Shirakawa-go New Years Trip

Hey all,

For New Years 2018-2019, Michi and I made a small trip to Shirakawa-go, which is a village in Gifu Prefecture, Japan. From Tokyo, you're looking at a two-hour plus ride by bullet train, followed by about an hour and a half or two-hour bus ride. The reason you might want to travel to this out of the way area is because of the buildings. Shirakawa-go is home to dozens of traditionally constructed Japanese buildings, although the construction techniques and designs are somewhat unique to that area.

If you can ignore the lovely lady in the foreground, in the background you'll see a steeply peaked roof made of mats of woven grass. The walls are simple slats of wood, and the windows are made of rice paper. Yes, even in a place that gets several meters of snow each winter and regularly reaches temperatures of -10 C (that's 14 F for you non-metric folks), they have designed their houses to allow for maximum air flow.

Anyway. The buildings were fun to see, and you can pay a small fee to walk around inside them, where they also have tea and videos explaining the construction techniques. We spent the night at the wonderful Toyota Eco-Institute, which is a kind of research center that also provides accommodation for scientists who wish to study the Shirakawa-go buildings, although they also allow normal people to stay there. Dinner and breakfast were well-prepared and lovely, and the hotel offers a lot of different activities you can easily sign up for. Michi and I decided to take a snow shoe tour through the woods surrounding the hotel, and it was delightful. At one point the guide asked everyone to gather around a "special" tree so he could explain something about it, whereupon he shook the tree, dumping snow on everyone's heads. It was quite funny. Later, he invited those crazy enough to jump off the trail and into the snow, which was about 4 feet deep.

We also visited a couple of restaurants and locations in Takayama. Now, since the early 2000s it seems like Kobe beef has been a known item among foodies in the US. This is a kind of beef that is very tender, and has high levels of marbleization, due to the cows being forced not to move around, being given massages, and yes sometimes being force-fed beer. In recent years, another kind of beef has been gaining in prominence in Japan: Hida beef, which is beef from cows raised in the certain areas around Takayama in Gifu. So, whenever you visit here make sure you try some Hida beef and you will not be disappointed.

Although it was just a month ago that we made the trip, it really drove home how much I miss snow. The Kanto area of Japan has a little in common with Amsterdam, in terms of weather patterns. One is the overall mildness of the winters here, and the lack of snow.

I highly recommend checking out Shirakawa-go. Thanks for reading!

My Soy-Called Life

hey all,

Does anyone remember that TV series? With Claire Danes and Jared Leto way back in the day?

I was just reflecting on my lactose-intolerance. Here is about two weeks worth of soy milk.

Compare with my brother's weekly supply of milk.

Some chocolate mousse made from chocolate and silken tofu.

I also like to make mango lassis using mango juice and soy milk instead of yogurt. I've found that modern yogurt has the milk sugar added back into it after the bacteria have done their work, and will still upset my stomach some.

Cheers,

Nostalgia

hey all,

This weekend was Michi's interview for the Eiken Pre-2. We're not sure if she passed or not. I guess she'll get the results in about three weeks.

We finally got our kitchen knife back from the store. We took it in the weekend before to get it sharpened, and the whole week in between was tough. Michi's old knife is about as sharp as the broad side of a barn, so cutting fruits and vegetables is not easy, and forget about chicken.

Yesterday we finally got around to making falafel. We had the ingredients for it a week ago, but weren't able to get around to it. We used canned garbanzo beans, and fresh grated onion and garlic, and of course plenty of spices. Once fried, the insides were softer than I remembered from the co-op, but still really good. It really took me back to be able to have that food again, and especially to make it from scratch (even more "from scratch" than we made it at the co-op). Although it feels like I've been enjoying something of a Renaissance at my current job, living at the co-op was also such a time. I learned a lot about life, school, friends, food, and work while living there.

Cheers,

Nara Story and Pics

hey all,

The story of Nara goes like this.

