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!