Coffee - Japanese Pour-over Style

 I have yet to figure out how to describe the Japanese style of packaging and working with goods we would likely encounter in a very different way. Yes, the Japanese are tea drinkers, but they also consume coffee and believe the American version is too weak. There are Starbucks and the cold lattes we had were familiar and suited to the warmer weather.

Anyway, to prepare the version of coffee I consume most regularly, the approach makes use of the pour-over technique. I am a nerd enough to know about the intricacies of the pour-overs when made for a higher price in shops - the initial splash to open the coffee and let it breath, etc. The daily approach is more like the approach when you make pour-over coffee by the campfire with a plastic gadget you position over your cup and a paper filter holding the coffee. Here is the Japanese version. You buy a bag of these individual envelopes that open to reveal a bag of coffee surrounded by a cardboard sleeve that you open to place over your cup. You then pour hot water from your hot water pot over the bag using whatever technique you prefer. 

Tokyo Outer Market

 The Tokyo Outer Market is closer to maybe what we might experience as a farmers’ market although focused on the goods from smaller providers which are more likely to be sea food in this situation. Of course to those from the midwestern state siders, the wares are often weird - items other than the main meat from fish and other unusual animals or vegetables.

It is often not so much the ingredients, but the methods of preparation that are unique. We are visiting Cindy’s Japanese interpreter from her first visit - Myumi. We are staying at her bed and breakfast in Odawara. The large differences between major cities such as Tokyo or Moscow and the smaller outlying cities are probably what you don’t appreciate unless you can spend some time or have a unique connection. She wanted to take us to a local famous restaurant and asked would be rather have sushi or Oden. We confused Oden with Udon and since we had already eaten lots of sushi we thought noodles sounded good. Oden turned out to be a process of boiling things like eggs, and daikon radish cross sections and fish balls in a broth. I can’t say I really liked the preparation because it was such a different experience, but it was interesting. This restaurant was small with a single row of customers sitting in an L shaped configuration around the server. We had conversations with a student from Taiwan who was a language major and spending a year to learn Japanese. Great skills in English and Japanese. Not the stereotypical tech guy I would have expected. We also met a couple from Lahaina in Maui so we talked about disasters and our own experiences in Kauai. The conversations with fellow travelers and local are such an important benefit of the experience. 

Fish Market

 You have to see the fish market, Cindy kept telling me. So, we booked an interpreter and a taxi and headed for the Toyosu Market this morning at 4:30. The market is different from Cindy’s visit some 22 years ago with the tuna and swordfish sold in a new and separate facility and an outer market at which the tuna and other sea food have already passed through a chain of wholesalers, intermediate wholesalers, and possibly several other vendors before it is available to consumers.

I will try to take you through the presale and sale process. All of the frozen tuna are laid out on the floor of this massive facility at 3. The bidders (yellow card in hat) and assistance can then examine the fish for two hours to determine which the will bid on. A section in front of the tail has been cut off and this meat and meat at the base can be examined. The buyers use of a pick like gadget to separate a small piece they roll in their hands and may taste. The second video here shows the approach of one bidder who kept samples of the fish on which he wanted to bid.

The auction process appears chaotic as each individual fish is sold in only a few seconds. The auctioneer announces the fish and appears to announce a basic bid. The bidder use hand signals to respond (fingers to offer amount), the auctioneer makes a quick call, and they move on. As soon as a tag to indicate the buyer is slapped on the fish, helpers begin to drag the fish into collections that will be sent to the buyer.

There were a few sushi restaurant in the central facility so we decided to have sushi for breakfast. The upload and download time for this post are getting long so I will provide some images from the outer market in a future post.

TeamLab Visual Arts Museum

 Tokyo’s TeamLab Visual Arts Museum was a Stan Trollip recommendation. He told us he had wanted to visit when he was here, but all the tickets for the day they had open were taken. Cindy booked early so we could have the experience.

The exhibit is an immersive experience set in a labyrinth of dark rooms and random passageways that have projected visual art constantly morphing on the walls, floor and ceiling. There are mirrors and floors I swear moved. Cindy says the floor tilting was a side effect of the visuals. The video/music was captured perfectly by my phone.

 

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Sky Tree Tower

 Our final outing from the boat was a bus ride to see the view from the Tokyo SkyTree Tower.  The ride offered the added benefit of providing a prolonged view of Tokyo and Yokohama at night. The SkyTree is the third tallest tower in the world at 2100 feet and though the four floor observation deck is not located on the top, the view is both very popular and spectacular. There were a large number of people which seems to be the general situation in Tokyo, but with a little patience and four floors there ended up plenty of opportunities for photos. This appeared to be a popular location for amateur glamour photos for young Japanese girls who posed endlessly for their photographers with the distant city in the background. I did take one photo of Cindy, but I am quick with a great deal of experience in glamour shots. Cindy doesn’t use that pouty look that seems to be in among the younger set.

