On the one hand, as the first month of the year winds down, I’ve finished a new short story and a collaborative novella (the first of three). On the other hand, I’m way behind on a couple of other projects and most of the past five days have been sacrificed to the flu (despite getting a shot this year).

But on the gripping hand, EATING AUTHORS doesn’t care about any of that, and so I bring you this week’s guest, Indrapramit Das. You probably know him for his short fiction which has been in a wide range of venues, but his debut novel, The Devourers, was nominated for both the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and the Tata Live! Literature First Book Award in his native India, as well as being short-listed for the Crawford Award. Oh, and it won the Lambda Award

Indra himself is an Octavia E. Butler Scholar and a graduate of the Clarion West. Keep an eye on him.

LMS: Welcome, Indra. Tell me about your most memorable meal.

ID: Late afternoon lunch years and years ago with my (late) maternal grandparents at our extended family’s house (Ballygunge Place, Calcutta), where I would go after school sometimes because my parents were at work. Somewhere in my early teens, tired and hungry after a hot summer day at school.

On my plate, the Bengali delicacy of hilsa (a most revered fish around the Gangetic delta) and chunks of hilsa eggs fried in mustard oil with dried red chillies, eaten with steamed rice (you crush the fried whole chillies into the rice, which sops up the oil that the cuts of fish were fried in) and a pinch of salt. My grandmother told me how to eat the bony piece, cut out of the fish’s midsection, watching me eat the pale, bone-prickled flesh (golden and slightly crisp on the outside, white on the inside, except the skin, which is dark, silvery black like the sea, and tastes like it too) so an arrowhead-shaped piece of skin, fat and bone remains like a riverine wishbone (a segment of the spine, with ribs arching out from it) at the end of the meal. Using the bony morsel on her own plate, she showed me with her greased fingers how to splay this ‘wishbone’ by bending the miniature ribs, so you can then pop that sharp bit in your mouth and suck out the thick layer of fat and oil clinging under the stretched bow of de-scaled fish-skin and slick bone.

My grandparents are now dead, but since that lunch, with them both watching proudly as I drained the skeletal remains of that hilsa of omega-rich fatty oils, I have never once forgotten to dismantle a piece of hilsa so I can drain that little reservoir of fishy bacon grease from under the arch of its needle-sharp spine.

#SFWApro

Yesterday, I was in Detroit. And, to be honest, I might still be there, because I’ve written this a couple days early and for all I know the weather there or here (here being Philadelphia) may have prevented my flight home on Sunday. Or it didn’t, but the plane crashed. Or I was in an accident on the way to the airport in Detroit, or maybe on the way home from the airport in Philly. Or aliens. Yeah, it could have been aliens, scooping me up because they’re bored (hard to do crop circles in this weather). Or, most likley, time travelers. By which I mean, time travelers again (because, duh, time travel). Seriously, what is with you time cops and time thieves and time accountants? Why do you always hassle SF authors? I’d think you’d be on our side, right? But I digress…

Whether I’m here, or not, what you need to focus on is that you have a shiny, new installment of EATING AUTHORS before you, featuring Wendy Nikel, whose first book, The Continuum, comes out tomorrow from World Weaver Press (and is probably the reason I’ve been thinking about time travel, in case you were wondering).

Prior to this book, Wendy’s been writing short stories, including an ongoing series about Juliet Silver, a tea shop server who becomes a fearsome airship pilot, and eventually a fearsome airship pirate! What more could you possibly want?

LMS: Welcome, Wendy. What’s your most memorable meal?

WN: I didn’t realize when asked this question how difficult it would be to come up with an answer. Although cooking isn’t one of my favorite things to do around the house (we probably eat more pizza around here than we ought to), I have a huge appreciation for a good meal, especially when I don’t have to make it or do the dishes afterward.

Because of this, my mind immediately went to some of my favorite restaurants and dinners at friends’ houses, because even an excellent meal can be ruined if the company is bad, and even an awful meal can be improved with good friends. I thought of the times when I was a kid and my grandpa would take us out to eat to celebrate good report cards. I considered the time we piled into my college friend’s car in the middle of the night and drove half an hour to the nearest 24-hour Wendy’s and then ate our cheap fries and Frosties beneath the buffalo sculpture in the park. I remembered the New Year’s Eve parties at my parents’ house, pigging out on leftover Christmas cookies and Lil’ Smokeys mini sausages and nachos.

