International thoughts

Last night we went to an intimate little Japanese restaurant in Kyoto where the chef was trained in French cuisine as well as Japanese. It was sort of a fusion meal, and the combo worked really well. The owner was an older Japanese woman, and the price of the meal seemed to include a chat with her at our table as we lingered over our tea at the end of the meal. Mostly she and my host bemoaned the changes of getting older, but we also talked about the differences between Western and Japanese anatomy, with my body as the Western model. Hah! I am hardly an exemplar.

I learned a new turn of phrase at that meal: "cat tongue." Cats can't eat hot food (hot in temperature, that is), so when food is so hot that you have to blow on it to cool it off, you are experiencing "cat tongue." Apparently Americans are known in Japan for having very catlike tongues, always needing food to be cooler before eating it. Indeed, I always have to wait to drink my tea because I think it is served at scalding temperature, whereas I've seen others just gulp it down.

My thoughts are turning toward China, where I am headed later today. This morning at breakfast, I picked out an odd-looking fruit from the fruit bowl to try. It resembled a peach pit except it was more the size of a ping-pong ball. Or maybe it looked like a brown golf ball, but the size of a ping-pong ball. Anyway, I bit into it and discovered that it was a lychee fruit! There is a pit in the middle and this hard bark-like skin, but the juicy white flesh inside was definitely lychee.

How appropriate to discover that as I head into Shanghai.