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.