Back in Grenoble

after a long day of travel whose only redeeming part was a beautiful view of the Vercors

from the bus.

We managed to stay up until eight, after watching my favorite car chase movie(They pass by Les Baux in the movie!), but slept fitfully, and I was wide awake by 4 AM. We got an early start and went to the marketwhere the arab vendors were wearing Santa Claus hats with blinking red LEDs on them

and then stumbled upon an Antique street fair on the banks of the Isere

so we checked it out. There were some nice tools

and some very nice armoires:
(2800 euro, but willing to deal)
The vendor saw me taking pictures, started joking with me : "Hey you can't take photos here!", then showed us a less expensive, but also very nice armoire:
(1600 euro, and also negotiable. there was no cornice)
And told us that it would go perfectly in our chateau: "You have a chateau, right?". Interestingly, the armoires he has seen in chateaux are as a rule not of very good quality. Here were some more, in the low 1000 euro range:

There were definitely some deals to be had.

Later, we found out that a chocolcate shop one block away from us sells Valrhona chocolate, as well as a few other things

And we ended up buying three "special" bars:

Ampamakia, from the Millot plantation, from Madagascar

Palmira, from the Palmira plantation in Venezuela

Gran Couva from the Gran Couva plantation in Trinidad

I'm no expert, but the difference in tastes are striking. This could become an expensive habit.

Berkeley

Berkeley was great, despite the fact that it was only for two weeks (1 week really, considering the fact that we were on the road for almost a week). We had made a tick list of restaurants to go to while in the bay area, and I am proud to report that we hit almost all of them. They ranged from the pedestrian (In-N-Out, the only fast food we can eat without guilt after reading Fast Food Nation) to the extremely embarassing (Rubios Fish Tacos) to the sublime (Kirala Sushi

(the bamboo device is a sake dispenser!)
and Ton Kiang Dim Sum, and finally to the unclassifiable (carne asada tacos from taco stands in Fruitvale). And of course we had some nice meals at home as well:
Heres chef Kenji with his Shabu Shabu setup:


While my dad and I were at the Japanese food store, a packet of orange mini crabs with the words "Let's Party!" caught my eye. At $2.85 these might seem over-priced, but consider the effort of the humble japanese fisherman, and how hard it must have been to catch all those little bastards with chopsticks. Here's Kenji with a particularly enticing sample:

The initial flavor is sickeningly sweet with a bit of sesame thrown in for good measure: think Japanese Halvah, only worse. Then, as you crunch through the exoskeleton, a wonderfully potent crab essence fills your mouth, leaving you breathless and vaguely sickened. The most interesting thing about the Party Time crabs is their ability to elicit a very reproducible and consistent series of feelings: deja-vu (i.e. other sweet Japanese snacks), then confusion, followed quickly by regret. It's hard to imagine any circumstances under which you might want to eat the Party Time Crabs, and the idea of coating your hands in crabby fishyness (and thats not even talking about the crab breath) at a party seems foolish to say the least.

I usually try to help out with tasks that my parents would be crazy to do by themselves, like clean out the gutters, chop tree branches etc. This time we built an anti-deer fence out of opaque fishing line (the efficacy of which remains to be seen), and tried to seal a water leak in the camping shell of the pickup. On the latter job, we failed miserably. Heres a picture after a night of rain:


notice the water bottle floating in the pool of water!


This morning the reality of being back in Grenoble sank in when I realized that there would be no Japanese breakfast waiting for me: no kasuzuke Salmon or rice, no tofu or kamaboko, no Nagaimo with seaweed and soy sauce, no fried tofu (age), no miso soup with bizarre and delicious mini-mushrooms, and none of the other dozen or so other staples of my dads morning ritual. The only thing I won't miss is the natto. Incidentally, two of the foods Anthony Bourdain vowed never to eat again (after tasting some pretty disgusting things) were normal parts of my breakfast every day (Natto and Nagaimo).. w00t!