Sakura of DOOM

First day in Tokyo! It's a bit overwhelming. Our flight was first delayed, and although we managed to exchange our travel vouchers for tickets for the airport bus to our hotel and get our rental cell phones, Narita's 2nd terminal is not particularly easy to navigate. We then headed to Asakusa to get even more train tickets (for Nikko), in which I got lost about eighteen times in the subway station and managed to get in to buy our passes five minutes before the office closed. Go me and my sister, but that took a lot more time than anticipated.

Then... Shibuya! I think I am still a bit shocked by just how big Tokyo is; no wonder last time I was here, I basically just spent all four days or so around Shibuya. I was startled in Seoul by the size of Myeongdong, which I feel is about four times the size of Ximending, but Shibuya is at least two Myeongdongs, to say the least. Also, it started raining. We had our umbrellas, but still!

So far, I love all the random little eateries underneath highway and subway overpasses, but I have to say, Tokyo's subway system is about ten times more confusing than Seoul's. First there's the fact that there are three separate lines, and I'm still not quite sure how transfers work between them (I heard it was more expensive). And then, the signage is really not very good. My sister and I stared blankly at the ticket screen, and all the exits and maps are extremely confusing. This is particularly weird when compared to Seoul, where I felt like everything made a lot of sense and I almost always knew where to go as long as I was within the subway system.

Thankfully, I managed to find Book Off in Shibuya without getting very lost—like Seoul and very unlike Shanghai, things on the map look far in Tokyo but are actually extremely walkable—and Book Off, like everything else in Tokyo, was far larger than I had expected. Can I say that I continue to hate the Japanese system of shelving comics? It probably makes a lot of sense when you read comics from the monthly or weekly magazines, but when you have no idea what company published which author's whatever series, it takes a lot of time to hunt through stacks of manga to make sure you didn't miss anything! I so wish things were just shelved by mangaka. As such, I didn't get any loot in Book Off and wandered off with my sister, slightly disappointed. But Mandarake was next on the list!

OMG people! How have I managed to never go to Mandarake before in my life?! And I thought Animate in Akihabara was awesome when I first went way back when! I didn't explore it fully, but Mandarake has rows and rows and rows of doujinshi (none of which I bought, since I have no idea what circles publish what and already felt bad dragging my sister through who knows how many miles of comics). And manga! And they arranged the manga by author so I finally managed to find the republished version of Mizushiro Setona's 1999nen shichi no tsuki Shanghai! FINALLY! Well, just part two of two, but still.

AND AND AND OMG!!!!!!!

I now own vols. 1-4 (of 8) of Takemiya Keiko's Kaze to ki no uta (I did not realize it was so long, woe!) and Hagio Moto's Heart of Tomas and November Gymnasium! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!! I have been looking for these ever since UNDERGRAD!

... and now I am not sure if I was just always looking in the wrong place, because they're published in a smaller format than most manga, or if I just needed to go to Mandarake. And they had a TON more Takemiya Keiko and Hagio Moto that I did not buy because the series were too long and I was already buying a lot as it were! But still!!! Magnificent 49er manga FINALLY! And all for less than $40!

Also, we went to a cat cafe for half an hour and watched a bunch of cats eat and chase each other around! They were so cute! I only wish we could have stayed longer to pet them more. Then on to dinner at an Okinawan restaurant with my sister's co-worker, in which we had this pork with the cartilage still in, cooked so that it was a soft, mochi-like texture. Also, we randomly had takoyaki under a highway overpass in Asakusa and a chocolate taiyaki in Shibuya!

So far, I am actually not sure if I love Tokyo as much as Hong Kong or Seoul, which surprises me a bit, but some of it is probably the size and the sheer overwhelming-ness of it all. And we have really only gone to Shibuya! Tomorrow, Shinjuku and Harajuku and Omotesando and Aoyama, or however much of it we make it through.

(I am SO TEMPTED to go to Mandarake in Ikebukuro to see if I can pick up my missing volumes for Takemiya Keiko and Mizushiro Setona. We will see how much my sister can take being dragged through bookstores where she does not read the language.)

BWAHAHAHA! I got a ton of loot at the Strand today (and at the Strand Annex over the weekend) and I am going to rub it in everyone's faces and brag because I never manage to find manga on sale in California.