Perhaps my favorite meal of all, though, was one that I actually did make. In the fall of 2007, my husband and I moved to Ottawa, Ontario for a year-long internship, and we celebrated not only our first Canadian Thanksgiving, but also the first Thanksgiving on our own. Up until this point, we’d always lived near family, and the most I’d brought to the table had been some pumpkin pies. But that year, we knew we wouldn’t be able to make the trip back for the holidays, so when October rolled around, I started plotting the ultimate Canadian Thanksgiving. It was my first time making a turkey, and I planned for weeks to make sure that we’d have all of our favorite Thanksgiving foods, right down to the chocolate and mint pies that my siblings and I usually made.

I bought the ingredients and spent all day cooking and baking — with a few long-distance phone calls to my mom to check to make sure I was doing it right. And when it was done, it was perfect. The turkey was golden, the potatoes were fluffy and buttery and delicious, and the pies were just right. It was like a little bit of home, despite being far away. Just that ritual of setting the table and sitting down to enjoy all that delicious, familiar food made our new home feel not so far away from our loved ones.

I didn’t know at the time, but this would be good practice for years later when we moved out west and once again had the holidays to ourselves. This year, for the first time since we moved here, my sister and her family are coming to visit for Thanksgiving, and I’m looking forward to once again gathering around the table with dishes made from the same recipes we’ve enjoyed since we were children, passing down this tradition to the next generation.

#SFWApro

On Thursday, the low temperature here was about nine degrees. The next day, we hit sixty-five and it rained. Saturday, we dropped back to twelve. Yesterday’s high was all of twenty-six. Well, at least all of the previous snow melted and washed away in the warm rain.

Sorry, no segue for this week; sometimes that’s just how it goes. Our EATING AUTHORS guest is Russ Colchamiro, whom I have always known as a short story writer (primarily because we were both in Pangaea, an anthology from Crazy 8 Press). But we were chatting in the Dealers’ Room at Philcon a couple months back, and I discovered I didn’t know the half of it. Russ has a string of novels to his credit, most notably the zany Finders Keepers series.

He lives just over the river in New Jersey, but he’s backpacked throughout Europe and New Zealand, the former figures in what he’ll tell you in a moment, but both experiences provide a context for a lot of his fiction. It’s not enough to say that Russ writes SFF. He actually writes humor and adventure and mystery. It just so happens that he does all that while writing SFF.

LMS: Welcome, Russ. Speak to me of your most memorable meal.

RC: I originally shared a version of this anecdote in my scifi backpacking comedy novel, Finders Keepers, through the POV of my alter ego, Jason Medley. The details below—this time through my own POV—are based on actual events I experienced late August of 1994 when I was 23 years old. At this point in the story—beginning in the Gare du Nord, the main train hub in Paris—I was mentally, emotionally, and physically fatigued, having endured approximately 36 consecutive hours of non-stop hustling between planes, cars, buses, subways, trains, hovercrafts, and more trains, on what was the initial leg of a month-long backpacking trip I took through Europe—my first trip of consequence anywhere. I was traveling alone, and spoke no languages other than English.

The direct train from Paris—where I was—to Rome—where I was headed—was due to depart in less than two minutes. It was also the last train to Rome for the night and I literally had nowhere to sleep—I didn’t know a soul in the entire city—if I missed it. But for reasons unclear to me the track number changed at the last minute, which left me running full bore, a loaded rucksack on my back.

I stumbled upon an information booth.

“Excuse me,” I said to the attendant. “Train to Rome. It was supposed to be on track nine, but it’s not. Do you know which track? Do you know where it is?”

He winged his newspaper, creating a distinct barrier between us, preventing eye contact. Smoke floated up from behind the paper.

“Sir! Train to Rome. It leaves in …,” I checked my watch, “… in less than three minutes. Train to Rome. Which track? Do you know which track?”

The cigarette grumbler winged his paper again. He turned his back on me.

“Excuse me, sir. Please. Can you help me? Train to Rome …”

I fantasized about jumping over the counter and clubbing him with a baguette until the right answer popped loose, but instead the clock in my head clanged away like an ancient gong.

10:54:03 … Clang!
10:54:04 … Clang!
10:54:05 … Clang!

The cigarette grumbler looked over his shoulder. “Three,” he said finally, then stormed into the back room. Slam!