I had wanted to check out various places in Nara in 2010, when Brian came and visited me in Japan. However, he was pretty worn out from tramping around Kyoto, and really just wanted to head back to Yokohama and chill. So I didn't get to do any sightseeing that time.

Last year, Michi's parents visited Nara during March and went to see a festival called Omizutori. They gave us a few sprigs of semi-burnt pine branch as souvenirs. Her parents explained what would happen during the festival, most of which I didn't understand too well, but it sounded interesting and Michi was more or less determined to go.

So we booked a really nice ryokan, and started looking up places to see. The festival is held at night, so we got to spend a whole day and a half sightseeing, and of course got to see the festival as well.

Kofukuji's 5 storied pagoda was actually visible from the outdoor hot tub at the ryokan. We got to take in Todaiji, Horyuji, and one other temple whose name I can't remember right now.

Nara is famous for these deer, among other things. They're viewed as messengers from the gods, and are quite tame. In my view, they are really boring creatures. They just stand there in the middle of the streets and sidewalks, waiting for people to give food to them.

Todaiji, which houses the biggest bronze Buddha in Japan, is also the largest wooden building in the world.

In Todaiji, there is this pillar with a hole in it. Those who are able to pass through it are supposed to achieve enlightenment in the next life. So it looks like I'm set.

Some early cherry blossoms at Horyuji with a 5-story in the background.

You might want to view the video I took of part of the ceremony. It is not the most riveting but it does have its moments. I have to apologize for the really annoying Japanese people from Hiroshima that you can hear commenting on everything. I wanted to tell them to shut up, but...


The main "snag" is that I forgot my glove liners and winter hat in the bathroom at Nara as we were waiting for the train to Kyoto (and from thence, by shinkansen to Shinagawa). I don't know if I'll be able to get them back. If not, I'll just have to pick up a new pair of liners and a new winter hat.

Cheers,

Fatigue

hey all,

The fatigue in the title has several meanings. I was planning a much longer, more in depth blog post about school, some news concerning Michi, and some pictures of a meal.

But then the weekend happened. We had a medium sized earthquake earlier today, not too far from Tokyo. No real damage, but still unnerving. Michi and I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey on Saturday and made homemade Gapao rice, a sweet-spicy ground chicken dish, originally from Thailand (I think).

I did a bunch of typing for work on Saturday morning, but managed to get some Battlefield 3 time in with Brian.

Today, I've been sorting through files on my computer, doing laundry, vacuuming, playing Skyrim and Battlefield 3, and I cooked my lunch for next week: mapo tofu.

That'll have to be all.

Cheers,

What?!

hey all,

First some A Dance with Dragons stuff. I read a bunch of it while riding the shinkansen and at Michi's family's second house, since there is little to do each day after dark falls. I actually stayed up until 2AM last night to finish it, and I need to go to bed early today to make up for the lost sleep.

It was a pretty good book. It is certainly up to the same high standards as his previous releases, and as ever the tone, description etc are on target.

Some of the plot devices seem to be getting a bit stale, though. A character thought to have died before the first book even began is brought back and his existence is explained by having been switched places with another baby. A similar ploy was used in the second book, where two characters are "executed" for trying to escape, when in fact their executioner was unable to find them and used some poor peasant bodies instead. And actually, another character was pretend executed, with yet another body double taking his place in the current book. And in the previous book, another character's place is taken by a look alike, and that look alike continues her role in this book. And yet another character is "killed off," only to have it later revealed that he is still alive, and a sorceress used magic to swap his and another character's appearance (so that the other character was actually killed). I think you get the idea.

From reading his blog, it seems that timing and pacing were major troubles for him in the writing of it. At the end of book 3 and/or 4, several characters were all making their way toward one of the main characters, and it seems that GRRM sweated the details of who would arrive when, in what order, and what the consequences would be of arriving at different times and in different orders. As I read the book, I could almost feel this. The same storm or set of storms messes with the ships of several characters, causing them to arrive earlier or later than they had planned. Some characters encounter mishap after mishap, only to finally make it within mere feet of their goal and still not quite accomplish it. Some make it to their goal, and arrive too late to achieve it. Half of them haven't even arrived, but are still en route or have abandoned their quest as of the end of A Dance with Dragons. I suppose he got the timing he wanted, but parts of it feel very contrived. Perhaps the delays of some characters will be given meaning in the later books.

