Mizu Yakitori

So I decided that this blog always needs a few pictures on the front page, and since i haven't blogged for a while about food, here goes:

Mizu Yakitori
315 W. North Ave.
312-951-8880

Went for a class outing last week to a newish jap place in town. Mizu Yakitori is a trendily set restaurant specialising in yakitori (who would've guessed?). The decor is quite clean and modern, and feels like a jap restaurant trying to be authentic yet functional. The lights look like they're from Molecule, and they have a cool private room with the traditionally low table like all good self-respecting japanese restaurants should.



We went at about 6+, and were somewhat intimidated by the complete utter lack of a crowd on a friday night, but it filled up quite quickly with the sort of crowd you might expect to see in a Sex and the City restaurant. They created quite a convival atmosphere, but conversation was not impaired by the noise.

The food itself was really quite interesting, they have a selection of rather obscure jap dishes, like sea urchin shooters ($6):



Which come in a wooden bucket filled with ice, and is actually a shotglass filled with the raw urchin in question, together with a raw quail's egg, raw ponzu sauce, and raw sprig of unremembered green. It is how cool la! But well it was the first time i'd tried anything like that, and it sure does give a more tasty kick than an alcohol shot. Which, by the way, mizu has none of, since they're still waiting for their alcohol license to be approved, so it's BYOB for now.

The actual food turned out to be quite delicious, if in tiny portions (or it could be just me)

and yes, they all look the same in the picture, don't they? We had duck breast, beef tongue, portobello mushroom, and chicken, all nice and tender and juicy. In the back was the star of the night, a bowl of enoki mushrooms and king crab. Super yummy. Everything was laid out very nicely and meticulously by our waiter (who was very attentive and ensured our tiny teacups were kept filled with tea from this tiny teapot which he always placed in the same spot on our table with the spout pointing east and the handle laid to rest -just- so. We had a selection of dips to choose from, although there wasn't quite enough of each yakitori to have a controlled test of their taste. The yakitori sticks are about 3-4ish a pop, and in the end we went off for supplementary dessert in another place. Not a place to go to for a full dinner unless you happen to feel very well endowed with cash.

Their sushi was quite tasty, and as you can tell from the lack of pictures, we were quite hungry by the time the sushi came.... all in all a good restaurant, scoring big on service and food quality, although not quite so excitingly hot on value for money, although it's quite reasonable as Chicago jap restaurants go.

Alarum! Invaders!

To think that the first time i get robbed in Chicago, it'd be an online theft.

I guess i should be grateful that it wasn't one of those strongarm robberies at gunpoint where people bundle you off into the trunk of a car and shove you in front of an ATM and make you withdraw money (did they catch those people yet?).

But it still is quite an irritating thing to have happen to you. Then I got bad grades on my math midterm too. Which isn't TOooooo bad because it's sort of balanced by my first midterm, but it still is quite pissifying and disappointing.

And then to cheer myself up i indulge in rampant American consumer culture and buy a coffeed drink from Starbucks (where else?) and it turns out to be
1) too sweet
2) lacking coffee

which is probably just sheer dumbness on my part, but what is one to do?

Time Sinks...

Warbears
Cute and cuddly with katanas and grenades. Absolutely hilarious.

Wall scrawlings

One thing i love about this school is the utterly hilarious nature of graffiti on the walls. Here our undercover reporter brings you a glimpse of the wall of the handicapped toilet in the basement of Reynold's Club:








(For our non-Chinese reading populace: * Yo mamma not good lookin' ah. )

Multilingual graffiti! What more can you ask for?

