The Cold

A couple of weeks ago I had a cold. It started out, as most colds seem to, with the mild impression that something was not right, and by the end of the first day had progressed to the point where I *knew* that something was not right and that it probably was responsible for the pounding headache and the increasingly sore throat. Unfortunately I spent the first evening out with a friend and didn’t get back to my place until late, at which point I felt like death. The next morning being my day off and also, coincidentally, the flea market at Kitano Tenmangu Shrine in Kyoto that I used to frequent on study abroad, I had made plans to meet my host mother and spend the afternoon with her. Instead of canceling and staying in bed I, of course, decided I felt markedly better and went out anyway. I still felt sick but I had a lovely day with my host mother and got home at a decent hour very much ready to sleep. The cold was, naturally, just getting warmed up.


There are few things more frustrating and lonely than being sick and alone in a foreign country. On the frustrating front there is attempting to find and purchase cold medicine, disinfectant wipes and throat lozenges when it takes a long time just to read the package and make sure that you’re not accidentally buying diet pills, candy and shoe polish. On the lonely front there is trying to cook and clean up after yourself when all you want to do is sleep, all with the burning suspicion that if you were to be suddenly bedridden it would take the school a little while to realize you were missing.

On the 5th day of my cold I started coughing even when not trying to go to sleep and was thus forced to adopt a measure seen on Japanese people of all ages during cold season: the mask. I have perhaps mentioned them here before, but face masks are worn by sick people in Japan to keep from spreading germs from coughing etc. They are not technically compulsory or anything, but social pressure is a law unto itself. Heeding advice from J I made sure to buy a men’s mask (apparently the women’s ones are very small) and wore it for a whole day at school. It was awful. I hadn’t been able to put my contacts in that morning and so every time I breathed into my mask it fogged up my glasses, and my nose was still running, making the inside of the damned thing feel like some sort of germ incubator. It was like wearing a steam room on my face. Every once in awhile I would have to pull down the mask, blow my nose, disinfect my hands and then replace the mask, which was of course damp inside and thus felt wet and cold by the time I got it back in place.

I downed grapefruit juice, went through all of my Theraflu, half a bottle of what turned out to be entirely ineffectual children’s cough syrup and used up more packets of tissues then I want to think about but in the end the only thing that worked was spending the entirety of Sunday in bed. Afterwards I was still a little sniffly and still coughed at night, but the worst was over.

Next time I’m just going to stay in.

But what does she eat?

“What do you eat?” is a question that I get from friends both American and Japanese, so I figured I’d give a go at explaining a little bit about the culinary aspect of my life.


Because I live alone and on a budget I cook most of my meals at my apartment in my kitchen. I knew that this would be the case when I was looking for a place to live, so it is no coincidence that I chose an apartment with a decent-sized kitchen with three gas burners (several places I looked at had only a single, rather corroded-looking electric burner) and some counter space.
Breakfast:

The most important meal of the day to be sure, but usually also the simplest and most boring. Outside of the occasional natto (fermented soybeans) on leftover white rice breakfast tends to be unremarkable, often bread with jam. When I first moved here I attempted to use the gas fish griller installed just below my stove as a toaster. I found that while it would toast bread if tended extremely carefully, it would also light bread on fire if left to its own devices for the barest moment. I no longer use it as a toaster and content myself with uncooked bread.
Lunch:

I bring my lunch to school every day, sometimes even on half-days where I don’t have class until 1:30. Lunch is leftovers from dinner, unless I accidentally don’t cook enough and then I have cup o’ noodle ramen, sometimes augmented with a hardboiled egg brought from home.
Dinner:

So, what do I cook myself? I have a rotation of about 6 dishes, though every once in awhile I think of something original (original is not always good, however, so some things never make it into the rotation). I strive to cook things that use very few ingredients, most of them cheap, and always like to have white onion, mushrooms, rice, pasta, miso, soy sauce and mirin on-hand. The thing about cooking in a foreign country is that some things you are used to finding cheap are expensive or limited in variety, such as balsamic vinegar or French bread, and some things that you are used to finding simply aren’t there at all, such as tortillas or peanut butter. I make a lot of Japanese-style dishes simply because the ingredients are available and relatively inexpensive compared to imports.

Most of what I cook falls into one of three categories: fresh rice dishes (Such as curry over rice), leftover rice dishes (Such as omelet rice, see below), and pasta dishes (Such as tomato pasta with chicken), all of which I eat with a side salad of whatever lettuce is cheap and sliced apple with sesame seed dressing.

