One of the risks of living in a foreign country is that it is tempting to take one’s experiences as a representation of the whole, and to generalize about a culture based on the activities of the people that happen to be around you.

I largely am able to avoid these kinds of things by adding, “In my experience…” or “To me, it seems that…” to the beginning of my sentences.  That covers me semantically, but I also need to make sure that mentally I don’t start prejudging people that I meet for the first time. 

Having said that, I do feel that after living here in Japan for 12 years that I am able to make some very generalized observations about Japanese people and Japanese culture.  One of those observations applies to specialization. 

Many Japanese people that I meet here work at a company where they are considered generalists.  In university they study some topic, and occasionally they get a job at a big company that allows them to use their university knowledge to help the company succeed.  However, it seems to me that a vast majority of people hired by major Japanese companies are asked to forget whatever they learned in university, and start from scratch learning their new company’s business.  They learn about how to work at the company, and maybe after five or ten years they are transferred to another department which may or may not be related to their previous work, and they start to learn something else.  They are treated as a general worker (many Japanese workers don’t have job titles) and are expected to do whatever work is assigned to them. 

However, when a Japanese person is given a task (or chooses one for themselves), they throw themselves wholeheartedly into it.  This task becomes their entire focus, and they will do whatever it takes to improve their skills in doing it.  Many older Japanese people are praised as masters of one art or another, and the greatest praise is reserved for the people that do one thing so well as to be the best.  What you actually do, whether it is artistic or not, or useful or not, these questions don’t need to come up.  Someone focused on something, got really good at it, and gained the respect of other people because of it.  

I see this a lot in the daily lives of the people around me.  They want to become better at English, so they hire a teacher, they make a study space at home, they spare no expense for materials, and they give up their free time in the hopes that they can become “better” at English.  School kids join a sports club and so they practice after school every day, at least one day of the weekend, and every fiber of their being is about doing well in their sport.  

What all this means to me is that there isn’t a lot of room for people who dabble. The people that try lots of things just a little bit, the people that are slightly talented at several things have no improved social status or respect compared to the people that focus on one thing.

Personally I think that dabbling is a good thing.  Thanks to dabbling I’ve been able to find an interest in things I never thought I would, and to try new experiences (especially when travelling).  Getting a taste of something new is, to me, a way of maintaining your youth and wonder in a world that is getting smaller and smaller the older you become.  

One of the things that comes up in conversation with Japanese people sometimes is the fact that I have had several different careers in my life.  I worked as a winemaker, a web designer, an English teacher, and there’s probably lots of other little jobs I did in between those.  For the Japanese people I talk to, the idea that you could be working in a wine company and in the back of your mind be thinking about web design, well, it is a totally alien concept.  For them, you work in job A so there is no room to even consider thinking about job B.

Because of this focus on single-minded improvement in one task, I do think that sometimes Japanese people have less flexibility and don’t do as well “thinking on their feet”.  Sudden situations that come up and require quick decisions and skills that are perhaps not as practiced as others may be a challenge.  

Japanese people tend to thrive in a world where there are clear rules, black and white distictions, and clear direction. Give them a task, allow them time to practice it, improve it, repeat and repeat it, and you’ll get the best quality work you’ve ever seen.    

As I alluded to in the beginning of this post, these are simply generalizations and I am sure there are plenty of exceptions to what I have observed so far, but I do think it is a really interesting aspect of the culture.  

Last weekend Kuniko and I were doing a little shopping and we came across some Munich-style white sausages for sale at a nearby supermarket.  These are really hard to find in Japan, so we snapped them right up.  I had planned on boiling them up this weekend, but some plans came up to party with the Yamaji’s.  So last night we had a little Oktoberfest celebration.  I got some German sauerkraut, I made some warm German potato salad, and I got a couple bottles of Oktoberfestbier, one from Spaten and one from Hofbrau House.  

It turned out pretty good, especially considering that it was a school night.  It also brought back great memories of our time in Munich.  We want to go back!

Kuniko and I always remember our summer trips and it is just about every day that someone brings up some memory or funny situation that happened during one of our trips.  We’re already eager to get started planning another trip, but we’ll have to wait until the end of the year so that our job situations clear up.  Where to next?

With my new schedule this term, Wednesday turns out to be the day that my workload absolutely peaks. There are several special classes, and due to a coincidental timing issue, I need to write at least one new lesson plan in between all the busy times.  Luckily today I have a little free time after lunch, but that will in fact be used by someone from my department switching out my computer for an upgraded model.

The good news is that after work I’ll meet up with some coworkers and go have dinner at an Indian restaurant in Kobe.  One of my coworkers is, in fact, Indian himself, and I believe he was involved in selecting the restaurant this evening.  I have high hopes.

