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.

More Interesting Foods

First off, here's a picture of our pantry in its current state:


We don't have a fridge yet, as we're waiting on reimbursements and my first paycheck to do our real furnishing, so we've been going to the store daily for food and not getting much that needs refrigeration. I can't reach the top shelf there, so I need Lee to get things up there for me, at least until we get a stool. He's napping right now, while I wanted to take pictures of new and interesting things. In addition to what I'm going to show you, I realized something. See those things on the top shelf? Can't tell what they are? Here's a close up:


Those would be the dessert-y items we have here in the house. That's chocolate chip cookies and our fourth box of chocolates we got for neighbors, but since we have only three, it's extra. Lee has I do believe, purposefully hidden the desserts away where I have to ask him to get them for me. And there's still no Cherry Pepsi in Japan! My sweet tooth may just shrivel up and die from inattention.

On to the new and interesting food items. First off, we have butter. This is your average, every day butter. Or at least we think so - we know all the other products in the vicinity were butter substitutes, and this is the only one that said butter only on it. You have no idea how thrilling it is to be able to read something and understand what it is instead of having a crapshoot for dinner. Anyway, butter here is not in stick format. It is packaged like margarine or cream cheese usually is in the US. It's in a big foil-covered rectangle about the size of the box. Not totally bizarre, but something I thought I'd share with you.

Next up, we have bread. The bread here is quite fresh and moist, and does not seem to have much in the way of preservatives in it. It's also completely square. The breads are all the same size loaves, though you can get thinner or thicker slices. The bread comes in 4, 5, 6, or 8 slice formats, all about a dollar each. 1/3 the bread for 1/3 more cost than at home, but most things are more expensive. I can hear you now - What is that small thing near the bread? Well, fear not, trusty reader, for all will be revealed in due time.

The small container near the bread is something we picked up because it was on sale. It is chocolate peanut butter. In a prior post, I was lamenting the lack of cost-efficient peanut butter and jelly sandwich supplies. This small container normally costs $1.28, but was on sale for $0.66 today. All of the peanut butter flavors of this brand were that much, but all but the chocolate were already gone. We decided to pick up one of the last four chocolate peanut butters, just to try it. It is much more chocolate-y than I had anticipated. I had it on a piece of bread toasted on the skillet, since we have no toaster. It tasted like chocolate and the butter I used in toasting the bread, but not really like peanut butter. I was saddened. We'll have to go to the foreign foods store to see if we can get a normal size peanut butter, even if it is double what we'd pay at home.

The last item I'll be sharing with you today is a rather every day food item, but in an interesting package. This is a miniature can of Sprite - about 3 oz. I could not let such a wonderful item not be blogged about, so we got one. It is normal Sprite, but much smaller. Here is with Mr. Hamilton. Sure, I could have used a ruler or tape measure, but I think this was better.

Hanko and Glamour Shots

Couple of images courtesy of my fine scanner.

First up we have our hanko. Around here signatures aren't legal marks, and that goes for Americans too. People use seals or chops called hanko in place of signatures. The school had hanko made for us before we even got here in anticipation of us having to sign leases and things like that. Mine is on the left, Ana's on the right. They tell us the characters are sort of translations of our names, but my name can be written with one katakana and there is a heck of a lot more than that on there. I haven't checked it against the dictionary yet - it could say rude things and I'd still have to use it. Might not want to find out.










Next up is a scan of an ad that has already run in the paper here since our arrival. They've apparently been taking a lot of pictures of their newest American female engineering professor and they're all 'Hey, look what we have!' about it. Around Ana are the American and Kiwi engineering teachers and the foreign members of the English department of KTC. I did patch this together out of two smaller scans, you'll see the line down the middle. To get better copies of the photos, left click on the picture to get a large version, and then right-click on the image for the option to save it to your computer.

Local Food Watch

I can't document everything strange that we eat, but...these were given to us by a neighbor. To our taste and understanding they were glutinous rice balls covered in sweetened bean paste. Strange, but edible. At least for me, Ana's taste buds cried 'wtf mate' and she was done before she even got through to the rice.















Ana wanted something dessert-ish and I was at the store and saw a huge bag of gumdrops - individually wrapped because the Japanese individually wrap everything. We bought some crackers a while back and they were wrapped two at a time.















Then I opened one up and got the sneaking suspicion that these might not be gumdrops - seemed viscous but liquidy. That and it said "jelly" on it.