Now, for a bit of fun, I’ll give you my recipe for Kimchi Omelet Rice:

Ingredients:

½ white onion

1 handful enoki mushrooms

Sliced ham

Kimchi (Korean spicy pickled cabbage)

1 cup day-old white rice

1 egg

Mirin

Soy sauce

Scramble the egg in a bowl with a drop of soy sauce and some mirin. Pour the egg into a pre-heated non-stick frying pan, tilting the pan until the egg forms an even layer over the bottom. Cook until the top starts to solidify, then remove from pan carefully with a spatula and set aside.

Chop up the onion and kimchi and brown together in a pan, adding the ham and mushrooms after. Simmer with soy sauce and mirin before adding rice. Stir over medium heat until rice is seasoned and warm with the same basic texture as fried rice. Scoop the rice mixture into the egg omelet and serve. If it turns out a little dry you can drizzle ketchup over top, though it is not usually necessary.

I have this for dinner almost once a week. If you find you’re interested in any other extremely simple recipes then let me know! Some can be more easily replicated in the ‘States than others though…

The Osaka Exhibition Park

Goodness but it’s been a long time since I last posted! Let’s see, what was I going to write about…

On Saturday, May 7th we had a school trip to the site of the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka. After the fair ended most of the pavilions etc. were demolished to make space for an extensive and very nice park with a couple museums and other attractions which is now called the ‘Osaka Exhibition Memorial Park’. I accidentally called it the ‘Osaka Explosion Park’ once and was quickly corrected.

I had never been on a fieldtrip like this before, but while we were required to come our only obligation was that we had to show up for the class picture at the end of the day. This left us all about 5 hours to wander around the park grounds and museums at our leisure, so luckily the weather was nice. The park has several areas dedicated to specific types of plants, such as a lavender field, a hill covered in hydrangeas (which were sadly not in bloom) and a camellia garden, as well as wading pools, a suspended walkway over a forest-like area and large open areas for games or picnics.

One thing we discovered pretty quickly was that all of the museums required an entry fee in addition to the park entry fee, which was a little annoying, but after wandering through several gardens in the full heat of our clear, sunny Saturday afternoon we decided to just choose one of them to kill some time and get into some air conditioning. We ended up paying student admission to the Osaka Museum of Ethnology, which turned out to be extremely interesting. The interior of the museum was divided up by geographical region, starting in the Americas and ending up in Japan, and contained a wide variety of national costumes, artwork, religious items and even a fully-furnished yurt. It was *really* cool, and my only regret is that I didn’t realize that it was okay to take pictures until about halfway through. One thing that I found especially interesting was that the Japan section dedicated significant space to the Ainu, a people native to Japan but not considered racially ‘Japanese’. I guess their aim was to show a piece of Japan’s ethnological makeup that would be unfamiliar to most visitors, but I’m certainly no expert on the subject.

By the time we assembled for our class picture we were tired and very ready to go home, and I at least was sweaty and footsore. As soon as we were dismissed the whole group headed for the exit, saying goodbye to ‘Tarou’, the sun tower that stands near the gates (I think it looks like a chicken or maybe like one of the gods from ‘Princess Mononoke’) and hopped back on the monorail for home.

A Donut of a Different Colour

Well! For all my promises of upcoming updates I certainly have kept you all waiting! Since moving into my apartment I have slowly but surely added to my furniture collection, and am by now pretty much squared away. J has been staying with me almost every weekend and it is nice to have someone to speak English to. Together we have seen two shows at the Takarazuka Grand Theatre and one at a theatre in Osaka. One of the shows that we went to see in Takarazuka was what they call a ‘Shinjin Kouen’, a sort of understudy performance where the actresses who have been in the troupe for 6 years or fewer fill all the roles in a one-act version of the troupe’s current play. I had never been to one before, so it was an exciting opportunity. While the actresses were necessarily less skilled than their main-performance counterparts, every person onstage was bursting with enthusiasm, clearly giving every line and dance move their all. The energy was contagious and more than made up for the occasional mistake or sour note.