My first impression of Tokyo is that it is dense. Great industrial buildings, massive apartment buildings, and lots of people all packed closely together. You may have seen that view of a multiple directional crosswalk containing nearly a thousand people moving through each other every time the light changes. I have my own version of that shot. Not at the same locations, but just a cross walk we used today. It was raining and a large number of folks were emerging from a train boarding site. As each individual hit the street, he or she opened an umbrella. Watching the nearly perfect repetition of this simple process was very interesting. Then the procession began to pile up at the light to cross the street - both sides. Walking into the group walking toward you was like moving through a wall of umbrellas - most it seemed at my eye level.

Sapporo

 Apologies for my lack of attention to the blog. I continue to struggle with my sinus infection/cold and the prolonged coughing fits have made it very difficult to sleep leading to exhaustion. Two trips to the medic so far with several different remedies attempted. It seems to be improving a bit. Cindy has a weaker version for which I am likely responsible and hopefully she will respond better than me. We are soon off the boat with more to deal with.

We did walk around Sapporo a bit. I skipped the four hour tour, but tolerated a slow walk pretty well. Sapporo (yes the home of Sapporo beer) is much quieter than the locations we will soon visit. We found a machine to exchange money because many smaller locations do not take credit cards. A few photos follow.

Cindy has purchased eSIMS for our phones so we can find our way around and use the translation apps. Text translation has been available for some time, but it is the translation of a visual input that I find very impressive. Cindy created two screen captures from her phone to show how this works. Google Translate is the app.

Cindy puts up with my humor when she is often the target of my photos. She made me add this photo. She sent it some folks who we sometimes travel with and know what I like to target in my photos. She calls the picture - Mark works hard to find a way to take a picture without people.

Books on Boats

 The stretch of 6 days at sea reduces the options for keeping yourself busy. You can always eat, but this is probably not a good idea. You can always spot those who invested in a drinks package as they spend a lot of time at the bar. I can drink a beer now and then and maybe a gin and tonic, but I have not conditioned myself to take advantage of the drinks package.

I have been reading a lot or exploring on my iPad. This means I have reverted back to my regular routine without the walks. I suppose I could walk too, but the weather has not been great. The longest track around a deck is a quarter mile so it would be pretty much like walking on a track. 

The sea days probably came at a good time because I have a respiratory issue of some type that results in a lot of coughing and fatigue. You can tell people are skittish around coughers so I have used a mask some and mostly stayed in our cabin. I and other family members seem to have encountered this illness in the last couple of years and if what I have is the same thing it can go on for weeks. I took a COVID test and then visited the ship’s clinic today. Another COVID test (all negative) and pretty much the diagnosis I keep getting. Evidently a virus that you just have to ignore if you can. The doc did give me a couple of things to treat the symptoms.

Anyway, you see lots of people reading, working Sudoku, and playing cards. I do read and I have been working on Mitchner’s Alaska. I started with Mitchner’s Hawaii when I was there and then downloaded Alaska for this trip. Mitchner’s book are very long. The audio version is 59 hours. I have 41 hours left and we have left Alaska so my motivation is slipping. I got to the point that the Russians were in charge so there was not anything about current issues. 

Viking claims a focus on education and they stock books for each trip using the advice of a book seller they work with. I don’t read paper, but I have glanced at the offerings and it is impressive. The collection changes depending on the destination and cultures explored on each trip. Pretty cool. 

And then there is the food

 Maybe you are not one of those people who take pictures of their food when it looks more unusual than what they would find on their plate at home. Not me. I can’t say I have experienced a great number of cruise lines, but the ones I have taken trips with make an effort to focus on their food. As I said in one of the earliest posts of this trip, I was going to combine my food posts. Far more elegant than would be necessary and far more ample. Yes, a great supply of food and greater difficulty getting exercise is not a good thing. 

This cruise moves from Alaska to Japan and foods common in these regions are emphasized. Lots of sea food and some dishes unique to the Japanese style. 

 

I always have regrets about a photo I saw, but did not capture. I can see the one I should have used to conclude this post in my head, but I did not take advantage of the opportunity when it was there. We were eating in a restaurant called the Chef’s Table. It turns out there were multiple tables, but that is beside the point. It is a large ship. The approach involved many courses with what I think is called a tasting menu - many small things. The initial offering was what I continue to think about. Was it a chef making fun of the whole tasting menu thing or was it an offering to accomplish something I don’t usually think about - a palate cleanse. Anyway, it was a single sweet potato chip on a plate topped with a small glob of white stuff on top. I grabbed it and ate it in one fluid motion before I made the effort to contemplate its beauty, significance, or take a picture. I realized my cloddishness and looked around but didn’t see anyone staring. I assume they were discussing the significance of the wine pairing with the chip. What culinary arts academy would prepare you to find the perfect wine for a chip?

