Saturday

While leaving the apartment yesterday, the security bar on our front door broke off in my hands. This sort of thing doesn't even raise my eyebrows anymore. I just dropped the pieces of the mechanism off at the front desk on the way out the door and it was fixed when I returned. Fixed too tightly, actually: now I have to shove resolutely to shut the door. Fabulous; but still no eyebrows. If you're interested, I've been spending too much time this week shut away in my dark office crafting photographs to put online. After hours of this, I've finally finished a measly five more images from the series I took in Kentucky last Spring. They are here if you want them. Last night I met Sunshine for a sushi dinner in a restaurant she'd noticed down a low hallway and up a flight of stairs overlooking the busy intersection of Lê Lợi and Nguyễn Huệ Streets across from the Rex Hotel. It's a very sterile and utile sushi diner with red furniture and tiled walls. It was my first experience of a conveyor-belt sushi place, a type of restaurant I've seen around but never had the opportunity to try. Pre-made morsels motor slowly around the bar, color-coded to price lists glued down at every place setting. Interesting, but we ordered from the menu anyway (and I discovered that conveyor-belt sushi, a culinary goal in theory, plays on my general prejudice against buffet restaurants in practice). The menu was probably more expensive. We had good sake and flower tea complimenting a great pile of tobiko which the menu showed being served in a hollowed-out cucumber, but actually came on a leaf stuck to the little bamboo lattice of a serving tray by a large wad of green wasabi. [Cavin]