today's adventure in foodcraft: tomato basil seafood soup

...and by "seafood" I mean "shrimp and clams" because I didn't have the patience to pick through the fish at Max Value today.

Thanks to Ginny (and I guess Boston Market) for the recipe! I'm not sure why this is supposed to be "intermediate" level - maybe because it involves more than two ingredients and no microwave?

But seriously, this is so quick and easy and simply tasty I am going to be going through EVEN MORE cans of tomato sauce than I already do. I probably account for like 40% of Kagome's sales in this town (so for those who are wondering, no, I cannot in fact get Boston Market stuff in Japan, nor would I really want to since generic garlic-onion-tomato sauce does just as well - plus, less fat content since it's non-creamy)

And I FINALLY found a locally-sourced supply of seafood what I can eats without worrying over the heavy metal content. Hooray for clams /o/ I do feel a little bad about boiling the little dudes alive, though. They never hurt nobody. But they are dericious, and in this case I feel more hungry than I do guilty.

Japan, you should really just send gift-cards from now on

Following up it's influenzariffic Christmas present, Japan's birthday present to me: chest congestion. Mmmmm, phlegmtastic :\

The Interwebs' birthday present to me: INFINITELY MOAR BETTER 8D
Say what you will about ND's internal politics (and I have said a lot of critical things), we have the awesomest damn band in the universe.

REAL winter

This is what it looks like.

See that lack of mountains? Those sprawling farmlands? The snow piled 3-4 feet deep? That is JAPAN, man! Only not, because Hokkaido is hardly anything like the mainland, except for that people with black hair and brown eyes who speak Japanese live there. And a healthy smattering of foreigners, too.

Foreigners who don't get stared or marveled at as much, it seemed to me. What I really liked about Sapporo was that people would leave me to my own business, but were very helpful when I needed directions or whatevs. Also the grid system. Oh. My. Jeebus. Grid systems are BEAUTIFUL, and cities built on grids are made of win. Sapporo is a Japanese city where you absolutely cannot get lost, it is un-possible. And it has great shopping, and great eating, and cheese, a-a-and BAGELS. BAGELS WITH CREAM CHEESE I seriously almost started crying right there in the middle of the store, I have been having the worst goddamn cravings for bagels and cream cheese for, what, probably a year now?

Best moment of Christmas day, in fact, for me, was sitting on an express train out to Asahikawa with my travel buddy, looking out the window at what honestly could have been any flat stretch of Wisconsin, eating my earl-grey flavored bagel with plain honest cream cheese slathered all over it. A close second was finally making it to a hot spring bath after getting hella lost, but by that time my Christmas Present From Japan, a.k.a. raging cold / very probably swine flu, was in full swing and I was feverish and cranky. This is the podunk mountain village we ended up in at one point, and grumbly as I was I couldn't help but admire the irony:

...Okay this is one of those things that is only really funny to people who know Japanese. Basically, we are at this point in central Hokkaido where it is cold as the ninth circle of hell, and stumble across this place whose name literally means "to know coldness" and on top of that sounds pretty darn close to what my students exclaim in the open-air hallways of our school at this time of year: "Wah! Samu'-!" ( "cold" is supposed to be "samui," but Kansai people love to drop syllables) I guarantee the Japanese teachers will find it hilarious.

Moving on, Touhoku. Really, really effing pretty c: The snow followed me all the way back to Nagoya, for pete's sake. Just look at this magic right here (this is in Nagano Prefecture, just south of Matsumoto):

After another 10 minutes or so, the snow got so thick you couldn't see 50 feet out, and the mountains just sort of disappeared. And then reappeared, even bigger than before. Japanese Alps: way impressive, you guys.