Lastly, there are the cliff hangers. As a fan who has waited 6 years to find out what happens to his favorite characters (all three were excluded from the last volume), the prospect of facing another 6 years waiting to see if some of them have really truly been killed off is not high on my list of things I want. One of my favorite character's last chapter ends with him being stabbed in the stomach and between the shoulder blades by some of his own men-at-arms. This character has been in the books from day one, and to me at least, I had always envisioned him shacking up with one of the other major characters and ruling the world together in happiness and peace. But now it seems he is dead, maybe.

This should not have surprised me. Other characters were growing more and more frustrated with his actions, and some of them warned him to keep more protectors around himself. Like other characters that GRRM has killed off in the past, most notably the blood bath in A Storm of Swords, where several major characters were killed. And of course even in the first book, GRRM infamously pulls no punches and has the central character executed, as many of you will have seen in HBO's adaptation, Game of Thrones.

I can only hope that he will be rescued and healed in the mean time.

Oh well. The 3 day weekend was pretty fun. We did some gardening work, which for me involved pretending to be a squirrel and cutting off more branches that were shading the backyard. And after than we did a BBQ on Saturday which was delicious: grilled strips of beef, chicken, onion, eggplant, carrot, and potato. Sunday was devoted to hiking up Mt. Azuma. I got sunburned on my hands, my upper arms, the back of my neck, and the lower half of my legs, despite slopping on plenty of SPF 50 sunblock before we even started. Some of it must have sweated or been rubbed off, because the sunburned areas are only in patches. I also got bit on my ribs by some crazy insect. As I was hiking, my left ribs started to hurt when my backpack strap pressed against them, and I figured the bag was just poorly designed. Turns out there was a bug which was biting my skin there and I didn't notice until I had to pull the thing off me in the shower. It refused to let go and I had to try three times to get it off me. It looked a bit like a small spider, but I'm not sure what it was.

That night, we also watched Norwegian Wood, a movie based on the partly autobiographical book by famous Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Nowhere near as compelling as the book, but compared to the usual mess that the Japanese make when making a movie these days (and especially when compared to the crap is gets produced when adapting a book or comic into a movie) it wasn't bad. Not as compelling as A Dance with Dragons, which I also brought along with me to read on the shinkansen and when we'd finished the day's grilling, hiking, and gardening. But still decent.

I got to play with my new Android phone a little bit, but it seems like other smartphones it can't hold a charge for longer than three or four days. I ask you, what use is a smartphone with a built in compass, GPS locator, and thermometer on a multi-day wilderness trek if I have to plug it in at night to be able to use these functions? Still, overall a cool tool.

Lastly, it seems we have the contract for our new place taken care of, so it only remains to wait a few weeks and then I move my stuff in, and the weekend after that, she moves her stuff in. We had planned to talk about house rules this weekend, but between me having my nose glued to A Dance with Dragons and the grilling, gardening, movie watching, and hiking, we felt that our plates were full. I will push for next weekend.

Below, please enjoy some of the pictures of the trip.

Cheers,

Week

hey all,

The season finale of Game of Thrones was pretty amazing. Of course, the climax of the book is by far one of the highest points that I've encountered in literature, but with some sour chords lingering in the background and of course a feeling of "This could be going there or there, but either one would be stupendous."

Lately, I've been gorging myself on nata de coco, which is a dish from the Philippines made from fermented coconut water. It has a texture that is very unique, maybe best described as sweetened juicy wax. Although that might not sound delicious, it is. I eat about 2 cups or so at a time, which is probably overkill, but it is that scrumptious.

I think we're getting together a foursome for rock climbing on Sunday, which should be exciting.