In other social news, we’ll be heading over to the Yamaji’s place on Saturday to help them celebrate the successful discharge of their daughter Anna from the hospital.  She was stuck in there for a type of pneumonia, but I guess all is well now.  Her husband will also come visit – the gang will actually be all here.

This week we have a recently hired new executive of an American subsidiary company visiting for meetings.  He was hired from another big manufacturing company, and he’s meeting with everyone to give and get feedback about how things are going overall with the company.

Apparently he doesn’t speak Japanese.  

This is good news – we need more non-Japanese in higher level roles in this company, but already even to me the stress of this change is becoming clear.  People I almost never talk to ask me to check the English of their documents before meeting with him.  My own department head asked me to translate a meeting agenda completely from Japanese to English.  Suddenly people who usually don’t use English are having to work with it, and that is causing some concern.

We have a translator on staff here at the factory – an American guy like me who is really friendly and whose full time job is translation.  Unfortunately he is close to retirement and may be heading for the door soon.

That will leave just me as a native English speaker, but there are a few people with English as a second language who could step in and translate as necessary.  

I’m really hoping that I don’t catch much more translation work.  The good point about translation is that you can work at your own pace (usually) and that there is a clear start and end point to your work.  The bad point (for me, at least) is that it just isn’t that interesting.  I like teaching English, my experience is with language teaching, and my master’s degree is in language teaching and learning.  

Once our translator retires, though, it’ll be interesting to see if they start looking to push me into the role. 

Thursday night after work Kuniko and I were sitting around the living room thinking about where we should go to celebrate my birthday.  Our first thought was to check with Chiemi.  Kuniko’s old school friend is an expert on picking good Italian restaurants, and within 15 minutes she had done some research and presented us with her top three choices for the Osaka area.  Wow!

We picked the best looking one, called La Cantinetta, and made a reservation for three.  Chiemi would give us a guided tour of their menu in person.

When we arrived we discovered that the chef was actually an Italian guy, which is a little rare.  He spoke great English and really made us feel welcome.  We ordered from all over the menu and everything he brought out was great – including a baked lasagne style dish that was a mind-blower. Chiemi brought a birthday bouquet for me, and we had a nice evening watching the customers come and go.  There was no wine list, as the Luca (the chef) said that nobody bothered to read it, so we selected a bottle based on the region that I wanted, and came dangerously close to ordering a $200 bottle of Barolo.  In the end we went with a Valpolicella Classico Superiore that really went nicely with the rich pasta dishes.  

Hopefully we’ll be back soon – Osaka offers a whole lot more culinary attractions than what we get in Kobe, and it feels like we’ve just scratched the surface.

The rest of the weekend was pretty low key.  We enjoyed the cool weather, and grilled some vegetables, did some laundry, and spent time just recovering from our work week.  It was nice to have a couple of days to get over my cough, and today it feels like it is nearly gone.  We’ll see once I start talking to students, though.

Oh, and one other interesting event happened this morning.  I was walking from our house to the train station, at around 5:15 am.  The streets were empty and it was dead silent, as usual. As I walked I could see the faintest flashing of lights on the horizon, and at first I thought it was just my eyes playing tricks on me, but after closer scrutiny it appeared to be a plane.  This plane was very high up, and I could barely make it out as it headed away from me to the southwest. 

I opened up an application on my phone that some of my students recommended to me.  It shows the air traffic around you at the moment, and at that time of morning there was only one plane around me.  It was an EVA Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Taipei.  I could easily imagine the passengers on board, packed into economy under blankets in the dark cabin, with just a couple more hours left in their 11 hour flight.  How I envied them their arrival in Taipei and all the good food that they’d be able to enjoy.  Maybe it was because we’ve spent so much time on long distance flights but I could easily imagine that planeload of passengers and what they must be feeling like as they fly unknowingly over a American guy walking to the train station in a quiet Japanese town.

Last night I once again made a trip to my dentist to continue the ongoing saga of repairing my teeth. 

The short story version of it is that the fillings that I got way back in high school are pretty old these days, and underneath them, bad things have been happening.  The dentist is working on the third of the four fillings that I had.  At first we thought that just two would need work, but a sharp pain last month told us that we’d need to continue to the third filling.  I wouldn’t be surprised if we go ahead and look at the fourth while we’re at it. 

Dentists work a little differently here in Japan, at least for the patients that have jobs.  I go to the dentist after work, so that means an appointment from 6 pm to 7 pm.  Because the time is limited he can’t do so much at one time, so I end up coming back quite often to gradually get everything done.  I checked my records and I’ve been going to the dentist almost weekly since May of this year.  Five months of dentistry!  Sounds like one of the circles of hell.

