While I have your attention

First of all: Sorry about the picture. That's what I get for being lazy and using a link instead of uploading pictures. The pictures change. There's some complicated computer explanation with remote servers and hotlinks and other words that I don't quite understand so, I'll say this: It was not on purpose an I'm sorry for those of you whose minds have been scarred.

And NOW, because you're waiting to hear about my school, I'll take advantage of the situation. This post contains all of the thoughts I've had or things I've noticed that don't have enough substance to actually turn into a blog post, but that I think are still interesting. There is no particular order or progression at all, it is merely what comes to my mind.

I do not know how the Japanese:
cut things with chopsticks
don't make a mess when eating noodles with sauce on them
put their lace-up shoes on so quickly
avoid being smelly and sweaty in a country where A/C is a surprise

Sensei is always talking about how the Japanese do nothing but study and school is really important, but I haven't talked to a kid yet who didn't fail at least one of their tests this semester.

On the same note, my International English class is not very good at speaking English.

There are some sounds that the Japanese just cannot make; the a sound in 'banana,' 'fan' is one of them.

I didn't know how all of the girls here are so skinny, because food is abundant and their P.E. classes are a joke.

I later found out why everyone is so skinny; I think I'm the only person in this country who isn't on a diet.

I think I've discovered why the girls here are so girly. If they weren't they would be confused as guys, because guys in Japan are so feminine. Sometimes on the bus or the subway I like to play a fun game called 'Guess the Gender.' In the past few days I have seen three people that had, and still have me completely stumped.

GUESS THE GENDER (answers are at the bottom)
It's a little hard to sneak pictures of people on subways and in public, so these are all just off of the interent, and they are the most androgynous of the androgyny.





ANSWER: They're all men. I admit the guy in the skirt is a bit much, but you get the picture.

There are drink vending machines all around Japan, but I haven't seen one that sells food the whole time I've been here.

The Japanese can handle 106 degree baths every day, but when it comes to weather and food they can't handle hot to save their lives.

Everyone is very serous about their job, even if it is just being a cashier or a janitor.

When Japanese people do construction work they put up screens or walls, and they clean up their mess when they are done. The same goes for city maintenance.

In America, we expect visiting foreigners to speak English. in Japan, they are surprised when visiting foreigners can speak Japanese.

Driving in Japan is almost indescribable. People break the rules, but there are rules for the rules to break, and everyone allows everyone else to break the rules. For example, even if the light is red, a couple of people can turn left if they are waiting in the left turn lane. Also, scooters and motorcycles and the like weave in and out of traffic like no one's business, and instead of cursing them like we do in America, it's completely accepted. If you want to get somewhere faster, you travel by scooter or some other motorized, two-wheeled vehicle.

Cars in Japan are amazing colors.
It's also difficult to take pictures of moving vehicles while you're moving, so once again all of these pictures are from the internet.










I have seen every single one of these colors, and more. They are not uncommon. My host family has a pink car, and I would wager that pink is one of the most common car colors in Japan.

That's all for now, but I'll add things as I think of them.

I'm Turning Japanese

My only plan for today was karaoke with my host sister and Mary, another YFU student who lives close to me in Nagoya, but it ended up being so much more. Mary called last night during my host sister's and my tacos party (during which I realized I am the only girl in this country who does not have a very cute boyfriend, husband, fiance, or some other variation of a significant other) and we planned for my host sister an I to meet her at a subway station at 11 AM. Isn't 11 AM a little early for karaoke? It turns out that no, we could have met up earlier and been able to fill the time.

First we had a surprise visit to the mall. My experience with malls in Japan has been pretty boring; the mall near my house is a sleepy, three story mall (one story is a grocery store), where the liveliest shop is the frozen yogurt/tea shop. This mall was more of what I am used to. After a little bit of shopping and topping off my souvenirs for everybody back home we had lunch at a Chinese restaurant. The dumplings were delicious, and my 'dangerously spicy' tofu was neither of the things it promised it was.
There were a lot of things in this mall that I was not used to, including this guy, who appears to be in the deodorant biz,

