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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Saturday, January 11, 2003

The breakfast buffet here, at the Marriott Cafe, is ordinary. Three lines, each all you can eat. I opted for the Fat American line and had Eggs Benedict, roasted tomatoes, bacon, sausages that tasted like bangers, but spicier, ham, hash browns, and lots of button mushrooms. As I swallowed on of the mushrooms, I heard it scream, "Larry warned us about you!!!" 7:59:46 PM    comment []

If you did not click on the headline Mobster's wife can't use frozen semen in "From The Wires" on Salon's front page, you have no soul. Go back, it is not too late. 2:28:13 PM    comment []

This gawdamn hotel room is a trap, like a man-eating orchid. It's huge and luxurious, but the niches and crannies are littered with the accoutrements of dorm-living. Ritz crackers, a bottle of hooch, Pringles, yes, Pringles, no I really mean it. and Mentos. I'm in a bad movie with product placement. Pringles. The fridge has beer, 5 kinds (6 with the ones I put in), M&Ms, Snickers, Milky Way. None of this is free of course, it's there to tempt you into a hyper-inflated priced snack. They picked the wrong stuff for me. A snack-sized Bento would get me right now. Didja know that the foods in a Bento Box contain the colors of the Italian Flag plus orange and brown? So said the in-flight magazine from Narita to Incheon in its only English article. It really didn't say the colors of the Italian Flag or even Pizza Margherita, of course, that was just my mnemonic. On CNN, they just said the Pentagon has begun an email campaign to "Baghdad" with "hundreds of emails" to convince them that Saddam is an asshole, as if they didn't know - SPAM! Back to Bento. Rice or bread give you white, green is easy, red might be squid, brown is usually meat, orange carrots, an orange, or mango. A variety of contrasting textures gives you bonus points for form. It all fits into an attractive box of your choice. It would be really silly to make your own Bento, you send it along with someone you love. You go out of the way to make it an aesthetic delight to complement the culinary. Mentos. Turn around at the food trap, 180 degrees. Through the double glass-paneled doors, into the bathroom. I have lived in places smaller than this bathroom. Separate shower and bath. More bait. Aromatherapy bottles inset on a stained oak plaque. 17,000 won (about $20) for the one labeled "Relaxation". I went to the second floor loungue called "The Entrance" last night, instead of having wiener schnitzel. The wait was over an hour for food, but the bar was nearly empty. There was a jazz trio, opening with Antonio Carlos Jobim, Dai In The Life Of A Fool. Was that not in Black Orpheus, the song that convinced the sun to rise each morning? Mainstream standards, the musicians grinned broadly when they played C'est Si Bon, their "outside" entree. The bartender asked me if I watch KBS. No, just got here. The piano player, the Korean with the blond pony tail and beret, he is the KBS music director, he's famous in Korea Ah, yes, he is good, I rejoin, that touch, the touch, he has it. He did. No one can teach you what to do when you run a scale and it gets a little off, a little ahead or behind, instinct tells you to slow down or catch up. A good jazz musician hears the possibilities in the misalignments and goes neither back nor forward. He went sidways, that is the touch. Kit-Kat. There is Kit-Kat in the fridge. I am afraid to eat my sausages uncooked because they are pork. They are probably safe. When it was time to leave the lounge, the tab went to my room number. The bartender looked at my name and said "Pow-ool", like a Raoul rhyme. There is an American military man. A what? Oh, "Pow-ool", Colin Powell, yes, we are homonymic brothers I say. He smiled. The beers cost about 8 dollars each, like Tokyo, but I got to hear a famous pianist. This place stinks of money. It is Vegas, Tokyo, and NYC all in one. Nothin' on the cheap except the suspect sausages at the strip mall. They were only a couple of bucks. 1:50:53 PM    comment []

