beet soup
Today I had some wonderful beet soup with my friend Madison. Well, technically it was beet tom kha! Which is even better, because tom kha is my favorite soup. Coincidentally, it is also my friend Sam’s favorite soup. Since she lives in San Francisco and we can’t get together in person, we have sometimes made dinner together virtually, cooking the same dish in our own apartments. We’ve made tom kha once or twice. I’m going to visit her in San Francisco soon and we have plans to make tom kha together in real life. Finally! I can’t wait :)
I had the beet soup after going to a barre class with Madison. It was interesting! Different than I thought it would be, but fun. I thought it would be more like dancing. Instead, it felt like a body strength workout - a lot of slowly holding poses that challenged your balance and strength. It challenged me (physically) in a similar way to Tai Chi, which I enjoyed learning last year. I quit Tai Chi to join a gym that has a lot of workout classes. Not sure if I made the right choice yet. The gym is easier to go to because it has a wide variety of classes to keep you interested - yoga, strength, spin. And it’s more anonymous, so there’s no social pressure. But I do miss the mental challenge of Tai Chi, the discipline it required. And the community it fostered. There was a real sense of reverence there.
On my way home I passed an advertisement for a Hiroshige exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. I hadn’t heard of him before seeing this poster, but I recognized one of the works featured in the ad! I bought a tapestry with a print of one of his landscapes at a Japanese street festival in Manhattan last year with my brother, and it’s been hanging in my apartment since. It features a cat looking out a window at a landscape. I learned that it is called 浅草田甫酉の町詣 (Rice fields at Asakusa, shrine-visiting at Tori-no-machi). The artist, Hiroshige, was the last great master of ukiyo-e, a style of colorful woodblock prints, popular from the 17th-19th century in Japan. Famous examples of ukiyo-e include Housaki’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre, by Kuniyoshi, The art form was apparently an inspiration to Monet and Van Gogh. I’ll have to go see the exhibit! And learn more about art history.
