roadrunnertwice | Entries tagged with travel

Okay, here's my technique for packing stuff for a trip:

Keep a persistent template packing list, so you don't have to conjure your list from the void every time. (Actually keep a couple templates, for different kinds of trips.)
Make a separate disposable "last call" list once you're almost done packing.
Take your list with you, and update it with anything you acquire during the trip.
Use your list again for re-packing.

I have hella ADHD, and yet I almost never lose things while traveling or forget to bring crucial items.

Starting about five years ago, anything related to Portland (and especially food, beverages, handicrafts, and interior decoration) has been kind of Having a Moment in Japan. IMO this makes perfect sense (a shared preoccupation with ingredients and craft and process, a shared willingness to stand in line for novelty food, and some easily identifiable stylistic tics that were ripe for appropriation and recontextualization), but it’s still kind of hilarious whenever you run into an unexpected instance of it.

So one of our favorite coffee spots in Osaka was this place called Brooklyn Coffee Roasters, near the main Namba train station. It’s not one of the cafés with a self-consciously Portland aesthetic, it’s just nice. It’s also usually quieter than some of the other (excellent) places we went, so we were able to chat with one of the baristas a little whenever we stopped by. That was good for getting more comfortable with my Japanese, and also he was just a real sweet dude and we liked him.

So anyway, on one of our later visits, he asks where we’re from and we say Portland, and his eyes light up, and he’s like “Oh! I love Portland, it seems like a wonderful place! I want to go someday!” (Imagine all of the below in a fairly free mix of Japanese and English, because we’re all trying our best out here.) Then he’s like, “Do you know Portland hard cider? It’s... my favorite. So good.” And we’re like, “Yeah, I think there’s a few cideries around town, there’s even one right near us.”

So he gets our orders in, and then while the other barista starts pulling the shots he trots off to the back room. And he comes back to show us a can of, no shit, Reverend Nat’s!!! And we’re like “That place is literally two blocks from our house, how did you even get that?! 😂” and he’s like “The guy who runs the pizza place over there imports it!”

In conclusion, omg. Also, several times in the last year we’ve noticed mid-size groups of Japanese tourists in our (very residential) neighborhood who seem to be looking for something in particular, and it wasn’t until that moment that we realized they were probably all on their way to Nat’s. Next time I’ll see if I can point them in the right direction.

Well, we’re back, and THAT was a hell of a vacation.

As some old-timers might remember, I studied Japanese in high school and college, for... a lot of years. And then I kind of burnt out on it and just bailed. Like, I’d been considering taking a minor, but I noped out of that at the end of sophomore year and ended up studying abroad in Cork instead of Japan.* And then I didn’t really do much with the language for the next 15 years.

Anyway, my Japanese was hella rusty! But better language facility makes a better trip, so I spent a couple months brushing up with Duolingo.** And that felt helpful, but I still didn’t really know how things were gonna go by the time we left.

But somewhat to my surprise, a lot of my Japanese came back, and it was really useful for the entire trip! I mean, 3/4 of my vocab and 4/5 of my kanji were gone, but my pronunciation and grammar and kana were all in perfectly good shape! Plus more words and kanji came back over the course of the trip (and even when I didn’t know a character, I still had enough of a working model for learning kanji that I could hold an unknown one in my head for a good part of a day).

So like, our minshuku in Kawayū Onsen was managed by what seemed to be a family (plus some extra help) with varying amounts of English, and they kind of triaged guests based on how much Japanese they could get away with. And after a couple interactions they were like, “k cool, that one dude can go handle someone else and we’ll just pass you off to Mom.” 😂

It was very fun and satisfying, and also I’m glad I could return the favor for the various times Ruth has had to Spanish for me.

* Idk, I was getting pretty decent when I quit, but I hit that point where the only efficient next step was to immerse myself and spend six months doing almost nothing else, and I ran into some motivation problems — like, now that I know this culture slightly better, do I still love it enough to be spending that much time with it? Would doing so give me a break from the things that drive me most nuts about my home culture [the sexism, the racism, the consumerism], or would it just be the same song at the same volume, at a venue where I’m a guest and don’t really have the standing to chew out the DJ? I still have very complicated feelings about that decision and everything around it, and internally rehashing it all was part of why I was feeling some anxiety before our trip.

