Cooling my heels on a green park chair, basking in what I thought would be my last days in Paris (I was mistaken, happily), with the Louvre to my right and the carousel from the carnival ahead and the goats munching away.

Just a shallow gulley separated the would-be lawn mowers from the rest of us; with red nylon cords, their unseen keeper tethered the goats. I spotted a few kids and some adults with more bravura, husbandry knowledge or gumption than me attempting to pet the billys at work.

Apparently the trend is catching on. The higher ups at L’Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) have installed four little black sheep on a bit of grass adjacent to the City Archives.

Would Andre Le Nôtre, famed landscape architect and gardener to Sun King Louis XIV, approve? I don’t know. But, the more important question, I think, in the memory of the recent Pastoral Artisan Producer Festival at the Chicago French Market (nestled inside the Ogilvie Metra Station), I’m wondering if the milk from these sheep will also be put to its best use in the form of cheese. If it hasn’t been, it should be; I’M PRETTY SURE THIS IS SOMETHING FRANCE CAN HANDLE.

Sidenote: If it’s too hot or cold outside while enjoying the Jardin des Tuileries, Musée de L’Orangerie can provide a very nice respite. The tiny museum houses some giant tableaus of the Impressionist painter Claude Monet. It’s a small and quiet place where the waterlilies can be enjoyed, if you don’t have time this trip to head to his home, garden and studio in Giverny (which can easily be achieved in a day) or the Musée d’Orsay just across the Seine.

Related Reads:

• Visit Claude Monet’s home and garden in Giverny, France. I visited here ages ago on a guided day trip and it was spectacular.
• Recently, goats have also been installed as the new landscape management system at Chicago’s O’hare Airport. Will some enterprising Midwestern folk make some cheese? If this were the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, perhaps some kaldereta or kilawen or pinapaitan would be in order? But I guess you wouldn’t want to eat your lawnmower, would you?

The first iteration was a staple-bound, craft paper, unlined beaut’. I picked it up at a street festival in Chicago, the Renegade Craft Fair, where, with two of my girlfriends, we traipsed up and down Division Street that summer weekend. In the notebook, I listed out the business of moving one’s life, chronicling, to use a favorite idiom, where all the bodies are buried. It was a pleasant reminder of home, all that I’d done to get on the road, and it fit right into my vintage leather purse from Detroit.

Alas, Notebook #1 didn’t hold up well, and sometime before I could finish writing in its pages, the cover had worn off through its stapled binding, and I jury-rigged it back on with an elastic hair tie stretched over the spine. It lasted from Chicago through sometime in Paris. Soon enough, I had to hunt for its replacement, retiring Notebook #1 to the zipped lining of my luggage. Though I was secretly happy about the damage since I love stationery and never has it been a chore to look for new paper.

Notebook #2 needed to be tougher and yet small like its predecessor. And then in a little stationery-slash-knickknack store near the L’Institut du Monde Arabe, there it was: a little bigger than my hand, graph-paper lined notebook with a plastic ziplock see-through cover. In this magical cover could go my phone, spare change, my business cards (which do double-duty as my travel photographs), receipts, ticket stubs and the general flotsam that clogs up a woman’s purse.

I’m on the last pages of Notebook #2 now. It lasted me through Amsterdam (both times), the rehashing of Paris, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Beijing, and back to Chicago.

You can always find a good notebook, that’s true enough… but are you brave enough to actually write in it? It’s true that I never travel without a pen and paper, but I was not always good enough to use them.

Recently, a friend and fellow traveler asked me, “Did you write all these posts while you were traveling, or did you write them after you came home?”

Like many traveling writers, she confessed that she’s usually exhausted after a long day of jaunting around a new city or country and lacks the energy to write. Later, when she returns home, something called regular life keeps her from putting pen to paper, or fingertips to keyboard, as it were.

For my part, I wrote what I could when I could. I was too overwhelmed in many ways being far from home for so long than to have much energy to digest it while there. I wanted to be there and just be there, let it all wash over me and through me. I asked a lot of questions, and up to now, many of them have no answers.

And now, now that I’m back on home soil, I’m thinking that that line of thought was just bullshit. Now I realize that I didn’t challenge myself. I lacked the discipline and the fortitude to self-impose deadlines. To be a writer, one must write. To be a good writer, one must write like crap at first, and then start again, and write something better. You can’t skip the first step. The first step is, in many ways, the only one that counts.

Perhaps, that’s why, in Paris, I had seen so many reminders of World War II. They seemed to be everywhere like scars: memorial plaques of clandestine meetings, arches to victory or to the fallen, bouquets of flowers. The past felt not so far away.

