Tokyo Blond Is Not Porn

Tokyo Blond is not a porn blog, about hair or even, as one pithy friend remarked, a micro beer or late 1980s glam metal band ("Dude, I just saw Skid Row and Tokyo Blond opened and played a killer set").


The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my experiences in Tokyo - poignantly, visually, irreverently - for fun.


Anybody can tag along...that is if I like you. This blog will endeavor to be entertaining and honest and frequent enough to keep those following interested including me.


Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Made In China

It's official.  Starbucks is poisoning me.  I've been here for two weeks now and every afternoon I'm bent over in pain from the crunchy curlies.  You know, abdominal pain that makes you start praying.

At first I thought maybe it was the food.  But I realized that can't be because I cooked it.  And more importantly I bought the ingredients from the expat market.  Yeah, originally I thought I could shop at the locals market, like I did in Tokyo.  But one trip to the local market and I realized that was not just a very bad idea but potentially life threatening.  The thing is - it was actually a wet market.

Have you ever been to a wet market?  I hadn't either, until now.  It started out promising enough: aisles of rice, noodles and canned goods, all in writing I can't understand.  But I could recognize the pictures - kind of.

When I got to the produce section I started to get a little wary.  There were a lot of things I had never seen before.  Usually this would excite me, inspire me to try something new.  But something didn't seem right.  Perhaps it was the temperature.  It was unusually warm in there.  There were no plastic bags or scales or sprays to temper the fruit and vegetable, just bins of tepid, droopy, foreign vegetables.

And then there was the meat department. Although "department" was clearly not the right word for it.  Slaughter house would be the appropriate term here I believe.  I have abstained from showing any pictures because a) they wouldn't let me take pictures (I can understand why) and b) they would make you sick.

In America we don't ever want to know our food was actually alive and breathing.  We don't call it cow or pig.  We have different names for the byproduct of quaint farm animals like beef and pork, or bacon.  We just don't discuss it. Everything is cleaned up (no blood or veins) and packaged into nifty little unrecognizable pieces that pretty much looks like it was made in a factory.  We don't leave the hoofs on, or the heads.  Not so in China.

The first thing I noticed was the redolence of fresh blood, that thick, heady, unmistakable fetor.  My stomach rolled.  Then I saw the butcher block, in the middle of the room,  still bloody.  In fact, a red runny matter was dripping onto the floor, like heavy syrup down the side of a pancake.  Except this was a bloody pancake.  I took a double take.  That's not, no, it can't be. Is it?  It is.  My stomach lurched.

Then there were what I like to call the "bloody bins."  Yes, bloody bins.  There were no signs on the bins, not even in Chinese.  I guess you don't need a sign to tell you this bin contains dead baby ducklings.  Yes, dead baby ducklings.   Not only that, but you had your choice of flesh colored or black.  Black?!  What the?!!!

The ducklings were just one of the atrocities I discovered in the bloody bins.  The other bins were filled with many heinous acts of barbarity: chickens (again black or flesh tones), head still on, or bins filled with just the clawed chicken feet.  There were bins of pig feet and various mystery meats I didn't dare guess at.

Oh my God.  It was like a Wes Craven film. I half-expected Freddy Krueger to jump out from behind the dirty plastic curtains with a hack saw.  My exodus was fast and efficient.

You know I'd heard of wet markets.  But in my mind they played differently.  The markets in my head were filled with bags of spices, colorful tents filled with baskets of alluring strange fruit.  The vendors grinned happy toothless smiles and handed out samples.   Sure there were live chickens and ducklings.  But I could still convince myself these would soon be pets, not dripping off a butcher block.  Ugh.

So yeah no local market shopping for me.  I found April Gourmet where the meat is actually pre-cleaned, under glass, and refridgerated, with signs that not only tell you what it is but where it came from.  And I don't mind paying five to ten times more than the local market.  I want to live. Sigh of relief.

This is why I knew the stomach aches were not coming from the food.  I realized they were coming from my local Starbucks when I stopped drinking coffee for a few days and the mysterious illness went away.  When I started drinking it again, the illness came back, just like pigeons when you throw them bread crumbs.

Yeah well, I followed the bread crumbs and they lead me to the horrible realization that my local Starbucks, the one I depended upon every morning, was in fact, counterfeit.  I'm not kidding.  I had read that most of the Starbucks in China were counterfeit.  Of course I didn't believe them.  Until now.  The realization made me pale.

And not only this, other things started to make themselves known.  The lobby of my apartment building, the one I so charmingly compared to a W hotel.  Well the other day I was walking through it on my way out and I noticed an alarmingly large piece of  marble on the floor.  Apparently it had fallen off the wall of the elevator bank.  Nobody had seemed to notice it.  Nobody noticed it for several days.

Then a couple days later, buckets appeared in the lobby to catch the dribble of a mysterious fluid dripping from the ceiling three stories up.  A couple of days later, after I repeatedly asked when the leak was going to be fixed, a giant hole appeared where the leak was, or rather, still is, and more buckets have appeared to catch the offensive liquid.

Then I discovered that most of those beautiful buildings erected for the Beijing Olympics, were falling apart.  Falling apart even though they had been built less than ten years ago.  It seems the Chinese build beautiful structures that don't last.  At least the new structures that is.  I mean the Forbidden City is still standing.

Suddenly "Made In China" has a brand new meaning for me.

But more importantly, what am I going to do about my coffee?