August 20, 2008

Munchies, Nummies, and Eats

Since the picture of my very, very empty kitchen (see previous post) probably has several people worried about my fooding situation, I figured now would be a good time to make a food-themed post to reassure certain parties that I am in fact getting nourishment, in abundance even.

The simplest way I can put it is that Japan is madly in love with food and the preparation thereof. This is not an exaggeration. If anything, it may be an understatement. Although there are only four or five channels on Japanese TV, on any given day you can easily view at least 24 separate programs entirely devoted to food. These usually follow the format of talk shows in which various celebrities recount their experiences of local specialties from all over Japan, interspersed with video clips of their adventures and educational information about the dishes and their places of origin. I've even seen a half-hour segment that featured an American family in New York City preparing crab cakes, steaks, and grilled vegetables in their penthouse apartment. Because the Olympics are being covered almost 24/7 by at least two channels at any given time, right now I would say that food-tourism shows make up about 60% of the programming. They probably account for at least 80% of television programs regularly. In other news, 72% of statistics are made up on the spot, and I'm too lazy to research this further right now, but I'd be willing to bet money I'm not far off the mark.

食べ物 (things what you eats) are also the preferred kind of おみやげ (little gifts you bring back to your co-workers and / or family after a business trip or vacation; sort of like souvenirs, except it's pretty much mandatory because you need to show some consideration for the fact that while you were out having a good time, everybody else was stuck back at the office / school / whatevs). Apparently the little mochi (rice cakes filled with bean paste) I brought back from Mie Orientation in Tsu City were a big hit. I was told that they were gone within a day. I was in Nagoya on Monday and Tuesday, so today I brought in a big box of wafer-cookie-things filled with buttercream. What makes them special is that their wrappers have pictures of Nagoya Castle. Also, they're pretty effin' delicious.

Of course, as I'm sure many people have heard, there are some things about foodstuffs in Japan-land that seem a bit...off. For instance, TV dinners: stick in microwave, remove after 2 minutes, eat. Yes?

No. As far as I can tell, there are no quick-fix dinners that you can actually fix quickly in the microwave. Everything I have come across at a konbini ("convenience store" conveniently shortened into three syllables. Sometimes Japanglish works a whole lot better than my native tongue. I'm making all these annoying parenthetical explanations now so I don't have to bother explaining my pidgin-speak later. You should probably take notes) has a big warning somewhere on the side of the packaging along the lines of "if you make the regretful choice to honorably place this holding thing in your microwave, we must humbly inform you that a bothersome electrical fire will unfortunately result." No matter how innocent and metal-free the container looks, you must never ignore this warning. I tried it with a styrofoam cup of pasta. The cover on it, which for all the world looked like nothing but plastic, had a thin coating of aluminum or something on the inside. Several large sparks and a few rude words ensued.

The other thing that never fails to take me by surprise and cause me some discomfort is the ubiquitous but very, VERY sneaky usage of mayonnaise. The local stores sell sandwiches that are actually two slices of bread with the crusts removed and the edges fused. So really it's like a sandwich-cake with delicious mystery filling. The type of sandwich is actually indicated on the wrapper - egg salad, curry, peanut butter, etc. So I figured when I picked up a menchi karoke sandwich, I was going to bite into it and find myself a nice menchi karoke in the middle (karoke is a little fried patty of something-or-other, usually meat. I still don't quite know what menchi is, and I doubt even the Japanese can tell for sure. Nevertheless, it's powerful tasty) The advertised filling was indeed there, but it was resting on a generous spread of mayonnaise. I purposely stayed away from egg salad, or any other kind of "salad" sandwich, because these of course always include mayo, but I have a feeling that even if I had chosen the "banana cream" - which was extremely tempting - I probably would have found that the "cream" was in fact mayonnaise-based. I'm not really keen to test this theory out, because there are alternative combinations of bananas and cream which I know for a fact don't include surprise condiments.