Turned out to be individually wrapped jello-like thingies, except the flavor is really weak. This one was orange, but instead of being orange like orange juice or orange soda, it was orange like watered down orange gatorade. Which more like water with a hint of orange than orange itself. Not a winner. I'll eat them at some point but I hope the other flavors are better. And this was what I managed to pick out of the whole candy section. Foodstuff identification failure. FIF for short.

Meeting the Neighbors

We brought a lot of little gifts with us when we came, knowing that there are many people you are required to give gifts to upon or shortly after arriving. One traditional transaction that takes place is gifting all of your neighbors as part of your official introduction, and sometimes they gift back too.

We've been busy and sort of putting off officially meeting the neighbors - it isn't the kind of thing that would thrill me in English, and in Japanese there was the possibility of it being pretty awkward. However, one of the neighbors broke the ice for us and came up to say hi and give us some bean cakes that will be discussed in another post shortly. I think I caught about three words of what she said.

After that, we figured we might as well go and meet the rest of them and hand out the gifts, as it was a national holiday and we thought people should be home. First we spent a while with the dictionaries and grammar books and made a cheat sheet to practice off of, and that worked pretty well for conveying our introduction to them, but some people then sort of figured we could speak Japanese pretty well after hearing us and went on at a mile a minute shortly thereafter. This is despite our assertion of 'Nihon-go dekimasen' which we said at least once for every person we met - means literally 'Japanese language I cannot' but theoretically is proper in Japanese. Anyhow, it was definitely a little awkward but they seem nice enough and we successfully followed the form of the thing as best I can tell, so yay us.

Natadera

We had a lot of firsts this weekend. First time to downtown (technically second, but I'm not counting going in a taxi to City Hall to fill out paperwork), first time getting caught out in a pouring rainstorm, first time on a train in Japan, first time in a religious place in Japan (Natadera), first time trying black sesame ice cream, first time taking the bus...lots of firsts, and all in one day.

We found out that Catia, an English teacher at KTC, was going out to a town called Kagaonsen on Saturday to see the sights, and went along.

We were to meet Catia and another friend of hers at the train station in the morning. As Friday had been hot and Saturday was shaping up sunny, we dressed lightly. Twenty minutes into our hour plus walk to the train station it starts pouring rain. Thankfully, we were passing in front of a 100 yen store (dollar store) at the time and bought two umbrellas for two bucks. The umbrellas in Japan can be very small and for $1 you get an umbrella that is comically undersized for Westerners in an actual rainstorm, so everything below about waist hight got soaked. This was not pleasing, but we successfully navigated all the way through the rather ritzy downtown area (saw Gucci stores and similar) to the train station.














They had a sweet clock / fountain thing. Train station in the background.














There was some confusion about trains and platforms but we asked a Japanese person to read the characters on the ticket for us and they pointed us at the right place. The train had some cool features - any given row of seats can be rotated to face the other direction just by stepping on a pedal and giving it a push - so the four of us could sit face-to-face and chat as opposed to sitting in rows. To find open seats we had to go to the last car, past the smoking zone, which was gross. Unfortunately, the rear of the train was, unbeknownst to us, lacking in doors, so when we got to our stop we couldn't get out before the train started moving again. We had to take a local train back from whatever that town was to Kagaonsen.

Once in Kagaonsen we noticed their fine giant statue thing, and grabbed lunch at the supermarket before getting on the bus to go to Natadera.

















Note the giant golden statue and our two cheap umbrellas.

Natadera is a temple complex with very nice gardens and impressive terrain. I've put up just a few pictures on the blog - see the full set here.


































Some of the paths and tunnels looked to have been hand carved out a looong time back and were actually kind of sketchy from a safety perspective - would have been easy to slip off a precipice or two.

We wandered around for a couple hours until it was time to get on the last bus back to the station, but while waiting for the bus we tried out black sesame ice cream from a place right in front of Natadera. Despite the picture and the questionable coloration, it was quite sweet and mild. I think they could have gone heavier on the sesame too - reminded me of peanut butter ice cream and has a good sweet/salt thing going on.

















We took the train back without major drama, and then had to figure out the bus system to avoid having to walk back in the dark in the rain. Catia briefed us - in Kanazawa you take a ticket when you get on the bus, and pay when you get off by putting both ticket and exact change into a thingie that collects them. I think you could underpay and get away with it as I don't think it reads the ticket, but the fee was reasonable and not walking back was good.
Day was adventurous and educational, but not relaxing. And if Natadera is indicative, they have serious gardens here.

