October 10, 2016
Living in Japan, I’m not used to spending a lot of money for ramen. But recently, while visiting New York – Brooklyn, to be exact – I shelled out $20 for a bowl of ramen and I would do it all over again. I would hand over, without a second thought, a sum of money enough for 2.5 mammoth […]
June 13, 2016
One of the great joys of importing barware from Japan is that we not only make annual visits to the factories in Niigata but we also get to stop into Ginpachi, a local sushi-ya in Sanjo City. Yoko and I now know that Ginpachi is closed on Mondays – one year we visited Niigata on a Monday […]
March 14, 2016
Here’s the scenario: you’re travelling in Ho Chi Minh and you’ve made it your mission to buy fish sauce. There is no Red Boat in the supermarkets here, no English-friendly labelling anywhere. You have no internet on your phone because you’re travelling cheap, you forgot to look up the brands your Vietnamese friends recommended, and […]
July 6, 2015
As you may know, Google does not work in China. Savvy travelers would know to install a VPN service on their phones before taking off into China. We were not savvy. So I guess we got the REAL Chinese experience: Page not found. This situation made getting around challenging and finding Speak Low was no […]
June 29, 2015
For years, I longingly listened to my grandma’s stories of her golden years in Shanghai. Her sudden move from rural Japan to French Concession Shanghai in the 1930’s exposed her to opera, Gauguin and film noir. Before she met any friends or her future husband, this cosmopolitan city was her first love in a new […]
June 15, 2015
When I was traveling with Washi in Chengdu last month, he was trying to fight off a bad cough. The day we landed, his cough was escalating to Malboro Man heights, so we decided to go to a Chongqing hotpot place to try and chase the cough (and our jetlag) away. We were going with […]
May 22, 2015
*Yoko is in China for 10 days! And with no access to Facebook or Instagram, she is sending us photos the old school way — via postcards. We’ll be featuring these snapshots from Yoko in Chengdu and Shanghai all week here on the blog. Enjoy! – Kayoko Breakfast today was at the neighborhood hot spot […]
*Yoko is in China for 10 days! And with no access to Facebook or Instagram, she is sending us photos the old school way — via postcards. We’ll be featuring these snapshots from Yoko in Chengdu and Shanghai all week here on the blog. Enjoy! – Kayoko When I saw this bottle of Chinese wine […]
*Yoko is in China for 10 days! And with no access to Facebook or Instagram, she is sending us photos the old school way — via postcards. We’ll be featuring these snapshots from Yoko in Chengdu and Shanghai all week here on the blog. Enjoy! – Kayoko One of the many advantages of staying in […]
May 21, 2015
*Yoko is in China for 10 days! And with no access to Facebook or Instagram, she is sending us photos the old school way — via postcards. We’ll be featuring these snapshots from Yoko in Chengdu and Shanghai all week here on the blog. Enjoy! – Kayoko I traveled about an hour south of Shanghai […]