The dentist himself is a nice enough guy, and like his staff he makes no effort to be friendly or to chit-chat with his patients.  It isn’t surprising for Japan, where the old Asian stoicism is often seen as professionalism.  It is strange to my American cultural norms – after seeing someone weekly for half a year you’d think we could move beyond “Hello”. 

Still, after five months I feel like I know the place pretty well: Wow, today I get to sit in chair number two!  This is only the second time to be in chair two, and I like the view a little better than chairs three and four.  By experience I know that chair two is the primary chair, because chair one is reserved for kids – it has lots of kid friendly decor and pictures around it.  Chair two is nice, but I notice the dust on the ground near the window, and I see there is a little stain on the ceiling right above the dental lamp.  I try not to think about how that stain got there. 

Anyway, the dental marathon will continue, but next week I have no appointment thanks the dentist’s busy schedule.  That just means that I’ll have to chew only on the right side of my mouth for two weeks, but I’m used to it by now.

On my way to work, just outside my office building, there is a used car lot that looks pretty shady.  

I should say there WAS a used car lot, because on Monday this week, that car lot went out of business, and they started pulling things down and clearing things out. However, for the past five years I had the chance to walk by this place on my way to work and make some observations.

I’m not sure why in particular this used car lot looked any more shady than any other used car lot.  Used car places as a rule tend to have a melancholy feel to them – saying goodbye to your old car is kind of depressing, and so a collection of old cars in one place has a vibe something like an animal shelter.  This place was an independent used car lot, which is a little more rare in Japan.  Most used car places are subsidiaries of major dealers – usually right next to the new car lot.

On a big board above this old used car place there used to be a big sign advertising all the reasons why you should stop in.  I remember one of the selling points of shopping there was that they offered five year loans on every car.  Most of these cars were pretty cheap to begin with – only one had a price sticker over $2000 based on my extensive research (walking by every day).  So even the most expensive one split into 60 payments – well, they probably made their money on interest from the loan. 

But the part of the big sign board that really got my attention was written in big Japanese characters on the bottom right of the sign:

“Women Welcome”

It took a while to get my mind around the cultural implications of these two simple words.  

Sure, American car dealers have a reputation for high pressure sales tactics by salespeople working on commission, so maybe the sign could be partly to allay fears in single Japanese women that they would get forced into buying something that they didn’t really want.  However, if they felt the need to write “Women Welcome” that kind of implies that in some places, women are in fact not welcome, and so I spent a lot of time wondering why that would be.

Your guess is probably as good as mine, and as it is clear now, their welcoming women policy didn’t really help their economic condition very much anyway, but these are the things that bounce around in my head while walking to and from work.  

Thanks to my seasonal cold my voice has taken to changing pitch at random points in my conversations.  It is kind of like going back to puberty again.  Before each class I give the students an explanation of how I am fighting a cold and I apologize in advance, but I can’t help but giggle when it happens.  The students are thinking, “Oh great, my English teacher is Squeaky the Giggling Clown.”  

Hopefully time will heal all wounds and my voice will be back to normal soon.  I never think about how often I use my voice at work, but teaching eight classes a day doesn’t leave a lot of quiet time, does it?  

Wednesday is turning out to be my busiest day of the week, with three different kinds of English courses to teach, so switching between them is a challenge both logistic and mental.  Today I did the switch successfully with a few minutes to spare, but I imagine that the law of averages will kick in and one of these days I’ll still be setting up when students walk in.  Maybe it is good to be able to respond on the fly without a lot of prep time.  Or maybe I have too tight a schedule on Wednesday. 

The silver lining is that Thursday and Friday are by comparison almost easy days, with plenty of time for preparation in the morning, and even an empty planning class on Friday to celebrate the end of the week.  Hoo-rah.

One of my students in a one-on-one class asked me today why there are no classes scheduled on November 20th.  I explained that I took the day off to spend my 10th wedding anniversary in Singapore with my wife, and the student had an unusual reaction.  The tone of his voice and his way of speaking made it seem like he had caught me out at doing something bad, and he said that he wouldn’t tell anyone. I wasn’t sure why as I haven’t made it a secret, but there may be some cultural difference at work here.   My guess is that taking time off of work to celebrate an anniversary with one’s spouse is not usual.  Who knows?  I’m really looking forward to it, though.  

Well, the blog is officially back.  At least, I hope it is.  What started as a week off of blogging extended into almost two months.  I enjoyed the time off, though!  

