Onsen

Many workplaces in America have a year-end Christmas/New Year's party. Everyone drinks and has dinner on the company dime, and aside from maybe some unwanted groping and finally saying those comments you've been keeping to yourself for a reason, it's a good time. We do that here in Japan too. Last weekend, we all piled onto buses to go to a ryokan on the Noto peninsula. This is a hotel that features an onsen, or hot bath. Like some companies in the US, we went to a huge banquet hall in a hotel and consumed liquor courtesy of our bosses, but there the similarities ended.

This was an overnight trip. Here, everyone was separated by sex. Males stayed in hotel rooms with other males, and females with females, 3 - 6 people per room. Upon arrival, many people went out to the onsen and changed into their yukata, or cotton kimono. I was staying in a room with Katya and two other teachers who didn't speak much English. Katya and I both changed into our yukata for dinner. Putting the yukata on correctly is very important. If you wrap it one way, it's for summer/onsen wear, but if you wrap it the other way, it's for funerals. You then tie a sash around it, and there's a jacket that matches the sash you can wear over it. They give you tabi socks to wear with the rubber sandals you wear in the hallways of the hotel. Katya and I put on our yukata and went into the onsen before dinner, as did most other people.

For dinner, Lee and I, being the newest staff members, opened dinner with the toast. There were at least ten or twenty other new staff members this year, but apparently as the newest (and there being two of us togther) we got the job. It was just a simple "Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Kam-Pai (Cheers in Japanese)!" but it was on the stage in front of hundreds of people, both of us wearing our yukatas. No picture, as I was nervous about the toast since we didn't get too much information about it and I forgot to give Katya the camera when I went up. Oh well. When we first got up, the hotel staff person wearing a tux and holding the tray with the plum wine for us to toast with had only one. Normally, there's only one person giving a toast. Someone else brought a second, which was good. We didn't think both trying to drink from the same thimble would have been appropriate.

After the toast we headed back to our respective low tables, me at a female table and Lee at a male. Beer, sake, and wine were poured (every table had two servers, one for food and one for bringing drinks from the open bar), and we began eating. There was sea cucumber, crab (nicely cut open like before), some sort of mussel, crayfish both cooked and raw, a steak, some seafood nabe (generic Japanese word for stew), a yogurt fruit salad, two types of soup (if I remember correctly), raw fish, and a bunch of other dishes. There were also cakes for dessert. Lee would like to note that as there was an empty spot at his table, he got to take the best parts of two dinners. Also, that he will not be partaking of sea cucumber again.

After dinner, we left the tables and milled around in the big hall talking and enjoying the cake and open bar. It was getting pretty late so Lee went to bed but I opted to go with the group that went out for karaoke. We sang for three hours and then headed back for one last trip into the onsen before bed. In the morning, there was another dunk into the onsen, a buffet breakfast and then a bus ride home. For more pictures, see our Flickr page.

Lee's Note: Despite going to bed earlier I was almost as useless as Ana the next day because there may have been some serious snoring going on in the hotel room I was sharing. We both certainly got less than four hours of real sleep. A good breakfast from the large buffet (thankfully Western food was available - not into the pickled fish and whatnot for breakfast) and another visit to the onsen helped some.

Dining Room Table

Once we realized that the $500 price tag on the tables included the four chairs, we quickly found a table that we liked. The chairs are interesting but not uncomfortable, and it's a nice dark wood. It doesn't match anything particularly, but there are already so many different wood tones in the apartment that we decided it didn't really matter. It also gave us a nice place to put our tree so that it didn't look quite so small and out of place.


Slowly but surely, we're furnishing the apartment.

Merry Christmas!

I'm not allowed to put another e-card up. Here's the NORAD Santa Tracker! You can see where he is at what time in the world, yay!

I recommend downloading the Google Earth 3D version.

Enjoy your holidays!

Holiday Baking

I will have made nearly 300 cookies by Christmas. This has taught me three things:

1. I really, really, really miss American size ovens.

2. I strongly desire a stand mixer.

3. Our apartment tends to be very humid.

I can only put 9 cookies in our oven at one time. Nine. The good news is that both kinds I tried came out well, and I hadn't ever made either of them before. They came out so well, in fact, that multiple people have asked for the recipe and I even made another batch of the gingersnaps to bring to Christmas gatherings. Even Lee liked the gingersnaps! I also made an anise sugar cookie. This one uses whole aniseed (or at least the recipe didn't say ground, and it did say ground cinnamon, so I used whole seeds) and is then rolled in a cinnamon sugar mixture when still hot. These were also very good.