** Ruth, for her part, learned most of the hiragana and a few phrases, and also crammed some lectures on Japanese history because she wanted some gestalt context. Have I mentioned here before that I really admire her approach to intellectual problems?

Current Location: breakfast
Current Music: Ibibio Sound Machine - Imma

Wait, say what?

“The chain is also known for almost exclusively hiring women: as of 2001, 95% of the company's workforce was female, and nearly all of its hotel managers were married women.”

We’re still totally fascinated by the Toyoko Inn, so I ended up doing some reading. Check out this remarkably frank archived page about their, like, strategy for cheapness. (Vaguely reminds me of someone’s account of asking a Trader Joe’s manager about prices some years back; something to the effect of “doing only store brand saves more money than you think even if you don’t skimp on quality, plus we pay all expenses in cash to avoid floating any interest.”)

I can’t even begin to unpack that bit about the “Okami-san tradition” as the reason for a nearly all-woman workforce (like, question mark question mark??), but I also note that their executive staff look to be about a 50/50 gender split (based on given names), which I think isn’t usual at the C-level anywhere.

Current Location: Sea-Tac

We just got on our train for Koyasan and the next stage of our trip, so it’s goodbye Osaka for now — we’ll be back before we leave, but only for maybe 12-15 hours.

For most of the time here, we were based in one of the Namba locations of a chain hotel called the Toyoko Inn. Now I know chain hotel recommendations are not the usual fare around here, but if you’re going somewhere where it’s practical to stay at a Toyoko Inn, you should definitely do it.

It was only like $70 a night, and imho they hit that mark by skimping on exactly the right stuff. Everything was slightly shabby, but shabby in a comfortable “this still works great, replacing it would be a dumb waste” mode, and it was all super clean. The room was small, but laid out in a totally non-boneheaded way. You can choose to have fewer cleaning days when you make your reservation (hallelujah). The shower has big pump dispensers of shampoo and soap instead of disposable bottles. And they serve a complementary Japanese breakfast in the lobby that’s super simple but really helpful for kicking the day off.

We usually use a hostel or an airbnb when we travel, because we loathe the hostile sterility of hotels — the new-everything-smell, the constant waiting-on, the over-cleaning, the general waste. But somehow, when Toyoko were deciding what to cheap out on, they managed to drop every Hotel Thing I dislike! Anyway, would totally stay there again.

Current Location: the train

Uh, Ruth and I are going to Japan tomorrow for a two-week vacation, during which we get to hang out with my old friends Laura and Emmalee on their home turf for the first time. What the fuck!! I've been somewhat anxious about it for reasons that don't really withstand any scrutiny (thanks, brain), which is why I haven't talked about it, but at this point I am ULTRA EXCITED and it is gonna be a great time. I'm gonna try and post photos to my Mastodon several times a week (crossposted to Twitter, but you can also just add it to your RSS reader if you wanna).

Halla-cat got her teeth pulled, like I mentioned she was gonna, but unlike with Annabel her stomatitis didn't really improve much. What the fuck!! So she got another steroid shot and antibiotic shot, and now we're dosing her with an immunomodulator (cyclosporine) every day, woof. That one extra sucks because it's an oily liquid with an unwanted taste that has to be given on an empty stomach. Like, COME ON.

Actually though, we've been having a better time of it than I thought.

For one thing, we've learned that while Halla really hates being stalked and cornered for something (getting her in the carrier to hit the vet is so crummy), she... actually doesn't seem to mind being ambushed. Or at least, she gets over it basically immediately. So you just leave the syringe with the gunk behind your ear, wait ten or fifteen for your moment, scruff her and squirt the stuff in her mouth, and then everyone's fine!!

For another thing... the medicine seems to be visibly helping. Well above and beyond what the steroid shot does for her. We think.

Anyway: promising. We'll probably be trying to mess with her food at some point, too, and there might be some other things we can do as well. But she's got more of her old self back on-line than she's had in months, and it's kind of amazing.

It's been over a year, and I still really miss Instagram. UGH. It was such a good way to keep up with friends and share what I was up to! I'm still so mad that they're so committed to ruining it!