Once we got back from Russia things got busy here at work.  I finished an old term and started a new one, and got caught up in all the work that that entails.  The new term is one of my busiest ever, so I find myself planning classes in the morning before I officially check in to work, and I also end up sometimes using my lunch break to set up for classes later that day.  The good news is that I have four class periods a week with no scheduled classes, so I can actually do lesson planning on the clock.  It sounds like common sense but actually to me it is a great luxury – like staying at a hotel with satin sheets on the bed. 

Kuniko is busier than usual, but still less busy than her previous job.  She’s got a lot of stuff going on with her career and maybe in the future I can get into that more.  For now, it should be filed under “developing story”.

Since my last posting we haven’t had many major developments except for a visit we had from family.  My cousin (really my Mom’s cousin) Steve and his wife Brenda visited from Australia and we hosted them for a few nights.  I really get along with Steve well – maybe because my life slightly resembles his.  He moved away from California to start a life in a new country, and found that the world is a big place and there are many more ways to live your life than the conventional list on offer in the U. S. of A.  We both like wine and my  highlight of their visit is when he walked through our local supermarket’s wine section and instantly and without contemplation scooped out a bottle of Moët & Chandon to celebrate my birthday and our upcoming anniversary.  The guy knows his stuff!  

Brenda was also really good to talk with.  Both Kuniko and I are not really active conversationalists so I’m afraid that she was stuck with some of the verbal heavy lifting, but it was a pleasure to speak with someone else who teaches for a living and to hear about the conditions under which she works. 

While showing them around our area I kept an ear open for interesting expressions, and was lucky enough to hear Steve say “Fair Dinkum!” a few times, and we also learned about the word “mufti”.  My vocabulary is slowly expanding even today.

After the visit Steve and Brenda went off to Kyoto for a five day stay, and we went back to work.  I managed to catch a cold at the tail end of the week, and pushed myself hard to get through the last classes of the day on Friday.  I staggered home and promptly slept for most of the weekend.  I’m back at work now, but the cold is still with me. I’m at the end stage when all the yucky stuff that was in my throat and nose wants to come back out by coughing, and I have to make sure not to send it back down my throat again.  An old friend once called it “lung butter”, and that’s what I’m doing all day – hacking up lung butter.

Moving on from that mental image, I did have a spot of good news at the annual work health checkup yesterday.  I managed to get through the battery of examinations without offending anyone and I’m getting more used to unzipping my pants in public thanks to the many times I have to take off and put on my business shirt.  The moment of truth was on the weighing scale, and I tipped the scales at five pounds less than last year.  I lost six pounds the year before that, so I’m hoping to keep the trend alive and lose another five next year.  In a few weeks I’ll get the bloodwork results back and we’ll see if I managed to lower my cholersterol at all.  They give me a hard time about cholesterol every year because it is just on the safe side of “high”.  The nurse always tells me to stop eating meat, and I  tell her that I eat meat only once or twice a week these days but I don’t think she believes me.  What else would Americans eat?

Well, that’s enough for an update post, but I promise to be more regular in my updates in the future.  My mom and dad have been ragging me a bit about the lack of updates, and let’s face it – they are the only ones who read this anyways so I hope this sates your appetite for Bryan news for a bit!

More to come soon.  Really!

The past week I have been concentrating on getting through the dreaded “after holiday work week” that was especially challenging this time.  Kuniko caught a bug at the tail end of our trip to Russia, and we were both a little out of sorts last week.  Luckily we had a two day weekend to recover fully, and by the end of it we were back to eating kimchee tacos and grilling ribs on the barbecue outside, so I guess all is well.

From yesterday I started riding the exercise bike again, and I think that all that walking around in Moscow really paid off.  My legs feel as strong as ever, and I fell right asleep after the workout and a shower.  

Here at work we are coming up on the last month of the term.  My students have been busy with various projects, not the least of which involves a bunch of American customers visiting the factory from tomorrow, and several presentations.  Hopefully my students will be ready for them, but luckily they have good news for the customers, and good news however it is delivered is easy to take.

I’ve posted pictures from our recent trip to Moscow at the usual place.  I’ll try to keep the journal updates coming.  They’ll arrive in order from oldest to newest, so be sure to scroll down to see the older posts.

Our flight out of Moscow wasn’t until 7:15 pm that day, but since it was on Aeroflot airlines, we didn’t want to take any chances. Whenever we take a trip we check prices on different airlines, and Aeroflot is always the absolute cheapest, so I was a little leery of using them. We had originally booked the flight on Cathay Pacific, but since they abruptly stopped service to Russia, they rebooked us on the Aeroflot flight to get us to Hong Kong.
Kuniko was still feeling like crap in the morning, so we decided to stay in bed as long as possible. Check out wasn’t until noon and while Kuniko rested I did the packing and got all our travel goodies charged up and ready to go. We had arranged for a taxi to pick us up at the hotel and drive us to the airport at around 2 pm, so we had two hours to kill after checkout. We decided to go have some lunch at a cafe right on Red Square, and take one last look at St. Basil’s Cathedral before we left. 

