Meiji Shrine

The Meiji Shrine was built in 1920 and was dedicated to the spirits of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shōken. This was my favorite place that I visited in Tokyo. The park was beautiful and the shrine was so peaceful! If you're going to visit (which I strongly encourage!) I recommend reading up on the proper etiquette for the shrine before you go so you can be respectful of the space. It made the visit more meaningful for me too!

You wash your hands and mouth before entering.

Perfect Polo

I've really liked Fred Perry polos ever since I first saw them in "This Is Britain." Many fine looking men were wearing them in Tokyo. Besides the unattractive price tag, what's not to love? I want one in black please!

Leeum

Leeum or the Samsung Museum of Art was the best museum I visited this year. Its collection is varied and dynamic and the space is beautiful. If you are ever in Seoul, you must pay a visit to Leeum.

Hi Seoul!

Long ice cream, I love you! Pictured are the masterminds of long ice cream.

This is one tall cone of frozen yogurt for approximately $1.25. Take that $5 Pinkberry and $3.75 Yogurtland!

Lee Jeong Lok

I saw Lee Jeong Lok's series "private sacred place" in the gallery of the 63 Building, which is the second tallest skyscraper in Seoul. The gallery occupies the building's top floors and is surrounded by windows, so it feels like an exhibition space in the sky.

Lee Jeong Lok, private sacred place #1-3, 2008

Pretty pretty. I think I will make a miniature for my room with a branch and LED lights.

National Museum of Contemporary Art

Noryangjin Fish Market

Noryangjin fish market is the best place to find fresh seafood in Seoul. I couldn't recognize half of the creatures they had over there. Every morning at 5 a.m. there is a live auction where the best catch is sold to restaurants etc., but that was far too early. I love my sleep! I went at 10:30 a.m., which is probably the least busy time of day. I didn't want to be jostled right into a pile of raw fish!

Oh, how to choose?

"Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers." - Hoover

Palling around.

Sashimi! It was amazing to see the fishmongers clean, debone, filet, cut, etc. the fish. They've some mad skills.

The sharkmonger.

The fishwife. She sold us abalone, shrimp, octopi and a red sea cucumber. I really wanted to buy some red snapper, but to do that I would have had to purchase the whole live fish.

Sorting!

Aerial view. The market is vast!

After you select your seafood, you take it up to the restaurants on the second level of the warehouse where they clean and prepare it for you...

Then you eat! I loved abalone, which I don't think I've tried before. I also liked the shrimp, which they grilled and seasoned with sesame oil and rock salt. I also tried... live octopus! Well, it wasn't actually alive, but the octopus's tentacles were still wriggling around after they cleaned and cut it up. It was creepy to see them all squirming around the plate. The restaurants used to serve the little octopi whole, but then some people nearly choked to death so they stopped. I was pretty scared to eat the wiggling piece of octopus, but I was told that if you chew really fast you can't tell it's moving. I don't think I've ever chewed faster.

Arrival

I arrived in Seoul and where did I go straight from the airport? Can you guess?

I went to a bakery. What is wrong with me?! In my defense, my mom wanted to go there "to get some bread for breakfast," so I was very much a victim of her gustatory schemes. I've been paranoid about my bread addiction for the past week as I visited my neighborhood boulangerie so many times that on the fifth day my favorite bakery man looked up, saw me and stated, "It's nice to be seeing so much of you lately."

Great, just great. This is coupled with the fact that I tried a bunch of pastries like pain au chocolat aux amandes and caramel éclair because I was leaving Paris for spring break and couldn't bear to deviate from my pâtisserie exploration schedule.


We visited Kim Young Mo bakery and of course the store was packed with samples of everything. Crazed by jet-lag (not really), I darted around packing my cheeks full like a giant squirrel. I loved this doughnut, which was covered in sugar and filled with a cherry-blossom infused red bean paste. It smelled just like the blossoms and tasted great too!

http://www.k-breadshop.com/home_index.php

Oh the Crime

"Crime et Chatîment" is up at the Musée d'Orsay right now and it is amazing! A description from the Musée d'Orsay's website:

"The exhibition Crime and Punishment looks at a period of some two hundred years: from 1791, when Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau called for the abolition of the death penalty, to 30 September 1981, the date the bill was passed to abolish it in France. Throughout these years, literature created many criminal characters. The title of the exhibition is itself taken from a work by Dostoyevsky. In the press, particularly the illustrated daily newspapers, the powerful fantasy of violent crime was greatly increased through novels.

At the same time, the criminal theme came into the visual arts. In the work of the greatest painters, Goya, Géricault, Picasso and Magritte, images of crime or capital punishment resulted in the most striking works. The cinema too was not slow to assimilate the equivocal charms of extreme violence, transformed by its representation into something pleasurable, perhaps even into sensual pleasure.

It was at the end of the 19th century that a new theory appeared purporting to establish a scientific approach to the criminal mind. This tried to demonstrate that the character traits claimed to be found in all criminals, could also be found in their physiological features. Theories like these had a great influence on painting, sculpture and photography. Finally, the violence of the crime was answered by the violence of the punishment: how can we forget the ever-present themes of the gibbet, the garrotte, the guillotine and the electric chair?"

Sigh, I love theme-based shows. Curated by Jean Clair, the exhibition established an interesting and useful chronology that began with the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, moved to the French revolution, and roughly terminated in the late 18th century with an examination of Bentham's Panopticon and the visual aspects of criminological studies. The images were arresting, powerful and really scary. Beware!

Jean-Joseph Weerts, Assassination of Marat, 1886

Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon, 1787

René Magritte, Wanted: $2,000 Reward, 1923

Edgar Degas, Interior or Le Viol, 1868-69

Rouen

I went to Rouen last Friday and I had a great time! Rouen was the home of Flaubert, boasts the Cathédral Notre-Dame de Rouen, and was the site of Joan of Arc's imprisonment and death. I really enjoyed the colorful geometric patterning that decorated the majority of buildings in Rouen and the amazing tart I ate at lunch, which was filled with the cheese and apples that Normandy is known for.

Tower where Joan of Arc was imprisoned.

The patterned buildings of Rouen.

Big church. I couldn't take a picture of the cathedral Monet painted because my camera ran out of battery. Bummer!

Skull engravings.

Bagels, I Love Them

I ate my first bagel in three months at Breakfast in America, which is surprisingly popular among French and Americans alike. I liked the bagel experience at BIA because I got to toast my own bagel using the toaster that was stationed at the table. Pretty pretty useful!