought about complex issues.

Believe me, in Japan careful and measured thought is a very prized thing, indeed.

The President of the United States serves as kind of a representative of all Americans to people living around the world. If you are an American, you are Trump. To people you meet in other countries, the first thing they think when shaking your hand is going to be, “so maybe this person is one of the reasons that angry, unpredictable guy has his finger on the nuclear button right now.”

Maybe the most important thing to come out of this situation for me is to realize that I don’t know what Americans want as much as I thought I did. I guess that comes with living away from your home country for more than a decade.

Although I am not happy with the result, I still have ultimate faith in the system – the checks and balances and power division that makes up the core of American politics. I’m hoping this will be a wake up call for Americans – for better or worse, this guy is our representative on the world stage.

And everyone is watching.

Kuniko and I had another fun weekend visiting some friends and eating at some new restaurants. We kicked it off with a nice long two hour beachside walk from Okubo to Akashi. It has been a while since we’ve done it, and surprisingly we weren’t really tired at all at the end of the march. We stopped in Akashi to do a little shopping for some presents to bring the Tada family on Sunday, and then came back home to relax the rest of the day. Kuniko baked up some focaccia bread, and later we used it with some prosciutto and Gruyere cheese to make panini sandwiches. They turned out nicely, but we were struggling a bit to get the cheese melted enough before the outside of the bread becomes too dark. More research is needed! We spent the evening playing Skyrim and resting up, and ended up going to bed pretty early – I was definitely in old man mode.

Sunday we got up at a leisurely hour and organized a bit before heading out to have lunch with the Tada family. Mr. Tada is one of my former students, and he had invited us over to meet his family and eat together. He lives in Suzurandai, which is a town north of Kobe city. It still falls within the city limits of Kobe, but it has a completely different feeling from what we imagine of Kobe. It is higher up in the mountains, and far away from the ocean, so it was quite a bit colder than the temperatures that we were used to.

Mr. Tada picked us up at Suzurandai station, and drove us a short way to his house. His kids were waiting eagerly for us outside his house (in the cold!) and were jumping up and down with anticipation. They were seriously excited to meet us. Mr. Tada’s son is about eight years old and his daughter is six, and they were pretty shy with us at first. By the end of the stay they were climbing all over us and we had been admitted as honorary family members.

Ms. Tada served us hand rolled sushi – kind of like tacos in that you choose the ingredients you’d like to eat and then roll your own. Everything was delicious, and part of the fun was watching the goofy kids eating and joking around the whole time. Mr. Tada was very proud of his family.

One of the things that Mr. Tada had requested was for us to bring pictures from our trips around the world. We obliged, although I always feel a little bad for the poor folks that have to sit through vacation pictures. Luckily with the iPad they could skip through as quickly as they liked to find things of interest. The kids seemed really into it, which surprised me a little.

After that Mr. Tada (and his kids) showed us their pictures from a recent family vacation to Vietnam. The pictures were great and I think they had a really good time. I laughed when I saw that almost every picture of Ms. Tada had her drinking beer – our kind of lady. The kids broke out into raucous laughter when a few pictures of them in the bathtub came up. Evidently it was some kind of family joke that we didn’t really get. We had coffee, sweets, and I played a game of Uno with the kids. It was a really fun afternoon. We left around 3 pm, and headed back to Kobe. It was so nice of the Tada family to host us, and we’re eager to return the favor some time in the future.

Back in Kobe we decided to go try a Mexican restaurant that had opened up recently. We weren’t exactly starving to death, but a couple of street tacos couldn’t hurt. The place was called YIS, and the décor and style of food was more Californian Mexican than anything. We had four tiny tacos – really just two bites – between us and a couple of beers. Total bill was 3600 yen ($36). Ouch! The tacos were great, but I don’t think anybody in Japan has figured out how to make delicious Mexican food with any sort of cost/performance balance.

In the same news article that I had found the Mexican restaurant was a list of other nearby new restaurants, and one was recommended for an authentic American feel and great burgers. So we went there, too.

The place was called Bo Tambourine Cafe. It was located down a tiny alley, and when we approached there was a kitten sitting outside hoping to get in. The kitten was a big hit with Kuniko and other customers, and I think it was earning a few scraps just by hanging out in front of the restaurant. Inside the d̩cor was indeed very American Рthere was a jukebox, plenty of tables and woodgrain walls that reminded me of mid-century suburbia. We ordered some drinks, a cheese avocado burger, and a plate of pork ribs.

They were great! The burger was the best I’ve had in Japan. Some Japanese burger places go for a big impact by piling vegetables on the burger so high that it looks like a tower, but this place made burgers like we make burgers at home: emphasis on the meat, with the veggies as accents. The ribs were also excellent – and they really did fall off the bone as we ate them. I think I recognized Costco’s ribs, but I can’t complain because they were cooked perfectly. There were some other dishes that we’ll have to wait and try in the future – gumbo, quesadillas, and more. The bill for the giant burger, plate of pork ribs and drinks was just about the same price as the four tiny tacos from the previous restaurant – much more in line with reality. This place was a hit – and it has been a long time since we’ve found an unqualified hit for American food.

We decided to walk the long way back to the station and burn off some calories. On our way we walked past a restaurant that Kuniko has been wanting to try – a panini restaurant. It was a tiny hole in the wall place, serving wine by the glass and with a huge menu of nearly twenty different sandwiches you could order. Since we had experimented the day before on panini, and since we were right there – we decided to stop in and split one. We had some red wine and chatted with the panini maker, who was very friendly and told us all about the breads that they use. The sandwich we got was simple but delicious – Italian salami, Parmesan cheese, and green olives. The bread was the real star – light was crispy on the outside but moist and soft on the inside. We bought a couple of sandwiches to go for my lunch on Monday, and then finally hit the road.