I had a cheese burger for lunch today. I did not take a picture of it either, but I assume you know what a cheeseburger looks like. 

What day is it?

 It was a very rough day at sea yesterday. The wind reached 60 mph. One hand for the boat. It was challenging to move around and you have to remember most passengers are my age. People weren’t sick. Just stumbling around. The one good thing with the boat movement was that we were headed into the waves so there was not much side to side action. Each deck has a central hallway that must be at least a hundred yards long so you get your steps in just getting to the dining area, meeting room, coffee machine, and back to your room. You have this sensation of walking up hill, then it feels like the boat stalls, and all at once you are moving forward quickly as your momentum shifts.

The time thing has me stumped. We are told to put our cell phones on manual so we could enter the correct time and day. Not certain why, but it does appear necessary. Each day we set our time back by one hour. Today we cross some date line and it is tomorrow, not today. This seems illogical - how do you back into tomorrow. Anyway, I am now trying to work out in my head the dates of the events we have scheduled in Japan (I am not worried Cindy always knows). The time cross the Pacific was to be 6 days, but is that days of cruising or 6 days by the Calendar?

Last night, we happened to be seated by the window while we had dinner on the first level of the ship. I pointed my phone out the window to try to provide a sense of the wave action.

Google Adds AI to Google Photos

Something a little different on a sea day. Exploring photos using AI

These are the photos I was looking for, and this is the story of how I used the new AI feature in Google Photos to find them.

My wife and I are about to set out on a month-long adventure that will take us to Alaska and then Japan. The strange combination is due to what is called a boat “repositioning” by the cruise industry. This is the fifth trip we have made to Alaska starting with driving the ALCAN highway when some of it was still gravel, several ferry trips through the inside passage, and now a cruise ship.  

As I prepared for this trip, I tried to locate images from past visits. I have always taken photos and written about our trips. Still, this content was collected over nearly fifty years and was created with multiple cameras and phones and scattered across online storage, numerous computers, and various types of storage media. When I retired, I undertook a project to collect as many images as possible in one location. I chose Google Photos, mainly because the images would automatically upload as I found them. 

My situation is not unusual for someone of my age. If you are an older individual, you already probably know that your kids don’t want your stuff. They also are not that interested in your pictures. Even those in which they appear. This does not mean that you won’t appreciate the opportunity to review past experiences. I find that selecting a few and generating the stories that go with them is more likely to generate interest in others.

Back to the bears.

During one of our Alaska trips, we visited our daughter and her future husband, who were spending the summer exploring and working on a whale watching boat. The daughter was in a phase where she took a lot of photos and even blogged about her experiences. We were walking on the shore and she was using my camera when we saw several bears, one of which was out in the water. She captured a series of images as the bear moved through the water and at one point, climbed and posed on a rock before moving on. The bear on the rock picture garnered significant attention and appeared on the front page of the Ketchikan paper. I had the famous photo, but not the sequence, and that is what I wanted to see if I could find.

Here is the challenge. My collection includes thousands and thousands of photos. Over the years, I have paid for and maintained a collection in Flickr that is made up of more than 7000. The issue with Flickr was that I had used it for many years to showcase my high-quality shots. I was not using the service to collect the large number of images I deemed of lesser interest to others. The other images accumulated in iPhoto on several machines and perhaps as slides or digital photos stored on CDs or whatever happened to be the external media of the day. As I rediscovered these images, they ended up in Google Photos in no particular order. Note, few of these images had geolocation data, and many not even the EXIF data that would indicate the date the images were taken. Cameras, an SLR in this case, do not have the means to record the geolocation data we expect from cellphones. 

Here is the feature Google has added to photos that seems added just for my situation. You can now ask Gemini (AI), available within Photos, to perform a wide range of tasks based on your photo collection.  First, the Ask feature does not presently work on a Macintosh, but does work with the Google Photos app on the iPhone or iPad. Ask appears at the bottom of the screen instead of the search icon, which may be confusing if you are used to the traditional search method. Entering the prompt “Find images of bears in my photo collection” creates a long list of hits - bears in zoos, a photo of a black bear carved from a tree stump, teddy bears being held by our kids, and all of the bear images taken in Alaska. I was able to locate one of the missing bear images as the bear approached the rock I could not find in any other way. 