Sprinting along the platform I strained to see through the train windows. Compartment after compartment was filled with passengers. Not an empty seat to be found.

An awesome clang! echoed in my head at the tick of 10:55:27. With the train about to pull out of the station, I heaved my rucksack onto the next car, jumped on the metal stairs, but tripped over my bag, denting my shin on the doorframe. Leg now throbbing, I pulled myself up and limped along the narrow hallway. Light came in through the windows. The first compartment was full. Same with the second, the third, and the fourth. I was getting anxious, covered in a film of sweat and anxiety that soaked through my clothes, afraid I would have to stand the entire fourteen-hour trip to Rome.

The final compartment was fitted with two padded benches, facing each other. There was just enough room for six passengers, three to a bench. There was one spot available, the middle to my right. “Train to Rome?” I looked to a twentyish brunette in a white ruffled blouse. “Sí,” she said.

I forced my rucksack between the other bags on the overhead rack, then squeezed myself between two strangers. Six sets of interlocking knees now occupied the small common ground between the two sides.

Shrouded in darkness, I ached head to toe, and didn’t care. I hadn’t eaten a solid meal in nearly two days, and didn’t care. I hadn’t showered in just as long, and didn’t care.

I was grateful just to have reached the end of one of the longest days of my life, one that spanned three nations, two oceans, and thousands of miles, a day whose beginning I could no longer remember or even care to recall. I was sitting down. That was good enough for me.

And yet the sleep never came. I pinned my shoulders against the seat back so I wouldn’t invade the personal space of my fellow travelers. But I wanted to feel like a whole person again, to make a connection. “Hi,” I finally said to the guy sitting next to me.

He rubbed his scraggly beard, adjusted his glasses, and then swept the long hair from his face. “Uh … sí, hello, yes. You America, no?”

“Yeah, America. From New York.”

“Ah! New York! Sí, sí. Antonio, Antonio.” Antonio then introduced Sonja, the black-haired beauty to my left, and then facing me Christi, René and Angelina, three twentyish girls, pretty and without makeup, dressed in jeans and ragged shirts, backpackers all.

We then took turns in the bathroom, a tiny closet at the end of the car.

As I stared at myself in the mirror, it was impossible not to notice that my complexion was sickly yellow; I had dark bags under my eyes. But I managed to wash my face, brush my teeth, gargle with peppermint Listerine, and then spritz each armpit with deodorant. The spray was cool. It stung.

Perked, but not perky, I walked in on my new friends. They were using their knees as tables, sharing a box of crackers, a brick of chocolate, and passed around a water bottle.

As if drop kicked in the face, I couldn’t believe my stupidity. Among my forty pounds of gear I hadn’t packed the most important item of all—food. Not a cookie, not a sandwich. No candy, no fruit, no drinks. Nothing. Not even a breath mint.

I all but collapsed into the fetal position and started to weep—when Christi smiled at me. “Hungry, yes? Eat. You receive good deed, you do for someone else. Is the traveler’s karma. You’ll see.”

It took all I had from hugging her senseless. You’re an angel. But gratitude aside, the starving coyote in me was ready to rip the throats from anyone who came between me and the sesame crackers. I surveyed the food, let out a short sigh. “Thanks,” I said. “I could eat.”

Bellies satisfied and with the overhead light switched off again, my new friends and I tried to sleep, a jumble of limbs strewn about. The train made several stops, and as the eyelids of the morning sky began to open, we crossed the French border into Italy.

In my mind I thanked my now-slumbering mates for their generosity of spirit. For treating that compartment as their home and for making me their most welcome guest. And as I thought about the days ahead, I wondered if I would meet anyone even half as kind as they were, or share another meal that would ever mean as much.

#SFWApro

We’re warming up again, but in the past week Philadelphia broke a twenty-three year record of not dropping below zero degrees. I foolishly spent too much time shoveling snow in single digit weather but the less said of that the better. Instead, let’s segue over to EATING AUTHORS and this week’s guest, Catherine Schaff-Stump. It’s fair to say that I’ve long been a fan of Cath’s short fiction, having acquired stories for various Paper Golem projects.

Cath’s a graduate of both the Viable Paradise workshop and the Taos Toolbox master class. And if you don’t already know her for her fiction, you’ve likely heard her voice, as she’s is one of the hosts of Unreliable Narrators, one of the funnest podcasts out there.

