hey all,
So we are rapidly approaching Valentine's Day here in Japan. And boy does it show. Girls and women are rushing around everywhere buying supplies to make chocolate sweets for their lovers/husbands, or they are rushing to stores to buy some "giri-choco" (that's something like "obligation chocolate") for their coworkers and bosses.
In Japan, girls give chocolates to their boyfriends on Valentine's Day, and boys reciprocate with a present 3 times as expensive a month later on a holiday called White Day. Why the sexes are separated, I don't know, but that's how they do it.
Michi and I decided to make a some chocolate cake, so I picked out the Fudge Cake recipe from Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food. Instead of going for the cake, we went with cupcakes, and I swapped the chocolate frosting out for some cream cheese frosting. The only hitch was the toaster over. For some reason the thing just did a terrible job of cooking them, so the second batch we did in her microwave (which doubles as a toaster oven) and they turned out fine.
Today is the last day of my current curriculum design class. I submitted the last assignment, a syllabus for a hypothetical class and a class rubric, yesterday. I think I'm going to take the next "semester" off, and sign up for the following class after I get back from my trip to the US.
And today, we finally went hiking for the first time since Hakone. We went to Kamakura and hiked from the Big Buddha statue over to Kita-Kamakura station. There was a somewhat mysterious shrine halfway along the path, and there was also a shrine that featured money laundering. No, not the illegal kind. You bring some coins or bills and wash them in a stream, and the money is supposed to multiply.
Michi found a absolutely hilarious movie on Hulu. The English title would be something like The Brass-Knuckle Boys (少年メリケンサック) . It is about a young girl who works at a record company. She sees a video of a punk band from the 80's on youtube, and decides to try to reunite them.
Over and out.
Cheers,