I tried one more search that also produced some very surprising results. I knew that we had fished for salmon on one of our Alaska trips and searched for salmon. I found photos I had taken of salmon in restaurants, pictures of smoked salmon within a display case I took while visiting the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and pictures of salmon taken while fishing in Alaska. The interesting thing about the fishing pictures was that these images appeared not as photos, but within videos. No tags, no meaningful file labels - AI found the salmon within the videos. 

How can this work? The only approach that seems reasonable is that Google “processes” stored content assigning what I might called tags to things and actions associated with blocks in files and frames within videos. A prompt then uses these existing tags to generate a response. So, I am speculating that Google preprocesses the content you give it for storage much like say the content you upload for use in NotebookLM.

Summary

Google has added AI to specific implementations of Google Photos. The AI allows intelligent search that is not dependent on stored text, dates, or geolocation data. The AI can use these sources, but can also identify imagery directly. This capability is not presently available on all devices, but works via a device that makes use of apps (iOS or Android). 

Dutch Harbor

 We just set out across the Pacific on our 6 days at sea. We left Dutch Harbor early because of an approaching storm and hopefully we will out run the high winds that are predicted.

We did have time to visit a very old Russian Orthodox Church before we left. The church is still used although they are presently without a Priest. A whiteboard positioned near the front door indicated that the church council will meet Thursday and there will be a pot luck on Friday. I am guessing the primary business of the council is how to attract someone to this location.

Supplies come to the smaller coastal cities by barge and they were taken the containers off the barge near our ship as we set out to visit the church. Our driver said that the local keep track of when the barge will arrive and the grocery store would be crowded. This would be the day to purchase fresh vegetables.

Kodiak Island

 Kodiak Island was the next to last stop in Alaska. We travel for a day and the next before ending our Alaskan adventure at Dutch harbor. 

Kodiak is another of those small fishing towns offering a tourist stop as a second gig. We took a school bus to the site of three different small museums and had the opportunity to take a few photos. The ships itself does not necessarily pull up to the dock either because it is too large or because other large vessels arrived first. When this is the case, the trip to shore is accomplished using a tender. I think that is just another name for life boat because they have maybe 8 of these and they seem pretty much unsinkable. 

Kodiak is home to the Kodiak Brown bear and no we did not see one. This bear is very large closer to polar bears than the relative grizzly. The museums all seem to have a plastic or stuffed version and Cindy was willing to pose to provide a comparison. The second image comes from an museum focused on the artwork of indigenous artists.

One museum located on the coast was focused on the military efforts during WWII. There was concern that the U.S. could be invaded from the North and several small outposts with a gun or two were located on the coast of Alaska. This one had working communications gear and because my dad was stationed somewhere in the South Pacific manning a radar installation I have always been interested in such equipment. When I was a kid we had some old radio equipment in our attic and we strung a wire from an upstairs bedroom to a nearby tree so the ham radio gear would work. Pop would sometimes sit there with us and write down the messages in Morse code that we could pick up. It was cool. He would write in all caps for some reason. I always wanted to get a qualify for a ham license when I was a kid, but thought I would be more capable of learning the code when I got older. When I got older I drifted on to other interests.

The coast of Alaska qualifies as a rain forest. I have always collected images simply pointing the camera into forests because I enjoy the effect you can sometimes produce. Here is an example from Kodiak. You should be able to expand the image by clicking on it and the larger image makes the depth of the photo more obvious.

Accidental humor

 I try to compensate for my lack of camera knowledge by taking lots of pictures. I have several expensive cameras and lenses, but I have stopped taking them on trips except when we drive. Just too heavy. The iPhone nearly always comes up with something better than what I produce with one of my cameras. AI betters my skills.

Sometimes photography is a matter of luck. I was going to throw the photo that follows away. Then, I was going to crop it to preface a series of images I took in the museum. Before I could cut off the shadow, I saw something that struck me as amusing. I call this photo - Watch your 6.

Resurrection Bay - Seward

 We try to take what we think of as a “whale watch” once during each trip. Whales are not the only sea-related wildlife you would see on a whale watch, but whale are the big deal sighting a photo most of us are after. A whale watch in Alaska has an additional cache in Alaska because Jim and Kim spent several months as the crew on a whale watching boat when they spent time in Alaska and we now think of the “kids” we see working on these boats with a sense of familiarity.

We are in Resurrection Bay out of Seward. To dispel any suspense, we saw one whale and I did not get a photo. It is late in the season for humpbacks as most have probably headed for Hawaii. The Orcas are still around, but I have never seen an Orca despite the many whale watches I have been on.

Here are some photos from today’s outing.

Stellar Sea Lion

Harbor Seals

Sea Otter

Birds