The cafe was pretty nice, pretty touristy, and pretty expensive. They did have a menu that included “traditional Russian foods”, but most of what they served was quesadillas, pasta and salads. Kuniko went with the borscht, and I had chicken Kiev. The food was much better than we expected, though, and I washed everything down with a beer. It was nice to spend one last meal here before we faced the trays of airplane food later on.

Our taxi driver arrived a little bit late – just enough to give us a scare – but we said goodbye to the hotel staff and then settled into the cab. The driver didn’t speak any English, but since I had already arranged everything (including payment) online, it was a quiet ride. There was considerably more traffic on the way to the airport than when we had arrived, and I was happy that we had allowed plenty of time to make our flight. The driver hadn’t discovered the wonders of deodorant, however, so that was a bit unpleasant.

At the airport we had some time to kill. There were some interesting vending machines there – one sold orange juice, and another sold Putin T-shirts and cellphone cases. I think the main target was tourists, but everything was written in Russian so who knows? 

There really wasn’t any place to sit at the airport while we waited to check-in. There were a lot of people waiting and they had already taken all the seats. We wanted to rest up though, so we grabbed a table at TGI Friday’s – I never expected to find one at a Moscow airport. I had a beer and Kuniko had some hot chocolate to settle her stomach, and after people watching for the better part of an hour we were able to head to the check-in counter.

From there everything went pretty smoothly. When I asked if our luggage could be checked through to Osaka so we wouldn’t have to deal with it in Hong Kong, our ticketing agent responded with “maybe”. I laughed out loud and she smiled a little – maybe the first smile from a Russian service worker during our trip. Luckily the suitcase was able to be checked through, and it made it safely to Osaka when we did.

The Aeroflot flight was very smooth, and the service was quite good. Kuniko had heard that the food was really good on Aeroflot, but unfortunately we found that at least for us, it sucked pretty badly. There were plenty of good movies on the entertainment system, though and I managed to finish a book and even get a little bit of sleep.

In Hong Kong we had a tight connection that we were worried about – only an hour and a half to change from Aeroflot to Cathay Pacific. As it turned out, we needn’t have worried. There was a big thunderstorm in the area, and the whole airport was running behind schedule. Our flight out initially was assigned a gate, but later they decided to delay our flight three hours, so we had lots of time to kill. Since we were in Hong Kong we went to the restaurants in the airport and try some Chinese food. The competition for empty tables was brutal – we weren’t the only flight delayed – but Kuniko managed to get a couple of seats and we ate some dumpling soup with noodles, and spare ribs wrapping in rice cake with soy sauce that was really tasty.  

Finally we got the call to the gate, and our Cathay Pacific flight took off smoothly. It was just three and a half hours to Osaka, and it was good to be back. We took the ferry back to Kobe, and I even saw one of my current students returning from a trip to Hokkaido. We were pretty tired after we got home, but we eventually went to bed at around midnight. Luckily we set aside Sunday as a recovery day, and as it turned out later – we would need it.

On our last full day in Moscow we did a longer than usual sleep in, and then went across the street to “Coffee Mania” for breakfast. The place was in an old building with an art-deco style, and the service was good although a little proactive. Sometimes it felt like they were taking our dishes out of our hands as soon as we finished with them. Kuniko had a nice eggs benedict, and I had a simple omelet with my coffee. As for price, it was a little more expensive than other breakfasts we had during the trip, but not outrageous.

Since today was the opening of the big jam festival we decided to walk around and see what it was like. We were still a little early, though, so we sat in the shade of the Kremlin and did some people watching for a while. I bought a small homemade soda – the syrup was delivered from giant glass cones with valves on the bottom – quite interesting.  The jam festival had lots of jam, of course, but we noticed that most of it was available in supermarkets in the area, and there were very few unique products for sale. Some food was prepared to be eaten immediately, but most of the jams and preserves were commercial products. A little anticlimactic.

After walking through the jam festival we decided to go do the bulk of our souvenir shopping at a nearby grocery store. We were able to get everything we wanted to get except for an interesting bottle of vodka. It was interesting that the most upscale and expensive vodkas were made for export, and as such were covered with English writing. I was looking for something a little more, well, Russian, so we continued our vodka search in several big department stores in the area.  