The day I tried making the gingersnaps was not a good day for baking. First, we couldn't find any ground ginger. There's lots of fresh ginger, but we couldn't find any ground. So, I decided that tossing the fresh ginger into the blender was a good idea. It's not. The ginger is too big to be adequately minced in the blender. Some of it was small, and there was a good amount of juice which will be good for the flavor, but there are definitely some cookies with extra large crunchy ginger bits. We bought a ginger/daikon grater for the next batch - got it down to a perfect size. When making the cookies, you are supposed to roll them into 3/4" balls and then roll them in some granulated sugar before placing on the cookie sheet and into the oven. I had to add nearly an extra cup of flour to get the dough into a non-flowing state, and then decided to go with 1.5" balls instead of the recommended 3/4" ones. Apparently, these cookies spread out when they bake:


They look more like muffins in the oven than the tiny little cookies I was expecting. They came out as one giant cookie with some perforations. It tasted pretty good, considering, so I froze the dough to make more cookies in about a week. I was trying to be proactive with the baking, and knew the day I wanted to bring cookies in, so I wanted to make the dough and a test batch early enough to make sure they would actually work. These ones were much better in smaller sizes and a bit less time in the oven.

Next I tried to make some frosting. I wanted to make a Red Velvet cake for Christmas, and wanted to try a couple of different frostings with it. This one was roux based, so I cooked the flour and milk and tried to cream together the butter and sugar. This did not work so well. The sugar flew everywhere and the butter just did not cream, leaving lumps of butter in the frosting. This (and mixing other doughs and things) made me realize that I really do want a stand mixer, especially the dough hook, and I convinced Lee by showing him the pasta maker attachment. As of yet, I have not found the necessary distilled vinegar or buttermilk for the Red Velvet cake, and have the frosting in the fridge, waiting for something chocolate to coat. It must be chocolate. I know, because I have tested various cookies in it and the chocolate ones taste awesome. Everything else, not so much.

Finally, to end the baking extravaganza, I made my tried and true biscuits. They came out...weird. Very watery, and I decided to just go with it instead of adding flour for a better consistancy. Not bad, per se, but definitely not what I was going for! No pictures of these. They confirmed the abundance of moisture in our household. I've made these things dozens of times, there's (almost) no way the consistancy was my fault, it must be the air. I shall attempt these again, for science. And my taste buds.

'Tis the Season

Happy Christmahaunukwanzika!


When we (Edit by Lee - Lies! I had nothing to do with it!) first put up the tree, we still had no furniture in the main living room. The tiny tree looked extra forlorn in the corner.


This is the extent of our Christmas decorating. A small tree and train, and a book of politically correct holiday stories. You can't tell, but there is an "Our First Christmas" ornament in there towards the top. (EBL - I had nothing to do with owning that either) It's clear and it has some shiny bits. I wanted to hang it over the window in the kitchen, but as the window has a shelf that is currently holding the knives, Lee said it was a bad idea. Therefore, it is on the tree, but invisible.

Also, as I write this, it seems as though an animal has gotten into the ceiling. I don't think we have an attic, but there's definitely something up there. Which is odd because we've never seen any squirrels or wild animals about. Bats, yes, birds, yes, and there are cats and dogs, but small wild animals...no. There are stories of monkeys in the forests, but they're a bit far away. I think it's trying to get in through the air conditioning unit.

Business Cards

Ana's work took her order for business cards months before me, but my office seems to have their act togther - mine came in first. Japanese on one side, English on the other. She's jealous. Pics!

New Phones!

We finally got ourselves some cell phones. Since we don't need them to show HBO or accept faxes we got the cheapest phones we could. As you can (maybe) see from the blurry picture, there's a silver stripe across the front that has the date and time on it. It's only there when you close the phone or it rings. There's also an LED behind it that flashes different colors - blue for missed call, green for voice mail, something else for text message, so that's pretty cool.

And the money shot:


The phones have English menus, which really lowers the learning curve. Unfortunately, the voice mail service is in Japanese - had to get Meiko to listen to the menu and tell us what buttons we needed to press when to retrieve the messages. I also discovered by accident that closing the phone does not end the conversation. I ran my battery down and gave Lee a voice mail that took up the entire allowed time this way, thinking that like my old phone it would end the call when I closed it. Nope! They both have cameras and about thirty places that various cords or cards can be hooked in. This is the typical look of Japanese phones - rectangular with a shiny strip on them. They get more features and colors if you want to pay more, but they're all very similar in style to what we've got. They're also a heck of a lot cheaper to have - just under $10/month per phone which gives us free calling to each other all the time and any other Softbank customer from 1 am to 9 pm. Excellent.