The reason that I could go to a play in the middle of the week was that this was what they call “Golden Week”, a 7-day period where several national holidays converge. Because there are so many holidays some schools and even businesses shut their doors for the whole week, which makes it a very popular time to travel. I, unfortunately, only had the actual holidays themselves off, which meant that I had last Friday, my usual Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday off with class as usual on Saturday and Monday. On Wednesday J and I dressed up in kimono and hakama and met a friend of J’s at a park in Tenouji, which was quite beautiful even if it was a little hot out. Afterwards we had lunch in a nice café near the station and then J and I went in search of a special donut shop in Shinsaibashi. Lately Krispy Kreme has opened several locations in Japan, including one in Shinsaibashi, but the donut shop that J and I set out to find was far more special. Instead of being fried, these donuts are steamed and use traditional Japanese ingredients to make Japanese-style donuts. After some wandering around and fighting with J’s iPhone we finally found the place and calmly waited in line for about half an hour before ordering at the counter and getting our donuts. I had a cherry-blossom flavoured donut with glutinous rice and walnuts in it topped with black sesame seeds, a steamed strawberry cake filled with strawberry cream, and a roasted green tea iced latte. J had a cherry-blossom flavoured one like mine only with actual cherry blossoms on top as well as an Okinawan brown sugar donut with candied citron peel in it topped with apple. They were beautiful and delicious, absolutely worth the wait and even worth the 200yen apiece. I think what I liked best about them, and about Japanese sweets in general, was that they were not really very sweet at all; the flavours were subtle and would have been eclipsed by too much sugar.

After looking around a couple of the stores in the area we headed back to my apartment where I made a simple dinner (a post about cooking will follow) before getting some much-needed rest. Tomorrow I have class again, and starting next week it will be back to business as usual.

Ohisashiburi! It's been awhile!

Well! It looks as though it has been almost exactly one year less one month since I left Kyoto and stopped updating this blog! I am back in Japan (Osaka this time) and am planning to start posting again. Below are a couple entries that I wrote when I first arrived, so read and enjoy! I promise more current entries soon!

Eating the Meatballs

On Tuesday…I honestly can’t remember what I did on Tuesday. I think that I went through Yodobashi Camera (a large electronics/appliances store in Umeda) and priced appliances after making a list of everything I could think of that I might need for my new apartment. There was probably a good amount of wandering around punctuated by eating.
Wednesday, however, was all about the apartment. In the morning I checked out of my hotel, stowed my luggage and headed to the rental agency, where they briefed me on what was going to go down with the lease-signing and collected the money that would be given to the company that owned the unit. Oh! First we had to stop off and pick up the official seal that they had ordered for me. You see, in the US we use our signature to represent ourselves on paper, in Japan they use little stamps, I think almost always with the characters of one’s last name. Well, in order to go forward with the lease I needed to have one so they ordered one for me with my first name, actually, written out in katakana phonetic script. When I called the finished stamp ‘cute’ they looked at me strangely, probably because it’s something very official, so ‘cute’ isn’t really what they were going for.

We went over the lease with a person from the company line by line, and then after what seemed like forever they gave me a key and the guy from the rental agency dropped me back off at the station. I went straight back to my hotel and hired a cab to my new apartment –there was no other way to get my three giant suitcases there.

As soon as I’d managed to get everything in the door I got to work measuring with a tape measure I now remember that I spent most of Tuesday afternoon hunting down. I did my best to draw up a floor plan of the apartment with measurements, and though the finished product wasn’t exactly great I think it did the job. I had thought about going to Ikea, but since I had to wait for the man from Osaka Gas to come and turn everything on I decided to leave it until the following day. By the time the gasman left I was pretty hungry, so I set out in search of a supermarket, and then maybe also a store where I could buy something to sleep on, since I had just committed myself to living in an apartment that had zero furniture and no appliances in it yet. Luckily, I found both a supermarket and a home goods store one after the other, and so was able to get dinner, 3 days worth of breakfast, a heavy coverlet to sleep on, some towels, toilet paper and other necessities. Sadly, I failed to find an alarm clock and so spent the whole night waking up in a panic that I was late for my appointment to go get my visa changed.
Thursday was a terribly busy day! I miraculously woke up exactly when I wanted to, found my nearest subway station, and was early to meet up with the man from my school. Talking to the visa people was scary, but apparently I did well and so before too long things should be sorted out. I went pretty much straight from the immigrations office to Nanba, where the free shuttle to Ikea is located. I had never been to an Ikea before, but I really had not expected to be herded in one continuous curve from entrance to exit like a cow at a slaughterhouse. I don’t mean that it was a bad experience or anything, but clearly you are meant to spend your entire day in there slowly accumulating more and more items until you have so much that the only way to get it home is to ship it. Luckily, I’m extremely cheap, so I spent most of my time vacillating between the two-or-three cheapest items on my list, with almost no time left over by the end to buy too much extra stuff. I ate the meatballs, which were tasty but not exceptional, and a cinnamon roll, and bought pretty much exactly what I went in there for (primarily a bed and a little sofa). I had naively thought that I would be sleeping on my new bed within 24 hours, so I was a little put out when they told me that the earliest they could deliver would be Sunday. Only 3 more nights of sleeping on the floor!