Loot ($2 for everything save the manhwa, which was $2.50):

• Mixed Vegetables, which I have never heard of but stars a daughter of a pastry chef who wants to be a sushi chef and the son of a sushi chef who wants to be a pastry chef.


• Sugar Princess 1


• Forest of Gray City 2


• Goong 2


• Flower of Life 3 (from Forbidden Planet)


• High School Debut 5, which I'm not actually collecting, but hey, TWO DOLLARS!


• Vampire Knight 5!!!!!!!!


• Nana 12!!!!!!!!

And, bwahahahaha, half of them are not out on Amazon yet!

... now I know how coffeeandink must feel like all the time.

ETA: On the other hand, I didn't find an ARC of Octavian Nothing 2 and I forgot to look for one for Justine Chen Headley's new book.

This week, I went with cychi and A. to see the Tezuka Osamu exhibit at the Asian Art Museum in SF.

As we got off the BART, little did we know (well, ok, A. knew) that this was the weekend for the LGBT pride parade, which meant... STREET FAIR!

It was huge! I didn't get to see most of it, as we didn't have that much time, but we all managed to find the fooding booths. We started off with funnel cake, deep fried and squiggly and covered with powdered sugar, absolutely delicious. It was the first time A. had had funnel cake ("Deep-fried dough with powdered sugar!" I said. "How can it be bad?"). Then we decided that we should probably eat lunch first before eating even more.

A. took us to a Vietnamese place in Little Saigon, in which I introduced A. and C. to the joys of roast squab, particularly roast squab with a crispy, glazed skin, oozing with juice and fat, laid on a small pile of carmelized onions and raisins. ("Better than duck!" said C. "I now think of pigeons in an entirely new light!" said A. "Squab!" yelled C. upon exiting and walking through a giant swarm of pigeons on the street.) We also had a tart and refreshing green papaya salad with little bits of beef jerky, along with stir-fried meat, bean sprouts, and other stuff wrapped in a thin, pancake-like substance, which was then wrapped with a lettuce leaf and eaten a little like a taco. Everything was extremely good, except possibly the pigeon claw, which A. discovered upon tasting was more decorative than actually edible, unlike chicken claws at dim sum.

We then went to get dessert at the fair, because they had.... DEEP-FRIED TWINKIES!

"OMG! Awesome! We must get some!" I exclaimed during our first pass through.

"Uhhh. Deep-fried what?" said A.

"I had some once. They were pretty good!" said C.

"OMG! Awesome! We must get some!" I said. "OMG! Beignets!"

"What's that?" asked C.

"More deep-fried dough! Awesome!" I explained.

"Look! Deep-fried artichoke hearts!" said A.

"Yay street food!" said C.

( Deep-fried twinkies )

( Tezuka Osamu exhibit )

( Yoshitoshi woodblock print exhibit )

( Book loot! )

( More food! )

I ended up rushing to Target and buying a tree on Friday afternoon, go me! It'll only be up for a week or so, but it was nice.

( Christmas Eve )

( Christmas Day )

( The day after )

Today, I am at work and feeling incredibly lazy. But there is yhlee-meeting tonight and a movie tomorrow, and then possibly ballroom dancing and Asian Art Museum visiting on the weekend. And then it will be 2007 and I will write up my year in books after I moan over all the books and manga that I haven't written up.

Possibly I will also write up my year in TV, anime and manga, but only so I can pimp the things I loved. And manga has taken over so much of my reading this year that it really should have its own entry.

I got so caught up in the whole deluge of comments that I forgot to post about this!

Anyhow, there was a library sale last weekend.

Need I say more?

I got:
- RuThAnne Lum McCunn, Thousand Pieces of Gold (Asian-American fiction)
- Lizzie Simon, Detour: My Bipolar Road Trip in 4-D
- Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link, eds., The Tiananmen Papers
- Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma (I liked his The Code Book a lot)
- Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
- Olivia Judson, Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation (Bugs having sex on the cover! Also, good reviews)
- Kim Wong Keltner, The Dim Sum of All Things (Asian-American chick lit)

All for $8!

And if that weren't enough, I went back to the used bookstore to get vols. 2-5 of Planet Ladder. They also had vol. 1 of Cross there, but I decided that I really didn't need my own copy to flip through, although I was really tempted, just so I could pull it out and show it to random visitors, thereby ensuring that no one would come over to see me ever again.

The best of all was finding the very OOP Four Shojo Stories in the corner of a random comic book store, still going for cover price. Still not cheap, but pretty good compared the the $60 it's going for online! Yay classic shoujo!