Lee's note: Ana's phone has a button on the side which makes her phone swing open automatically, which is freaking sweet. I would have gotten one except that it was only available in magenta and mauve. Not so much a mauve guy myself.

Back on the Bus

I've taken nearly one hundred pictures to blog about, but I just haven't sat down to write anything in the past couple of weeks. So, here goes:

Monday was our first large work dinner party - these occasions are very important in Japan for group bonding and because the social rules are relaxed enough for people to say things that need to be said. This particular dinner happened under the auspices of blessing our machine shop.

The Mechanical Engineering staffs from both KIT and KTC have an annual ceremony where the machine shop is blessed by Shinto priests - praying for the safety of the shop and the occupants thereof in the coming year. It was interesting, despite the fact that the audience spent a lot of time in long bows, and were therefore more able to observe their shoes than what was going on. Not necessarily optimal for our first Shinto ceremony.

First, an enormous bottle of Sake was opened to entice the protective deities to come down to hear our request that they protect the machine shop. A tree branch with white papers or something tied to it was waved over some machines and a representative from each group (KIT students, KTC students, lab workers, KIT teachers, KTC teachers, etc.) placed a small branch similar to the large one on the altar as an offering from each group to keep us safe while working on the machines in the coming year. There were also fruits and vegetables and other bottles of alcohol as offerings on the altars. A lot of clapping was also involved at various points - I think the kami might have ADD or something and need loud noises to keep their attention. After the ceremony, we went to a fairly traditional Japanese restaurant for dinner.

When you get off the bus at the restaurant, you check both your coat and your shoes before entering the dining hall. This dinner was very traditional for Japan, though thankfully it featured chairs instead of low cushions. Lee and I were seated at the table with the presidents of both KTC and KIT, which put us in pretty exhalted (and non-English speaking) company. The first few courses were already on the plate, which was covered by a paper with a pretty design printed on it. They had some speeches which are of course largely wasted on us, before getting to a toast or three involving the plum wine already on the plate.

Finally, the eating commenced, and beer and sake are brought out by the case. The beer glass is smaller than many juice glasses and a sake cup is about triple the size of a thimble. This is a good thing, because in Japan you can't fill your own glass - you fill for people around you and they fill for you. The trend is to be both generous in quantity and numerous in times pouring. Which means we had a bunch of sake and beer. Neither of which are our most favorite, though the beer is very light and dry and not bad and sake the sake was okay too.

Food-wise, there was crab, which is well prepared in that they cut open the crab legs for you instead of making you crack them open. There was also some pretty good soup, some sushi, fish ovaries (tasty, but my stomach churned), a huge snail or something, a bowl of green soba noodles, and a bunch of other things that I don't even remember. They kept on bringing dishes out, about ten different dishes in all. We ate everything, though it would have probably been better to have not known about the fish ovaries. It was a very enjoyable evening.

I mentioned that I'd taken a lot of pictures at the beginning of this post. I don't have any from the ceremony or the dinner. Therefore, please accept this picture of a giraffe. If the reference is unfamiliar, you may or may not want to click on this link.

more animals

edited to make the picture fit!

Kenroku-en

This is one of the three most famous gardens in Japan, and it is right here in Kanazawa. We actually went to Kenroku-en almost a month ago, but I like to take a LOT of pictures and hadn't organized them until today. We weren't as impressed with this garden as we were with Natadera, but we probably just came in an off-season. It wasn't summer anymore, so some things were dying, but fall colors weren't quite at their peak and they just put all these rope supports on some tree branches. The rope supports are there in case it snows; you don't want these awesome branches you've spent, in some cases, decades cultivating into just the right shape getting bent or broken during the winter due to heavy snows. There isn't much snow here, but when it does snow, we've been told, it's heavy and wet. Not good for delicate branches. We can't wait to go again when the plum and/or cherry blossoms are in full bloom, and may stop by again if there's a pretty snowstorm. One where the snow stays for long enough for us to get downtown and see the garden.


There were a lot of cool bridges and for some reason, one branch of a cherry tree was in bloom. It was all pretty nice. See Flickr for more pictures!


