Grand Adventures and Household Chores
Reflections on our family’s adventures as we live, work, and play around the world
As I’ve written before, this is a month without external childcare, which means less time to explore solo. I still really wanted to take a cooking class in Kyoto, so I decided to bring Theo to the bento box class at Cooking Sun. (Their registration form let me add a child under five for free so I took them at their word that preschoolers were okay.)
Continue reading “A Kyoto Cooking Class – With A Preschooler”
Theo and I walked to the local rice shop, only to find it closed. (Boo.)
Luckily, in front of the rice shop we found a rice vending machine. (Yay!)
Our hosts moved this lizard from their house to the garden, where Theo and I were playing. The lizard was very still, probably hoping that we would go away. Theo declared that he was going to watch until it moved.
As we made our way from Kyoto to Oiso, Brian and Theo played Kerbal Space Program on the Shinkansen bullet train. (I worked and looked out the window, but it’s harder to make an interesting post title out of that.)
Underground is a collection of interviews of the victims of 1995 sarin attacks in the Tokyo subway system. The interviews don’t just provide information about the attacks from the perspective of those impacted, but also paint a picture of the daily lives and priorities that were interrupted on that day.
Geisha, A Life is the memoir of Mineko Iwasaki, who lived in Kyoto’s Gion Kobu district during the 1960s and 70s and was a highly successful geisha through her retirement at age 29. Iwasaki was a chief informant for Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of Geisha which (somewhat confusingly) is a novel, not a memoir. Geisha, A Life is a less sensational (but still fascinating) peek into the daily life of Iwasaki from childhood through her retirement.
I also read and enjoyed two novels this month, both of which unfolded slowly as they explored the quirks of their characters. The Lake is a novel set in modern-day Tokyo that slowly reveals the past of its two main characters as they grow closer. Norwegian Wood is a coming-of-age novel set in Tokyo in the 1960s with themes of love, sex, and death.
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Because traversing 1/3 of the globe all at once seemed like a poor idea, I split our journey between Japan and Morocco into two parts; after leaving Tokyo, we spent two nights in Abu Dhabi in a posh hotel that we booked for cheap through Etihad Airline’s stopover program.
I have to admit that mostly we just stayed in the hotel, with occasional excursions to the nearby mall for Indian, Thai, and Lebanese food. (Normally, I find malls pretty unappealing. However, if they all had food courts like this one, I expect I’d like them a lot more.)
Other than the mall, the only exploring we managed was half-day trip to the desert. Normally, Theo is a pretty good traveler. On this particular day, well, he wasn’t.
Apparently, Theo hates deserts. Continue reading “Theo Hates Deserts (But Camels Are Nice!)”
Finding a Moroccan cooking class in Rabat was challenging – when searching online, I kept being redirected to classes Marakesh. Luckily, I eventually found the web site of Salam Cultural Center, which offers cooking classes in Rabat in addition to language and cultural exchange programs.
For our main course, we made the ubiquitous tajine, a word that describes both the pot used to cook/serve the dish and the food itself. Continue reading “Cooking in Rabat – Tajine”
Last Saturday, within the span of about two hours, Theo received seven kisses and two lollipops, all from people we’d never previously met.
We mentioned the attention to a Rabat resident, who told us that this was typical in Morocco. When he was visits Europe, it feels strange to not pick up and play with random children. Even further on that extreme: the United States*, where he found that mothers would look concerned if he simply smiled at their children.
Cultural norms – they vary. Brian and I acknowledge this, and understand that in some countries (well, Turkey) strangers will find it very natural to spend an extended period of time petting our child’s blondish hair, even though it feels odd to us. And that in most parts of the world, people just give candy to children. This is in stark contrast to the United States, where we actually have a saying about candy from strangers. (For anybody from outside the US, the saying is: “Don’t take candy from strangers.” Pretty simple.)
Friday is the day when most Moroccans eat couscous for lunch – so last week, Brian and I did as well. The couscous, vegetables, and sour milk were all very good, but our favorite part was an amazing chutney, with onion, raisins, and cinnamon.
People at the cafe explained that Friday was couscous day because it is the holy day in Islam, but I still wasn’t exactly clear on why holy day equaled couscous. After some searching on the Internet, it seems like in Morocco the weekend previously included Friday, and this was the day when families would gather for this filling, tasty meal. The Moroccan weekend now falls on Saturday and Sunday. While many people are still heading home to eat with their families each Friday, some people (like us) are eating their couscous in restaurants.
We acknowledge that our carbon footprint hasn’t been great during our almost two years of travel. Still, when possible, we’ve been trying to avoid planes, and instead default to trains or ships.
To travel between Tanger and Barcelona, we booked a cabin on a Grandi Navi Veloci ship. When the vessel was originally constructed, it was probably designed to feel like a cruise. However, most of the cruise elements seem to have been gutted, at least for this journey. The two pools were empty, aside from cigarettes butts. The beauty salon had been converted into storage. Many other rooms were just blocked off and closed, or converted to prayer rooms. Continue reading “Tanger to Barcelona By Ship”
