Yer a wizard, Herschel + 🍜🎞
2018-Apr-22, Sunday 12:01![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Time now to rest, but I was busy the last two days. Account below.
I kept telling people that I was going to "Wizard Shabbat" on Friday night because it was shorter and basically correct. It was actually a Harry Potter-themed Shabbat dinner put on by Wicker Park Moishe House, which was just far enough away that I went to Wicker Park straight after work rather than going home and having to immediately turn around and leave again. But I got there at 5:15 and dinner wasn't until 7:30, so first I went to the The Moth and bought the companion tea bowl to the one I wrote about here, so now I have one that's pale green and one that's pink-white, like a cherry blossom. Then I went to a tea shop and sat and read Murder on the Orient Express while drinking bubble tea, and I think that's the first time I've ever done that in my life. I never studied in coffee shops or anything while I was in school.
Then, when the time came, I walked a few blocks to the Moishe House and entered another world.
The amount of Harry Potter content vs. the amount of Jewish content was roughly 80-20, not counting the attendees. I talked to one of the people living in the house later on, and she mentioned that she'd quiz people about their houses (she correctly guessed I was a Slytherin) and sometimes they'd reply something like, "We're in your house," which obviously completely misses the point. The invitation did say that no Harry Potter knowledge was required, though. And other than lightning the Shabbat candles before eating, it was pretty much a costume party.
There were far more people there than I was expecting, though. The event on OneTable had 14 people, which I thought would be a lot but was still doable. However, there were also all the people who signed up on Facebook, and the people who heard through word of mouth, so there were more like 45 people there. It was a bit overwhelming until a person in the line for food struck up a conversation with me and then I ended up talking to him and the people sitting at the table when we ate, a woman and her Israeli fiance. After that, everything went a lot smoother. I ended up getting a ride home from another attendee who lives in Edgewater and we bonded over the Legend of Zelda.
I'm really glad I found OneTable. I foresee getting a lot of use out of it.
Saturday morning I lay in bed for a bit and then got up and got on the train to head downtown for Ramen Time! Along with![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
meowtima, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
drydem, and mutantur, I went to Ramen-San to get ramen prior to the ramen movie. And such ramen it was:
...okay, that's actually not true. The noodles weren't chewy enough, and while the broth wasn't bad, it wasn't fantastic either. It was good, but that's all, and when I'm paying $18 for American ramen rather than ¥800 for Japanese ramen, I want to get my money's worth to the extent that's possible. Ramen-San also had okonomiyaki, but it was both 1) Osaka-style and 2) Some kind of weird deconstructed version. The negi and bonito were shoved off to the side, there were no noodles...I'm not sure what was going on. I posted the picture on Facebook with the commentary お好み焼きという食べ物んだけど、いったい何これ？ ("What the hell, they're calling this okonomiyaki?") and several people I know in Japan were pretty amused. America!
I have no similar complaints about the movie, though! We went to the Gene Siskel Film Center to see Ramen Heads, a documentary mostly about Tomita Osamu, whose ramen shop has won best ramen in Japan five years running, with some diversions into other acclaimed ramen chefs elsewhere in Japan. His shop serves food from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., but his apprentices arrive at 7 a.m. and stay until 11 p.m. prepping the food and cleaning the shop. If Tomita can't be there to personally oversee the process, the shop doesn't open.
In some ways, this is just another case of using passion as a resource to enable exploitation of workers. They're working 16-hour days and their boss is working six-hour days. Alienated from the product of their labor, etc. But on the other hand, the ramen looked amazingly delicious. Going to dinner beforehand was definitely the right idea--drydem mentioned afterwards that if we hadn't eaten lunch beforehand, he would have immediately had to make a beeline for the nearest ramen restaurant and I certainly would have joined him.
They used two different terms that were translated as "ramen head" in the subtitles. The first was ラーメン通 (ramentsū, "ramen connoisseur"), which is simple enough. The second was ラーメン馬鹿 (ramenbaka, "Fool for ramen"), which is a great Twitter and Instagram hashtag as long as you aren't hungry when you look at it. And now I want ramen for dinner, but I've already taken ingredients out to thaw. Sigh.
Speaking of, I went home from ramen and thenlisekatevans invited me over for dinner, so after a bit of time at home I bought some rye bread and went to her house. We were later joined by a couple other people, so we spent a long time cooking chocolate cake, garlic broccoli, steaks, and bruschetta, and by "we," I mostly mean the others. I contributed by cleaning and also by eating the finished product. I went home at 1 a.m., slept badly, and here I am on Sunday.
