Nishida / Aomori Museum

We had another spa session this morning,





but not before having another excellent meal: a huge Japanese breakfast.


The best items from this menu were the home made tofu and Japanese style miso-egg

Last year, Kenji had a huge show in Aomori, and he has been in contact with one of the curators, named Emiko, who very generously offered to drive us around while in Aomori. There were also several other people from the museum to help out, all of whom fawned over Kenji and called him Sensei (teacher). Kenji seemed very happy with all of the attention, the Japanese breakfasts, his local dialect etc. It was strange to see him so at home in a place I had never really known, but I was happy to see him so completely in his element.

We were picked up at the spa by Emiko at ten and made our way up to the Nishida Sake Brewery. The back story for this trip begins back in Berkeley, where we were eating at our favorite sushi restaurant: Kirala. I decided to try out a sake and asked for a menu. I was really surprised to find an entry from Aomori (my dad's home town) called Nishida Denshu and showed it to him. It turned out that it was from the Nishida Sake Brewery, and the Nishida in question was one of my dad's friends from middle and high school -- Nishida-san! It also turned out that the sake was wonderful, so when we decided to go to Aomori, I pleaded with Kenji to write to Nishida-san to get us a tour of the factory. We subsequently learned that Nishida does not offer tours to anyone, and its actually not that easy to even buy his sake because he makes it in such small quantities, and it is highly sought after.

Happily, Nishida invited us to his house/brewery, but at the beginning of the day, we still didn't know if we were going to get to see the factory. It was out of town, which was a blessing for him, because it meant that his very old house survived the US fire bombing of Aomori (the same fire bombing which had utterly flattened all of Aomori, including my fathers large house... leaving a smoldering pit with the occasional fire proof warehouse left standing).

Anyway, to say that I was excited to see the source of the sake is an understatement. His factory and house is a sprawling complex, with a beautiful garden and old style house at its core. We got a tour of everything, including the machine which mills the rice,

to the storage tanks, where the rice/yeast/water slurry lives for one year


and finally the presses.

Interestingly, Nishida says that he gets the best sake from these old style presses rather than his fancy new filtration machine. He also showed us the well from which he gets the water with which the sakes is made

as well as some samples of different milling levels of the rice



I also had a chance to take some pictures of Nishida-sans beautiful enclosed garden.



And it turned out that Nishida-san is also a devotee of the Church of Hasselblad.
Nishida gave us excellent postcards, and two special bottles of Sake -- one of which is a brand new product.


From Nishida-san's we went to a local noodle place and had some excellent tempura-soba, and then on to the vast and expensive new Aomori prefectural museum. The highlights for me were the jaguars made of rope:


The hyper futuristic "Sleeper" style can't-be-anymore-white bathrooms
Incidentally, judging from the looks I got, the bathroom is one of the places where Japanese people do not approve of camera usage
the jomon ceramics (excavated at the museum site)

and of course the Munakatas

I'm sure there will one day be a Kenji section in that museum.
Some of the other things were some Marc Chagall theater backdrops:

and some really elegant and functional plywood chairs:
whose design I will probably copy (I got lots of close up pictures of the joints etc). The most bizarre thing was probably the huge robotic space baby thing which would started screaming and marching every 5 or 10 minutes or so. Sadly I was too much in awe of it to remember to take a picture.

On our way out of the museum, we encountered a guy doing pirouettes on a unicycle. Definitely not something you see everyday. Well, it got a whole lot weirder when the music started, and a troupe of them came cycling out from behind the museum and the lights and sound system started up


It was mesmerizing.


After a little rest at the JAL hotel downtown (the same place I had stayed with my dad back in 2000) the museum people threw a part for my dad. Chloe and I did our best to communicate, but mostly concentrated on drinking Nishida sake, and scarfing down the excellent food. The scallops and corn-mochi were awesome


but so was the sashimi and the five other dishes! Kenji, mom and I were all asked to give on the spot talks. I did my best, but who knows how it got translated!

More travel woes

This morning we had an excellent breakfast at the hotel
then got a cab for the airport. Unfortunately, while it was sunny and nice in Tokyo, it was apparently raining so hard in Northern Japan (where we were going) that the airline had cancelled our flight! After some quick rescheduling by Kenji, we headed out to Tokyo station, where we would be taking a bullet train to Hachinohe, but we first needed to get some lunches for the train







The lunch boxes were excellent, with the exception of one thing. There was this ball shaped thing (upper right chamber, below the carrot) with what looked like bacon wrapped around it. My dad claimed that it was some kind of potato, but on the inside it looked distinctly un-potato-like. In fact, although I have never eaten one, it looked like what I imagine a testicle to look like on the inside : lots of different kinds of tissue and white. It also tasted horrible; I still have no idea what it was, nor do I want to. Kenji ate the other half and adamantly claimed that it was yamaimo -- the dreaded mountain potato so hated by Anthony Bourdain.

After a smooth trip up to Hachinohe, we were greeted with the news that the train that was scheduled to take us the final distance to Aomori was also unlikely to leave, because of flooding on the tracks.