We walked, and it takes about an hour to get from our place to the garden. There's also a castle downtown and some temples, along with samuri and geisha districts, but we haven't visited those yet. We then got slightly lost going home - there's a little shopping street we decided to walk down, just to see what was there, and we thought it ran parallel to the main street. Apparently it does for a while, and then the main street takes a right and the parallel street keeps going straight, so we came out of it...somewhere. We kept walking until we found the river that pretty much separates our end of Kanazawa from the downtown, and walked along it until we found the correct bridge we cross over. They have such nice river walkways next to all the rivers here. You can follow the river all the way to the beach, though that takes awhile. We'll probably wait until we have bikes for such an adventure.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We miss you all!

Enjoy your turkey...and cranberry sauce...and pie...and have an extra helping for us, since we won't be getting any of that!

Snow!

We had a bit of snow here. Actually, we had some hail, some rain, and some snow, all while thundering and lightning(-ing?...). Apparently, it's quite common here to have snow and rain during a thunderstorm. Those of you from Buffalo probably remember the big "Thundersnow" storm a couple of years ago. That's supposedly normal here, though not fun to walk to work in. Though the snow doesn't tend to stick around for longer than 24 hours. Anyway, here's a couple of very blurry pictures of the neighboring plants covered in snow:




Also, while I may not have seen cucumber or other odd Pepsi products yet, I have seen watermelon and grape flavored Kit-Kat bars. I don't recommend the watermelon ones...

Real Squid Pizza

As Lee and I were somewhat mislead about the squid pizza last time, which is really more like a squid fritter, we decided to make a real squid pizza for dinner. The squid fritter was really good, in fact, much better than the squid pizza turned out. We bought something frozen that looked like it could be squid (or possibly sea cucumber, or something). Luckily, when it thawed it did turn out to be squid. Lee also wanted mushrooms so we got oyster mushrooms. They're creepy looking.


I made dough and sauce and we got what was considered pizza cheese at the store. I know there was Parmesan and I think mozzarella in there, but it really didn't taste like actual cheese. Mmmm, squid and mushroom pizza.


We made two pizzas, one squid and mushroom for Lee and one cheese with some squid bits for Ana. Squid is not a great pizza topping. The cheese product they have here is also not a great pizza topping. Another food tried in the name of science. Or something.

Misty, Dreary Day

Today was a day for cleaning. My ankle needs a rest from walking everywhere, and it's raining, so we're staying in. While cleaning (and knitting, and playing video games...), we noticed some pretty cool mists in the hills behind our apartment, and took some pictures to show off.


They don't really get much in the way of Fall color here. There are trees that change color, but not like back home. Much nicer there. The hills are mostly bamboo, so only that small stripe of colored trees change; all the rest stay green, or so I've been told. There's a couple other shots in Flickr (in the Apartment set), though I wish I had thought to do a panoramic of just the hills - that's exactly what I wanted, I just didn't think of it until tonight when the opportunity is no longer there. Oh well, nice pictures anyway. Here's another one of the fields behind our house:


The Japanese even have a word for Fall foliage, though I forget what it is. The red maples and Ginko trees are nice, but they don't stay pretty for very long. They tend to change and fall immediately, instead of hanging around for a bit and allowing me to enjoy the color. Oh well, Spring is supposed to be much nicer here than at home, so I have that to look forward to!

We Did It For Science...

We tried KFC, ordinarily forbidden by Lee. First, because we were looking for forms of chicken other than chicken breasts, and two, to see how it was different. You just can't get chicken with bones in it here, except for wings. We discovered that there are no biscuits at KFC here, but there are french fries. There's a seasoning packet to put on the fries (which come in a bag), and instructions to pour the seasoning into the bag and then shake it up. (We declined to do so) They don't give you very many fries either. This is the four piece meal, for about $10, which, in our opinion, was not worth it. The pieces of chicken seem smaller than at home, no guarantees. We probably won't be trying the Dominoes or Pizza Hut in the interest of science, as a $30 pizza is just not appealing in any way, and that's what they cost.

Long Time No Post

Not that we haven't been doing anything, just that we haven't been writing about it. So, here's some pictures from a walk we took about town almost two weeks ago. First, we went down a busy road and then realized the building we thought could be a department store was actually just apartments. Then, we turned down the river to go to the other end of town to see a craft store and a stationary store. There's a nice path down all of the little streams around here:


The ducks are different here. They have colored tips on their bills. From far away, they don't look that different, but they aren't quite the same (click to see it better):


In fact, all of the birds here are a bit different. The crows are much larger and louder. There's a couple of hawks that live in our neighborhood too, but they always fly away before I can photograph them. Very large birds.