Now one system works. This morning we had to get up at 10 'til 4 to catch a Tokyo cab to T-CAT limousine service to insure getting to the airport in time for a 9:15 check-on. When the alarm went off it sounded like a cartoon city air raid. I was looking for an exit from a building when someone led me to a rather plain door, the kind that is generally used for unmarked exits. When we opened it, there was a whole new world at the bottom of a staircase. A street with many bicycles lined with glitzy stores. My guide pointed one out to me, a music store named "Yurgood's". Typical silly dream until I began walking around in the lobby of JW Marriott here in Seoul. The lobby was busy so I tried a side aisle past the usual overpriced hotel shops. I couldn't go too far because I was waiting at the elevator for Billy & Rush. They did not show up at the decided time, so I went back to my room. After about half an hour, the phone rang and Rush said he'd gotten busy with his email and forgotten. Did I want to go out now? No, I had fallen asleep while the plane was on the runway at Narita and wanted to rest. About an hour later, boredom won out over fatigue and I went back to the lobby, down an escalator. There was a whole new layer of stores, this time more reasonably priced. American restaurants, an upscale pizza/pasta house that had "antisalad" on the menu. What happens if you eat it with salad? More shops, a large department store. Young people dressed to kill, growing crowds. Down another layer and there were customs and immigration offices. I was in Central City Air Terminal. A walk to a theater complex, out a door. An international food court, leading edge video arcades like in Shinjuku. After a while I turned back out of a fear of not being able to find my way back. No Yurgoods, but "Thurgood's" sounds like sausage and that's German and the Marriott Cafe was featuring "Old-Tyme Favorites" including wiener schnitzel. I'm off to have some now. They have a couple of other German foods on the menu, specials for "New Year's" which is either just over, like Japan, or is in its final day. Christmas-y foil banners proclaim "SEASON'S GREETINGS" and one restaurant will give you 15% off if you have proof you were born in any other Year Of The Goat. A quick Google tells me that Koreans celebrate two New Years, one on the trad 1st, one for the Lunar New Years. Here is some Google: The New Year's greeting is "say hay boke-mahn he pah du say oh". Recently people have started to say "Make a lot of blessings this year". It is a more active saying, isn't it? I think that perhaps it's because of the hardships Korea is going through. If we observe the meaning of the greeting "say hay" means 'New Year', "boke" means 'blessings', "mahn he" means 'a lot' and "pah du say oh", 'please receive'. It literally means "Please receive many New year's blessings". Many New Year's blessings to you! A little more Googling tells me that Korean New Years is not until January 31 this year. Do they party for the whole month between the holidays? Or is it like this here all the time? I'll have to check with urban kayak... 5:32:02 AM    comment []

I have two backup systems for posting to the blog. Right now, neither seems to be working! 4:52:22 AM    comment []

Seoul.  A fellow Salon blogger wrote a very nice rant a while back, sayin' it was time to stop with the Seoul Jokes already. You know, Seoul Man, Seoul Food, Seoul Music. But how about the the "other" Seoul, I wonder, the homonym - like Seoul Of My Shoe (for a walking tour), Fillet of Seoul (lotsa good fish here, and especially in these times, Seoul Survivor?  I know, they suck too. I think he even mentioned Seoul Survivor. Some food from the karaoke feast that I forgot to mention: Something that looked kinda like a half-Twinkie but had a piece of squid in it. It was a dumpling that you'd dunk in a light broth that was lightly decorated with spring onions. And I forgot the crowning jewel...we got to joking about how various foods get names that makes no sense at all to foreigners, both US and Japanese. I mentioned Buffalo Wings and there was a lot of discussion about what they might be, bad jokes, worse than Seoul Jokes, about what you call a buffalo without wings ("ground buffalo", of course) and then Tsusaka-san asked if we'd ever had buffalo tongue. One of the Scottish guys said his mother made him eat tongue until a certain age, until he found out what it was, and after that he never ate it again, no matter that she reminded him that he liked it.  A couple of beers passed, a couple of courses, a couple of songs, then our wait brought a couple of hibachi to the table. We fired them up, not knowing what was coming next. Two platters with thin reddish slices of meat that resembled Canadian Bacon arrived. Rush, turning to the Scottish guy, said it was ham. Nobody was cruel that night and he quickly told him that it was the buffalo tongue when he grabbed. It was delicious and delicate, unlike beef tongue which has a heavy flavor when boiled or pickled. It contained enough fat to prevent sticking on the hibachi. Most impressive was the perfectly round shape - somebody stuffed these into a casing and cured them (making for the red color). I've made Canadian Bacon by stuffing pork loin into casings and that's difficult enough. Think I'll try it with tongue when I get back. Those very thin slices - perfect - a great idea! The cafeteria at work Thursday and Friday: Incredible! I had poached salmon for lunch one day and a small fish, like a bream, in tempura batter the next. On the way to Seoul this morning, JAL served a Bento box meal. It included a tiny bottle of soy sauce that contains about a half teaspoonful! About a third the size of the Tabasco miniatures I lifted from the Admiral's Club at DFW. My chopstick technique has improved a bit. With help from my Tokyo friends, I learned to cut meat (push down with the points repeatedly) and remove bones and skin from smoked fish, but my proudest moment was on the flight to Seoul where I managed to eat gelatin cubes. Those suckers are slippery. Just after checking into the hotel,I bought some unspecified (at least in English) sausages at a conveniience store and plan to snack on them cold. They resemble Vienna sausage, but have been smoked and come vacuum-sealed. My beverage of choice is two 16-ounce cans of "Cass Fresh Beer". The convenience store had a large selection of smoked fish and sausages and that bodes well. 3:59:25 AM    comment []