In other news, I've finally gotten around to logging in to my student loan website and calculated that if I pay $1000 per month from July, 2011 until January, 2014 I can completely pay off my student loans. For some reason, their website doesn't seem to support you figuring this out right there, but if you have the interest rates and the principle, you can figure out the rest yourself with a spreadsheet program.

I think next week's lunch will be lamb and barley stew by Alton Brown. This week, I bought some frozen fried chicken, gyoza and shumai (both are Chinese pot stickers: basically just pork with spice with a wonton wrapper), and I've been alternating one for lunch, the other for dinner, then the third for the next day's lunch, etc. However, the temperature has been around 28C (that's about 82F for all of you in Burma, Liberia, and the US), but the humidity has been above 70%, so you always feel like you've got glue on your skin. In any case, frying every night is not really the thing you want to be doing in this kind of weather, so I'm going back to my "slave over a stove for a 1.5 hours- eat for a week" pattern.

Classes are for the most part going well. I'm working on the history book study guide a little, day by day, and it is coming along nicely.

Cheers,

Enoshima, or In Praise of Spontaneity

hey all,

The original plan for today was to go rock climbing either at a gym in Tokyo or head over to Yugawara for the millionth time, but...Well, life happens. We woke up a little late, but yesterday I had realized on my to Tokyo that I had left the 2.8L of sweet and sour chicken I'd made sitting on the floor cooling next to my refrigerator. Two red peppers, 1 carrot, 1Kg of chicken thigh meat, 1 can of pineapple, ketchup, vinegar, and a whole lot of arrowroot starch...No way was I going to let that sit out for 36 hours and probably spoil in the meantime. 12 hours, yes. But 36?

Yes, 2.8 liters of homemade sweet and sour chicken. When you get home at 7PM and arrive at work at 8:30AM, you tend to cook lots at once, and feast throughout the week

So instead, I left before Michi and went back to my apartment and put the food in the fridge. We met back at Yokohama station and headed to Enoshima, which you can read about here or here.

If you go there, you will see lots of dragons everywhere, because of a legend that after an especially powerful earthquake, a 5-headed dragon popped out of the island (which itself had suddenly appeared) and started to lay waste to the surrounding villages and villagers. One day, the dragon encountered a beautiful goddess, and fell in love with her. The goddess, however, refused give her love to the dragon unless he changed his ways. From then on, he became a helpful dragon and stopped terrorizing and devouring the villagers.

One of the pillars on the bridge leading to Enoshima.

Mt. Fuji just barely visible in the distance.

One of the caves and the candle/torch the give you to light your way.

Turtle Rock

One of the cooler dragon shrines on the island.

There are tons of these eagles? around. They look like Golden eagles, but I'm not sure.

Two pieces of fried whale meat, which I bought at a street vender and yes, I ate. Pretty good, but not sure if it justifies killing them.

In other news, I'm still in the process of renewing my visa. I sent them the papers they asked for, and they responded by saying that the type of visa I have is not the correct kind for the kind of workplace I'm currently at, so I need to change it. And, hooray, in order to change it there is even more paperwork that both my company and I need to gather, fill out, and mail in. I sometimes wonder if it might not be better for all involved if the Japanese just went back to beheading foreigners who crossed into Japanese territory.

Cheers,

Trips

hey all,

So things are busy. I guess one of the nice things, about myself at least, is that when I'm busy I generally keep my room clean, organize my time a bit better, and don't waste it on stupid things. The downside is that I'm busy, so I don't have relaxation time or even enough time to fit in errands sometimes.

Take today for example. My one errand that I wanted to get done was to do a wire transfer to the US. But we had a 3 day holiday, so when I tried in the morning before class, I couldn't get through because I bet lots of people were trying to get their own bank errands done before the weekend. And between 1:30 and 6:45, I had 30 minutes of free time, split up into ten minutes, ten minutes, ten minutes, which is not enough time to prepare for the next class and make a phone call.