On our walk, we also saw some interesting gardens, and photographed one nicely manicured tree. You can tell how much money a family has by the niceness of their garden. This family must have money.


When we got to the end of the river, we came out into a little park. There were benches and areas for kids to play, and nicely manicured bushes and things. There was also a statue:


We went to the stationary store to check it out, and then headed home. On the way, there were some pretty flowers:


Such pretty things everywhere. As long as you don't look at the power lines, which are all aboveground.

Happy Halloween!

They don't really do Halloween here. No Trick or Treating, no parties (unless you're an odd foreigner who likes that kind of thing..) and no costumes. They wear costumes enough otherwise anyway here; they don't need a special holiday. Imagine my surprise when I walk by the local KFC/Pizza Hut (yes, they're in Japan too!) and find this:


I was somewhat saddened and scared. I'm still hoping that they're just dressing him up for Halloween, and not the start of the Christmas season. They don't really do Christmas much here either, but the stores already have displays with fake fur trees and blinking lights, along with Christmas cards that contain more circuitry than my students' robots. Christmas season isn't until after Thanksgiving. They don't have Thanksgiving here (if you're wondering why not, remember why we celebrate it...) so I suppose the last international holiday before Christmas is Halloween, but come on people - two months? If I have to pass the Col. Sanders Santa every day on my way to work for the next two months...I don't even know what will happen. But I'm sure it won't be pretty.

KTC School Festival

The school has a festival every year. Last weekend was the festival. That means I had to work both days. It was pretty cool though, there were dancers, drummers, other performances, and I did not take as many pictures or video as I had wanted. Here are some highlights:

The drummers were great. I really, really enjoy Taiko drummers. They put on a really good show, and I'll have to get a better memory card for next year. I also got my picture taken with them:


There were beautiful Ikebana flower arrangements all over. The school always has a couple in certain areas, and I didn't know that there was a club here that does the Ikebana. I'm planning to join for next year. You pay your membership fee and get fresh flowers you've arranged every week. They also have you get certified along the way. I figure if I still want to do it when school starts again in April, I will, but it may just be a passing fancy. They had a few arrangements in places like the tea ceremony room and then there was an entire room full of the arrangements. I took pictures of a bunch of them and put them on Flickr.

There were dancers, and all dance troupes performed on the floor in front of the stage while flag wavers waved their flags on the stage as a background for the dancers. I was much more enthralled by the flags than the dancers myself:

There was a lot of food, sold by the student clubs as fundraisers. There was traditional food, like squid fritters and bubble tea, as well as American food, like hot dogs and popcorn. They consider hot dogs in buns to be called hot dogs but hot dogs eaten not on a bun, like on a stick, to be called weiners. Interesting factoid of the day. You could buy a $10 raffle ticket and it came with five $2 coupons for food, so you could get $10 in food. There was really no point to not buying a raffle ticket. They had things like a Nintendo Wii and WiiFit package, a PS3, a very large television, a sewing machine, and the first couple prizes were two containers of orange juice. It was a good time. There was a food tasting contest that was judged by a panel of professors and students, and the professors were given interesting hats from theballoon guy. There was a balloon artist who was really very good, a haunted house, an English Lounge where you could play board games and eat Halloween candy (my favorite room), Bingo, arm wrestling, a room where you shot corks from wildly inaccurate guns at small boxes of candy for prizes, karaoke, rooms for the fifth year students to show off their projects, a bazaar, and all kinds of other things.

Some students dressed up. There was a Snake from the game Metal Gear Solid, and he would hide in boxes like in the game and jump out to scare unsuspecting passers by. The students did a lot of work setting everything up. They put up banners and decorations, and even decorated the school statue of a fisherman. He's only wearing a loincloth, so it's a bit scandalous from the backside! The teachers did very little except show up and patronize the food booths. I enjoyed it greatly and will be looking forward to next year. Next year we'll have two festivals to go to, both the KIT and KTC festivals, as they're held on different weekends in October.