crane machines with food inside of them,

and, last and best of all, purikura. The photo booths are the best machines ever invented. You step into them and it's probably four times the size of a Western photo booth, with four or five huge, glowing white lights. The inside is totally green, presumably so that you can use all of the effects. You put 400 Yen into the coin slot, and you pick a little scene or background to take your photo in (three at a time). There are various backgrounds for two or three people, plain patterns, specific poses, basically everything that you can imagine. After taking six unique photos, you go outside to a screen where you can decorate the pictures with cute designs and various pens and, once again, basically everything you can imagine. When you're finished with that part (and the purikura machine has successfully made everyone's eyes gigantic and a little creepy, if you're not Japanese) you have the choice to send to pictures to a cell phone. Finally, after all of that, you get the photo arrangement you chose and can then go cut them up however you like... and they're stickers! Why we don't have purikura in America I don't know, but it needs to be fixed, pronto. Here are a couple of examples:


Purikura was the first amazing Japanese thing that I discovered today. The second was karaoke. The karaoke place that we went to looked more like a hotel lobby or a restaurant at first, complete with a drink bar and menus for both food and karaoke. There were so many options to choose from!

The karaoke room we chose could have held about eight more people, and it had one of the low tables, cushions to sit on, and a well beneath the table to put your feet in. They even had slippers for the customers, but they were about four sizes to small for any of us, even my Japanese host sister.

The videos that played during the songs were hilarious. They were cheaply made and looked like they were made in the 90's (which was perfect for when we sang Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears songs). During 'Hakuna Matata' there were kittens playing for about half of the song.

We spent about four hours at karaoke, but it felt like half of that time. Saeko and I got home just in time for dinner (tonight was sushi) and after dinner I watched ARASHI on some weird game show. The three events that I saw (I didn't see the whole show) were Jungle Bingo, Rolling Coin Tower, Pinball Runner, and a jenga-esque game with a giant robot that I don't remember the name of. In Jungle Bingo, each team had to climb through a jungle gym/maze and open a bingo square when they reached the top, and only two could go at a time. Winner: Jokers (not ARASHI). In rolling coin tower Matsujun, Nino, and two players from the other team took turns stacking big face coins on top of each other as the tower passed by them on a circular conveyor belt. Winner: ARASHI. In Pinball Runner one person had a huge basket strapped to them and they had to run on a conveyor belt to catch balls in their basket, but they couldn't see the balls ahead of time. Instead they had to rely on two team members tell them where the balls would be coming from (there were numbers along the wall to make it easier). Winner: Jokers. Last, there was a giant robot on blocks, and each team removed three blocks per turn. When the robot fell, whichever team removed the last block lost. Winner: Jokers. Finally at the end, since ARASHI lost, everyone was standing on platforms above foam pits and they chose one person to drop into the foam pits. Too bad, Aiba.

In related news, ARASHI released a new single yesterday, 'To Be Free.'

Link:

A Little Taste of Home

I may not still be considered Mexican food after I substituted so many things. I made fajitas with green peppers, onions, and chicken just fine. Tortillas and tortilla chip were a little difficult to find, but my host mom and I managed to find some. Tortilla soup calls for chicken broth. Easy, right? No. They do not have chicken broth at the store near my house. The have canned quail eggs, but no chicken broth. When I came home empty handed and broken hearted, my host mom said that they might have some chicken broth. In a cube.


I was a little skeptical at first, but it worked out just fine.


My host mom also said that we had Worcestershire Sauce (Ooster Sauce, as the Japanese call it), but instead, we had this.
Turns out Komi Sauce Deluxe is pretty close to Worcestershire Sauce.

It was when I reached the Pico de Gallo that things started to get interesting. I couldn't find Jalapenos (a bit of a shock), so I just some other spicy green peppers that looked like skinny and wrinkly jalapenos. The measuring spoons were marked a little differently (in ml; 小さじ was 5ml and　大さじ was 15ml), but I decided since the proportions were the same, it didn't matter. And so what if the garlic was vacuum packed?
It was still garlic, no matter how weird it looked.

Cumin was surprisingly easy to find. Cilantro slightly less so. I eventually just decided to substitute Italian parsley for cilantro, but I couldn't find any of that either! Instead, I found this:
Yes. That is for real.

In the end, my weird fajita experiment worked out pretty well! My host mom wasn't quite sure how to handle the fajita, so she ate her first one with a fork until she realized that everyone else was eating it like a fajita. My host family also said it was spicy, but I didn't really notice any spiciness (I thought the Japanese could handle spicy?).