It's about time I checked with my supervisor downstairs (this post is being written in the computer lab on the third floor, which actually has more high-tech machinery than any of the labs I saw at Nanzan University. I am perplexed and bemused by this, seeing as Shima High School is in the middle of nowhere, and Nanzan is in the middle of Nagoya. What the what now?). She's still working on getting me internet at home (>_<) Erg. Once I finally got my alien registration card so I could prove to the phone company that I wouldn't just order up internet service and then flee the country or something, all the public offices were closed for Obon holiday. That holiday period ended Friday, but then it was the weekend, which means no work. And I was in Nagoya Monday and Tuesday. If I don't have the use of the webbernets by the start of the school year, I honestly might just start going American on people and beat them up until they give me what I want, and then beat them up some more for the hell of it because I police the world. Or, yanno, just wait and gripe quietly to a few people, and use all the time I would spend on the computer at night watching cooking shows.

August 6, 2008

インフォメーションGET!!!

First off, yes: I'm alive. Yes: I like my new town pretty well. NO: I DON'T HAVE INTRONET YET D:

BUT HOW AM I MAKING THIS POST??? (lolallcaps)


My ALT-sempai (that's senior assistant language teacher) was kind enough to invite me over for dinner & for to make use of h
is interwebbernets connection, which is far faster than what is available at the school where I work. Also, the school doesn't want me bringing my personal laptop to work and hooking it up, because I guess they're afraid of spreading viruses or something. So I have a dinosaur of a laptop to use there (if Jenni is reading this, remember your old laptop? EVEN SLOWER). It can't handle image-laden websites, or even very large images for that matter. I froze it up today just trying to load a desktop-sized picture of Navy Pier.

But anyway, back to the low-down on
my new digs.

I have a little one-bedroom apartment that's out on the main road between Ise and Shima (Ise being chock full o' shrines, and Isobe, the part of Shima where I live and work, being chock full o' liquo
r stores and old people as far as I can tell). When I figure out how to stick pictures in the middle of posts, I'll update this post with some shots so you can have visual aids to supplement your vibrant imaginings.

SURPRISE UPDATE! PICTUARS ARE HEAR :B

This is what I wake up to every morning. Mountains, greenery, and the sun streaming through my hideous pastel-flower curtains at 5 in the morning. I'll upload more pictures of my bedroom once it's redecorated a bit so it is fit to evoke admiration rather than pity. The good news is the tatami mats are clean. There are spiders living under them, but I figure they keep the really nasty bugs from taking over the spaces beneath my floors, so they can stay down there. I'm certainly not going in after them.


Kitchen / "lounge area" - directly behind me is the TV and a sliding door that leads out onto a patio just large enough to hold my wee-tiny washing machine & racks for drying clothes. That big yellow plastic tube you see in the foreground is a toxic powder that you spread about outside your domicile in an ancient Japanese voodoo ritual to ward off crawly things. Actually, it doesn't ward them off so much as guarantee that if they walk across the chalky white line and enter your living space, they will succumb to the malice of evil spirits sometime within a week or so. Maybe.

Anyway, at $230 a month this place would be a steal by any American's standards, and to someone like myself who has become accustomed to living out of a single room with a stacked bed-and-workspace and one sink on the far wall, it almost seems like too much space. Almost. I've managed to make a pretty spectacular mess of it thus far, so I would say the settling-in process is going quite well.

However, the previous occupants either didn't see fit to clean it . . . EVER . . . before they left, or it has been vacant for a looooooong long time, because when I first walked in the smell from the shower room was ominous, to say the least, and everything in the kitchen/TV area had a disturbing stickiness about it that humidity alone just couldn't account for. I won't even talk about the stove top, since the landlord has since replaced it with a shiny new one that makes me very very happy because that's one less surface to sanitize. I am also happy to report that I have a gas stove, so cooking is not so much of an ordeal as it could be, although the heat and humidity tend to make the prospect of preparing hot food quite disenchanting.