In any case, Ogawayama was...dramatic, to say the least. On the first day, Michi and I went to a rock in the Family Rocks area, called Mara Iwa (Mara Rock, or something like Penis Rock in old Japanese). This is a rather tall pillar of rock which features a lot of slab climbing: smooth, almost flat and featureless rock walls. We climbed a few routes there but most of them were out of our league.

The next day we had a climbing lesson, but...that's where the drama comes in. For now, I'll just say that we finished the lesson early, and went hiking around the Rooftop Rocks area.

The last day was lots of fun. We went over to Mother Rock, again in the Family Rocks area. Most of the routes on Mother Rock are 5.8, 5.9, and a few 5.10's and above. We climbed almost everything that we could, something like 8 or 9 routes in 6 hours. With a really satisfying day of climbing in the bag, after two days of frustration and disappointment, we went back to Tokyo.

And back to work. Monday was a normal day at work, more or less. But Monday night, we left for our second trip, to Michi's second house near Mt. Asama. We got to check out a field strewn with volcanic rock, a shrine where Masayuki Sanada is buried, Ueda Castle (where the Sanada clan ruled), and also a waterfall. Of course, there was also the usual gardening and yard work as well, but for the most part, fun stuff prevailed.

Mara Rock on the right, and Older Sister Rock on the left.

A strange indentation in one of the rocks in Rooftop.

Our lodge seen from the top of one of the routes at Mother Rock.

Mt. Asama

Entrance gate to the volcanic rock field.

Me doing the demon rock thing.

Cookies made to look like volcanic rock, supposedly with some of the rock ground up inside them.

A cherry blossom tree near the Hasedera in Ueda where Masayuki Sanada is buried.

One of the remained turrets of Ueda Castle.

A waterfall we stopped by on the way back to Tokyo.

And then today, Friday, was of course another normal work day, but it felt like Monday. I kept on commenting on it during the day, but none of the kids got the joke. The parents did, though.

Cheers,

Big Day

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,

Hahhhh.

hey all,

I had a great weekend. I didn't have to work on Saturday, so I picked up some root beer,chipotle Tabasco sauce, and tea from Kaldi, bought a new shower puff ball, and also two new study books for Japanese. My favorite website, smart.fm, is becoming a paysite soon so I won't be able to use it. I also made a fresh batch of peanut butter, but I do this almost weekly, so it isn't that big a deal.

I studied a little bit of Japanese, played some video games (and decided to sell 3 more games, leaving me with only two), until I went to Tokyo to meet up with Travis. A long island ice tea later, and we were watching Gantz at a nearby theater. Although it probably won't make it to US theaters, should you get the opportunity to see it, don't bother. The manga is much better, and if you haven't read the manga, you won't understand what is going on anyway. If you have read the manga, then you will just be disappointed at the shallow characterization, poor handling of the alien fights, and the disjointed pace at which the movie proceeds.

Sunday, Michi and I came to Yokohama and walked around the Chinatown district. No, there weren't any shootings, strange water shortages, or incestuous relationships (if none of that makes sense, go see Chinatown with Jack Nicholson), but there were some colorful temples, lots of Chinese grocery stores, and some really good Chinese restaurants. We had picked where we were going to eat from the internet before getting there, but we kind of stumbled onto the restaurant while taking in the sights. For 2000 Yen each, we got a bowl of mapo dofu, some sweet and sour pork, fried pork cutlet with chopped greens and jellyfish, a bowl of corn egg-drop soup, and a coconut flavored pudding/jelly of some sort. Everything was delicious, but I think I now have an unhealthy obsession with mapo dofu, because I'm now determined to see if I can make it myself and have it taste like that restaurant's. I've found 3 ingredients that are only listed in some versions of the recipe that I think will be the keys. In particular, there is a pepper-like spice called sansho in Japanese which gives you the weirdest feeling in your mouth, kind of like licking a battery except more pleasant.