Her most recent book, published last September, is The Vessel of Ra, a YA Gothic fantasy and the the first volume of a proposed Klaereon Scroll series. I encourage you to check it out.

LMS: Welcome, Catherine. Talk to me about your most memorable meal.

CS-S: My husband Bryon and I are Disney people. We were brainwashed by consumer culture as children, and as both of us grew up poor, Disney was this Holy Grail of vacation for us, much touted on television in living color. We wanted to live in that Disney magic, just like Uncle Walt spoon-fed it to us. As adults, we recognize rampant consumerism when we see it, but dang if we still didn’t want to go to the Disney theme parks and try to revel in the dream that was sold to us several console televisions ago in the past.

So we did. The first time Bryon and I went to Disney was 1996. It was splendid. We rode the Haunted Mansion three times in a row. We discovered that not only were the various theme parks wonderful, but also fantastic was Disney food.

You, gentle reader are probably thinking about corn dogs right now, but I am here to tell you that with some planning (reservations six months ahead kind of planning) you too can sample the pretzel rolls of the Canada pavilion, quiche cooked by Remy from Ratatouille, the tangine of Morocco, and even the flank steak of the Liberty Tavern. If you are truly romantic, maybe your husband will roll you a meatball with his nose at Tony’s Town Square while you are sitting by the Lady and the Tramp statue.

However, it is not Disney who is responsible for the most delicious meal I have ever had, although it was in Orlando, and I was there because of Disney. Sometimes you eat outside of the park. I’ve always been intrigued by the giant pineapple at Disney Springs (kind of a mall for Orlando tourists who want a little Disney, but aren’t lining up for the e-tickets). There is a restaurant with a giant Tyrannosaurus outside of it (aptly titled The T-Rex Café) and there is a giant silver pineapple. Hey? Who wouldn’t want to eat in a giant silver pineapple? So, reservations were made, and my culinary life was irrevocably changed.

Now, with apologies to Nickelodeon: Who cooks in a pineapple under the sea?

The answer might surprise you…Gloria Estefan!

Yes, people from the Eighties, Gloria Estefan. She of the Miami Sound Machine. And yes, Miami Sound Machine does, in fact, belt out a very good tune. However, it turns out that Gloria Estefan has a second career as well—a delicious, crunchy second career. Gloria and her husband Emilio are restaurateurs who celebrate Cuban food and culture. The first Bongos was opened in 1992 in Miami, and one opened at Disney Springs in 1997. Bryon and I wandered in there one night, beginning our love affair with Cuban cuisine, which may now be my favorite kind.

As is often the wisest thing to do with an awarding winning restaurant, we decided to put ourselves in the hands of the wait staff. The young lady who helped us out told us the things we had to try that they were most famous for: Croquetas de Jamin Tradicionales and Vaca Frita.

The croquetas were tasty, a concoction of a case of mashed potato blended with spices enveloping a lively ham covered by a creamy bechamel sauce. As an appetizer they were tasty, but I’ve had food that good before in other establishments.

Vaca Frita on the other hand? This terrific dish was skirt steak soaked in the citrusy goodness of delicious Cuban mojo, then rendered crispy so it had a sort of breaking point as you crunched into it, an interplay between chewy jerky and al dente pasta. Each mouthful sang and danced in our mouths. There was a giant platter of it, and like the red shoes of cuisine, you wanted to stop eating as you were satisfied, but you couldn’t stop yourself. One plate would have been enough for the two of us. We were heartbroken not to finish all of it.

Seeking Cuban food became a quest for us after that. We do have a Cuban restaurant in Cedar Rapids and the food is fine. There is a passable Ropa Vieja, good plantains, and solid Cubanos. And in Minneapolis, that scion city of the North where one would be amazed to find Cuban food, there is Victor’s 1959 Café, where the crab cakes are divine.

But we know, the husband and I, that the best place to find Cuban food is where we started enjoying it at Bongo’s. In my dreams I envision heaping platters of picadillo, lechon asada, and flan. Oh yeah. I can enjoy all that. But in my heart I’ll be thinking about vaca frita.

#SFWApro

It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to 2018. I’m happy to put the past year in the past, to focus on a shiny new year full of potential and renewed purpose. I invite you to come along for the ride.