I have gotten nothing done today other than writing this. Now that it's done, I'm off to the store to go shop for the week and in a bit I'm going to start cooking dinner--fish curry, the same curry I wrote about here. Add that to the leftover curry I already had and it'll be a curry-filled week. May your own weeks also be as tasty.
I kept telling people that I was going to "Wizard Shabbat" on Friday night because it was shorter and basically correct. It was actually a Harry Potter-themed Shabbat dinner put on by Wicker Park Moishe House, which was just far enough away that I went to Wicker Park straight after work rather than going home and having to immediately turn around and leave again. But I got there at 5:15 and dinner wasn't until 7:30, so first I went to the The Moth and bought the companion tea bowl to the one I wrote about here, so now I have one that's pale green and one that's pink-white, like a cherry blossom. Then I went to a tea shop and sat and read Murder on the Orient Express while drinking bubble tea, and I think that's the first time I've ever done that in my life. I never studied in coffee shops or anything while I was in school.
Then, when the time came, I walked a few blocks to the Moishe House and entered another world.
The amount of Harry Potter content vs. the amount of Jewish content was roughly 80-20, not counting the attendees. I talked to one of the people living in the house later on, and she mentioned that she'd quiz people about their houses (she correctly guessed I was a Slytherin) and sometimes they'd reply something like, "We're in your house," which obviously completely misses the point. The invitation did say that no Harry Potter knowledge was required, though. And other than lightning the Shabbat candles before eating, it was pretty much a costume party.
There were far more people there than I was expecting, though. The event on OneTable had 14 people, which I thought would be a lot but was still doable. However, there were also all the people who signed up on Facebook, and the people who heard through word of mouth, so there were more like 45 people there. It was a bit overwhelming until a person in the line for food struck up a conversation with me and then I ended up talking to him and the people sitting at the table when we ate, a woman and her Israeli fiance. After that, everything went a lot smoother. I ended up getting a ride home from another attendee who lives in Edgewater and we bonded over the Legend of Zelda.
I'm really glad I found OneTable. I foresee getting a lot of use out of it.
Saturday morning I lay in bed for a bit and then got up and got on the train to head downtown for Ramen Time! Along with
drydem, and mutantur, I went to Ramen-San to get ramen prior to the ramen movie. And such ramen it was:...okay, that's actually not true. The noodles weren't chewy enough, and while the broth wasn't bad, it wasn't fantastic either. It was good, but that's all, and when I'm paying $18 for American ramen rather than ¥800 for Japanese ramen, I want to get my money's worth to the extent that's possible. Ramen-San also had okonomiyaki, but it was both 1) Osaka-style and 2) Some kind of weird deconstructed version. The negi and bonito were shoved off to the side, there were no noodles...I'm not sure what was going on. I posted the picture on Facebook with the commentary お好み焼きという食べ物んだけど、いったい何これ？ ("What the hell, they're calling this okonomiyaki?") and several people I know in Japan were pretty amused. America!
I have no similar complaints about the movie, though! We went to the Gene Siskel Film Center to see Ramen Heads, a documentary mostly about Tomita Osamu, whose ramen shop has won best ramen in Japan five years running, with some diversions into other acclaimed ramen chefs elsewhere in Japan. His shop serves food from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., but his apprentices arrive at 7 a.m. and stay until 11 p.m. prepping the food and cleaning the shop. If Tomita can't be there to personally oversee the process, the shop doesn't open.
In some ways, this is just another case of using passion as a resource to enable exploitation of workers. They're working 16-hour days and their boss is working six-hour days. Alienated from the product of their labor, etc. But on the other hand, the ramen looked amazingly delicious. Going to dinner beforehand was definitely the right idea--
drydem mentioned afterwards that if we hadn't eaten lunch beforehand, he would have immediately had to make a beeline for the nearest ramen restaurant and I certainly would have joined him.They used two different terms that were translated as "ramen head" in the subtitles. The first was ラーメン通 (ramentsū, "ramen connoisseur"), which is simple enough. The second was ラーメン馬鹿 (ramenbaka, "Fool for ramen"), which is a great Twitter and Instagram hashtag as long as you aren't hungry when you look at it. And now I want ramen for dinner, but I've already taken ingredients out to thaw. Sigh.
Speaking of, I went home from ramen and then
I have gotten nothing done today other than writing this. Now that it's done, I'm off to the store to go shop for the week and in a bit I'm going to start cooking dinner--fish curry, the same curry I wrote about here. Add that to the leftover curry I already had and it'll be a curry-filled week. May your own weeks also be as tasty.