From Ikea I went back to Nanba hoping to find a 100yen shop and lo and behold! There was a nice big one just inside the JR Nanba OCAT terminal! I bought dishes and other needful items…and then proceeded to carry them for what felt like an eternity. I had told myself that I would price the items that I had already seen at Yodobashi Camera at the Bic Camera store in Nanba, so even though I was tired I dragged myself (and my bags full of 105yen dishes and sundries) all the way there. The prices proved to be better at Bic than at Yodobashi, so I made up my mind to buy my household appliances there, thinking that at least if I wouldn’t have a bed I could have a tea kettle, or maybe even a refrigerator! Again, naïve. The electric tea kettle, microwave and rice cooker will arrive on Saturday evening, the refrigerator and the washing machine come on Wednesday evening. But! In the (really long) process of buying all this I managed to sign up for internet! I thought to myself, if I can’t have a hot cup of tea, buy groceries or sleep in a bed, maybe by tomorrow evening I can skype with my family! Need I say it again? Naïve. That one isn’t coming until the 17th. Sigh. At least signing up right there saved me 20,000 JPY on my appliances. Exhausted, bought myself a teriyaki chicken sandwich at the McDonald’s on the 2nd floor of Bic Camera and trudged home.
Okay, so Ikea:

-Everything is in Japanese, English AND Swedish. This means that I would stare at a word in katakana for a full minute before realizing that it was just the Swedish name for the thing spelled phonetically.

-Free refills on drinks. I love this. I had about four cups of different soft drinks.

-The almond cake had no marzipan in it. I was TERRIBLY disappointed.

-Okay, so the meatballs are just meatballs in a light gravy, not spiced, with a side of boiled potatoes and lingonberry jam, am I right?

-This has got to be the single largest store I have ever seen in Japan. It’s like a Super WalMart, only the people aren’t as scary and everything’s in Swedish.

-That heart thing with the arms, creepy or cute? I’m leaning towards creepy.

Boats in the Night

On Monday J didn’t have Irimachi (The opposite of Demachi, at Irimachi you accompany the actress to the stage door) until after 11am, and I was certain that I had things to get done, so after a quick breakfast at Vie France we went our separate ways. Fortunately or unfortunately the busy day that I had envisioned was not to be, so I ran a couple quick errands and headed to Takarazuka to meet up with J. The sakura were even more beautiful with a blue sky for their backdrop, though it was still windy and cold as before. When we met back up J’s fan club offered me a ticket to the special event that was that evening, so J and I started to plan a day around the idea of hanging around all afternoon and then having dinner together after the show. It was, sadly, not to be. J got an email from my school asking to have me call them and I found out that I was supposed to meet the Real Estate people at the school that afternoon at 4:30. I thought about trying to make it there and back in time for the show but since I had no idea how long it was going to take I opted to decline the ticket instead. Instead we hung around for a little bit, took print club photos, ate some hanami dango (flower-viewing dumplings) under the sakura and then parted ways at the station with a promise to have dinner after J was back from the show.
As it turned out, I had misunderstood the woman on the phone, so when I arrived at the school at 4:30 I was just told by the Real Estate person that I was going to need an official name stamp and 200,000 JPY by the 6th at the latest or else I’d loose the apartment. We made an appointment for the 6th and I left a little annoyed that I had cancelled my other plans for something that could have been done over the phone. What I learned only the following day, however, was that I was supposed to be there at 4pm so that I could go to their office and start squaring things away and meet all the necessary parties. Oops. I went back to my hotel, sent off the necessary account information and read/dozed/practiced pointe in the deserted hallway for awhile. J was back late, but luckily FaKin is open until very late so we grabbed some burger sets, chatted a bit and then fell fast asleep back in our hotel beds.

Takarazuka and Environs

It has been a little while since I wrote anything down, but that has been because I’ve been more than a little busy, though not always in the way that I would prefer. After about 4 hours of driving around from one place to the next I found an apartment that I liked a great deal on Saturday the 2nd. Unfortunately, in order to rent an apartment one needs to pony up the cash for the security deposit, first month’s rent and a variety of other fees. This meant that until I had about 200,000 JPY in-hand I could not move in. This in and of itself is not a huge problem, it only becomes complicated when you don’t have a Japanese bank account to wire money into, and that without a Foreigner Registration Card you cannot open a bank account. It was very lucky indeed, then, that my contact at the school had offered to work some magic for me and set up a provisional account so that I could receive enough money to cover the apartment and tuition until such time as I could open an account of my own. After apartment hunting I decided to send off an email update from the internet connection in the hotel’s lobby, only to find it currently in-use. I waited for a little while, went out for some dinner, came back and the same guy was still there, hunched over the public computer. Frustrated, I asked the front desk for directions to an internet café, which I actually managed to find only to be turned away because, you guessed it! No Foreigner Registration card. I cannot for the life of me understand why I should need proof that I’m a legal foreign resident in order to USE THE INTERNET, but what could I do? I trudged back to the hotel, where I used my best assertive polite language to scare away the little man who had been monopolizing the internet connection for the last several hours.
A list of things that one cannot do without a Foreigner Registration Card (non-exhaustive):