The only other things worthy of note are that we now have new shower rooms at my guesthouse, which is nice because the old ones were really bad, and that I should be getting the results from the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) in the next two weeks or so.

Cheers,

Shoes, Etc

hey all,

I mentioned that I had sent my climbing shoes in to a shop to be repaired, but they had come back not fully repaired. On climbing shoes, there is the sole, which is made from a special type of rubber, and there is the RAND, to which the sole is attached. The RAND is attached to the leather of the shoe, and that is where one of my problem areas was: the RAND had pulled away or detached from the leather in some spots. The other problem was that my soles were starting to wear thin in some spots. I got new fronts on the soles, but for some reason the RAND had not been reattached to the leather. So, I bought some superglue, and went to town on the seams, and then duct taped them in place for 24 hours to make sure the bond held.

I haven't climbed on them yet, but I think they should hold. They are getting old anyway, and instead of getting them repaired again, next time I might just buy a new pair. These I'll keep, and they can be my back up pair.

I've been planning on writing about rice treats for some time, but have never gotten around to it. A lot of things in Japan are made from rice (go figure): bread can be made from rice. There are manju, which are are streamed cakes of flour and rice flour that have different fillings.

Senbei, which are rice crackers. It is actually dismissive to just say "rice crackers:" senbei come in a bewildering number of different shapes, sizes, and flavors.

There are mochi, which are balls made of pounded glutinous rice. Even this is dismissive: mochi come in many varieties, and are eaten in many different ways.

Sake is brewed from rice, as is amazake (a type of sweet drink which is one of the precursors to real sake but has no alcohol in it).

Kasu, which is the solids that remain after sake has been brewed, fermented, and filtered, ss used as an ingredient in some soups. And of course, they just eat the stuff  (rice, that is) by itself.

In other news, come January 16th I will have been in Japan for 1 year and 10 months, minus the four days I spent in the US. The 2 year mark is just around the corner.

Today was tough because one of the teachers decided to not come in without warning anyone. No call, no email. Everyone had to scramble and cover some of his afternoon classes, and miraculously our boss found a potential candidate to come in and cover his morning class. I'd hate to be him if he comes tomorrow.

Cheers,

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.

Cooking

hey all,

Pretty decent week so far. On Monday I went into Shinjuku to renew my housing contract. I also was struck by an urge to make BBQ sauce, yet another commodity that is hard to find in Japan. After searching around a bit, here is what I made.

1/2 cup ketchup
1/4 cup sugar
1 medium onion
3 tbs lemon juice
1 cup Dr Pepper
chipotle Tabasco sauce to taste
salt, pepper, chili powder, and cumin to taste
1 tbs corn starch

This is a really simple one. Chop the onion very finely and fry it. Once soft, just mix everything minus the corn starch together in a sauce pan with the onion, and boil it for 10-15 minutes or until it starts to thicken up. To help with the thickening, add the corn starch (dissolved into 1/4 cup of cold water, of course). This makes a pretty decent BBQ sauce. I cut the sugar by half from the original recipe, but it was still a little too sweet. Next time, I'd add some mustard powder and maybe some vinegar.

Yesterday, the cooking spree continued. First, I went swimming for an hour at the local pool, and then my new housemate and I made hamburgers topped with my BBQ. Then we made an apple pound cake, which turned out really well, despite almost burning the house down. We made two batches: one which we tried to cook in my Pyrex bowl in the toaster oven, and the second which we cooked in the pan you see below.

Batter
3/4 cup oil
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1.5 cups flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 apples, diced
1/2 cup chopped nuts

Icing
1 stick of butter
2 tsp milk
1/2 cup sugar

This one is also really easy. Just mix everything for the batter together, put in a greased baking dish, and bake. I can't really tell you about times, because we used a toaster oven: about 20-25 minutes on 290W seemed to work fine for our half batch. For the icing, just put everything into a pot and simmer it for 20-30 minutes, stirring often. If you have extra apple, add that to the icing as well. Coat the cake with the icing.

Dinner was BBQ beef rice.

Cheers,