I've heard from people that they dialed back the hateful scrambled timeline a bit from its peak aggression level when I left, but one of my problems (in general, I mean) is that I kind of tend to live in the future a little, and Facebook have been SO CLEAR that their business model really requires Instagram to collapse into a pile of corrosive garbage, and that they will drive it to that point at the maximum speed they can get away with. So even though they've conceded to corrupting it more slowly than they were in early 2018, opening it still just depresses me because I can't stop thinking about the final destination.

That was a downer, maybe I can add a fourth thing to round out the post.

It's feast day on the anti-jet-lag diet today, and we just had Ethiopian food for dinner, and that is definitely a circumstance to improve one's outlook on life in general, I tell you what.

I went to NYC for a week of vacation! It was excellent. I had a fantastic time. A little bit of museum stuff, a little bit of nightlife, a whole SHITLOAD of just hiking around and soaking in the atmosphere of, I dunno, I must have hit at least fifteen neighborhoods. Ate a bunch of cool food. Had a couple of cool drinks. Met up with some old friends, and crashed on the couch with Shane and his boyfriend Dusty and their housemate Lee, who were all just unbelievably nice and gracious and generous.

It was the shit. I got back on Sunday. Hi.

Let's go ahead and start with the intestines, because I know someone is going to ask me about that. There, it's out of the way. (They tasted fine, but I don't want that texture in my mouth ever again.)

Anyway, I tend to do a mostly vegetarian thing when I'm in the States, but that dog don't really hunt here, so I've just been eating what everyone else eats and figuring I'll balance it out later. Roll the film, please:

Dürüm, a meat and vegetable roll-up of sorts made with extremely thin (~1mm) flatbread.
Ayran, a salty diluted yogurt served as a beverage.
Baked quince in honey with clotted cream.
Pide (stuff-baked-on-top version).
Pide (bare version, i.e. just flatbread).
Helva with Antep pistachios.
Quince braised with meatballs (both kinds of quince I had were pretty unbelievable; gonna have to learn how to wrangle that fruit myself, now).
Dolma (tasted like dolma!).
A ton of meze and salads I didn't even get the names of. (We went to this great restaurant in Istanbul called Çiya. Highly recommended.)
Şeker (sugar) oranges, which are these seedless manderins with bright green or yellow rind. They taste exactly like the satsuma oranges we can get in the winter, but the contrast of green to shocking orange looks really alien and cool.
Non-Cavendish bananas! Which tasted like... Bananas. OK!
Lots of olives, mostly during breakfast. They sell uncured olives in the markets here, too, which are inedible but that's still kind of exciting. I'm at where olives come from! (When I was walking around outer Antep, I saw a group of older women and kids sitting on the sidewalk outside of a park sorting through a little wash-pool full of raw olives, which was yet another thing I'd never seen before. Dunno whether they were prepping them for sale or for curing.)
Turkish white cheese and sheep's milk cheese.
Pomegranates. Better than the ones we get here.
Adana kebap. (I was actually about to just say "A couple kinds of kebap," but then Kate got on my case about it, and I totally should have recorded it so you guys could hear.)
A COUPLE KINDS OF KEBAP, which I am now totally allowed to say, because we went to Imam Çaǧdaş after I wrote that last line and ordered the mixed grill, none of which did I have the training to recognize. It was all delicious, though.
Also at Çaǧdaş, we had what was possibly, depending on who you ask, the best baklava in the world. (This is apparently part of an ongoing rivalry in Antep, which mostly produces the pistachio type rather than the more common walnut type. I don't know anything about the other contenders, but this was pretty fucking good.)
A strange relative of baklava that looks like a shrimp and is composed of like 70% air and which collapses like a fatally-punctured diving bell when you put it in your mouth. (By the way, the waiters at Imam Çaǧdaş are really nice and bring you tons of free stuff you didn't order.)
Lahmacun, which is a kind of loosely pizza-like dish except that the crust is really really thin and verging on crackery in texture; like with a New York slice, you eat it folded in half, except that you tear off a chunk first and put parsley and lemon on it. We actually made this the last time Kate was in Portland, and I think we got pretty close, although my crust was definitely too thick compared to the real thing.
American-style oatmeal with fried apples and hazelnuts.
SO MUCH TEA. The way the Turks make it is actually kind of weird to me: they stew it to undrinkability, then dilute it and add sugar. (No milk.) I was kind of worried that I'd be a mess of tannin stomachaches, but apparently diluting stewed tea magically negates its bad effects? Or maybe sugar helps neutralize tannins the same way milk does, except that doesn't really make sense. Or maybe I've partially outgrown that reaction, which might be an ok tradeoff for the onions thing. Okay, now I'm just rambling. -_-
Börek, a flaky pastry roll filled with just about anything, which changes its character quite a bit depending on what it's being used for. There's greasy meat börek, sweet pistachio börek, cheese börek that resembles nothing so much as a macaroni and cheese croissant, and egg-and-yogurt börek that is almost quiche-like. …I ate a hell of a lot of börek, now that I think about it.
Walnut cookies! Simple and good.
Eggplant, which Turks cook better than I've ever had before.
Soupy egg scramble alongside bread with honey and clotted cream.
Muska, a dessert made from pistachio paste wrapped in a leathery skin made of dried and floured grape molasses. (Bringing a kilo of this home, if anyone's curious.)
A hot yogurt soup with sheep meat and micro-dumplings, garnished with mint oil. I'll have to ask Kate about the name of this one again, because I can't quite remember it.
Çi köfte, i.e. raw meatballs in lettuce. Surprisingly great!