Anyway, so far the local insect population has seen fit to keep to the outdoors. Everywhere outdoors. All over the building, the stairs, the walls, the lights . . . but there are no monstrous bird-eating spiders or poisonous centipedes or wee-tiny little tatami mat bugs inside. The little tatami mites ("dani") are actually probably the worst pests you could find indoors, because they're too small to see, they bite you all over during the night, and they're at the bottom of the food chain for all the other wriggly crawly nasty beasties you don't want to
see in your room. You learn about so many fun things living out in the boonies in Japan.

I do love the nature, though, for the most part. There are cute little crabs roaming about the "river" (actually more of a salty backwash from the sea that runs through a weedy ditch outside my apartment building) that wave their tiny arms at me whenever I pass by and startle them, and rumor has it there are monkeys in the little arm of forest that cuts into my neighborhood. The other day from my window I saw a Japanese raccoon-dog napping outside in the shrubbery. It was quite possibly the cutest animal I have ever seen, something
like a cross between a marten and a big brown fox with black stripes across its eyes, black limbs, and a skinny little tail. Apparently they're very common around wooded areas, and Isobe is pretty woodsy. There's a short-cut to my high school up a hill and through a patch of bamboo forest that grows up to the baseball fields behind Shima High School. It's a little rough, but it gets me to work in 15 minutes instead of 25, taking the long way around down the large roads with no sidewalks. Also it's cooler under the trees, and there are always pretty emerald dragonflies with black wings fluttering about.

Since it's still summer vacation in Japan, I won't have any classes until September, which means I pretty much sit around all day at my desk, reviewing my old Japanese textbook and attempting to make small-talk with my co-workers. They're all very nice, thankfully, nothing like the frigid, enigmatic, alien beings we were warned about during the big JET orientation in Tokyo. The orientation sessions kinda reminded me of the talks we had to attend at Nanzan University for foreign students, in that the negative aspects of culture-shock and the possibility of terrible things happening were way overblown (re: the infamous "Japan is not safe" presentation that has been the subject of much mockery amongst my group of Nagoya-buddies). I'm not feeling too isolated despite the language barrier and the fact that I'm living in the inaka ("heart of the rice field," literally; in more colloquial America-speak, "the sticks"). I don't feel shunned and unwanted by my co-workers. My supervisor and several of the teachers speak very good English. I have another JET at my school who's been here a year and can help me figure stuff out. By Tokyo-Orientation standards I'm living in a fantasy world.

Heart of a rice field! That's my apartment right there. Despite what lies perspective might be trying to impress upon you, there's actually no direct way to get to it from the main road (hint: this little footpath right here is not "the main road" - it's that dark line running through the middle of the picture). You have to walk past it and down a little side street to get to the driveway what leads to the apartment parking lot. It's a little bit inconvenient, but I would much rather see cranes wading in the reeds outside my window than blacktop or concrete.

I haven't been able to compare experiences with my fellow Mie prefecture JETs yet, except to some extent Nicole, since I have her phone number. I've started using my old cell phone from Nagoya, but because it's so out of date and I don't have my foreign-resident ID card yet (affectionately referred to as "the gaijin card") I can only use a prepaid SIM-card - the cell phone companies won't let an undocumented immigrant contract with them. What gives, right? That's downright un-American. To be fair, I am actually pretty well-documented. I'm just waiting on the bureaucracy now.

This also means that I can't get a phone company to hook up internet service at my apartment yet. If my local city hall is to be believed, my gaijin card won't be ready to pick up until August 14th. Which means I can't apply for internet service and a cell phone contract until then. Which kind of really bites. 'Cause that means I can't really use Skype unless I'm ganking AJ's intarwebz at his place, and even though he's invited me I've already soaked up enough Japanese sensibility to feel bad about imposing. But my supervisor and I have done all we can; now it's up to the government. That's never a phrase you want to use.