News of the World

hey all,

Still got the vacation blahs. Too much free time and too little money is never a good combo.

As some of you know, I went to the doctor on Monday. It was a kinda sudden decision, so I didn't  have an appointment, and I also showed up late in the morning. Both of which resulted in me spending about 4 hours at the hospital.

They took what seemed like 10 different X-rays of my shoulder and elbow, and in the end the doctor said it was probably just muscle inflammation. Rest for a week, and hey, would you like these root beer scented patches with painkillers that are absorbed through the skin? Yes, they are actually root beer, or more specifically, wintergreen, scented. This is part of the reason why root beer is not popular in Japan: it smells like medicine to them.

So since Monday, I've been waking up, taking a shower, and slapping one of these on my shoulder, and spending the rest of the day doing not much at all. I read a little bit, go through a few pages in my level 3 Japanese study book, cook, and play video games.

Lately, I spend a lot of time getting to know my new house mate. He's from Alabama, and for some reason we share a lot of the same interests: cooking, games, movies, music, books, etc, so we've been cooking some lunches and dinners together (tonight was chili and margaritas) and chatting about random pieces of culture. He is listening to A Song of Ice and Fire as an audio book, so we usually spend a good bit of time going over where he's at in the series, and I dish out the latest piece of news from the author's blog, as I'm frothing at the mouth to read the next book, and also to see the HBO series, and basically can't shut up about it. I even rant to Michi a little about the books, and she's been reading snippets of my Japanese version, and is also looking forward to reading them in entirety once she finishes Holes.

Anyway, last weekend was pretty fun. Saturday, Michi and I made one of our usuals: healthy ramen. I opted to make tsukemen, which...Ok, Japanese people have a large number of types of noodles and several different ways of serving them. Ramen is typically thin noodles served with hot soup, and on a hot summer day that's the last thing I want to shovel into my piehole. So, tsukemen is the same setup, basically: thin noodles served with soup, but the noodles aren't in the soup. First they're cooled down, and then plated separately. You dunk them into the soup, which is still hot, but becomes cooled by the noodles as you eat it. Anyhoo. After that, I received a home made business-level Japanese quiz and got 70% right, and then we went to fireworks in the neighborhood where my elementary schools are. Pretty impressive, but I've yet to really figure out night time photo taking (all of them end up looking like crap), so I didn't even bother to try to photograph them.

If you are really anal retentive about food, Japan is not too bad a place to live, as long as you're anal retentive about Japanese food. As I've said before, Japan is mostly a country for Japanese people, and Japanese people like Japanese food. They don't seem to like Mexican food, for instance, as Mexican restaurants are hard to find, and good ones even rarer. As it happens, what Michi and I did on Sunday was go swimming (which further aggravated my shoulder), and discover by chance a really good Mexican restaurant. The prices were very decent, and the dishes all smelled, looked, and tasted amazing.

This coming weekend is anybody's guess. There was a trip that an outdoor club member organized that I wanted to do, but I also don't want to risk aggravating my shoulder anymore by carrying a heavy backpack around for 3 days. I think Michi might be going to her second house again, but I'm not sure if I'm being invited this time. If I did go, I wouldn't be able to do any chores for them (at least not ones that involved shoulder use), and I'm not sure how well that would fly. If I'm not invited, I might end up making root beer recipes all weekend. I bought 4 cans of root beer today, and I've been fantasizing about both root beer floats and root beer cup cakes.

Anyway, check out this for Japanese grocery shopping woes/info.