Alas, I forgot to bring my camera yet again!

But after I managed to wake up after dreaming that I was at the Baba ashram with dirty showers and that everyone there hated me (I think I looked at too many pictures of India yesterday), we headed out to Empress Pavilion for dim sum. Amazingly, there was a very short wait. I think most people this weekend are trying to eat barbeque or something. We were seated in a corner, so we didn't get all that many carts passing by. Even so, I still got shrimp and jiou tsai dumplings, BBQ pork buns, taro rolls things, Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce, and I finally got to try the black sesame rolls that Rachel keeps talking about! They're really good and gooey and sesame-y, though after Rachel said several people didn't like them, I started seeing a vague resemblance to slugs.

Not that that stopped me from eating all of them.

After that, we wandered around several anime stores for a bit, in which I bought some keychain figurines to give to people and Rachel got more Naruto figurines and a FMA one to round out her collection. Then we nearly died of heatstroke as we wandered about Chinatown, which prompted Rachel to buy a hat and me to buy a dinky little umbrella, so I could shielf myself from the sun and look like all the other old ladies wandering around.

Then, it was on to Kinokuniya! I spent entirely too much money on:
- Cecilia Seigle, Yoshiwara
- Ryoko Ikeda, The Rose of Versailles, vol. 1 (it was republished in 8 vols.)
- Nananan Kiriko, Strawberry Short Cakes (I have no idea where I heard of her, but the art is interesting)
- Fumiko Enchi, Masks (Mely keeps reccing her)
- Hisaya Nakajo, Sugar Princess vol. 1, which is apparently about an ice skater girl

Hopefully I'll be able to find used copies of Saiyuki in Japanese at Bookoff or something, because I desperately want to read the originals. I also made Rachel get vols. 5 and 6 of Saiyuki Reload because they are so good!

We ate kurobuta ramen at a ramen place whose name I can't remember. They only have one type of ramen, though, and for a good reason! It was absolutely delicious -- very flavorful and silky broth, probably cooked for days and days with pork bones, tender slices of pork that nearly fell apart in your mouth, eggs hard-boiled to the perfect doneness, while soaking up the flavor of the broth, and noodles that were just tender enough, but still chewy. So, so, so good.

We also got mochi from the traditional mochi place, which has apparently been open since 1903, and two of the ones we got were pink white-bean mochi! I pretended that Fuu made them.

We also passed quite a few bookstores with books on ninjutsu, largely written by Steve Hayes. Rachel bought one, titled Clan of Death: Ninja, with the further bits "The Incredible True Story! In the quiet of a whisper, come the deadly soldiers of the dark."

There was a lot of snorting and snorfling that went on as we went over our purchases of the day.

And now, I am going to raid even more of her manga shelves, having now finished the published bits of Naruto and Alice 19th.

Lalalalala I got Salty Dog II and Backgammon and Reload 6 and Nana 13-15 and OMG am so broke but lalalala pretty pictures squee yay!!!!

1. I forgot to bring my camera. Of course, I realized this while I was at the San Francisco airport, because I saw some vending machines that sold iPods and Gameboys and audiobooks (!!) and wanted to take a picture. That may qualify as the niftiest vending machine that I've seen in the US! I miss the totally random Japanese vending machines, but iPod vending machines were pretty cool. Alas, you will all have to suffer the lack of my camera with me.

The good thing is that my dad is letting me steal his, as I have been inspired by other LJers' trip photoblogging to try and do my own. The bad thing is that I'm not quite sure what to take pictures of, outside of the food, because things that I think are normal aren't necessarily, and things that I think are nifty may indeed be very boring.

2. I opened the in-flight magazine, only to discover that they were showing Nana the movie.... but on the way back. Woe! Hopefully I will get to see it on the way back. Or find a DVD or something here.

3. Taiwan bookstores are really crowded. I ogled over manga and restrained myself, given that I will be going to the comic book store later, and it's cheaper over there. However, I did get myself two Chinese cookbooks! One is just on assorted pancake-like flatbreads (bin) and what you can do with them, which totally excites me, and another is just a fairly normal-seeming vegetarian one. I only hope that I don't get too confused by figuring out the instructions in Chinese, and the names of assorted ingredients.