Festival Weekend

It's a festival weekend. Or something. It's the KIT Festival, though we didn't go because we were tired from yesterday's trip (more on that later). It's also a national holiday (or something) and I get Monday off of work. I have to work next Saturday and both days the weekend after due to an Open House and the KTC Festival, but I get the Monday after the Festival off too. They have strange schedules here.

Anyway, back to the point of the post. This morning, we're hanging out and not really doing much of anything, when we hear a commotion outside. We look out the window, and lo and behold, there is a parade. Why there would be a parade today, down our street, we have no idea. However, there was a parade with people in costumes and a dragon. Also a little dude with a big stick and crazy hair. He was fighting the dragon (I think). I got a picture of the procession from our bay window, but didn't go down to see it as I was still in my robe. I tried to get a video, but my memory card was full from yesterday's trip to Natadera. Anyway, the dragon:


I still have no idea why this happened, or if it will happen again, but there you are.

A Random Post

Things that would make me happy in Japan:

Brown shoes and belt. I have 2-3 pairs of brown pants, but no matching shoes and belt combo. I’ve never been in a position where I’ve had to wear clothing quite as professionally as I do here – I have to actually tuck in my shirts and wear belts and all that.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I suppose I could get some. It costs $10-$11 for enough supplies to make 9 sandwiches. That’s one jar of peanut butter, one jar of jelly and three loaves of bread. Three loaves of bread with six slices per loaf. They’re not that big on baking here. The jars of peanut butter and jelly wouldn't last much further than those three loaves either. I’ve been warned away from trying to buy uncut breads here. A coworker thought she was getting a lovely loaf of French bread for some egg salad sandwiches. She has everything ready to go, cuts the loaf open, and finds chocolate inside. You tend to find chocolate or beans or something in breads. These people just don’t understand sandwiches.

Wild Cherry Pepsi. I love me a Wild Cherry Pepsi. They have normal Pepsi, normal Coke, plain Mountain Dew, some random melon, grape, and orange flavored drinks, and ginger ale. The machines at school also now serve 7-Up and Sprite. I’m scared of the orange one since you can get hot orange juice, so I think it’s just carbonated orange juice. Though I love orange juice and Sprite, especially if you add some tequila…Since I don’t like the sodas they have, this is both a good and bad thing. I won’t be drinking any, which is good, but if I just really want some, I have to order it from the Foreign Buyer’s Club in Kobe. Maybe the local foreign foods store has it. Do you know how weird it is to go to the foreign foods aisle in the store to get spaghetti?

Things that I’ve learned in Japan that I could/should have learned beforehand:

I love Earl Grey tea. Never tried it before, it always creeped me out. It’s delicious.

/random post.

Graduate Work in Trash Disposal

After we got our stuff out of the Fedex boxes, we needed to get rid of the boxes themselves as well as packing material and other refuse. Trash disposal is very complicated and regulated here. We have a sixteen page guide on how to do it, with at least ten distinct categories of waste that have to be kept separate and delivered to different places on different days. If you screw it up, members of your community call your real estate representative, who calls your boss, who bitches you out for it, so it isn't recommended. I had seven different types of trash by my count, and I wasn't necessarily sure which categories they fell into, so I sent Ana into school with a list of what we had and instructions to discover for sure what to do with each. That done, the first batch (sliced and diced boxes, bags of newspaper, plus the "burnables" bag) went out this morning and I haven't gotten a phone call yet, so I think it was correct. I never thought I would get such a charge out of not screwing up taking out the trash.

Yay Boxes?

So all of our 15 FedEx boxes arrived, many of them having been re-opened by Customs. Here they all are, piled up in our living room/dining room area. Not terribly banged up, we were quite ecstatic that the boxes were here so quickly. Customs had just released them Friday, and they arrived Saturday afternoon. The local shipping guys were also really helpful, carrying all 15 boxes up the stairs to our second floor apartment, and handing them to us at the door. The Japanese do NOT enter a house with shoes on. They all have little entryways where you stop and take off your shoes, then step up to the actual floor, and shoe cupboards in the entryway to keep your shoes in. Having all the boxes here safe and sound was quite a relief, even more so as all of my button-down shirts were in the boxes and I started work last Wednesday.

