Kitchenware Town

Sarah, Robert and I made it to Kappabashi (Kitchenware town) last weekend. It was an entertaining way to spend an afternoon. There are a multitude of shops selling everything you would need to outfit a home or commercial kitchen, or open a restaurant. Here are a couple of photos:



This is the store where you can purchase the perfect sign for catching the eye of potential customers as they walk by, provided they can read Japanese -- not an unreasonable assumption here. Several of these signs read (in part) either 'Ramen', or 'Karaoke', and that's about all I can make out -- other than 'Open', of course.



This store sells the plastic food featured prominently in the front windows of many restaurants here. The "food" is very realistic looking, but also quite expensive. Many of the items in these display cases were well over $100.

And without further ado, here is this posting's gratuitous Robert picture. In Japan, one lives under constant threat of morphing into an anime character. Tragically, Robert's transformation has already begun:



Last week we stumbled on a new (to us) playground in the Hiroo district. I have heard Hiroo referred to as the "Gaijin ghetto", though it is actually quite upscale. It is a much quieter than Roppongi, its more famous cousin to the East. Hiroo seems like a very nice area, especially now that we've found the park! Sarah and Robbie had a great time on the teeter-totter (or shi-shaw in Japanese, if you'd rather).



We may move to this area once the lease is up on our current place in mid July. I was recently asked to extend my stay here in Tokyo and take on a new role: 'Product Manager for Derivatives Enablement, Tokyo'. The title probably sounds fancier than the job actually is, but it is a big promotion. The next couple of years will likely be challenging, but hopefully they will be a lot of fun too.

Sarah is on board with the idea of staying here through the end of '09, even though I know it's probably not her first choice. Sarah, you are a model wife, mother, and my best friend. Thank you for this. On a related note, Robert starts 3 day a week 1/2 day daycare/preschool at an international (i.e. English language (i.e. very expensive)) school just down the road on Monday. Wish him luck!

The annual 'Skipalooza' ski trip organized by our friends Matt and Mary kicks off in a couple of weeks, and with it has come the attendant bump in e-mail traffic to the mailing-list associated with the event. For the first time since 2004 we will not be in attendance and that's a real bummer for two reasons: not only has it been an epic snow year, but I will miss the thrill, the tingle of danger each time I take a drink, lest I shoot it out my nose like I did my coffee this morning while reading the following:

Matt: First the bad news. Lem and Satu have decided to join us in Utah after all, so unfortunately we'll have to share the house with them again this year. The good news is that this means you'll all be getting a cash rebate when we get to the house. Think of it as compensation.

...

So far only Rockett is coming to Tahoe for PPSW (Pre-Palooza Ski Week). But wait! Did you realize that the world Elk calling championships are being held here next week? You can't turn down sking *and* Elk calling, surely? We're talking the world championships for heavens sake!


Isaac: Last time I called an elk it just put me straight through to voicemail. I ended up having to text it.

Can you imagine a whole week of this?

Isaac's wife Wendy is a second-grade school teacher. As penance for stealing his material, I am including a link to a proposal Wendy has up on donorschoose.org to purchase new chairs for her classroom. Unfortunately(?) Wendy's project appeared on television recently, and now appears to be fully funded (I think I need to start checking e-mail more than once a week). Donorschoose is an excellent service though, and I encourage you to browse the available proposals. If any of them speak to you, please consider making a donation. And Wendy, if you put another proposal together in the future, will be sure to post it here.

Valentine's Day

Thursday was Valentine's day. Before I write more about that though, I must confess that I my grammar freakery has gotten a bit out of control -- I just the last few minutes doing research on whether this post ought to be titled "Valentines Day", or "Valentine's Day". Counting the number of google hits for each search term indicates that "Valentine's" is more popular, but only just: it has 24,800,000 hits to "Valentines" 22,500,000.

As usual though, a trip to Wikipedia set me right. First of all, their article on Valentine's day includes the apostrophe. More important even than Wikipedia though, our very well educated friend Cammy blogged about "Valentine's" day, and evidently on the day of, too. Come on Cammy, there have got to be better things to do on Valentine's day than update your blog! ;-)

The final straw though, is that there are of course several Saints Valentine, and a feast in their honor was traditionally held on February 14th. Somewhere along the line though, we seem to have dropped the feast in favor of chocolates, cards, and roses.

