Travel

We couldn’t have picked a better day to immerse ourselves in Korean tea shops than a day filled with brisk temperatures and a slight chilly rain. It made our check ins of tea houses much more cozy even though we were on a seriously ambitious mission to sip and sit in a combination of traditional and modern establishments.

We started at Miss Lee, a colorful and playful tea house washed in bright colors and natural woods. If I was looking for a quiet austere place for tea this sure wasn’t it! We arrived for an early lunch of bento boxes with a variety of teas. There’s something to know about the world of Korean tea:  it’s not necessarily always based on traditional tea plants and their leaves. It’s a world that encompasses fruits, seeds, twigs, roots and leaves, not to mention some grains and barley and rice.

The flavors of a rainbow are all here, from sour and astringent to candy-like and sweet. One of my favorites was Omijacha, made from the dried berries of the Schisandra chinensis and called the Five Flavors tea because it has sweet, salty, bitter, sour and pungent notes. Served either hot or cold, Korean teas are consumed for health and vitality but to me some are just plain fun: give me a cup of Yujacha (citron) any day for dessert and I’d be a happy man.

Cecilia was a ‘10’ on a scale of one to two. She had unmitigated primal passion. Her sexual appetite was unparalleled and horizontal. It was vertical and diagonal. When I suggested to Cecilia that we spend the Fourth of July in Hawaii, she responded by giving me a fireworks show in the bedroom that went on till daybreak.

After Cecilia made my night, I made travel plans. We would first go to Hanalei Bay on the North Shore of Kauai. Then to Maui – Kaanapali Beach and Hana.

As I was packing for the trip, the phone rang. It was Cecilia. She stammered and fumfered and did everything audibly possible without actually forming words.

“What’re you trying to tell me?” I asked repeatedly.

“I can’t go,” she finally said. 

We just spent a few days in Dublin on our way home from Italy. When we departed Rome on Thursday it was ninety-seven degrees and dry as toast; when we got off the plane in Dublin two hours later it was in the mid-fifties and drizzling. The first thing I did was to buy a wooly sweater and a cap. I love Europe — you can change cultures as easily as changing your clothes.

We were there to visit our friends Marc and Cathy. He’s an American of Irish descent and she’s a Dubliner born and bred. They showed us a grand time, a brilliant time. That’s the way they talk over there.

First stop on Thursday evening, we met Marc at O’Donoghue’s bar — a perfect place to slip into the spirit of the Auld Sod. I noticed that Irish bartenders aren’t mixologists. They draw pints, they pour shots and they engage one and all in charming conversation — that’s it. I asked for a gin Martini and the barman looked at me quizzically.

“So, that would be a bit of Martini in a glass and then … a bit of gin?”

“Well, more like a slug of gin and then just a whisper of Martini.”

“Ah, just a whisper then,” he said with a smile. The smile is everywhere.

I’ve just returned from a quick trip to Tokyo, where The Hub was promoting a new film and where we were both doing our best to eat from morning to night.

Eating in Japan is serious business, and sushi is no less than an art form.  The Michelin Guide expanded to Japan for the first time in its history in 2008, and in its debut year, it awarded more stars to the Land of the Rising Sun than any other country, including its native France.  In fact, there are now more than twice the number of cumulative stars found in Tokyo (227) than in Paris (97)!  (Not that any of the Japanese chefs really cared.  One 3-star designee apparently asked, “Why does a French restaurant guide care about what we’re doing in Japan?”).

Over our four days and nights, we ate like kings.  We sampled hot oden noodles, hot ramen noodles, cold soba noodles, mounds of tempura, shark fin soup (supposedly very good for your complexion), skewers of yakatori (basically chicken on a stick, though our selection included chicken skin on a stick, which was inedible), and all sorts of other delicacies that I’ve now lost in a haze of sake and jet lag.  Speaking of sake, we knocked it back – always cold and dry and delicate.   We were also given a shot of something that looked like a weak Bloody Mary but turned out to be 40 proof vodka laced with turtle blood.   My arm hairs were on end for about 10 minutes.