Flames

Our stove is scary. It's a gas stove, and the flames are huuuuuuge. It makes sense, since typical wok cooking here requires massive amounts of heat, but it's still a very scary thing to have the flames rising halfway up the sides of a rather large (obviously CutCo, thanks mom!) pot. The pot in question contains a daikon, something that looks like a huge carrot and tastes like a weak radish. You can apparently do anything to a daikon that you can do to a potato, so we're mashing it with some garlic. They don't have minced garlic here; we've been getting actual cloves and chopping them up for use in stir fry. We've been making a lot of stir fry here, as the vegetables are pretty cheap and it's the easiest thing to do with what we know we have available to us.

In other news, Rochester had its first snowfall yesterday and today I walked home from work in the rain with no umbrella or coat. In fact, Lee's still been wearing shorts and I've only worn something over a t-shirt or work shirt a couple of times. The winters here are actually very mild; so mild in fact that they use water to clear the streets of snow. I'm assuming it's salt water from the ocean (about an hour's bike ride away) and the salt would then help too. It might not be though. Next month is when all the falll foliage is best; the trees have only just begun to change. We'll have to find a scenic place and take pictures then.

Even Here, Jehovah's Witnesses

Elapsed time from move-in to first visit from Japanese Jehovah's Witnesses: 22 days. That in an impressive response time considering that they represent somewhere around 0.1% of the Japanese population according to Wikipedia. They had a little book with languages and I believe they just wanted to say hi (in Japanese) and figure out what languages we speak, preparatory to securing a bible in that language and coming back loaded for bear. I missed the opportunity to say I wanted one in Klingon, but they left pretty rapidly, which might have been because I was wearing my Tabasco sauce PJ's when I answered the door.

Glorious Appliances!

The reimbursement came in, and apparently the dollar was strong against the yen when we shipped things and bought tickets, because we got back more than we expected. They still owe us for my plane ticket but we won't get that until I start working.

Anyhow, Ana drew out most of it in cash and Meiko took us shopping for appliances. I can't say I ever expected to be excited about buying kitchen appliances. Three weeks without a refrigerator was actually a lot easier than I expected, but that doesn't mean I wasn't looking forward to being able to buy milk and not have to use it within twelve hours and things like that. We also got a rice cooker that could probably pilot a plane if we programmed it correctly - looks like something out of Star Trek, and a combination microwave / convection / steam oven whatsit that is pretty large for around here and still not very big.

Got some good deals - the fridge was their store model for last year and was marked down about 40%, which made it cost the same as the cheapest ones but it has a much more solid feel to it and is a little bigger. The microwave was a never-used (according to the store) 2008 model but we got it for $265 at a secondhand store when a new one is $578 the other place we saw it. I'm glad we found it cheap because I would have balked at spending that much on an oven right now and the less expensive ones can be very small indeed. The rice cooker was on sale too but I don't know if they are usually on sale or not, got $50 off the MSRP. Might well be par for the course.

Anyhow, enjoy some pictures.

Fridge:


Fancy rice cooker:
Fancy multi-oven:
Fancy strap-on carrying handle they put on the rice cooker box:

Hanko Meanings

Since Lee actually kept a picture of the Hanko, I can finally look up the meanings. So far, I've used it to sign in to work in the mornings and to sign important documents, but haven't stamped it on anything to actually look up what is says. Mine (the second one in the original post) has two symbols, "a" and "na", so it just says "Ana". The meanings for the symbols are "subordinate" or "Asia" for "a" and "what?" for "na".

Lee's (the first one) has a bunch of symbols. I honestly can't find the first or last one. Might be the "hey this guy's a foreigner" symbols. Or it could be, as Lee said, things we don't want to know about. Either way, the last symbol on the top row is "ri" and the first one on the next row is "i", so it says "rii", pronounced as close as you can get to "Lee". The weird thing is that for Katakana, the written lanugage those two symbols are in, to make a long vowel (ii instead of i), you would actually just draw a horizontal line to indicate the elongation. In Hiragana, you'd double the vowel like it is here. Though it could be done this way because the elongation symbol is on the second line instead of next to the syllable. A single horizontal line also means the number one, so it could be interpreted as "Ri-ichi" or "Li the First" I suppose. I must investigate this further...

Giant Spiders

There are large, green + black + red spiders all over town. Mostly in webs hanging from trees or power lines. Photographic evidence follows. The second one is blurry but shows the color better. I was leaning over the wall of someone's garden to take these so I didn't want to stick around all day taking more. As before, to get a quality copy of the picture, left-click once to get the large version, and then right-click to get the option to save it.