Omiyage

Omiyage
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

This is a photo of Kaori's omiyage, gifts, from Smith's supermarket in Taos. Her two big bags include candy (Almond Roca, Lindt Truffles, Tic Tacs, a couple of white chocolate bars, two bags of Christmas-themed KitKats, one big and inexpensive bag of Christmas chocolate that I almost warned her off of as it was one of those bags that had "chocolate" in big letters and "flavored" in small letters.), beef jerky, some 505 salsa, and three small cans of Hatch green chile. When in Rome, I guess. And when in Taos.

Today we had a late start as the power went out last night and when it came back on, the hot water didn't. We waited for a couple of hours, had coffee and breakfast until the front office opened. After calling and finding out the ETA for the hot water was unknown, we decided to go out and do some shopping, greasy hair be damned.

Our first stop was Taos Pueblo where we looked at the church and wandered in and out of shops. A year ago, when Shoko visited, we also came to Taos. She and I went to Taos Pueblo and wandered in and out of shops. Today, I stepped into one jewelry shop and the man behind the counter said, "Oh! You look just like my sister! I was, like, what are you doing here? Why didn't you tell me you were coming?" Which is the exact same thing that he said to me a year ago.

I love going to Taos Pueblo, love the people there, love being mistaken for family. But I hate going to Taos Pueblo because the disrespect shown to the people of Taos Pueblo by some of the visitors makes me want to commit murder. In Acoma, the guided tours now begin with an run-down of the rules that visitors must follow: No picture taking in the church or cemetary; Don't take pictures of people without asking their permission; No eating or drinking in the church; etc. Our Acoma tour guide went through these rules then jokingly said, "Or you get the same punishment that we used on the Spanish during the Pueblo Revolt: We toss you over the side," and she gestured at the six-hundred foot drop to her left. So what I think Taos Pueblo needs is a group of spunky tour guides and a six-hundred foot high cliff. Kaori was surprised at the rules--that people needed to be reminded that it is actually rude to walk into someone's home without permission or eat or drink in the church, but I was, like, we aren't in Japan anymore, Toto. In Japan, some big temples also have recorded reminders--in English only--that remind their gaijin visitors that, no, the temple ground is holy: It's not a park, so you can't have a picnic and play games here, or, no, you can't eat or drink inside the temple.

After Taos Pueblo, we wanted some lunch, so we went over to the Mainstream Bakery behind Taos Plaza. I have to say that I was decidedly not impressed with this place. Hopefully, through the magic of Google searches, someone will read this warning and stay away from the place. Maybe the flies buzzing around the uncovered pastry should have warned me away, but the menu looked decent so I ordered a "chef's chop salad" which promised turkey, ham, cheeses, tomato, cucumber and hard boiled egg. (It turned out to be some romaine lettuce with about a quarter cup of turkey on it, two slices of tomato, four or five paper thin slices of cucumber, and three-quarters of a hard boiled egg. Yes, three-quarters of a green-yolked hard-boiled egg. The server dropped it off and ran away really quickly, probably wanting to avoid having to answer my question about what happened to the ham, cheese, vegetables--you know, the salad.) Initially Kaori asked for a toasted bagel, having read it on a hand lettered sign on the counter. She was told that, sorry, they weren't serving breakfast anymore. I was, like, what, you can't toast a bagel because it's 11:45 and not 11:30? I wanted to get all Five Easy Pieces on her and order a chicken salad sandwich on a toasted bagel so that I could tell the woman behind the counter that she could hold the chicken salad between her knees. But Kaori, embarrassed, quickly chose a raspberry scone from the display. It turned out to be stale, of course. We ordered coffees and had to serve ourselves--the stack of cups were mostly splattered with some coffee someone had spilled. While we were waiting, another table (who had been waiting even longer than us) were told that, they were sorry, but the bakery was out of the ingredients for their sandwiches. (I wish I had been similarly warned.) Seriously, Mainstream Bakery in Taos: Stay away.

Our afternoon plan was simple: Kaori had to buy omiyage, gifts, of candy and so on for her friends and co-workers. The original plan was to go to Mal-Wart, but when it came time to actually go, I chickened out. I suggested to Kaori that, if we stopped at Smith's, we could kill two birds with one stone and buy candy as well as something for dinner. Kaori agreed, and though I was envisioning a quick trip to the supermarket, I was forgetting how overwhelming and/or fascinating a large, foreign grocery store can be to the uninitiated. Kaori spent nearly an hour looking at candy, first examining the giant candy bars, then looking at all the bags of assorted chocolates, then looking at the cookies, then going back to the assorted bags of chocolates. After that, I made the mistake of showing her the aisle of seasonal candy, the rows of Christmas-themed chocolates. That was another twenty-minutes. Then we had to look at cookies again. Then we had to look at salsas. I don't know if you've had a look at salsas recently, but, um, there are almost as many kinds of salsa as there are kinds of candy. I showed her the four brands made in New Mexico, and she chose one of those.