I connected up with two of the three slated hosts for my Great Meander back southwards. First night, my Japanese host dude took me out for a local (Akita) variety of nabe, in which the special ingredient was kiritanpo, mooshed-up rice cylinders that are hollow and closed at one end and sorta diagonally sliced at the other. The rice still retains its ricey-ness, so it's not at all like mochi, and it does an excellent job of soaking up the tasty nabe broth :d

Second night, I was crashing the couch (well, futon) of a fellow JET. He's been around the world a bit, did Peace Corps in South Africa, and was eminently gracious in sharing his stash of American cold medication with me, as well as some tea. We went out for Italian food in Sendai and talked for hours without really noticing the time go by and it was generally a very chill and groovy stay. I really wished I'd had more time to spend in that city. As it was I probably could have just stayed a second day & night and not bothered with Matsumoto / Nagano, but then I guess I wouldn't have had that lovely picture to show you above.

My would-be hostess down thataways never connected up with me, so around 11:30 I wandered into a business hotel that was about as overpriced as anything you could expect to find near a busy station - 5,500 and change for one person for a night. Actually most of the other hotels were charging more, but that still doesn't mean it's reasonable. As it happened, I'd managed to sneak in half an hour past the stated closing time, but before the manager guy had left and set the key-coded lock on the main door. So when he waddled out from a back room I asked if he had any free space, not really expecting anything. Must've had a soft spot for foreign girls down on luck, though, 'cause he offered to let me have a room for the 4,000 yen I claimed was everything I had on me (this was a half-truth: I DID have 4,000 yen in my pocket. And another 10,000 in my wallet, which was in my bag.)

Got back into Nagoya on New Year's Eve, and spent the night out with friends. Then I spent most of Jan. 1 sleeping off the effects of New Year's Eve / travel weariness. Still got a sniffle and a cough lingering, but otherwise I feel mostly peachy-keen.

I'll leave off with a view from the top floor of the Chocolate Factory in Sapporo city, where they have a sweets cafe overlooking Shiroi Koibito Park (Snowman Park). That was a very delicious Christmas Eve indeed :3

winter

It's a typical December day in western Japants.

The wind-chill is below freezing, my sliding door and window are open to try and suck out some of the dust from my very unfiltered living space, and I look like this -->

That's a warmfuzzysweater underneath my Dinosaur Comics hooded sweatshirt. I would have another full layer underneath my warm corduroy pants, except I am washing just about every piece of cold-weather underthings and overthings that I own.

Why? 'Cause for Hokkaido adventures commence in 72 hours \o/ And after THAT? Touhoku adventures. And then Chubu adventures. I'ma wandering down the local train network (well, starting off on the expresses because I realized there's no feasible way to get from Sapporo to Akita in a single day otherwise x.x durrrrrrdurrdurr I fail geography), stopping off at a few of the larger cities on my way back down to Kansai.

I initially had no plan whatsoever but to maybe try a couple of the inns / hostels I happened across in the metropolises, and take refuge in 24-hour internets cafes if that didn't work out. But as departure day approached I got to thinking maybe my spirit of adventure would be less dampened if I had an actual sleeping room for sleeping times. To that end, I joined this couchsurfing / international exchange network a Siberian dude at a dinner party told me about, and sent off one request for crashspace for each of my stopoff points, not expecting to have much luck given that it's the holidays and most people are off having their own fun travels.

The morning after I sent the requests, I'd gotten affirmatives from all three peoples :D These are vouched-for and peer-reviewed experienced hosts, with confirmed identities / addresses and so on, so safety factor is high. The network is very efficiently self-regulating in that respect, to minimize on creepers. PLUS they all sound like for-seriously awesome people! Two of the three have been around the world and back again, one of 'em is actually a current JET, and one is a BRAIN SURGEON. SUPERNIFTY.

I am all kinds of excited about this trip ~/o/ (that is me running around with my arms out making whooshing noises)

Happy St. Nicholas Day (belated)

Upon the feast day of Santa Claus 1.0, I found myself back in Nagoya again, gettin' presents for myself and others. Would have gotten my parents' Christmas box, except the post office tends not to deliver big honkin' boxes when there is no one to which they can hand 'em over. But it got re-delivered tonight, and I gotta say, for spending a week derping through the international post system, those cookies sure aren't too pulverized :D Yay!