What I intended to blog about this morning though, is Valentine's day in Japan. Here, the Valentine's day tradition is for ladies to give the men in their lives chocolates.
When I explained this to Sarah though, and suggested we celebrate the Japanese way -- well, let's just say she was less than enthusiastic. ;-)

There is a follow-up holiday in Japan on the 14th of March called "White Day". On this day, guys are supposed to reciprocate & buy chocolates (generally more expensive chocolates) for their ladies. As you might expect, while celebrating White Day was a good idea too, it was not going to get me out of Valentine's day, and that's just fine. I am not one to pass up an opportunity to show Sarah how much she means to me.

Playing into her hand as well, earlier this week at work we had our annual compensation conversation, so come Thursday I was feeling rather flush. One bottle of '99 Dom Perignon, an 8 dollar cup of strawberries, a few Godiva chocolates, and take-out donburi (sashimi on rice) later, we had ourselves a wonderful, quiet evening at home. With Robert.

Change of Plans

Well, we woke up this morning to a world of white outdoors. Evidently it began snowing last night, and it has not stopped yet. The sidewalks are covered in an inch or more of wet snow and even the roads are slushy. How convenient that today is Sunday! The wind is up, and the snow is coming down much harder than it did a couple weeks back.

We ventured down the road to Johnathan's (a Japanese Denny's equivalent) to have breakfast, drink coffee, and watch the snow fall out on the street from our perch on the 2nd floor.

We generally hit Johnathan's for breakfast once each weekend, and the same waitress always greets us. Robert, of course, has worked his charms on her -- she takes good care of us.

Our trip to Kitchenware town has been put on hold, but we will probably still head out this evening. We aren't going to let a little snow get in the way of our good time!

Robert is getting closer and closer to talking. Often when we say a word like "balloon", "cracker", "puppy", etc., Robert tries to say it too. It doesn't come out quite right yet, but it is good to know that he's trying.

Sarah's MySpace Page

A link to Sarah's myspace page is now included at right. On an unrelated note, it snowed here a couple of weeks back. I don't think the temperature ever got below freezing, but we had oodles of great, fat flakes pirouetting lazily down out of a slate grey sky. The populace combatted the onslaught with umbrellas, and I must confess that I did the same -- certainly a first in my short life. An umbrella is definitely at less risk from being suddenly and catastrophically inverted during a winter snowfall, versus a summer typhoon, but it is still a bit odd to see sidewalks full of people contorted under their umbrellas to keep out of the gently falling snow.

There was not much accumulation, at least not here in the city, but it was very picturesque while it lasted. Several members of my team are from India, and this was their first experience watching snow fall in person.

While I'm on the subject of work, development on our project is nearly complete. We deliver in mid-March, and assuming all goes well between now and then, I will be taking on a new and expanded role in our Tokyo office. This will delay our permanent return to the US until the end of 2009, but it was an offer that I couldn't refuse. More details to come.

The weather since our snow has been clear and cold. There were a couple of days spent just below freezing, but for the most part, the thermometer has been stuck in the upper thirties/lower fourties.

As I think I may have mentioned previously, retail/wholesale businesses in Tokyo tend to congregate in "districts". For example Akihabara is the electronics district. Thtere are probably 9 blocks and many alleys full of electronics stores, some large some small, hawking every type of consumer electronic imaginable. Just past Akihabara, at Asaksa-bashi, is the wholesale bead district: here Sarah has spent several days shopping for glass and crystal beads. Imagine several blocks of alleys, crammed with shop after shop, each selling dozens or hundreds of varieties of crystal beads strung together on fishing line, and you will have some idea of the wholesale bead district.

Tomorrow during the day, we are planning to head to a new (to us) area: the wholesale kichenware district. I hear that this is where you can purchase the incredibly lifelike plastic food that is so prevalent in restaurant windows here, as well as Nabe pots, Ramen bowls, and the like. The latter items are what we are after on this trip -- we have had Nabe a couple of times since our arrival, and I can not get enough. I hope that purchasing the equipment to make it at home will provide the necessary incentive to do so.

Tomorrow evening, Sarah and I are taking our leave of Robert to head up to Shibuya, eat sushi, and watch 28 Weeks Later. Don't worry about Robert, our wonderful sitter Katie is going to take care of him.