I take it as a given that every kid everywhere reads Anne Frank’s diary in school. But that is not the case. I met other visitors in Amsterdam who hadn’t studied Anne’s diary, and others who knew the story too well with the histories of their own families. Underlining this disparity in knowledge about the Holocaust recently is the scores of Beliebers – or, fans of pop star Justin Bieber – tweeting over the “mysterious” Anne Frank. Today, April 30, is the day in 1952 when Anne’s diary was first printed in English.

Anne was thirteen years old when she started her now-famous diary.

The secret annex where Anne, her family, the van Pels family and dentist Fritz Pfeffer hid and lived for two years is above the office and warehouse where Otto Frank ran his business in Amsterdam. It’s now known as the Anne Frank House.

The Anne Frank House is located on the Prinsengracht canal, a few short meters from the Westerkerk, or West Church. The peals of church bells sound throughout present-day Amsterdam. Anne wrote about how hearing the bells were a comfort to her, marking the regular passage of time in an otherwise monotonous confinement. The day the Nazi Germans stopped the Westerkerk bells must have been sad for Anne. Reportedly the Nazi melted down the bells and used them for munitions.

The Anne Frank house, where she and her family hid in a secret attic, is in the center with the tree, Prinsengracht 263.

At the beginning of the museum, in what used to be Otto Frank’s offices and warehouse, visitors learn through short films, photographs and small exhibits how World War II began, the rise of Hitler and Nazism and the history of the Frank family. In the bookkeeping room, a false bookshelf hides a small stairwell, the entrance to the Secret annex.

No photography is allowed inside. Once the house was to be turned into a museum, Anne’s father, Otto, requested that the premises remain empty. When the Germans had discovered them, they took away the occupants of the secret attic to concentration camps and confiscated everything they owned. What visitors then feel when they enter the Secret Annex rooms is the void, the emptiness not just of material things but of souls. How dark it is inside from the blacked-out window coverings. Anne’s words throughout the museum illuminate the lives of the eight people hiding there but especially share the psychological toll it must have taken on everyone in the Secret Annex to be always in the dark, to have to keep quiet, to be alive, but yet at the same time, not free and truly living.

Anne wrote volumes. Her many diaries and other writings are all on display. An inspiring sight for a new writer like myself.

The museum brings the lessons of tolerance, free speech and religious freedom to bear on the present day. The final feature of the museum showcases five to seven short vignettes that build to yes/no ethical questions, all inspired, it appears, by actual events. For example, should neo-Nazis be allowed to form political parties, hold parades and public rallies? Should prayer be allowed in public schools? Scattered throughout the room are voting machines, where viewers can vote for 30 seconds after each short story. The exhibit displays the percentage of how people in the room voted, and as the questions were quite complex, the votes were fairly split. As a final note, it’s a great notion to keep these conversations about human rights going beyond the walls of the museum and into the civil and robust discussions of the public sphere, as my friends and I did that day we visited the Anne Frank House.

“We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.” – Anne Frank

Related links: 

• German redditors: How is the Holocaust taught in schools? (Reddit.com)
• Holocaust Education in Germany: An Interview (PBS.org, Frontline)

I caught a glimmer of summer on a preview of Anthony Bourdain’s second episode of Parts Unknown on CNN (Sundays at 9 PM EST). In a well-cut teaser of Tony’s LA Koreatown episode showing tonight, what flashed before my eyes was a glistening plastic Jollibee cup of HALO-HALO…. and it looked a little like this (‘cept this one’s from Chow King):

First, an introduction to halo-halo. Its name literally translates in English to “mix mix,” which is the way one’s supposed to eat the icy and sweet layered treat: with a spoon or straw, mix the shaved ice, tapioca, slices of leche flan, pounded toasted rice for a good crunch (pinipig), jello cubes, ice cream like ube (purple yam), evaporated milk, beans, sliced fruits like banana, jackfruit, young coconut meat in strips. It’s damn near the kitchen sink of delicious things you can find in the PI.

This is the stuff I grew up with. I remember visiting my godmother’s condo with my mom circa early 1990s. Summer would bring out the beloved plastic shave ice appliance. Its base was a C-shape that would fit around any medium size bowl. A small ice compartment above the bowl held six to eight ice cubes. The ice cubes funneled down to a shaver, which I powered by turning the knob clockwise. I loved that scraping noise the blade against the ice made and the slight resistance as I grated the ice into snow… Chhh, chhh, chhh! If the shave ice machine was sitting on my godmother’s kitchen counter when we arrived, I got giddy knowing she’d gone out and bought all the fixins at the Asian grocery store and soon we’d have halo-halo.