We begin this new year of EATING AUTHORS with Delia Sherman as the first guest of 2018. Delia writes for both adults and children. She’s published three novels for the former (one co-written with her spouse, Ellen Kushner), all in the Fantasy of Manners vein, receiving a Mythopoeic Award for her troubles. Her middle-grade stories and books have earned her a Norton Award, a Prometheus Award, as well as a second Mythopoeic Award. She’s also a past nominee for the Crawford Award and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

In addition to her own writing, Delia is one of the founding members of the Interstitial Arts Foundation. Delia’s a teacher and lecturer (Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies from Brown). She’s also an experienced editor of both anthologies and webzines. And she regularly pays it forward, sharing her expertise by teaching at Clarion and Odyssey and Alpha, and plenty of other workshops throughout the world (which fits in nicely with her self-professed love of travel).

LMS: Welcome, Delia. What meal stands out most in your memory?

DS: Memory is an odd and selective thing. I know that I’ve eaten a lot of good food—formal meals in restaurants, lunch stops on road trips, picnics off the roof of a car ditto, dinners and lunches and parties in the houses of friends. But mostly I don’t remember what I actually ate. There is, however, one meal—or rather one set of meals—that I remember perfectly, because I’ve cooked it annually for ten years. It’s my wife Ellen’s and my favorite family tradition, and we take it a lot more seriously (for a given value of seriously) than Thanksgiving (for which we often hide and write and maybe fry up a duck breast for two). We hold it on Twelfth Night, traditionally the night when the magi brought the traditional baby gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the infant Jesus. It also—in England, anyway—is a time of feasting, entertainments, music, and plays. And since we’re both enthusiastic about all those things, it seems like the perfect time to throw a Twelfth Night party.

The feast, to begin with, was an afterthought. The play’s the thing, and the friends we invite to help us read it. Shakespeare, of course, is a favorite. We’ve done Twelfth Night and As You Like It and Winter’s Tale. Ben Jonson was less successful—we didn’t make it all the way through Volpone, although we gave our best shot. Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was a real hit, and we almost repeated it a second year, but substituted Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not For Burning at the last minute. We’ve done Noel Coward (Private Lives) and Moliere (The Miser) and Liz Duffy Adams (Or,). The core group of readers has always been me, Ellen, and two merry gentlemen she’s known from the 1980’s, when she last lived in New York. Since a lot of what we read is male-heavy, we practice gender-blind casting. Every scene is recast by our Perpetual Stage Manager, Patrick, who is kind enough to give favorite speeches to whoever begs hardest for them. By long tradition, Daniel gets first crack at the ranting elderly ladies and Ellen has a corner on the clever, snarky heroes. I prefer sensible characters of either gender, but will chew scenery when called upon.

We’ve played with the timing of dinner to accommodate both art and hunger. If we try to read the whole play beforehand, we either eat too much cheese or get so hungry the reading becomes a slog instead of a pleasure. If we use dinner as a long intermission, sometimes we don’t get to the second half of the play. We’ve never tried putting off the play until after dinner because that way lies a Twelfth Night without any play, and where would be the fun in that? Of course, everything would be easy if this were just a bowl of potato chips and maybe a steak or burritos kind of party, with ice cream afterwards, or maybe some homemade cookies, if we get ambitious. But it’s not.

You see, I have a thing for goose. It’s probably having read Dickens at an impressionable age, but for me, it’s just not Christmas without a goose. Except that we don’t actually celebrate Christmas, so the goose has moved to Twelfth Night instead. I use a recipe I found in Gourmet magazine in 1977, involving a dried fruit stuffing and port wine gravy and a certain amount of fussing with the hot fat that is the inevitable side-effect of roasting a goose. It is always moist (if I don’t forget to turn the temp down after the first 30 minutes) and usually crisp and tastes very faintly of fruit. I used to make red cabbage with it, but have recently turned to roasted brussels sprouts. Given the size of the oven in our apartment this year, I might go back to the cabbage, or maybe I’ll sautè the brussels sprouts with chutney. Potatoes, of course, and green beans and sweet potatoes mashed with sautéed apples. We carry in the goose (carved, because carving a goose is a greasy, messy affair best achieved without an audience) to The Boar’s Head Carol, because we like to sing. Dessert is a King Cake, a French tradition traditionally supplied by Daniel, to be eaten after we’ve either finished the play or voted unanimously to give up and tell bad jokes instead. Whoever gets the bean (or the little china donkey) in their piece has to wear a gilded cardboard crown. One year, Patrick forgot to take it off when he left and didn’t notice he was still wearing it until Daniel took pity on him before they got on the subway.