One department store near our hotel was decorated with LED lights that made up the shape of some animated characters at night, and so when we went inside we found almost an entire floor dedicated to toy stores. The place also was decorated heavily with Russian flags, and there was a big Disney toy store inside also. There was a live show going on with a guy in a wizard suit entertaining kids and their families, and the whole thing was oddly surreal.

As we continued our vodka hunt we went through the basements of several nice department stores. Like in Japan, the basements had upscale supermarkets with higher than normal prices. As we walked through it was almost eerie how few customers there were. In fact, often times we were the only people there. The economy is tough in Russia right now, so I guess this is to be expected.
I also noticed that in almost every big store in Russia there were young men in suits with permanent frowns that watched the floor of the shop. I expect that they were security, and they always gave customers icy, suspicious looks, which doesn’t exactly make you feel welcome in the stores. I smiled and nodded at a few, but they just scowled and turned away. It was a weird vibe. 

Tired out and empty handed from our vodka hunt, we decided to solve our problems with a cold beer and a light lunch. For the last time we went to our little beer restaurant and sat outside while Russian kids rollerbladed to patriotic music nearby. For lunch we just split a salmon salad, and after our beers we headed to the GUM department store where we finally found a bottle of vodka to take home. We bought a box to help with packing, and then we went back to our hotel to hit the pool and hot tub.  

In the afternoon we decided to take a nap, and when we woke up Kuniko was feeling a little sick – something wrong with her stomach. We decided to stay in bed as long as possible, and then we got up and headed to the restaurant. After leaving the hotel Kuniko realized that a spicy Georgian dinner was probably the last thing she should be eating tonight, so we walked back to our hotel room and I tucked her into bed to get some rest. I just snacked on stuff in our room and did some writing and reading, and then I went to bed soon afterwards. It wasn’t the gastronomical extravaganza that I had envisioned for our last night in Moscow, but since we were traveling the next day I think it was best to rest up and get ready for the long plane flight back home.

We got up this morning with a sense of real determination.  The idea that somewhere, out there, a really delicious restaurant was managed to elude us become some sort of challenge.  I know we can’t speak the language and I know we can’t read anything in Russia, but surely two people with smartphones in 2015 could figure this out, right?

Our big idea was to take a morning stroll before the day heated up, and see if we could find the restaurant location ourselves.  According to their website there were three restaurants in the mini-chain, and we could already eliminate one of them since we tried to visit it the previous evening.  So we picked the next closest restaurant, which wasn’t all that far, actually.  It was roughly a 30 minute walk north from our hotel, actually near Cafe Pushkin – a restaurant that we had already visited and enjoyed.

As it turned out, we were able to confirm the location of the restaurant.  Multiple signs, menu on the door, and so we were confident we could call later and get some reservations.  Since we were already out and about and looking for coffee and breakfast we decided to go ahead and go back to Cafe Pushkin since they are open 24 hours.  Breakfast was very nice – Kuniko had a fried quail eggs and cheese on toast, and I experimented with homemade curds with cream.  It was my first time to try curds (other than cottage cream) and it was a little bland for my taste.  Maybe I should have gotten some jam or jelly for the top?  Also worth mentioning was the interesting toilet area underneath Cafe Pushkin.  The whole building is quite historic, so when we walked down the marble staircase to the basement we could also see the historic bathroom.  There was a coat area, with an old lady manning the reception, and the dark bathroom had toilets and sinks painted with designs – it was really unusual (for a toilet).

After breakfast we had cappucinos that came with two pieces of chocolate and a good dash of cinnamon, and then we walked back to the hotel.  We had left the “Do Not Disturb” indicator on our room, so we just walked back to flip it to “Clean Up”, and we left to go see the Novodevichy Convent, a Russian Orthodox church.  It was a six-station metro ride, and then we emerged in a more rural area of Moscow.

The whole reason I wanted to see this place was way back in Amazing Race season 9, when the teams stopped by while getting a clue. I remember being so impressed with the interior, and wanting to see it for myself some day.  Because of all the road construction, it was not immediately clear where the entrance to the Convent was.  We accidentally entered a huge cemetery adjacent to the Convent, and spent quite a few minutes looking for some kind of passageway between the two.  We never found the passageway, but we did find lots of interesting and elaborate headstones there.

Finally we left the cemetery completely and found the entrance on the other side.  We paid at the door, and then went inside the Convent and made our way to the Smolensk cathedral.  We arrived just at 10 am, and apparently it was break time for the workers that were restoring the outer walls of the Convent complex.  Hundreds of workers streamed past us to go outside and rest for a bit, and so by the time we made it to the Cathedral it was very quiet inside.