In recent years, I’ve learned about iced desserts from other Asian countries: Taiwan, China, Japan and Indonesia, to name a few. This last-mentioned version I tried recently at the University of Chicago Indonesian students’ food fair. It’s called Es Cendol, an iced drink (sometimes it’s shaved ice, I understand) with a coconut milk base, brown sugar syrup and rice jelly formed in bean or squiggly shapes flavored with pandan, a leaf used to flavor many kinds of Indonesian desserts and its pastel green hue akin to pistachio. Historians disagree on the genesis of the various Asian iced desserts in this 2005 New York Times piece. Back to halo halo.

Here’s my favorite halo halo, wonderful in its simplicity from Razon’s, a Pampangan restaurant chain. Their version very finely shaves the ice to order, keeping it soft like snow so the ice doesn’t resolidify to an ice ball that you have to fish out of your cup halfway through the dessert course. It makes all the difference to me. Other ingredients: leche flan, condensed milk, brown sugar syrup, banana. That’s it.

Sidenote: I cannot believe this film will be 20 years old next year.

Here’s a little difference I spotted when I was in Tokyo.

Men returning home, all clad in the workaday uniform of dark slacks and tucked-in, light-colored, button-down dress shirts, waiting in lines for the train.

One morning in Roppongi Hills, I saw the workers march off the trains, into the stations, and sometimes, straight into their office complexes – fed up into the corporate glass-and-steel beast via crisscrossed escalators. The workers formed single-file lines that snaked the entire distance, train to office.

With the only exception of London, in most other places I’ve visited – Manila, Chicago, New York, Shanghai, Beijing, Paris – mass transit equals masses. While waiting, individuals spread out safe distances from each other if there’s room, and then once the train or bus arrives, everyone crowds around to board with little regard for who arrived first, a sense of order nor courtesy, unless one is a nonagenarian, wheelchair-bound or very heavy with child.

An interesting question to ask is Why?

Perhaps here is an answer in the coverage from ABC News of Japan’s recovery from the 2011′s 9.0 Richter scale magnitude earthquake and tsunami. In Sendai, ABC reported, some residents waited twelve hours in line at the few stores open to buy food and other supplies.

Overnight and into the grey, chilly morning, long lines formed outside small convenience stores and supermarkets throughout the tsunami-ravaged city of Sendai.

At one, Daiei, the orderly lines had begun 12 hours before the shop opened and stretched for blocks.

“I came to get baby food for my 2-week-old nephew,” said Maki Habachi, 23, who had been patiently standing for four hours and still had an eight-hour wait to go. “My sister only has one day’s food left.”

Without fuel for her car, she had ridden for two days by bike just to find food. Even bottled drinks in the ubiquitous corner vending machines were sold out.

Despite the line’s length everyone remained calm and polite.

As Japanese survivors cope with food and gasoline shortages amidst the aftershocks and rising body count, they draw on a sense of social order. Unlike scenes in natural disasters in Haiti and New Orleans, there is little anger, no looting.

Waiting in line – whether for the train on the commute to work or for water and supplies after a tragic natural disaster – are both part of the social order that’s practiced every day.

In the same article, Carol Gluck, a professor of modern Japanese history at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute said, “It’s not cultural or religious — it is a historically created social morality based on a response to the community and social order… It’s not that the Japanese are naturally passive and obedient…There is a historically created social value to it. People uphold it. It works. Someone leaves something in the subway and they get it back. When you find something you give it to the lost and found.”

Maybe queuing up for the train isn’t such a little difference after all.

Related reads:

• Seven Things that Make You Look Dumb on a Shinsaken (japan-talk.com). Notice the #1 thing that makes someone look dumb: Skipping the line. Also close to my heart is #3: Talking loudly on your cellphone. Shinsaken, FYI, are bullet trains. In fact, Tokyo has several different train lines run by different companies, and several lines may run out of the same train stop, so it’s very easy to get on the wrong train. Especially if you don’t know Japanese. Make sure you’re on the right platform.
• If you’re doing some advance Tokyo travel planning, I’d recommend checking out the Sumo tournament in September. Another sumo-related piece of interest I caught recently was in Freakonomics: The Movie (2010). This collection of mini-documentaries takes a look at different human phenomena and explains them through the lens of economic theory and principles. They did a wonderful feature on cheating in sumo…

• One of my favorite documentaries is Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) about Jiro Ono, an 85-year old sushi chef and proprietor of what some say (the Michelin Guide) is the greatest sushi restaurant in the world, a twelve-seat establishment tucked away in a corner of the Tokyo subway. More than a story about food – though there’s plenty of food porn – I find it to be more about passion and lifelong dedication to one’s craft, chefs and purveyors, and family. Watch on Netflix immediately.