4. I am now in the hospital getting a very thorough physical, courtesy of my mom, who is, shall we say, extremely concerned about all things healthwise these days. All the doctors keep asking me why I'm doing this when I'm so young (all the other people here seem to be in their fifties or so). It's very cold. But the good thing is that they feed you lunch (unagidon! whoo!) and that they are providing me with internet access! They are also frighteningly organized.

The bad thing is that anytime they tell me something or ask me questions, I'm very puzzled, given that my Chinese medical terminology really sucks, to say the least. Also, it's freezing in here because Taiwan doesn't believe in indoor heating and the building is made of concrete, and I'm in a robe. At least they gave me an outer robe.

5. Further plans for this afternoon include a haircut, at long last!

6. I have already had beef rolls (beef flavored with some sauce and green onions wrapped in something rather like a scallion pancake), noodle soup, dates, wax apples, strawberries, and Asian pears. And watermelon. Whoo fruit! How I have missed you! I will make my mom go out and buy me lots more, but I have to remember to bring said camera so that I can show everyone pictures of fruit stands and such!

Oh dear. I went down to the used bookstore to sell some of my books and ended up finding vols. 3-4 of Alice 19th in Japanese. I willfully resisted, but once I have trade credit, I fear I will relapse. I need to stop buying books in non-English because I will never read them! And yet... three dollars each!

So then, of course, I decided to head over to Books, Inc. and proceeded to end up getting Fruits Basket 4, Saiyuki Reload 1 (I miss Minekura art. I need to scout for artbooks when I go home), a gift for a friend, and Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief. I haven't even started reading all the books I got while I was in NY, or even the books I got when rachelmanija was here. I think I need a book-buying hiatus.

The sad thing is that in the back of my mind, the book-buying hiatus is littered with loopholes (It doesn't count if I get manga! It doesn't count if I get stuff with gift certificates or trade credit!).

Also, I curse all of you who have gotten me back into manga and so impatient that I cannot even wait a month for my Amazon gift certificate to get more Fruits Basket. The only reason I stopped at only one volume was becuase vol. 5 was in bad shape and they didn't have another copy.

I curse you all to be deluged with too many good book recs and have no willpower to resist!

*madly cackles*

Argh, have just found out that LJ is still not emailing me all my comments! Grrrr.

But... Yay! I have made my very first gingerbread house ever, with much help from cychi, who I made do the icing. It is ugly and lopsided and completely, disgustingly packed with candy, but now I feel all holiday traditional! Well, as much as you can get with a prefabricated gingerbread house kit from Costco. But I care not! Plus, have never made one before ^_^. (Also, the front has a frightening resemblance to a spider's face. I am not quite sure how this happened.)

Am still somewhat missing New York and visiting people and crashing at my sister's apartment, and all that happy holiday stuff. It was also just nice being in the city itself again; four years of college in New Jersey, and I'd grown to think of New York as The City. I didn't get to go there as often as I liked, just enough to pretend that I actually knew where I was going and the like. Also, I just like cities. I like figuring out the subway and the bus systems, and I like digging around in all the nooks and crannies.

New York was grey and dirty and much taller than San Francisco, which is cloudy but pastel and ornate. There's more honking and more biting wind. And I don't care, because I love it, from the clanking subway cars that come to screeching halts to the crowded streets. I seriously contemplated moving there for a few hours (mostly while I was at Chikalicious and the Strand and coffeeandink and my sister's apartments), but promptly reconsidered the second I stepped outside. I don't deal well with the cold.

I felt all happy because after a day being completely confused by what was where, I went around and felt all New-Yorker-y because I was walking around really fast and dodging people and avoiding eye contact! Of course, the fact that this excited me probably already disqualifies me from New-Yorker-dom ;).

And now... book loot!

( Much loot )

Wah, now that I have typed this all up, all I can think about are the poor books that made their sad way to my cull pile =(. Oh well. The library calls!

After seeing coffeeandink's book-filled house, I am now inspired to fit in even more bookcases! fannishly and I sort of went through the living room and figured that we could fit in three more bookcases or so, and I think I can fit more shallow media cases for manga or mass markets in my bedroom. Ha! And! I shall copy Mely and use my kitchen cabinets too!

This is probably a good thing, because I just found out that the library sale is this weekend! My public library always has things in pretty good condition. I am planning on going twice, once for stuff I actually want and once for the bag sale.

Why, yes, Bob, I did indeed buy over twenty books this weekend. I do not understand what this has to do with anything ;).