Seafood and Wednesday: Edo-Tokyo museum

I forgot to mention. Tuesday, the family friend took me to a sushi place, with illustrated menus in both languages, single-piece servings, a wide variety, and him paying. So I decided to be bold and try things like sea urchin, herring roe, long-necked clam, arc shell (like the Shell oil company logo, supposedly), and a couple of identified fish nigiri that I was initially given in place of my sea urchin, because someone messed up in the ordering process.

Conclusion: I was closest to liking the arc shell. Clam was chewy, herring roe (a solid yellow mass, not like salmon (big red balls) or the other one (tiny red balls)) was weird and salty, urching was yellow, pasty (as in like paste) and salty/sea-ey, fishes were okay. Nothing to challenge the hegemony of salmon, tuna in all varieties, eel (I had eel and sea eel, didn't notice a big difference), egg, and yellowtail.

But friend and I got to totally mutually geek out with each other about omega-3 fats, mercury (he says selenium neutralizes methylmercury, and hey, there's a lot in seaweed), Okinawans, and other food/health/aging/exercise issues. It was very gratifying; usually I get "please don't read the ingredients to us, Damien, we don't want to know".

( Wednesday )

Depending on restaurants, or now hotel, I've drunk a lot of green tea, 5-10 cups a day sometimes. Clearly I like the good stuff, unlike my mother who thought it was all boiled water (which, to be fair, a rather faint tea brew isn't much different from.) Clearly I need a better way of making it at home, where I have 1 or 2 at most.

Internet continues to be for crap, with "can't access server", "network unreachable", or LJ and webcomics not loading all their CSS and image files.

Thursday: Imperial Palace

Human rights of visitors to the US: declining.

Scissors being absent, just scraping at my beard with a razor seemed to do a decent job of trimming the hairs.

(ETA: I was out of small bills and big coins and decided to change a 10,000 yen bill in the nearby bank. This involved filling out a form with my name and local number. To change a not that big amount of Japanese cash into smaller bills of Japanese cash, which I'd already done without paperwork in a couple of stores, as receiving change. This seems odd.)

It occurred to me that I've had tons of sushi and ramen, udon and soba, some terikaki and sukiyaki, but no tempura here. Today I fixed that (twice), first having brunch at an udon place with shrimp tempura, no miso, and yasai (so she said; vegetables.) I'll skip ahead and say I later had it again, for dinner in the hotel restaurant; both times there was only one piece of shrimp, with the other tempura pieces being vegetables. Or for brunch, a fish of some sort, tailfin included. Brunch had tempura over rice, udon on the side; dinner had tempura in broth with soba, leading to disintegration. Lunch had iced green tea; dinner had my choice of hot or iced green tea, I took iced, and the tea *looked* exactly like water, but had a strong tea kick. I don't know how that works.

( Palace )

Principal witch-hunts gay students, lifts girl's shirt, is defended by community for defending their Christian values. Ah, northern Florida.