…I think that's most of it.

Current Music: Girl Called Eddy - Golden

To take a break from the travelogue for a while (yes, I'm still working on some posts; yes, I'm back home), let's get back to something I mentioned in passing earlier.

The jet lag had me worried, a bit. This was going to be a fairly short trip, I did not want to waste any more of it than I had to on recuperatory bullshit, and all the talk of being useless for one day per zone freaked me right out. (And I knew I was susceptible, because I got the nasty lag going east to Ireland back in '04, and it really did leave me unable to do much but play Game Boy in bed for half a week.)

Anyway, initially what I kept finding were the news reports from earlier this year about how maybe, possibly, fasting for 16 hours before landing could keep The Lag at bay. So I was going to try that, except I didn't really have a lot of hope for it, since all those stories turned out to be based on a single study that involved injecting DNA-modifying virii into the brains of mice. ("If you've got jet lag and you're a mouse, we can help.") But then I ran across this.

Ignore for a minute the vibe of the site, which is somewhere between herbal supplement huckster and horoscope generator; the instructions are fairly simple once you strip away the explanatory text, and they're actually backed by a history of human testing (pdf link). And the whole shebang was developed by a dude at the Dep't of Energy's Argonne "Look At Our Fucking Death Ray" National Laboratory, which, you can't beat that heavily-irradiated pedigree. (Also it's apparently been used by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Canadian National Swim Team, and Ronald Reagan. [?!])

The theory behind it is also kind of awesome: basically, in addition to your main bodily clock, you have a gastric clock pegged to local food availability, which seems to exist in order to forcibly override and reset the main circadian clock in extreme situations. The goal of the diet is to deliberately trigger that override at a time of your choosing without suffering too much shock in the process. Very clever. In a nutshell, you do an alternating pattern of feast days and fast days, with breakfast on the final feast day triggering the reset.

Long story short, it fucking worked, and I completely evaded the lag in both directions. Eastbound lag is supposed to be the worst kind, so I did the full version of the diet before the trip; on the backswing, I couldn't really be bothered to do it right (I was surrounded by delicious food), but the half-length version seems to have worked anyway.

Needless to say, pulling this off is a lot easier if you can actually sleep a little bit on the plane, and I think I can recommend this ridiculous-looking shit in good conscience; it worked far better for me than it looks like it should have, and was totally worth the dough. Also, spending as much time as possible outdoors on the first day seems to be a good plan, as does obeying the rules about caffeine (only between 3 and 5 PM) and alcohol (don't do it; presumably this also goes for weed).

By the way, in case you couldn't tell, I've been in Gaziantep for the last few days. I am going to keep bouncing back and forth here, because you're not the boss of me.

Like most places outside the U.S., Turkey scandalizes with what it's willing to call a two-way street, but that's only scratching the surface of the transportation situation here: what actually surprised me most were the motorbikes. Well, probably something like 60% scooters by volume, but you get the idea. Little 125 CC buggers, mostly with underinflated knobby tires and usually laden with some ridiculous amount of cargo. Need to move five nineteen-liter water tanks (full) across the neighborhood? Leave the car at home and scoot that shit. You can carry two in your lap, right?