“People give flowers as a present because flowers contain true meaning of love. Anyone who tries to posses a flower will have to watch its beauty fading. But if you simply look at a flower in the field, you’ll keep it forever. That is what the forest taught me. That you will never be mine, and that is why I will never lose you.”

- Paulo Coehlo’s Brida

I said that mid-March to early April was the best time to see the famed cherry blossoms in our nation’s capitol, Washington DC. Perhaps that would be for a typical spring.

Yet this sequestered spring’s unusually cold temperatures held an unforgiving grip into April, until a few days ago.

Here’s a few photos (click each thumbnail above for a full page slideshow view) from a few years ago on the Potomac River Tidal Basin.

Related links:

• Cherry Blossom Cam, a live web camera.
• As the cherry blossom trees live on a National Park – the National Mall and Memorial Parks – The National Parks Service’s website has plenty of resources for visitors, including maps and a super cool mobile apps page that includes tours. It’s all free, that’s your taxpayer dollars at work! Meanwhile, don’t forget to file income tax with the Internal Revenue Service by April 15.
• A PBS feature on the history of and the cultural significance of cherry blossoms in Japanese society, “For Hundreds of Years, Cherry Blossoms Are Matter of Life and Death.”

We met while touring the Opéra and decided to hang out. His name was Joey and I decided he looked trustworthy enough to take my picture with my fancy camera. Because until now all the selfie photos I’d taken were of me in mirrors and I was pretty sure I could catch him in a foot race. He was Canadian, harmless.

We were just passing through Centre Pompidou, on our way to a classical concert. Funny about plans, how quickly they can change.

Centre Pompidou is a cultural center I’ve heard characterized by more than a few guides as a building with its insides turned out, its multicolored exoskeleton that’s hard to resist imagining myself climbing all over like a giant jungle gym. A 2D Salvador Dalí- esque mural peers over his fountain’s lidless eyes, faceless lips and makeshift futbol field. None seem to regard his absurd Shhhhh (or Chuuuuttt en français).

The square was full of people-watchers at cafe tables, South American dancers and drummers busking the crowds of onlookers, other travelers, lay-abouts, someone with an acoustic guitar and loose knowledge of Beatles standards.

Joey and I peered into a gathering crowd of all ages and shades standing around a vinyl mat of sixty-four black and white squares, some giant plastic chess pieces and two players. As we approached, the lady player had just laid to waste an opponent, and his friend was looking to redeem him.

Joey seemed very interested. I confessed that I didn’t know a lick about the game, other than how the pieces moved and their names, and then asked Joey if he wouldn’t mind explaining chess to me while we watched the match. Chess, he said – well, whispered – is all about playing to an end game. One plays aggressively or defensively, and switches as necessary. Successful players see several steps ahead as the many routes of possibility open and close, as the players move pieces and take others away. Sometimes you have to choose if you want to give up one piece for another. Ask yourself if it’s a good trade. For example, is a bishop worth losing to a pawn if, by doing so, my rook can take said pawn and get into better striking position?

As the game went on for about an hour, Joey narrated the play-by-play much like nine innings of baseball. Why a player made a move and what countermove was made. The game started to make sense, actually – when the tense and urgent pauses of five or ten minutes when the crowd and the square surrounding us seemed still, then gave way to flurries of moves by the players, each trading a few pieces quickly, two pugilists sparring in the ring. Player picked up her black piece, and with the base of it, knocked down one of his white ones by its top, pulling the fallen white piece to the side of the board with her left hand and replacing the empty square with her black piece in her right. He quickly follows in a mirrored dance – white piece in hand, knocks black piece down and off to the slurry of already-fallen opponents and then into its new place.

After one of these move-countermove-countercountermove exchanges, one player commented on the other’s strategy. A little friendly banter would ensue, a little teasing, self-aggrandizing fluff, self-deprecating glib, whatever it was, each one trying to get the other to reveal a little something. Find a little tell.

Crossed arms folded, thumbnails were bit, gazes fell down again to the newly changed pattern on the chess grid. The players’ contemplation again began.

More often than not, Joey had a quick answer to my “why’d that happen” or “what happened” or “who’s winning now.” Usually he could predict which move would be played next. Joey from Canada continued: If the players are evenly matched, then, who wins the game becomes a matter of who makes fewer mistakes or who can take advantage of position more quickly or who has more pieces on the board.