While in Sakae, I found the perfect way to illustrate to many hiLOLities of Kurisumasu-toki in Yapan:
Yes, that is the Colonel. Yes, KFC's Colonel. Doesn't your family uphold the cherished Western tradition of the Christmas bucket o' chicken parts? Heathens!
(and incidentally, yes, this IS a digital picture of a picture on my cell phone...I um, left my memory card at the office. Oh technology.)

The other main activities of Christmas are eating big white-frosted cakes with strawberries on them and going on dates. Perhaps dates where you eat big white-frosted cakes with strawberries on them, I dunno. The general atmosphere of Christmas and New Year's is basically the reverse of what it is in the States, except only New Year's Day is a national holiday here.

Luckily, this year the school is giving everybody the three weekdays leading up to January 1 off, no paid leave needed, thus I will be spending the holiday season up in Hokkaido :3 There I will hopefully see such wonders as their free-range moss balls (this is not a lie), only-two-snowballs snowmen, and the Japanese yeti (this may or may not be a lie).

Thanksgiving

...is not celebrated in the J-pan, but Monday was some sort of national holiday, so I went to Nagoya to see a couple people I'd met at the art show. It was pretty much the best day ever, and since I ended up eating tons of food in a cozy home with a lovely family it was almost kinda like Thanksgiving, only lunch was curried potatoes and beef kebabs.

I haven't done much of the giving-thanks thing for some time, so I would just like to say THANKS MOM & DAD ♥

Thank you for the pre-Christmas Christmas gift, he is stupendously shiny and I have named him Lucian :D

Thank you for investing so much time and effort into securing the education and opportunities that have gotten me hop-skipped around the world a couple times over.

And thank you for making sure I made it to 18, as Dad likes to say, while at the same time letting me keep some basic faith in humanity and trust in my own gut reactions, such that when a large Pakistani man stopped by my art show and after some polite small talk about art and culture and the British occupation of India invited me to eat at his house & meet his wife and five children, I did not immediately think "oh my god, potential abductor." That thought came maybe third or fourth, was duly weighed, eventually proved quite wrong, and by the end of the day on Monday I was very saddened that it had sprung up at all. I cannot remember the last time I felt so welcomed and loved by near-strangers.

"Lunch" stretched out to four hours as I was urged to second and third helpings and we talked about many things - our home countries, Japan's education system, Islam and Christianity and religion in general, The Da Vinci Code, and how we all agree that Vegemite is about the grossest "food" ever synthesized by man (sorry Australia). Then Mr. S and his wife presented me with a small patch of beautifully hand-woven carpet from Pakistan, drove me to the subway, insisted on paying for my subway ticket to the main city station, and asked that I call them to let them know I got back to my apartment okay.

exposed in public! O:

By which I mean, please to enjoying my arts exhibition pictures very much yes! ~/o/

First off, lemme just say that all the other exhibitors at the Nagoya Foreign Artists Exhibition are amazazing artists and superfantastic peoples. There is a core circle of folks who've been showing their stuff there since the first one 24 years ago - I heard a couple veterans marveling at the fact that this was the first year they had a few participants who were younger than the event itself (that would include me <.< but only by a few months!)

On opening day (Tuesday) it was a bit slow in the morning, but a big rush hit around lunchtime and a few of my friends showed up in the afternoon (it was a public holiday, so everyone was off work) Here are a couple Japanese ladies enjoying the artstuffs. Check out that wicked pencil portrait of Billie Joe Armstrong! And the pretty birds as well c: And the dood in back there is a German photo-journalist living in Nagoya who just started a new English-language magazine with his friend. How awesome is this show?! The answer is purty awsum, guys.
And of course, here is my stoof.

A bunch of people had name-cards next to their artist profile, so I decided even though I don't have a website or anything yet I may as well make my own. Y'know, for poops 'n' giggles. There were 14 left when I departed on Tuesday night, so we'll see how many are remaining on Sunday.
And finally, proof that I was indeed there. A lovely volunteer coordinator by the name of Jan kindly took some pictures for me, as well as chattin' with me during the lulls and gently funneling people past my panel (n___n)