As I expected, the interior was more beautiful than what I saw on the TV show.  There were only a few people inside, and we sat and enjoyed the beauty of the building in peace and quiet.  It was interesting to think that just by watching an episode of a TV show had led me to this place and time.  Thanks, Amazing Race!

We spent a little time walking through some of the other buildings in the complex – one was more like a regular church, and it was clear that they actually conduct most of their ceremonies here.  They even had a small underground gift shop with lots of goods that were apparently blessed for a profit.  Nice!

Back at the metro station we bought some tickets for our next destination.  While buying them a homeless-looking guy tried to get us to buy his old ticket.  He assured us (in Russian) that it still had three rides left on it, but I had some doubts and we went with the machine tickets.  He just shook his head and walked away.

Our next activity was to hit some of the more interesting stations of the Moscow Metro.  I had heard that the architecture and design of the metro was something to see, and so I had done some research on which stations might be worth visiting.  You can ride the metro anywhere you like on one ticket as long as you don’t leave the station, so this was a cheap and easy way to see a lot of different stuff, all underground.

We stopped at six or seven different stations.  Since we couldn’t read the station names, I had an application on my phone that did the translating, and we were able to find them all.  Most were on kind of a big loop line running in the center of Moscow, so they were almost in sequence.  Also helpful was that the trains ran every 3-4 minutes, so even if we screwed up and got off at the wrong station we could wait a few minutes and try again.

According to the websites that I read, the stations of the Moscow metro were grand in scale and design because it was thought that should it be necessary, they would be used to house Russian citizens in a time of crisis.  These stations were made as symbols of the “government of the people” taking care of the people themselves.  This meant that most stations had very classical architecture – tilework, stained glass, marble and bronze statues.  They weren’t ostentatious, and they were a big contrast to the purely functional stations of Japan.

After stopping and photographing five or six stations we were starting to get a little tired out, so we ended our Metro journey at Red Square, and popped out of the station right next to the outdoor beer restaurant that we tried on our first evening.  Unfortunately they were closed even after the posted opening time of noon, so we switched to a back street near our hotel, and walked into a very stylish restaurant that we had seen earlier.  It turned out to be a Georgian restaurant (which was the same kind of restaurant as Khachapuri, where we were planning to go for dinner), but since we couldn’t read anything how would we know? We had a couple glasses of Georgian white wine (meh), a some light snacks: cheesy flatbread, and a cold creamy (walnut-based) satsivi with chunks of chicken inside.  Both were really good, and we switched to prosecco after the wine to celebrate the good food.

On our way back to our hotel room we asked our hotel concierge to call and make reservations at Khachapuri, and we confirmed the correct phone number and location with him before he called.  He made the call, made the reservations, and we were set!  The rest of the afternoon was spent in the sauna and pool splashing around.

Finally dinner time rolled around, and since we knew exactly where we were going it was an easy trip to the restaurant.  They had our reservations, they sat us down at our table, and the menu was the right menu.  Hooray!  I liked the atmosphere of the place – casual but lively, and halfway through our dinner a guy came up and started playing piano.

I had never had Georgian food, but it is an interesting combination of Turkish and eastern European food – with lots of spices and fruits, and pretty good wine, too.  That night we had a fried cheese pastry just oozing with Georgian cheese, a coriander and onion khachapuri flatbread, young duck in cherry sauce, fried mushrooms and herbs, and an appetizer of grilled eggplant wrapped around a nut/cheese paste with chili peppers on top.  Holy crap it was good!  This is one of these times in life when the wait was worth it.  Kuniko drank Georgian beer but I was drinking lots of Georgian wine.  The two different reds that I had were much better than I expected.  We weren’t really impressed with the Turkish wines that we had during our visit to Istanbul, but these were much more drinkable and reasonably priced.

Our server wasn’t really good at using English, but he was patient with us and kept smiling.  Since the next night was our last night in Moscow, we were hoping to eat at a place that we really liked.  We decided then and there to go ahead and make reservations to come back the next night, too.  The server took our reservations and then we checked out of there.  Wow, what a great meal!

On the return trip to the hotel we stopped at a convenience store for some ice cream to eat while we walked.  I managed to go through the whole transaction speaking only Russian, and I don’t think the staff even noticed (or cared) that I wasn’t from around there.  That was a good feeling – we’re starting to get used to things.

Near Red Square preparations were almost complete for a jam festival.  All week during our stay we saw the preparations underway, but according to the internet this big jam and preserves festival was scheduled to begin the next day.  They had giant animals made entirely with fruit on display, and they had built a temporary skating rink (for rollerblades) as well for live performances.  We looked around at all the stuff they were building, walked through a two story underground shopping mall that we had completely missed every time we walked by during our stay so far, and then finally we sat on a bench in the cool night air and did some people-watching.

