Random Happenings

Today I was in a Japanese home-ec class. There were twenty five 15 year old girls holding cucumbers in one hand and giant kitchen knives in the other.

Dirty Manga

A few weeks ago, Andy found these two lovely examples of Japanese comic book animation, or "Manga", in the stairwell outside our apartment building...


We think some teenage boys must have stashed them there. It appears that the young lady on the right is eating a hot dog on a stick...

Merry's Bar

We were walking home from a friend's house last Friday and decide to stop off somewhere downtown for a drink. Of course when we saw a sign that read "Merry's Bar" we couldn't resist! We ended up have a grand old time with some locals and drinking and eating a bit more than we'd planned.



Our hostesses, Mi-chan and Kumi-san



Andy's getting some complimentary Nihon-shu (Japanese sake)



It's polite to keep drinking glasses filled throughout the evening, so this is the ultimate in etiquette --- a brimming sake glass with a catch-all box for overflow




Kanpai!!!

And on the 12th of September, God said, "Let them have wheels!"

We have added a new member to our little family here in Japan! We call him "Shorty". Shorty is a Mitsubishi Pajero Junior, and we love him very much.

This past Saturday, we woke up early and hopped on a train to Aomori City, about 2 hours away. Aomori City is slightly larger than our little town of Hachinohe (approx. pop. of 350,000 versus our 250,000), and it has a more metropolitan feel to it. It has become a stopover point for people traveling to Hokkaido, as it is a port city at northern tip of Honshu, and there are ferries and bullet trains that depart for Hokkaido daily.

We had scheduled to meet up with another JET who recently moved to Aomori City from a more remote village and discovered she didn't really need the car she had purchased only months ago (In fact, she never even got her license and hadn't really even driven it). It's a 1992 Mitsubishi Pajero Junior (two door) - in the States they call it a Montero. It runs on diesel and sounds like an 18-wheeler when it idles. Quirks aside, it's a great little car and it should (hopefully) get us to the mountains for some snowboarding this winter! It even came with racks!

Before picking up the car, we fueled up (our bodies) with some delicious Vietnamese food from a little restaurant downtown called Saigon. We got there just as they were opening and had the first entrees of the day. Andy got yellow curry and I chose the green.







Andy cemented his status as a member of the Clean Plate Club...



When we finally hit the road back to Hachinohe, I was a ball of nerves. Andy repeated the mantra, "Stay to the left, stay to the left," at every turn. I constantly adjusted the wipers in lieu of putting on my turn signal. It's amazing how strong the physical memory of driving a car can be. Now try turning that memory around 180 degrees in your brain while you're in a foreign country, you're slightly hung over, and it's raining.

The drive back was slow but scenic.





Amazingly, we made it home in one piece.

Hey y'all,

I started writing stuff for this blog a month ago, when I had newly arrived in Japan. Sadly, I'm just now getting around to posting it, so you'll have to scroll down to the bottom, start from the beginning and read up! Anyway, I was quite long-winded for the first few entries, but I plan to restrain myself going forward. Only the important stuff, I promise! And there will be photos. And The Mr. will weigh in. Enjoy!

Obon at Ito's

On the last night of the Obon Festival, one of the English teachers at Andy's school, Ito-sensei, invited us over for dinner at his house with his family. He and his wife prepared us a delicious assortment of dishes. His daughter Ami arrived late from school activities and joined us. After eating, we walked down the street to the river's edge, where we witnessed all the floating lanterns for Obon. Families sponsor a lantern with their family name on it to honor the spirits of their deceased ancestors.

After dinner, Ami played us recorded clips of American Idol and her celebrity crush, Adam Lambert.

Nice to Meet You, Laundromat and Video Store

8/12/09

Today Andy had a half-day and was home by 12:15pm. We whipped up a delicious lunch from leftover spaghetti with mushrooms, onions, and red pepper and added cooked pork, egg and parmesan, which resulted in a sort of carbonara-style dish. Of course we washed lunch down with a couple of Cokes. Reuben told Andy that Japanese Coke has a little bit of nicotine added to it. Now whenever I drink a Coke I notice that I get a little head rush. I think I’m hooked.

