Japantown

Since the film festival began, Japantown has been our home away from home. We spent a couple of hours wandering around before our movie and I did some shopping. First I bought a small plastic lemon squeezer at Soko Hardware. Soko is a wonderful place. Besides hardware items, the store sells Japanese pottery, clay pots, bamboo steamers, mandolines, chef's knives, rice cookers, sheets of handmade paper, paper lanterns, seed packets and all manner of other wonderful things.

Next I bought two sheets of decorated paper at a stationery store. They're encrusted with marbled swirls of paint, one in gold and white with hints of blue and the other in pale red, bronze and green. "Aren't they beautiful?" exclaimed the shop owner. "They're new, specially made in Thailand. And see, they're thick, too. Which sheet do you want? Why don't you go through them and examine them closely before you choose? Even though they look alike, each one is subtly different." She even told me how to iron out the creases if I folded them to mail as a gift. Bob and I also enjoyed the store's display of origami creatures, especially the dinosaurs, rhinos and wild boars made out of dollar bills, prudently displayed in a glass case.

We ate at a Chinese restaurant. When kimchee arrived at the table as our appetizer, we suspected it was actually a Korean-run Chinese restaurant, located in the heart of Japantown. We strolled through the Mall again. Through one store window, we saw an old woman sitting at a table folding origami. We passed someone else arranging flowers in a vase at a table in front of the Ikebana Society. We walked by the specialty cupcake store. It's the custom in many Japanese restaurants to display plastic replicas in the windows of the food you would be eating inside, bowls of ramen or plates of sushi. The cupcake store had done this, too. There were plastic replicas of cupcakes sitting pristinely in a transparent wall of cubicles. Each cupcake had its own little cubicle. It was cute, almost as cute as the bento boxes on sale throughout the Mall.  I badly want a bento box, but I haven't found the right one. I don't want it to be too cute, such as the ones with smiling pandas on top, but I don't want one that's too ornately formal either, such as the black lacquered boxes with their traditional cherry blossom designs.