hey all,
Today is the 4th of July! I haven't been home in about 1.333 years. As much as I complain about things in the US (the obesity problem, the stupidity problem, the why-can't-I-find-some-decently-priced-delicious-food problem), I really do miss it. I miss seeing my family and friends, I miss being able to walk into a regular supermarket and finding food items from all over the world at reasonable prices. I miss the wide open spaces, big stores, and big houses.
In celebration of the US, Michi and I made hamburgers, or tried to. Her mother had given her some hamburger that was left over from making something else, but there were already chopped onions mixed into the meat. You see, to the Japanese, a "hamburger" is really what I would consider a meatloaf patty: it has onions, egg, and possibly bread crumbs mixed into it. Maybe 80% of the time, it will be served as is: just the patty with sauce on it, then veggies on the side, no bun. I have actually never seen a hamburger bun in a grocery store anywhere in Japan, so if you made them at home, you'd have to use regular bread.
In the interest of trying to save the purity of the already onion-violated hamburger, I refused to add egg to it, so when we fried it, the patties began to fall apart, and by the end they looked more like taco meat than hamburgers, but hey. We had to use regular bread, another concession to Japan's 99.9% ethnically Japanese population.
They tasted good (actually, quite excellent), but failed to give me that, "Ah, a little taste of home" feeling.
To analogize, one of the things that Japanese people usually can't believe is when I tell them I don't really care whether my soup is pork, salt, or soy sauce flavored. These are the main three flavors of soup, especially soup served with noodles. To me, they all taste about the same. I think, to the Japanese, anything foreign tends to get lumped into fairly broad categories. Hamburgers get grouped with meat loaf, waffles and pancakes get grouped with birthday cake, peanut butter gets grouped with chocolate sauce (I'm not even joking about this: this is how they think). I can somewhat understand this, since I'm doing something like it with their soup flavors, but we're still talking about soup here. Waffles and birthday cake are totally different. Peanut butter has a totally different composition of protein, carbohydrate, and fat than chocolate sauce.
Anyway, I'm probably freaking out a little because I just finished a 6 day work week, and I have 2 more 6-day work weeks coming up...I just realized that I haven't even described my how my first day of work at my new job was. My brain is running on fumes at the moment, so I'm going to put that on hold for a day or two. Tomorrow, I'll be doing yoga after work, so hopefully I can chill myself out a little. Wednesday, I have more training for my new job, so maybe Tuesday I can write up my first day experience.
Cheers,