Also, these short-haul freighters have some uncanny slowriding skills. Which comes in handy when they ride on the sidewalks or through one of the semi-covered bazaars. I am not exaggerating for comic effect. All comic effect in this post is supplied by unvarnished reality. I have never ever seen the flesh pylon slalom played the way they play it here.

Adding to the surreality of it all is that, here in Antep at least, they like to coast. Well, okay, it's a medieval fortress city built on a bunch of enormous hills, so use what you got, but it's still weird to have a two-stroke scooter in shitty repair cruise past you in utter silence.

Buses are worth a mention, too. I never figured out the system in Istanbul, and we mostly took foot or tram, but here in Antep, they have these little mini-buses that flow as thick as red blood cells. There is no real system, as far as I can tell: the buses have incomplete lists of where they're going posted in their windows, but mostly you just ask the drivers when you're getting on and you can board or jump out basically anywhere. It kind of blows my mind how convenient it is; no one seems to wait more than a minute and a half for a bus to show up. In short, total chaos that works better than it seems like it should. Turkey!

There aren't many bicycles.

Right, so anyway. Let's start from the beginning. I deplaned in Istanbul, paid my $20 US for my 90 day visa, meandered through passport control, collected my bag (20% coffee and microbrews by weight), walked out of the terminal, and was met by a shout of "Nick!" and a hug that I'd been craving for, well, a while now, let's just say that.

Modulo some minor directional confusion (nothing above par for my course, except that I happened to be really hungry and towing a bag and may have pouted at

katealaurel a bit), we arrived at our hotel without incident. We'd ended up at an apartment-style place with one suite per floor, in a tall narrow building in a quiet and peaceful neighborhood (well, comparatively speaking) more or less inside Beoǧlu.¹ We were later told that the area half a block downhill from us wasn't safe to go into, but I wouldn't have guessed it.

Istanbul is full of grand, abandoned old wrecks, beautiful stone or concrete or brick buildings whose age I can't even guess at that have been left to fade and go to seed. Some of them are cored-out and broken-walled and barren, like the one just out our window, and others seem mostly intact but have boarded-up doors and windows stuffed with broken lamps or mannequins. At home they'd be called blight, but they're everywhere, here, even on the busiest and glitziest thoroughfares and shopping rows.

There's also a species of wood-slat buildings that look like sculptures left by some long-departed people, of which barely any are still usable or even salvagible. Kate tells me they're a traditional Istanbul style, but are fiendishly expensive and difficult to restore, and it's more lucrative to let them rot until they can be condemned and then build something modern.

Not that I have the eye to tell the somethings modern from the somethings old, yet, and they're all crammed in shoulder to shoulder, making oddly dark canyons of the streets. (In Istanbul, you go five stories high or you go home.) The ground floors are crowded with commercial bustle, and it invades the upper floors too, sometimes as storage space, sometimes for extra seating, sometimes fitting whole other shops in there. Then there are the rooftop cafés, which I hadn't really guessed the number of until we got up on the Galata tower and looked down on them.

This town is Built Up, is what I'm getting at, and it is BIG, stretching practically from horizon to horizon. It's big and it's tall and it's older than hell, and while I wouldn't call any real city truly knowable, Istanbul has the bad grace to rub your face in it. I kind of love it for that.

¹: For some reason, the iPad doesn't seem to have any good way to get Turkish characters, so an earlier version of this post had a bunch of em-dashes and apostrophes dangling around.

Current Music: The Mountain Goats on Kate's computer

I'm going to skip ahead a bit so that this part doesn't contaminate the rest of some other post.

Late on Halloween morning, Kate and I were sitting on a bench under the Galata Tower when we heard a very nasty-sounding crash. The kind that makes everyone in the neighborhood go quiet for a moment, we're talking. "Probably construction," Kate said, shaking off the hush. "Huh; ok," I said. But no: it turned out to be a guy blowing himself up at the police station in Taksim Square.

So yeah, baby's first suicide bombing. Reports were still hazy the last time we checked, and neither of us have kept up on the news about it; some analyst said it was definitely PKK, a PKK spokesman said he hadn't heard about it until they called him to ask about it, and there were somwhere between 22 and 32 injured, of which 10 or 12 were police; no one killed on the scene aside from the bomber.