We hemmed and hawed for a while, and ended up taking the longest taxi ride of our lives (1:45 or so) up to the Asamushi spa. Happily we made it in time for dinner, which is really one of the best parts of the spa, and Chloe got to probe the limits of her culinary adventurousness. There were really too many delicious things to describe in detail, but the scallops and Abalone in particular were excellent.





The spa itself was excellent, with an out door rotenburo, two indoor pools and a warm water "waterfall" to loosen your back. By nine AM the next day, chloe and I had taken three baths, and the trials and tribulations of the previous had been mostly forgotten.

United-- the worst airline on the planet?

Well I can think of a few that are worse actually, but it seems like every time I fly United, I'm surprised by new standards of mediocrity. Our flight from SFO had bar none the worst airplane food I have even encountered. It was some kind of sweet and sour chicken concoction, and it made Chloe and I feel vaguely ill for the balance of the trip. And that was just the beginning! After flying across the Pacific, we all watched in frustration as we got flown around in tight circles, waiting to land. I could see whitecaps on the water, and there was no doubt that the winds were reasonably strong. One hundred feet from the ground, the pilot waved off at the last minute, sending us into a high thrust climb away from the airport. It was frustrating to be able to see the crack in the runway and not land, but hey, a rookie pilot has to learn somehow right? I'd just prefer if it wasn't on *my* transpacific flight. The fun part was still to come however, because in the course of all the circling and stepping on the gas to get away from the airport, we basically almost ran out of fuel and had to land at the Yokota air force base, home of the 347th airlift wing, and not a very good place for a commercial jetliner. After taxiing around for ages, the military boarded and walked through the plane. I'm not sure what exactly they were looking for, and how a 747 full of pissed off travelers at Yokota was a security issue, but I fully trust in the logic and sense of our military's protocols. After sitting for another age (three hours), we finally got fueled up and flew to Narita. As we arrived in, the stwardess announced that "obviously I have no information on connecting flights". Ummm, why is that obvious? Isn't that part of your #$%#$ JOB?! In any event, it was an inauspicious start to our trip, but hey, things can only get better from here, right?! We had dinner at a local izakaya



One funny coincidence: my parents ran into some of their friends from San Francisco on the plane!

Pre Fab

It looks like more tasteful and modern prefab homes are becoming available. Here are two new ones which look really cool:

minihime
Marmol Radziner

Crissy field redux

I finally got the nerve and time to try to ride Crissy again. This time however, I had a support team: Chloe on shore with binoculars and the Coast Guard on speed dial. Things got off to a rocky start, as I found a knot in one of my center lines, and I realised that I had forgotton my helmet. After just hearing a story about a guy getting whacked by his board and spending two days in the hospital, I wasn't going to take any chances. Chloe very nicely drove back up to our apartment to grab the helmet, and I spent the next twenty minutes chewing on the knot to try to get it out: lines breaking in the middle of the bay were the last thing that I needed! After Chloe got back, I headed out.

The wind had filled in to the beach today, which made getting up a lot easier, and I was even making a tiny bit of upwind progress, when I saw that the locals seemed to be heading back in. The combination of the 1.7 knot flood tide and weak winds was making upwind progress almost impossible. Because of this, I started heading back in as well, and had to stop for a Blue and Gold ferry, a smaller tourist boat and a few other watercraft. I ended up at the very end of the Crissy field beach, but not on the rocks! Heres a GPS trace of my brief outing.

All in all it went well, and I feel much more confident about riding Crissy. Unfortunately, it looks like the season is over!

more window work

Today we put trim around the inside and outside of the windows, made them close a little more flush than last time, apllied some waterproofing, and improved the earthen steps down to the river and relaxed a little

New Boulders

Today we drive up to the Sierra and were hoping to go the Saddle Boulders, near Donner, but there was some kind of bike race happening, and the road to where we needed to get to was closed! It turned out that we were somewhat near another of the areas which I had scoped out via google earth, but it turned out that both of the roads that google had listed were chained off, with many "No trespassing" signs. This is bad news, because it means that topozone is wrong in some places about national forest boundaries. We walked up a hill nearby and found these excellent untouched boulders with very hard looking problems

We ended up driving back to the ultra secret bouldering area which we found last weekend. There were some rednecks swilling beers, getting ready for a little huntin' and I made a mental note to be as loud as possible to avoid getting mistaken for big game and shot. We weren't quite as lucky this time and spent a lot of time getting shredded by thorn bushes without finding any decent boulders. The only ones we found were either encrusted in moss or 3 feet tall. We circled around, and were almost at the point of giving up when I saw a boulder up on a hill which looked intriguing. After a little hemming and hawing, I went and had a closer look. It had a beautiful burnt out tree which followed the contours of the rock, and two *fabulous* looking climbs on the southwest and southeast aretes: more of the stellar granite on the boulder from last time, but with bulbous knobs at the top.