#SFWApro

photo credit: Beth Gwinn

Welcome to the last EATING AUTHORS post of 2017. It’s been a turbulent year, on so many levels, but we’ve made it. I like to think having a weekly retreat into the lives and meals of all of the authors who have stopped by here has in some small way been of service. Thanks for your continued interest, for reading their works, and for supporting speculative fiction (and meals!) throughout the year.

We close out the year with this week’s guest, Thomas K. Carpenter. He’s something of a full service SFF author. Tom writes everything from YA dystopia to historical fantasy, from steampunk to post-cyberpunk, and has been known to wander off into alternate history as well. Seriously, whatever your tastes are, Tom has a book for you. Whether it’s a hundred different halls of magic or the library at Alexandria or every aspect of your life coming down to points in a game, he’ll keep you turning the pages.

LMS: Welcome, Tom. Tell me about your most memorable meal.

TKC: Golden Dandelion Tempura Blooms can cure loneliness.

You may not know this, but it’s true.

When I was twenty-five, I took a job with Toyota and they sent me to Japan for six weeks. Not to an exciting metropolis like the Godzilla-less Tokyo, or even the more subdued Nagoya with its dancing Elvis park (skinny-greaser Elvis rather than sequined Vegas Elvis), but the rural town of Tahara in the Aichi prefecture. A place, that I’m sure, literally nothing has happened. Ever.

Adding to my Lost in Translation experience was that I’d just gotten engaged before I left, and my fiancée had barely moved into our apartment. Between my curiosity challenged co-workers and the lack of fine dining outside of a three-story McDonald’s, I was getting stir-crazy, so I left for Kyoto one weekend—alone.

The city of Kyoto is filled with shrines. Small shrines, big shrines. Shrines that felt like they’d been built for giants. I got up early in the morning and moved from shrine to shrine. I would either sit and bask in the noisy silence of the city, or wander around the pathways between the sea-wave rocks. When I had enough, I would walk to the next shrine.

I recall a certain dislocation that carried me through the day. I was thousands of miles away from my fiancée wishing either she was with me, or I was back home, but mostly that she was with me, so we could enjoy the city together.

You can walk a long time when you’re trying to fill a hole.

Eventually, I had to eat, and at this point, even after a couple of weeks in Japan, I was still intimidated about trying new things. It wasn’t the food that scared me, I’m an adventurous eater, but the worry that I would make some horrible faux-pas, thus reinforcing the horrible image of Americans abroad.

But eventually, I found a little restaurant, no bigger than a counter and two booths, and run by a father and son. The father spoke only Japanese, while the son could piece together enough English that I wasn’t going to embarrass myself. They specialized in tempura. I ordered what essentially was the chef’s choice meal.

I was served tempura, one piece at a time. The batter was so light it was almost translucent and with a slight peppery flavor. It served mostly as a crisp outer shell.

I ate nothing twice.

Each piece came with its own dipping sauce: sea salt, or squeezed lemon, or ginger soy. The father would craft my bite of food, while the son would explain how I was meant to eat it. We started off easy—shrimp in lemon squeezings, asparagus in chunky pepper—hitting the foods people think of when they hear tempura. Then we moved onto non-traditional tempura items like crispy shrimp shells, or leafy chard.

Between the servings, I chatted with the son. He had questions about America, while I had questions about Japan. The father would chime in, translated through his son, and we had a round robin conversation.

The final serving of the meal was a golden dandelion tempura bloom. I’d never thought of a flower bud as something to eat, but it was delightful.

When I was finished, I bid them farewell (which included lots of awkward bowing on my part, since I hadn’t yet learned the rules) and went in search of some green tea mochi ball ice cream. It’d grown dark during our meal, and bright lanterns lit the pathways. Sometime afterwards, I realized I wasn’t lonely any more. I still missed my fiancée, but at least for the time being, I wasn’t lonely, and I’d gotten over intruding into strange restaurants. For the rest of the trip, I ate like a local and had many more interesting conversations.

P.S. – About five years later, I had the opportunity to take my wife to Kyoto to visit the temples. I couldn’t find that tempura shop, but that didn’t stop us from having a lot of great meals.

#SFWApro