It was another one of those marathon weekends where friends and food are the main events. Believe it or not, we’re going to do something similar next weekend, too. I have a German wine tasting with a friend from work, and then Kuniko and I will meet for some authentic Korean food in Kobe. After that, who knows?

Last weekend we had a chance to host a couple of my ex-students for dinner. Occasionally I take a liking to some students and invite them over, and sometimes it turns into a friendship that lasts (like Yoshi, Mr. Tsukiji, and Mr. Kato) and sometimes it kind of fades out (like Mr. Tojo and Mr. Okochi). This time I invited Ms. Yoshida and Ms. Kamiya over for dinner. Ms. Yoshida was one of the first students I taught as a new employee of the company, and she is starting to be seen in a leadership role within the company. On top of that she is a woman, and women tend to be at a disadvantage in the company because they are in such a minority. Ms. Kamiya is an engineer who I taught recently, and together all four of us ate Mexican food, drank wine and had some good conversations.

Kuniko and I enjoy hosting, and I think we made everyone comfortable enough that they could speak about whatever they liked and be relaxed. It was fun – and I hope that we’ll have another chance in the future for all of us to get together. We had so much fun that we almost missed their last train back to Kobe – luckily they made it back to the station with a minute or two to spare.

The added bonus here is that we have lots of Mexican food leftovers to keep us happy for the rest of the week. Quesadillas, kimchi, and tacos – yum!

Back in November 2015 I blogged about a guy on my morning train that hogged both of the front positions of the line, being selfish and trying to get an advantage to find a seat on the train every morning. You might want to go back and read that post to understand what I’m about to write a little bit better. At the time it kind of bugged me that he was doing that, so soon thereafter I decided to train him to stop.

Actually, I was kind of inspired by the book Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. In that book the main character finds himself in an unimaginable position of having to tame a tiger to save his life on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I certainly was playing for lower stakes, but purely as a sociological experiment I undertook the challenge.

First, I clearly defined my goal. I wanted the old guy to stand correctly on either the left or right side of the boarding area. The center was where he was, and this was the behavior that I wanted to change. He should stand correctly as a habit, and to do it whether I was there or not in the future.

I also wanted to avoid direct confrontation. Living in Japan I have to play by Japanese rules and social norms (to some extent), and that meant doing things indirectly and gently without making any social waves that would cause stress for others. The only stress I wanted to cause would be the stress felt by my unwitting experimental subject standing improperly in the middle.

Today I am declaring my experiment a success! However, it did take a long time. My original post was almost exactly a year ago! This morning the old guy was lined up on the right side of the loading area, for the eighth work day in a row.

How did I affect this change? As I said, it was a long process. At first I stood to my subject’s left side, and ever so slightly invaded his personal space. Sometimes I held my bag on my right side, so that it occasionally brushed his pant leg. When the train arrived (from our right side), he was still in the center position and he could easily rush to find a seat. But I was patient, and very rarely (one morning in ten) the train would come in slightly too fast, and the final stopping position would end up past our position, putting me between our poor subject and the door. Usually people shift to allow the other person to enter at the same time, but I played stupid and just stood in the same position taking the whole space for myself (doing the very thing that bothered me about my subject to begin with). Suddenly my subject went from being in the best position to being in the worst, and he was never happy about that.

At first when this happened he actually physically tried to push me out of the way. I’m big and tall, so I just pretended like I didn’t notice and I certainly didn’t look at him – I didn’t want him to know that actually I was doing this on purpose. I would take my time getting on the train, and take the last seat available. He would stomp his foot and sigh loudly, but he had no recourse but to stand and wait for a seat to become available. He never said anything to me, and didn’t threaten violence or anything. This is Japan, after all.

So I continued this slow, grinding process of standing in his personal space, ignoring his clear unhappiness, and making observations about his behavior. Of course, he could have just changed positions or changed trains at any time – I wasn’t going to track him down and try to keep up the experiment. I’m bored in the mornings but not that bored.

I stood on his left side each day and inched closer to him. I tried to think of the river that slowly erodes the mountain over the course of a million years. I didn’t have a million years, but I was sure I could break the old Japanese guy’s resolve. There is a lot to be said for idle curiosity and plenty of free time while waiting for trains.

Gradually, he started to give me space. I wasn’t exactly sure when the moment of truth happened, but one day he was standing all the way on the right side when I arrived. I took my spot, and we both had a very fair 50% chance of getting an open seat, instead of the near 100% chance he alone previously held. If the train overshot and my subject was in the correct position I would shift to my left to allow him access to his half of the entrance. His reward, for following the rules.

A few weeks later I moved to a different position on the platform so that I could watch him, and he continued to line up correctly, even after I wasn’t around.

What a great feeling it is, to walk down the steps to the station platform, and seeing the guy is standing correctly in the boarding area. For just a moment I could feel the same thrill that lion tamers must feel, having the giant, dangerous cats respond to your commands. Surely big cats could be tamed as easily as old Japanese guys, but I don’t think I’ll go into lion taming anytime soon.

Mission accomplished, everyone! I didn’t celebrate with champagne or anything, but it was nice to see that my experiment was a success and that even old Japanese guys could change their ways with a little help from meddling foreigners like me.

But I’ll still keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn’t slip back into bad habits.