Traversing snow

Spend a thousand going to Korea to ski? $2000 heading to Whistler for a week or so of fun and excitement? No! This is what i did yesterday:

1. Pay $39 + a few hours of driving to go on a SAMSU/CUSA skitrip.


2. includes ski + boot rental, ski lift ticket, and lesson


3. Disdain lesson completely and go learn from friends


4. Fall down in front of a bunch of kids while trying to go up a tiny slope by holding on to a rope pull


5. Learn that skis need to be parallel to direction of motion in order to prevent falling down


6. Get ambitious after 2 tries down an easy slope and try an intermediate one


7. Fall down repeatedly. Adopt "Learning by doing" philosophy.


8. Try again. Fail embarrassingly.


9. Adopt "Learning by doing on a simple slope where you can experiment technically and improve technique" philosophy


10. Finally get some sort of technique together and manage to do intermediate slopes without falling (yay)


11. Fall asleep for 10 hours


12. Discover that yes, truly, muscles that i didn't know existed are now aching.

And of course as with most other things in life, skiing (and resultant conversation at dinner) made me realise: the shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but sometimes the best path is the winding one, lest your overeagerness to reach the end makes you fall over and lose your footing.

ORD loh

What a strange feeling it is to automatically translate ORD in your head to O'hare international Airport instead of something a bit more momentous. I guess everything can be unlearnt.

Snails are faster than ADSL

SNAil-based data transfer Protocol (SNAP) is an Israeli developed technology, faster than ADSL, and even faster than Wi-Fly TCP (Transmission by Pigeons) protocol!

And other signs that you're becoming a hopeless geek: when you see a road sign saying "parking between signs disallowed --> " and can't find the accompanying sign, the first thing that comes to mind is "unmatched parentheses".

Passings

So, yes, it turns out that Megsie wasn't just sleeping/giving birth/preparing to give birth/practicing her flotation techniques, but was actually not terribly alive. An ex-guppy, as it were. Which is greatly unfortunate, and leads us to wonder if things might've been different if we'd used Brita water instead.

That set me to thinking: I'm really quite lucky that i've never really had to deal with the loss of a loved one. Was too young to understand when my grandparents died, and never having had pets which stayed with us long enough to die, or never being attached to any of them enough when they died, i guess i can only sympathise but never really truly empathise with those whose loss is great. Which irritates me, because i like to understand people, and empathy is key to that understanding.

Now i guess i'm lucky to have been spared this hurt, but i know that in all probability death will strike sometime and I'll have to deal with it. If it had, would i be more appreciative of life, and of near-death misses? Miracles have happened to those around me, and just because the status quo was maintained, somehow i always just brushed it off as an "oh.", although i always felt insufficiently thankful, my feelings just didn't work that way. Now, a little older and wiser, i look back upon those moments and marvel that things turned out the way they have, that those friends who were in danger are still alive and part of my life, and i'm glad for that. But i think the primary irony still lives on in me: i never really appreciate the people i have until they're gone, most of the time. I just hope i can change that without having to learn the hard way.


To all those who've experienced the loss of a love, may peace rest in your heart.

Wristwatch Cameras

Yay, my new Casio Exilim Z110 (aka "camera") came today (thanks Brian), and it's proving to be a huge distraction from the Econs midterms i have next week.

It's got (sort of) full manual with shutter speed priority of up to 60s:

(chess set I bought from Peru, in a darkened room)

and video with sound (finally) and all sorts of other cool features like an RGB histogram (which i don't really need). Am happy with it so far, photos will appear more frequently now... even though my dear housemate was so kind as to volunteer her canon for my semi-permanent use, somehow i just like casios better.

So among the first few photos we have our household pets:

Skippy on the phone, and


Megsie, who's a pregnant guppy and hasn't actually moved in the last 36 hours. hmm.


Oh yes, and the exilim tells the time, too.

Honor bets

So i realised the other day that we're so conditioned into automatically thinking the worst of people that you tend to work into your expectations little failsafes, and see if you can plug loopholes.... like how "the user is always stupid and needs to be protected from himself", and there are few people you can trust enough to make a bet, the deciding factor of which can only be judged by the person him/herself.

What a world it would be if everyone lived by an unbreakable honor code, only keeping to the code wouldn't be enforcable by anything except honor itself.

Oh and
1. Balsamic chicken sandwiches taste nice.
2. Apples keep very long when they're in the fridge.
3. Apples outside of fridge don't quite keep very long at all.

Money Laundering

The worst kind of money to have in your pocket when you put it through the laundry!



Happy Chinese New Year. As soon as i'm free enough i'll put up a proper post, but this was too good not to share immediately.