After the great dinner we went back to our room, polished off the vodka and hit the sack.

Tuesday we started off by getting out of bed and heading across the street to try out “Coffee Mania”, which was billed as the most expensive coffee chain in Moscow.  We didn’t want to try it because it was expensive, just because it was right across the street from our hotel.  As it turned out, they were still closed at 7 am, so we left it for another day.

Instead we walked a few blocks to a small bakery/cafe chain restaurant.  When we arrived they were just opening, and as we approached one of the waitresses tripped on a microwave oven that they had used to prop open the door, and she narrowly recovered before hitting the pavement.  She was laughing the whole time about it.  We ordered some large coffees and they were indeed very large.  Really just large bowls full of coffee, with no handles.  Good stuff, though, and it served to wake us up.  We also had some breakfast, but the dishes we had were a little challenging to eat.  The waitress was determined not to smile – she was having a rough day and she wasn’t even the one that tripped on the microwave oven.  Service was slow as usual, but that is just part of getting used to European time –  we have this kind of mini-culture shock every time we visit Europe.

Our morning walk was all the way to Arbat street to do some souvenir shopping.  They seemed to have the right combination of cheese and quality, so we set off.  The first time we went to Arbat we took the Metro, so it took a few wrong turns before we figured out how to get there on foot.  The streets of Moscow are pretty wide, with as many as 6 lanes in either direction, so sometimes you had to find alternative paths to get where you wanted to go.  Also they had a fleet of big tanker trucks that just drove around the city spraying water over the streets, so you had to watch where you walked.  

Once we got to our destination we did a bit of shopping.  I found a Putin shirt I liked, and then we found a supermarket with a deli in the basement, so we bought some goodies to try.  We had a piroshki, and also what I think was called a knish(?)… a kind of fried pancake layered with mild creamy cheese, dill and cilantro. Yum!

From there we walked a ways north along the wide streets to reach Patriarch Pond, a very nice pond in the center of a square park.  The was a boat house on one end with a restaurant and it looked like a nice way to spend an afternoon.  Around the pond there were a lot of people lounging on park benches reading books or using their smartphones, and I saw some people doing stretching exercises down by the water.  It was a peaceful part of the city, and it was nice to take a break there.  

We circled back to familiar territory by cutting through an upscale restaurant district, with lots of apartment buildings interspersed with trees.  It felt a lot like Paris, and I thought that it would be the only place in Moscow where I would consider living.  We found our way back to Cafe Pushkin, and then from there to “theater street”, and then from there to an Irish Pub to rest our feet and cool off with a beer.  The staff were all dressed like Catholic schoolgirls, which was something you don’t see every day. 

In the afternoon we made our way back to St. Basil’s Cathedral to go inside and look around at the interior.  The line was surprisingly short, and the interior was quite nice.  Once again no photos were allowed, but we spent about half an hour looking at frescoes, climbing staircases, and trying to find the correct exit (there were actually four of them).  I liked the feeling of the interior, but to me clearly the best view of St. Basil’s is from the outside.

Since we couldn’t get into the restaurant that we wanted to try yesterday, we figured we’d give it another go.  This time we left early and tried to show up right at 5 pm, which is damn early by European standards.  We walked right in, got a table and a menu, and we started to look through the menu and decide what to have for dinner.

I was a little surprised to find that some of the signature dishes of the restaurant weren’t on the menu, and then upon looking at the cover of the menu the name of the restaurant was completely different. Just across from us was the flag that had the correct restaurant name, but the menu was different.  Kuniko and I realized that we were in the wrong place.  As far as we could tell, either the restaurant that we wanted to visit had moved, or the restaurant we were in actually changed names between the afternoon and the evening.  Either way, we weren’t going to have a chance to eat what we wanted to eat.  Foiled again!

We decided to stay and eat anyway, and we had some really good food there.  We had a beet salad with chopped greens, black bread croutons, mushrooms and blue cheese.  Also we ordered some cheese dumplings and some fried chatarelle mushrooms cooked in a cream sauce.  Everything was great, but we vowed to find the real Khachapuri restaurant the next day.  It was becoming a challenge!

Once we went back to the hotel we tried to visit the rooftop bar, but we couldn’t find it.  I think maybe it only opened by request.  We tried to visit the stylish bar across the street from our hotel (The Mandarin) but they weren’t open until much later.  So we ended up going to a convenience store nearby, buying some snacks that we wanted to try, and then washing them down with two big glasses of vodka in our room.  Thanks to the vodka our night ended somewhat prematurely – I think we were asleep by 7 pm!