Kaori wanted some small containers of milk and ice cream and I showed her the smallest in the store: A quart of milk and pint of ice cream and was, like, I don't think we're in Tokyo anymore, Toto. In Tokyo, at any grocery or convenience store, you can get a pint or so of milk and a single, half-cup size of any ice cream. In fact, pints of ice cream are really rare and exorbitantly expensive---about 700 or 800 yen per pint. Kaori was amazed at some of the containers of ice cream that went up to the one and two gallon sizes. We opted to get a kid-size container of milk at the Allsup's near Taos Pueblo and a couple of scoops of Taos Cow ice cream from the cafe in Arroyo Seco that the woman kindly packed up in a pint-sized to-go container. (From the Too Much Information file: Kaori told me later that she drinks about six liters of milk a week. I said that the calcium (which the traditional Japanese diet is often deficient in) must be good for her bones and told her about the hunched old women I could see in Higashi-Mukojima. Turns out that she's not trying to stave off osteoporosis, but is actually drinking all this milk in an effort to increase her breast size. I pointed out that actually, breasts are made from fat so that maybe as long as she weighs, oh, thirty-two kilos, her breasts are going to remain miniscule. (Okay, I didn't say it that way; my English was much simplified.) She said that she wanted to be skinny with large breasts and that, furthermore, she could see skinny women with large breasts all the time. I asked, "In Tokyo?" and she said, "In Tokyo, mmmm, [meaning: "No."] but on TV." And I thought, how can anyone over the age of fifteen not know that almost every beanpole chick with giant boobs that you see on TV is some wet-dream made real through the magic of silicon and surgery? But the myth of the naturally skinny big-boobed beauty persists. Want huge boobs? Drink your milk, ladies. But I'll warn you, it hasn't worked for Kaori.)

On the drive back to the Ski Valley, we looked in a couple of shops in Arroyo Seco, then headed back to the apartment, where I am now. My evening is going to consist of dinner, a bath, and packing. We're off to Santa Fe in the morning!

Later: Though X thinks that I'd make a great tour guide for Japanese tourists in Japan, I have to say that I'm worn nearly transparent by this last visit. I don't care so much that Kaori's English is very basic (I mean, I grew up in a family in which some of my grandparents spoke only very basic English, so I don't care about that), but she is probably the least Westernized of my friends from Tokyo. (And, yes, I'm only writing this because there is zero chance that she will ever read it as none of my Tokyo friends know about this blog--except Kazu, who doesn't read it.) Kaori's lack of Westernized habits didn't bother me in Tokyo, because quite frankly, I didn't spend a lot of time with her outside of the time before and after classes at The Kaisha. The women I did spend time with were Westernized Japanese women, very front-and-center kind of women to the extent that they were able to deconstruct and examine their own excoriating experiences within a culture as blatantly misogynistic as Japan's. The women I spent time with didn't do things like nod and say, "mmmmmm," when they didn't understand something or giggle some little trilled note as they hid behind their hands. That type of little girl behavior drives me insane when little girls do it. When grown women do it? I long for a plucky tour guide and a six-hundred foot cliff. But really, I shouldn't be so hard of Kaori. This is her third trip to the US, and her first time out outside of New York City, where she spent a week on each visit doing the tourist things that any Japanese can read about in a tour guide. New Mexico is a different kettle of fish than New York. No guide book in the world explains the differences (and I know I can't either). And, too, this is Kaori's first trip anywhere on her own. I mean, the woman has never traveled alone, not at any time, not for any reason. She has, for the last eight years, traveled with her husband, but before that, she traveled with friends. (My friends--even the most Westernized of them--were often suprised or shocked or amazed that I would even think of traveling alone, even to some nearby city in Japan. It simply isn't done that a woman hops a train and goes alone to Kyoto or Hiroshima. "You are meeting some friend there?" they'd ask. And it seemed that they never knew what to do with my negative answer.) So, yes, Kaori is being very brave speaking English for seven days straight and traveling alone to visit me; I think I can afford to be a little considerate. And I am. But her visit is close on the heels of Naomi and Katsu's visit and I'm tired and I miss my home and my friends and my cat and my life.