hey all,
So the big day is tomorrow. NHK is coming in and they will be filming. I'm really looking forward to next week ending, actually. Work has been going well, but this TV special has added a lot of unneeded and unwanted stress to everyone's lives. Luckily, I also have next weekend off. In fact, Friday is a national holiday, so I have a 3 day weekend.
This weekend was pleasant. I got to skype with a lot of my family, finally caught up with a couple friends, and even went indoor rock climbing. I also took some clothes in to the tailor to get a button reattached to a shirt, and to have some frayed edges and rips fixed in two pairs of dress pants. Sunday was apartment shopping. We looked at an area in between Tokyo and Yokohama, but the station's design would have been really inconvenient for us to use the train line we need to use, plus the area that would have made it convenient to use that line was not too convenient.
To understand more about why we have kind of lost interest in that area, you need to remember two things that I've mentioned here before. The first is reikin (礼金, for those who can read Japanese or who have Japanese enabled on your computer). This term pisses me off. It is often called "gift money," but it literally means something closer to "celebration money." I'm sure if I had convinced some poor sap to fork over 1-2 months worth of rent for no reason, I'd be celebrating too, but as the poor sap being forced to fork that over, I don't really see it that way. There is also shikikin (敷金), which is key money. This is usually 1-3 months rent.
So let's say you find a really nice place: good area, the building is not too old, flooring is solid wood, kitchen is spacious, etc. The rent is $700. You think to yourself Wow! That's a find! You look at the fees, and you gasp. The key money is 2 months, and the gift money is also 2 months. So although the rent is really cheap, to move in you have to pay $2800 up front. And you'd better like the place a lot, because the contract will be for 2 years, and at the end of two years, you will not get a single cent of that $2800 back. That is what we encountered at the first station. Although the rent itself was not too bad for most places, the fees were.
At the second station, we had more luck. Larger apartments for lower rent, and lower fees (gift money only 1 month, key money only one month). For me the second area would be pretty nice. Actually closer to where I work than I live right now, plus all the extra space, etc. My rent would actually be less than what I'm paying at my guesthouse, and I don't even get my own bathroom, kitchen or shower here. The problem is that Michi would have to find a job here in Yokohama, or face 50 minute commute on crowded and frequently delayed trains.
After apartment shopping, I gave in and on the way home bought some chicken, pineapple, ketchup, red pepper, onion, and vinegar. Can you guess what I made? That's right: sweet and sour chicken. Kinda a pain in the butt: you chop the chicken, dredge in flour+spices, then deep fry. The sauce is made by frying sliced carrots, onion, red pepper, garlic, and ginger, then adding pineapple, ketchup, vinegar, sugar, and cornstarch. I don't have an efficient way of saving the oil used by deep frying, so a lot of it gets dumped down the drain instead of going back into the bottle, and then you have to wash the cutting board, a bowl for dredging the chicken, a bowl for storing the cooked chicken, plus two pots (one for the sauce, and one for deep frying the chicken), and the knife. This may not seem like a lot, but the kitchen is small and I'm cooking by myself after all. I'm used to cooking things like spaghetti, curry, and mapo tofu, which basically require one pot, one knife, and one cutting board.
I had wanted to make a version using tofu (which you can get by the pound for about a dollar here (OK, OK, 400g for about 100 Yen, but nobody outside of Japan would understand that)) by Alton Brown, but his version just seems wrong. It calls for 2 pounds of tofu, 3 cups of ketchup, 2 cups of vinegar, 2 cups of pineapple, and all the other portions are similarly big. It calls for a lot of sugar, and even honey. Plus you have to marinate the tofu overnight, and I don't have big enough or even just enough tupperware containers to store all the food it would make.
I made a pretty passable version just by winging it. In any case, I have two large cases of mapo tofu for lunch for the next week, plus at least one more dinner's worth of sweet and sour chicken left over, so I'll be eating well the next few days.
Next weekend should be pretty exciting. We're planning on using the 3 day weekend to take a rock climbing lesson from the teacher who taught us how to multi-pitch climb, and have him teach us how to use protection. Yes, yes, stop laughing. In climbing, this means show us how to use things like cams, hexs, and nuts while climbing. We also have a trip planned in the same area to see an inactive volcano. They hold a yearly ceremony where they burn all the grass off the mountain to allow new grass to grow, and the plan is to see that and if we can, climb it before they burn it to see the dawn from the top.
My last item is that I still haven't received the results from my Japanese test, so I'm hoping that it comes next week.
Cheers,