During lunch Andy put on the obligatory episode of Seinfeld. When we had visited Andy’s folks in Ohio before we came to Japan, Andy grabbed a season of Seinfeld to bring with us. That turned out to be a very good move. Having Seinfeld playing on the TV while we’re at home makes everything just a little more comfortable, and it feels that much more like home, as if we’re in the presence of old friends. And Seinfeld helped Andy pull through his rough first week in Japan. Alone and depressed, he would turn on his Seinfeld DVD’s for some “serenity now”. Sadly, by now we’ve run through every episode in the season several times by now. But we just keep on watching them over and over again. They never seem to lose their magic.

For the afternoon we planned to make a trek to the Laundromat. I had bought a set of sheets for our new bed, which had arrived by delivery from Nitori a couple of days prior, and they needed to be washed (and dryed) before we could use them. We have a washing machine in our apartment, but no dryer. This is typical for a Japanese household. Believe me, you don’t realize what a luxury it is to have a dryer until you don’t have one. Our machine will wash, rinse, spin, but then we have to hang the soggy, wrinkled items outside or by a window to dry them. What results are wrinkly and slightly crispy shirts, towels and undergarments that never feel completely dry. A pair of Andy’s underwear came out of the laundry the other day and was so crunchy when it dried that I think it would have felt like he was wearing newspaper. So I threw them back in the laundry hoping a second time around would improve matters.

Discovering that we had the capability to take our clothes down the street and throw them in the dryer at the Laundromat for a few dollars was a godsend. When we got to the Laundromat, we noticed that there were several dryers in use, but no one seemed to be washing anything. We figured out that most people wash their laundry at home and then hop in their cars and bring the wet clothes to the Laundromat to dry them. While we sat watching our laundry spin, we witnessed several Japanese people drive up, park, haul in a plastic bag full of wet laundry, throw it in a dryer, and leave. Hit and run. They would come back in a half hour or so to collect their belongings.

While our clothes dried, we decided to walk up a couple of blocks to the video store, called Video Love. We had already been discussing getting a rental membership at some point so we thought we’d investigate the possibility. We walked in and perused the aisles and spotted a whole wall of Foreign Films, which consisted mostly of new releases from Hollywood. The beauty of renting movies in Japan is that anything made in Hollywood is still in English, only the menus and subtitles are in Japanese. But you can just turn the subtitles off, and it’s like you’re watching an American movie from an American video store! I think the video store will be one of our greatest resources while we’re living in Japan. Back home, I’d had an ongoing list of movies I’d failed to see and had resigned to the fact that I would probably never catch up on all of them, but fate would have it that now was my chance! Not only would I be able to catch up on movies I’d missed, but I could choose from a section of popular American TV shows too. I never thought I’d get the chance to catch up on Mad Men or Dexter when I left for Japan, but what did I know?!

On top of the new releases there were several shelves of older films, which could be rented for ¥90 (approx. $1) a piece and kept for 7 days. Andy and I selected Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and Broken Flowers as our first rentals. We also grabbed Disc 1 of Mad Men Season One from the TV series section. On our way to the front of the store we walked past a doorway through which I could see shelves of animated DVD’s from floor to ceiling. As I peered closer I could see that the animated characters on the front covers were mostly young girls and mostly half-naked. Some of them were drawn with giant bulging breasts and others were postured as to facilitate an up-skirt view of their penciled-in pre-pubescent genetalia. Most of them were wearing some form of schoolgirl uniform. It occurred to me immediately that these weren’t just your run-of-the-mill Anime videos…..these were dirty Anime, Anime porn! I glanced up to see a sign above the doorway written in Japanese. Though I couldn’t read the writing, I could read the number 18. Apparently this was the adults-only section.

On the way home from the Laundromat, we stopped at the local supermarket near our house, called Minatoya, to pick up something to make for dinner. We usually end up getting something from the fresh seafood section to put in the broiler. As I was looking at the selection of salmon and mackerel, but Andy pointed to some styrafoam plates containing fresh crabs. These crabs were so fresh, in fact, that a few of them were still moving! Unbelievable! These crabs had probably been in the ocean only hours before. Poor crabs, they never knew what was coming!