-Open a bank account

-Buy a cell phone

-Use an internet cafe
My good friend J was going to be in Takarazuka on Sunday and Monday, so I tried on Sunday morning to figure out if I was supposed to do anything. Since the school was closed I just sent an email to my contact that I would be available on J’s phone and headed for the Mister Donuts (abbreviated “MisuDo”) in Takarazuka City. I just missed her and so waited on the Hana no Michi until she was done with her fan club activities, pretending not to hear the people talking about me while watching the sakura blossoms blow in the wind. We went back to MisuDo and sampled their new line of fruit and vegetable-flavoured donuts (I had pumpkin, she had apple and mixed berry) with cups of coffee. I was *very* excited to learn that if you eat in the store at MisuDo they will refill your coffee for free. Very few things in Japan have free refills, and this is the first time I’ve ever gotten a free refill on a café au lait. By now more than a little wired we walked around a bit and then headed for the big shopping mall in Nishinomiya Gardens. It was very nice with a pretty good food court where we both got fried rice with steak and a glass of ginger soda. Very tasty. We walked and walked and walked some more before heading back to Takarazuka, where we had dinner at Mai, my favourite okonomiyaki place. Afterwards we engaged in the fan ritual know as Demachi. Because J’s club is small and very friendly I was able to tag along. Had everything gone through according to plan we would have waited in Lotteria (a fast food restaurant) until we received a call that the actress was about to leave the theatre for the day, at which point we would have run back to the theatre, lined up, and then seen the actress off, handing her letters of encouragement and maybe exchanging a few words. Sadly, this was not to be. We stayed in Lotteria until it closed, at which point we huddled in a little enclosure near some vending machines. We moved from there into a line near the stage doors, where we waited until they turned off the lights –the theatre staff’s way of telling the fans that it’s time to go home. Demachi cancelled J and I trudged back to the hotel, exhausted and chilled through by the persistent wind that had lashed us all day.

Some abbreviations:

-McDonald’s = Mac (Eastern Japan), MacuDo (Western Japan)

-Mister Donuts =MisuDo

-First Kitchen = FaKin (say it 5 times fast and you’ll see why I find it the funniest one)

-Family Mart = FaaMaa

Arriving in Osaka

Greetings to readers both gentle and otherwise! It has been almost a full three years since I last updated this blog and in that time, naturally, a great deal has changed. I have graduated from college, worked for a time and now I make my triumphant return to Japan as a design student at a school in Osaka. At the moment I am sitting in my hotel room sipping some free green tea and listening to the sounds of the large construction project going on outside my window. In a few hours I go apartment hunting (!), wish me luck!

Getting here was about as tiring as usual, though it did have a few extra difficulties thrown in at the last minute, clearly to keep me from growing complacent. Problem One was learning on the Wednesday afternoon before my Thursday flight that United had changed the weight allocations for international flights, so that instead of being allowed two 70lb bags without charge (140lbs of total luggage for those too lazy/tired to do the math) I was allotted only two 50lb bags (100lbs total luggage), which really does make a great deal of difference, especially when one is moving to a foreign country. We made that work out by reconciling ourselves to paying $200 fee for an extra bag and carefully weighing each piece.

The travel itself all went pretty well until I got to customs at Kansai International, at which point I ran into Problem Two. You see, my student visa had not yet come through, so I was going to enter the country on a tourist visa and then change it once I got to Japan. Stupidly thinking that the truth was the right way to go on my landing documents I won myself a trip to the back room at customs. Even after I explained exactly what the situation was they went away with my passport for what seemed like forever but was probably closer to 20 minutes. I filled the time by giving dirty looks to the security camera. In the end they looked a little suspicious but at least they gave me back my passport and let me go out to meet the people that the school had sent to pick me up.

I will admit that soon after arriving in Osaka I started to feel some panic. I mean, what the hell was I playing at? Getting an apartment, a bank account, a cell phone, and all without the help of my family? I started thinking about how easy it would be to just tell the school ‘Thanks but no thanks’ and turn right back around and go home. Luckily I did neither of these things. Instead I bought some dinner, got into bed at a decent hour (8pm) and told myself that I’d find my courage by light of day.

Thankfully, it seems to have worked.