In the end, the lady player seemed to resign to her fate before it happened. Not letting it get to the fatal checkmate, she gracefully bowed out and thanked her opponent, who successfully avenged his compatriot. The crowd all clapped to thank the two players before we all dispersed to whatever errand we’d forgot about an hour ago. That classical concert, in a church I can’t now remember the name of, was probably on its final movement. That possibility we let go in favor of another, but now though, other interesting courses of action for the evening took its place: a few bottles of beers by the Seine, jazz trio standards resonating against the cobblestones and the bateaux mouches flying to and fro, a gunmetal Aston Martin to admire on Île Saint-Louis, a few glasses of wine in a library full of old tomes. If chess was all about playing to an end game, this night wasn’t.

Many of my Facebook cohort in past days debated about and questioned the origin of Christian Easter symbols and traditions popular in the United States like eggs, egg hunts, dying Easter eggs in pastel palettes and Easter bunnies. I’d heard long ago – thanks, Catholic school – that the egg symbolizes the tomb of the savior because of its illusion of inanimate that springs to life in a few weeks. (Basically the symbols and traditions of Easter can be traced to pagan rituals of spring, fertility and sex. Links to follow.)

Can I ask some fun-loving Filipino or Filipino American parents, in the spirit of tomorrow’s April Fools’ Day, to please hide a few lavender- or pink-dyed balut in their children’s Easter egg hunts today?

What are balut, you ask?

Balut are boiled duck embryos incubated to a partial maturity of 17 to 22 days, depending on how “done” you like them. They are a Filipino delicacy, sometime rite of passage or aphrodisiac, should claims of the last-mentioned are to ever be believed.

The common way I’ve heard balut placed in the context of cuisine for Westerners goes like this: If we eat eggs – scrambled, over easy, hardboiled… what’s known as “the regular way” – and we also conversely eat mature chickens, let’s imagine a timeline connecting the egg stage and the chicken stage, during which the balut/embryo stage falls. If we eat what’s at the beginning and end of this continuum or timeline of a chicken, why not  eat everything in between, too? That argument may or may not fly for you.

Depending on one’s taste for “doneness,” a consumer chooses a younger or older balut. The older the balut, the more mature the embryo is: firmer formed bones, beak and feathers. From the duck hatchery, street vendors buy batches of embryos and cook them at home. What the vendors boil the balut in – clean water, vinegar, soy sauce, or any flavorings – is what distinguishes one’s product.

Day old chick, deep-fried.

In my research for Street Food Around the World, I had my first balut this summer. It’s incredulous to me that I managed to dodge consuming the most infamous of Filipino food for this long. A few bottles of San Miguel Cerveza Negra and an easy drinking pitcher of a Malibu-infused concoction named Weng Juice at a Pittsburgh Steelers fan bar in Malate, we stumbled out to our local neighborhood balut cart. For my lack of videography skills and in the interest of time, I’ll post the profanity-laden video later, if I can get sign off from the other parties involved and figure out how to delete my expletives. Street traffic goes by, my companions get propositioned by the “ladies of the night,” and you’ll see what a balut face looks like (mine).

“Don’t look at it” was the balut-eating advice echoed by all. I second this, and add “Don’t smell it or smell your hands afterward.”

Balut. Photo credit: Julia Thiel, Chicago Reader.

Now wouldn’t it be simply memorable (read: possibly traumatizing) for your child to find  and open one of these Easter eggs, with our fine feathered friend here, disguised cleverly in Paas, in place of chocolates or Jolly Ranchers? As far as I can tell, balut have nothing to do with the way with Easter is celebrated today in the Philippines.

I’ve heard it said on numerous occasions that the Filipino brand of Catholicism can be unique, and I think that’s because the sacred and profane are mixed. That’s one way to think of it. Another way: pre-Christian, pre-colonial spiritual traditions provide the (strong) undercurrent for the Roman Catholic faith floating on the surface. Much of the Western press covering the Philippines now have published stories and images of the ritual of some Filipino Catholics to crucify themselves, with five-inch nails, in honor of the Easter holiday. This article, published yesterday by the Toronto Sun from Reuters’ Michaela Cabrera, depicts the scene as “carnival-like.” That’s not really saying much, as other Filipino religious holidays are filled with exuberant displays of food, ceremony, pageant and decoration.

Man crucified for 27th time on Good Friday. Photo credit: Romeo Ranoco, Reuters

Related links:

• Heartthrob actor Zac Efron was in Manila during my stay, too, for a promotional tour with local (?) fashion label, Penshoppe. He tried balut, too.
• In Key Ingredient, Balut edition, Chicago Reader’s Julia Thiel talks with chef Kristine Subido of Wave about her use of the iconic ingredient.
• Facebook meme on origins of Easter symbols turns out to be left of accurate, reports Megan McArdle of The Daily Beast.