Lil treats in uncertain times

Hello! It's been a while. I'm going start posting things here again (I hope more than once). I intend to use some of this weird time to organize my thoughts about some of my experiences and memories. Most of my photos these days are screenshots of videochats, so I'm looking forward to having an excuse to go through my (slightly more exciting) archives.

I want to start off with something very easily digestible: a series of comforting foods from my trip to Japan in 2018. These were photos that I took sneakily/while feeling embarrassed, so they're not great (or even good). But it still gives me joy to reflect on some of the things I ate/drank there. Drawing food, thinking about food, making food, has been my go-to form of meditation in the last few weeks, so this feels appropriate.



The tiniest beer I've ever seen.



Daily breakfast in Yokohama. This is genuinely a meal I think about several times a month. The most comforting ever.



A very small and perfect eggs benedict.



mr.donut donut.



A little snack at a brewery.



Breakfast in Kyoto. Breakfast ("out") is not really a thing in Japan, but I found a sweet bakery to get some stuff from.



Kakigori (shaved ice) on an unbelievably hot day.



Tofu skin (yuba) soup.




Train snacks on the way from Kyoto back to Tokyo. Pictured is a beer that I spilled everywhere (I felt deep shame).



The most simple ramen that I ate while watching a sumo match with the owner of the shop.



A square watermelon. End.

Around this time last year

I was roaming around in Berlin before catching my flight back to Toronto. I spent my last day there walking around my weird French neighbourhood, and decided to go see Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation, which was a few S-bahn stations away from my pension hotel.





Behold (my photos couldn't do it justice).





I got a quick snap of the beautiful building directory (each of those wooden blocks has the residents' names on it, so I didn't get too close/creepy).



Flyers are a thing, even in Le Corbusier's building.



Back to the S-Bahn.



--
Edit:

I just came across this picture from 5 years earlier, on my first trip to Berlin in 2012. I forgot that I'd been introduced to this building at the Berlinische Galerie :--)

Analog Toronto pt. I

I've been thinking about whether/how I want to incorporate analog stuff on this blog. Here's a test using a selection of photos I had layin' around in my scanner folder. Most are from last winter, I think.

Tokyo flea market

One of my favourite activities while traveling/in life is going to flea markets, so it's maybe not a surprise that I made sure to go to at least one while I was in Tokyo. This will probably be the first of many flea market posts on this blog.

Early(ish) on a Saturday morning, I set out to catch a train from Komagome.



Saw a couple of cuties about to start their day.



I took the JR loop to the Tokyo Monorail line, and got off at Oikeibajo Mae. There was a lot of interesting stuff going on here: a mix of high rises, canals, wide open water, and horse stables.







As I left the station, this sign assured me I was heading in the right direction.



After a quick once-over, I located some yakitori and takoyaki, which I ate on a curb.





I wish I'd had the nerve to take some better pictures from the less sparse areas of the flea market, but this was the general setup.



Life imitates art.
   

I bought a really beautiful speckled bowl from this man reading a newspaper.



All in all, this was one of the best mornings I had in Japan. I found a lot of cool things (mostly breakables) that I carried around for the rest of my trip. I also found it weirdly easy to bargain with the vendors, despite that not really being a thing in Japan, and despite my extremely limited Japanese.

Montréal pt. I

Last September, after an intense month of work, Murk and I booked a weekend trip to Montréal, 6 years after we went on a trip there in the early days of our friendship.

This trip was much-needed. I was about to leave for Dresden for three months, and Murk had just finished her thesis. It marked the end of an era (~1 year) during which we worked in the same building (on the same floor), met outside for coffee breaks, and shared french presses of tea and comfort.

After a typically haggard Megabus journey, this was the first bud we met in the neighbourhood.





Obviously we stopped by St. Viateur and Café Myriade on our first morning.





Followed by a nice stop at Jean Talon.





We peeped a couple of fashionistas on the street.









The next morning we went to a place called Larry's, which had amazing tapas-style breakfast.





That afternoon, we hung around Café Bloom and surrounds before making our way back to Mile End.

Leipzig/hypezig pt.I

One Saturday morning last fall, my Dresden companions and I made a little trip to Leipzig for the day. I'd been once before (for an unforgettable night/morning at IfZ... more on that in a different blog post, maybe), but I needed to go back. I didn't really have a functioning camera the first time I went, and I could only see so much of the city on 0 hours of sleep.

My goal that day was to wander around and see as much art as I could. Leipzig is a really beautiful, sparse, and spread-out city -- a place I feel I could go back to a lot. We started the day walking from the train station in the general direction of Plagwitz, a historically industrial neighbourhood where a bunch of art stuff is concentrated.

These buddies were slipping around on the ice in Clara-Zetkin park. We probably spent a good 20 minutes watching them along with a 5-year-old kid and his mom.



One of many cool elderly Leipzigers exercising early in the morn.



We finally got out of the park and made our way westward through the canals.







After a cake break, we stumbled across a lil' holiday market.





Eventually we made it to the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, a massive "reclaimed" cotton factory complex.













We spent the evening at a bar called Kune on Eisenbahnstraße (about which countless articles have been written), on the other side of town. Few bars have made me feel so comfy, for real. I had a delicious beer called Bubi Helles, and we called it a night.