Haru liked the tortillas (Haru's the dog, not my host sister. My host sister is Saeko)

Everyone liked their gifts (my host dad loves hats!)

And Haru enjoyed herself, too.

Takikomi Gohan

And various other dishes.

Today my host sister and I planned on making dinner, but I didn't quite work. She didn't sleep last night because of work, and my host mom can't help but help (It's just like home!) make dinner, but I still learned how to make some Japanese food.

Takikomigohan：
Rice with a bunch of seasonal vegetables in it. And let me take a second to say that the Japanese have some very weird vegetables.


Japanese carrots are the strangest looking carrots I've ever seen. I don't know what they to do make the carrots grow so sort and fat, but every Japanese carrot farmer does the same thing. I thought the first few were flukes, but they all look like that.

Gobou is another root vegetable. It is long probably a foot and a half to two feet) and thin and looks a bit like a giant alien finger.

There's nothing in the picture to compare to the the size of this massive radish, but daikon weigh about two pounds I would say they're about a foot long. (Not my photo.)

Takenoko, when it's peeled and vacuum packed, does not resemble, in any way, the bamboo shoot that is once was.　
And then, once you open the package and begin to cut up this foreign object, there are open spaces in it and some white grainy substance in those air pockets.

Next, we have goya, or bitter melon. I had the unfortunate experience of tasting this 'melon'. It is aptly named. (I also didn't take this photo, we didn't buy any bitter melon, thank god.)

And last, we have lotus root. Cool looking, and it tastes pretty good. (Again, not my photo.)

I also learned how to make miso soup, but I sort of wish that I hadn't. There are thre kinds of miso soup; red, white and mixed. The paste used to make all miso soup, whatever variety, is made from fermenting soybeans, barley, or rice (usually soybeans) with salt and a Japanese fungus. You mix this paste with a Japanese soup stock, dashi, and just wait until your miso soup is strong enough.

Finally, my host sister showed me how to make tamagoyaki (tamago means egg, yaki means grilled/fried). The name is pretty self explanatory. I didn't see what all went in the egg before it went in the pan, but most recipes call for sugar, the same dashi soup stock as before, and sometimes soy sauce and salt. From there you just keep layering and rolling the eggs until you have a sort of egg block, which you then cut up.


以上

Recap: JPDO and Tokyo

A week ago, I had just finished school. Now I am in Tokyo and it feels like it's been about a month instead of a week.
The three-ish days in Berkeley for orientation were pretty great, except for the weather. June in San Fransisco seriously feels like November in Texas, and I'm not even exaggerating. But it was canceled out by the fact that San Francisco is the prettiest city ever. The houses are all sorts of pastel colors and they're all close together and up on the hillsides like stairs and there so much GREEN! The first thing we saw when we got out of the airport were rolling green hills on one side and the bay on the other side. And Berkeley isn't bad either. We could see the Golden Gate Bridge from the dorms!

The plane flight was pretty uneventful. I saw four new movies; "Alice in Wonderland" (okay), "How to Train Your Dragon" (loved it), some movie about Tolstoy (sad and confusing), and "Leap Year" (major chick flick, but cute). And while on the plane I'm pretty sure there was some sort of time warp. We left San Francisco at around noon on June 9th and arrived in Japan at 2:30 on June 10th, but there was no nighttime. I'm not sure when it changed from Jun 9th to June 10th, but I'm a little sad that I missed the night of June 9th, 2010. I never know what could have happened!

We got into Narita and were greeted by a giant hot dog, and then we drove for about an hour past rice paddies, a hotel called the Rainbow Hotel, and Tokyo Disney.





Everything is amazing here. Even the construction equipment is colorful!



And the toilets? Just like everyone says they are. The button are pretty self explanatory, but we still decided to experiment with them yesterday evening. The wall got a little bit wet.

We went to the U.S. Embassy today to thank the people who gave us our scholarships, and then we went to a museum that had all sorts of Edo exhibits. We ran into about five school groups (mostly elementary school, but one high school) and they were SO CUTE. We're staying in a really nice hotel in Tokyo with an awesome view:


(Those big buildings are the Tokyo Metropolitan Buildings, big government buildings)

I get to ride the bullet train to Nagoya tomorrow and meet my host family!