For the rest of the trip, we saw a lot of riot police. And more than a few demonstrations and marches, too—some of which seemed kind of obscure (the tekel [bodega/package store/liquor store] workers' union was out in force one night—guh?), but I wouldn't be able to explain American politics to a Turk either, so whatever.

Also, that night we ended up walking past a hospital where some of the wounded were being treated, and there was a vigil on.

They re-opened the public transit hub at Taksim the next day, and those of us who didn't get blown up got on with our business.

I don't have much more to say about it. Hell of a thing, though.

And the word is, NO JET LAG. Fuck yeah, I am a dynamo of awakeness. That's pretty much all there is to say about that. (Well, there's more, but I'm going to leave it until I have time to write about stuff that isn't exciting foreign locales.)

I'm in Istanbul on the morning of my third day here, writing this in our hotel apartment while Kate types some emails. I'm having to re-think a bit how I interact with a new city, simply because I haven't traveled in so long, but so far I think I'm absorbing an okay amount of it. We've gone to the Ayasofia, walked around the old town, sat in cafés, eaten some amazing food, seen the insides of two incredibly old and cool mosques (including the "new" mosque, which, well, that name writes its own punchline in this town, doesn't it), not-shopped at the grand bazaar and the spice market (both tourist central) as well as the pet market and the highway underpasses and really pretty much anyplace where there's enough free space on the ground to set a cigar box. (The entrepreneurial spirit, she is alive and well in Istanbul.)

I've NOT been interacting much with the Turks, which I do feel somewhat guilty about; this is also the first time I've traveled with a guide (of sorts), and I'm leaning on her, possibly too much. Still, I'm here for less than two weeks, so I'm not going to get over-ambitious re: cultural exchange.

At any rate, we've been spending a lot of time wandering the streets, dodging scooters laden with water tanks and dancing around and between families and couples and clusters of bros. The streets are crowded here, it's kind of unbelievable. I think even more so than the chain of big European cities I rushed through back in '04, though it's tough to compare across so much passed time.

More soon.

Current Music: Compay Segundo on Kate's computer

My little brother and sister are graduating! And I'm going to Massachusetts (for the first time ever) to watch and hang out.

It occurs to me that most of the people reading this have never seen Target Corporation's headquarters building. It's just a blocky sort of tower, but at night, they turn on this crazy lightshow, and it's one of the things that, for me, defines summer nighttime strolls around my neighborhood. Anyway, I took some videos a few nights ago. (One, two. Pardon the shake, I am not a filmmaker.)

Current Music: Ted Leo & the Pharmacists—La Costa Brava

Back in my apartment, and it feels pretty good. I think this may have been the first time I've broken this place in as "home." You know, the "I've just traveled 1300 miles, and can't wait to get some sleep in my own bed" effect. Having it be the endpoint of some epic journey, instead of the midpoint.

Anyway. I did manage to make the number 2 (second-to-last run of the day, hot damn), so I didn't have to ride to downtown and then either walk ten blocks or try some funny tricks with the 18. Once I got back, I dropped my stuff, repacked the little bag, and set out as a man on a mission—it was 1:30 AM, my last real meal had been half a spinach-feta turnover and some fruit at around noon PDT, and I was going to get myself a tempeh Reuben from the Hard Times Café. (First had to deposit a check at the downtown ATMs and withdraw some cash.) I ALSO would have really appreciated a beer or two, but it was pretty much last call by the time I reached the ATM, and I didn't really want to drink before eating, so no dice. Oh well.

So yeah, I had a kickass and thoroughly Twin Cities meal, and am now about ready to pass out on my keyboard. Massive thanks to everyone for making my visit back to the PNW an amazing one.

Current Music: Joel Plaskett—A Million Dollars

WOW. I'm looking at flights and trains right now, and Sun Country Airlines only charges $135 for a one-way SEA -> MSP. Even if you cut it as close as Feb. 24th. 135. That's the same price as a one-way on the Empire Builder. WTF.

Well, I have options now.

Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: Sleater Kinney - Steep Air

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Let's get wrecked on Rolling Rock and stroll down to the sea