It took us a while to complete the eastern arete, and even after a huge amount of effort I was unable to complete the western arete. bummer. We both had a lot less skin on our fingers by the time that we were done. We walked out and were hassled by two locals on an ATV about driving too fast on our way out. Normally I'd be happy to oblige them and slow down, but they were so rude about it that I couldn't really back down. I wasn't able to parse all of the yokel-speak, but they were clearly agitated and said something about "not minding if we used that road" if we used it on their terms. First of all, I was only going about 15 mph, and in any case its a public road. Just to be sure, I asked them if it was a private road. They said that it was a Forest Service road, to which I responded "That's what I thought", rolled up the window, did a nice four wheel burnout and tried to kick up as much dust as I could while driving off.

A lesson in humility

Every once in a while, I get one of those slap-in-the-face, undeniable "You're in over your head experiences". They're good in a way, because they mean that you're pushing yourself, but almost always demoralizing, sometimes humiliating and frequently dangerous. Today, after weeks of emails and preparation, I tried kiteboarding at Crissy Field.

As I've mentioned before, watching someone kite under the Golden Gate bridge was my inspiration for finally getting motivated to learn kiteboarding. The local that I had seen riding under the bridge five months earlier (Chris) had given me advice last week to wait until today, since conditions weren't optimal. One of the key considerations for kiting Crissy is the direction and speed that the water is moving under the bridge. During strong floods, it's difficult to get and stay upwind, and you get blown into the bay. During strong ebbs, it's easy to get upwind, but you could end up out to sea in the event of a breakdown. Today was a moderately strong ebb at 3 knots, and the wind conditions looked fine. Chris advised me to keep my kite moving right off the beach, since it was so light and that getting back in would definitely require swimming. After a lot of dumping my kite into the water I managed to body drag out past the sensor and stand up on my board. I was nervous, but elated to have made it to the wind. However, I noticed that the gusts were getting pretty strong, and soon I was way overpowered, barely touching the wavetops and going much faster than I wanted to be going. Furthermore, I wasn't making any upwind progress. Soon, the inevitable happened and I crashed into the water really hard. I went limp to avoid hurting my shoulder again, came back up and immediately noticed that my board (or rather, Chloe's board) was floating away. I body dragged as fast as I could, but couldn't keep up with it.

So there I was: in the middle of the San Francisco bay, bobbing around during a 3 knot ebb without a board. It's hard to describe how small you can feel out there, with supertankers steaming by, and how far away the shore looks. I estimate that I was around 1 mile offshore. I wasn't completely screwed because I still had my kite, and it was still in the air, so I started body dragging back to the shore. In order to not end up too far downwind, I spent most of my time dragging upwind, which meant a lot of spray in the face. After what seemed like a very long time, I finally ended up around 200 yards off shore. At this point I hit the wind line, and it started to get very hard to keep my kite in the air. I was now close enough to shore that I wasn't really that worried. Sure the current seemed to be taking me back out into the bay, but there were people everywhere: a mock-fishing boat full of tourists who were taking pictures of me and twenty or so people on the steps of the Saint Francis Yacht Club looking at me with a range of reactions from concern to pity to amusement.

I wrapped my lines up, let some air out of the kite and started swimming. I hadn't really had to swim in since my first time out at Alameda, and it felt like I was moving about a foot for every five minutes of kicking and swimming. After a long time, I finally made it in but my kite unfortunately got dragged over the rocks again. This time there were barnacles AND mussels, and I haven't gotten the courage up to check for damage yet. After pulling my soggy exhausted ass into a heap on the concrete causeway, I took a breather, wrapped my kite up, and began the walk of shame back to the lot. Chloe wasn't there so I gave her a call, and it turned out that she was watching some other poor bastard in a blue kite who was having problems. She took the loss of her kiteboard as well as could be expected, and smiled knowingly at my voicing my intention of taking a break from kiteboarding. Some guy must have overheard that I lost her board, because he said "You look like someone who lost a board!", to which we both exclaimed "Yeah!". It turned out that Chloe's board had gotten into the ebb and he had seen it floating out to Japan near the South Tower of the Golden Gate bridge. In an act that exemplifies the coolness of the kiteboarding community, he actually picked it up and brought it all the way back to the beach (it's a long way)! Chloe was overjoyed, and I was relieved. I'll be buying that guy some beers next week.

So there it is: my first experience at Crissy. The guy who pulled my board out of the water and Chris both say that I should just get back out there, but I'll have to give my sore shoulder a little time to rest first.

update: The kite had only a minor shred on the canopy, I found my valve, and I dropped off a cooler full of microbrews to Stefaan on monday.

Windows

A long time ago (15 years ago?) my parents had bought some lovely leaded glass windows to put up in the small loft that we had built for me to sleep in. After a long planning stage, I decided that the time was right for implementation. Chloe and I got right to work with our new Bosch cordless jigsaw to cut out the holes.



We attached the windows and hinges to 2x4s, then glued and drilled them into place, after a little cursing and cutting of the wrong side of the wood. By the end of the day, we had installed the windows, and they look lovely.