We had quite a few issues with FedEx and our boxes - mid-August, we learned that 14 of the 15 customs declaration papers (with weights and costs) were missing. We figure it was Chris the ever-so-helpful FedEx guy in Bedford - this is meant very sarcastically. We told him the shipment was worth $9000, he logged it in as $2400. We took 9 hours to fill out the 15 sheets, and we're pretty sure it was him who lost them, since he told us we only needed one and they proved that the shipment was worth well over $2400. So we're going back and forth with FedEx, and they're telling us to falsify the information, and we really don't want to since we couldn't remember everything that went. The number of kitchen implements alone was quite large, and pricing it all? Not going to happen. They said they'd just let it all sit and it would be allowed in when we got here. So the boxes finally arrived. About four of them came bearing this:

A lot of our dishes were broken. Six out of eight bowls (three of Lee's beloved blue bowls and three of the brand new ones from Target), all heavy ceramic and packed fairly well. Two out of four Ben and Jerry's holiday bowls bought with Debit from the RIT on-campus Ben and Jerry's the year they sold them (Freshman year, I think). These were all different colors and had sayings on the outside - we still have Peace and Harmony, but Love and Joy are gone. Two out of four champagne flutes, both of the Reidel glasses from the EPCOT Food and Wine Festival last year, three of Lee's four Old Fashioned Double glasses (whiskey glasses) and two of our five beer-style glasses, including an RIT Alumni glass and my EPCOT Mission Space one. Luckily, neither of my mugs broke and none of our four actual dishes. The largest Pyrex measuring cup of a set of three, never opened still in original packaging broke as well. Both of our metal strainers were bent amazingly, though later fixed by Lee. Well, un-bent - one of the handles broke off in the un-bending process which involved quite a bit of kicking. We figure that might be why they wanted the costs so badly earlier. We had no shipping costs, so we get no reimbursement for all that was broken.

Only seven ceramic items survived - the four bowls and two mugs, and the brand new Polish plate from my mother that was a wedding gift. I wish the Ben and Jerry's bowls had come out okay, but I'm very glad that the plate and mugs survived. We may try to glue a couple of the ceramic bowls back together since they're in huge shards, but we might just go buy more. Gluing them together might be the easiest method, since garbage regulations here are crazy.

Final tally (Not Broken/Broken/% Broken):
Stemware - 2/4/67%
Ceramics - 7/8/53%
Glasses - 2/3/60%
Pyrex - 1/20/5%
Glass shards in my foot - 2 so far

Moral of the story: Pack your box so full with bubble wrap that nothing can move, then write "FRAGILE" over everything. But probably just bring everything that could be broken with you on the plane.

Our Apartment

We chose the second floor apartment with the two tatami rooms. This is the view we get to wake up to every morning:


This was taken on our balcony, which you get to through the doors in the bedroom:


We sleep on a futon on the tatami, and it gets rolled up every morning and put away. There's a lot of storage in closets in this place. We thought we'd need a room just to store things, but with all the closet space here, we really didn't need an apartment so large. I'm not complaining though! Here's our kitchen:


And in the same room, the dining room/living room space, and the door leading out onto the other end of the balcony:


We have a room we will probably not use much:


And a room that we'll probably use as an office and guest room, so that when we have guests they can experience sleeping on the futon in a traditional tatami room:


This room has traditional paper doors that open out to the sun room, a covered balcony with another awesome view:


The bathroom arrangements here are somewhat weird, though our toilet doesn't have all the high tech features many others do, like a heated seat or bidet. It does have two flushing levels, and instead of just filling the tank when you flush, it runs through a faucet into a built in sink that drains into the tank, so you can wash your hands using the water you will later flush with. You get charged for water twice here, once for clean water and again for any sewage water that goes down the drain, so little things like that sink are common. It also saves space in the tiny toilet room. The floor in the shower room is a material similar to what you'd find on the floor of a tub or shower, and there's a drain in it. You close the door and shower in the room, instead of having curtains or something around your tub.Our bathtub, which an adult (or at least a Japanese adult, we haven't tried it yet) can soak in completely:


Our shower area, with a mirror and shelves for everything, also two places to hang the hand-held shower head for multiple uses:


That's about it for now. We'll be taking more (and better) pictures as we get furniture and get things set up. View from the sun room: