A random smattering of various whatnot

We are off for a weekend trip to Sendai with our friend Nagu (and his parents) to visit Nagu’s maternal grandparents (we spent New Year’s with his paternal grandparents). I am especially excited about going to Sendai because a) there is supposed to be this bay with a series of small and pretty islands there that you can take a boat tour around, and b) there is a special sweet from Sendai (of course! did you really think that there would be a town in Japan that wouldn’t have a special sweet?) called kiku-fuku. It apparently is a bun with ice cream inside of it. How amazing would that be? I promise pictures!

Also, in another ice-cream related note: I swear that the ice cream section at our grocery store here in Japan (the one with the “products related to rice” sign) has gotten bigger with the advent of warmer weather. This makes sense, I suppose, since more ice cream is probably consumed in warmer weather. But, please! Can you imagine the ice cream section in a U.S. supermarket shrinking seasonally? As if. This is what makes America great (there is definitely room for a joke here, by the way).

And now, for your amusement while we are out of town, I present some pictures (Rob, note the change from the book reviews. Just for you. Now you’ll just have to do without the knowledge of what I’ve read and what I think about it. Your loss).

First, some hats I knit recently.

The hat on the left is for my mom for Mother’s Day. She actually picked the yarn out in New Zealand – and it is the most beautifully colored wonderfully textured yarn ever. Here’s a close-up shot for proof of this:Also, because it is boucle, it was also quite forgiving of my knitting errors in shaping the top. I just might start knitting more projects with boucle yarn.

The hat on the right is for my friend, Doctor Turan. While I had envisioned making him something subtle and refined in greens and grays, thus befitting his new-ish status as a Doctor, he wanted Bright! Colors! This hat was my attempt to do a little bit of both, plus get better at working with stripes. I’m actually quite pleased with how the hat came out, and the top (proof that I can shape tops, just infrequently) isn’t half bad, either.

Second, for your dose of Japanese items using English in a weird way, I offer you two examples.

This bag is from the juice store (of course!). While the juice store in Tsukuba pales in comparison to that temple of juice perfection that we have in California, Jamba Juice, it is a fun place to go for a semi-healthy weekend treat. Why they a) give out bags, and b) have this written on their bags, I have no idea.

Also, I saw these glasses the other day.

I'm not quite sure what to say about this. I do have a few questions for the person that decided to put this phrase on the glasses, though.

Soup

So, a few months ago my friend Daniella made this great peanut soup (I think her recipe was probably from Moosewood, but I am not sure). Inspired by her soup, I set out to make something like it the other day. Cooking a new dish here for me is pretty rare, as is most cooking here for me. I can do a decent red spaghetti sauce, Mexican food, and tomato soup, but beyond that, well, meals require that you are able to read the labels in the grocery store.

Anyway, I combed the internet for recipes, learning that peanut soup is also called West African groundnut soup sometimes. There were a lot of recipe choices, so I used a sort of composite recipe from several sources. To my surprise, the soup was actually pretty good and filling and didn’t taste at all like Thai peanut sauce (the way I’d feared any warm peanut-y dish would).

If you want to play along at home, here’s my recipe:
2 tbsp cooking oil (any kind will do)
1 large onion, chopped
1 bell pepper, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
6-7 mushrooms, chopped
½ tsp cayenne powder
2 potatoes peeled and cubed
¼ of kabocha squash, chopped (I think any squash would do, as would yams)
¼ of a cabbage, chopped (I used purple, but green probably looks nicer)
1 cup apple or apricot juice
3 cups tomato juice (I think this is crucial for the texture)
5 tbsp chopped cilantro or parsley
2 tbsp chopped fresh ginger
1 celery rib
½ cup unsweetened peanut or almond butter (crunchy gives nice texture!)
2-3 tbsp fresh chopped basil

1. In a large soup/stockpot, cook the onions in oil over medium heat until translucent
2. Add the bell peppers, garlic, mushrooms, and cayenne, cook 1-2 more minutes
3. Add the potato, squash, cabbage, and ½ the apple/apricot juice. Stir to mix, put lid on, turn heat to medium, and leave at medium for ~20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Your goal here is to start softening the potatoes, squash and cabbage by steaming/near-boiling them, so if the apple/apricot juice runs dry, add more.
4. Add the remaining apple/apricot juice, the tomato juice, ginger, cilantro/parsley, and celery rib. Put lid back on, turn heat to med-hi, and let cook for ~10 minutes.
5. Stir in peanut butter until mostly incorporated (this isn’t that easy at first!). Turn heat to lowest setting and let cook for ~35 minutes or until the sweet potatoes and cabbage are soft.
6. Taste to adjust seasonings. This is important because saltiness may vary greatly depending on your peanut/almond butter. Also, at this point, I wanted a spicier soup and added more cayenne and some red pepper flakes. [It occurs to me that if you wanted to add cubed tofu, you could probably do it at this phase]
7. Remove the celery rib, top with the basil and enjoy!

Shots of spring

Hard to believe this is the same park!

Sensory Art

This week at the international school the theme was “our five senses.” On Monday morning, the kids looked at some optical illusions online (with a real live optics scientist in the room!) and then did a smell test. The smell test was really funny: the head teacher had taken ordinary things (lemon, cinnamon, onion, peanuts, coffee, perfume, etc) and put them in unlabeled containers. The kids gave the funniest answers! One kid thought that everything he smelled was caramel candy (caramel candy was not item in the smell test). Also, the kids told the head teacher that her perfume smelled both like mosquito repellent and alcohol. Neither is far off, I guess, if one thinks about perfume’s uses or its constituent elements, but neither is what one wants to hear one’s perfume smells like, either.

Anyway, in art we used our sense of touch to create pictures with interesting texture. I brought in sandpaper, cotton balls, straws, toothpicks, tissue paper, plastic film, dried pasta, and yarn. I told the kids to make a picture of anything they wanted, but to use as many of the above elements as possible so that if they closed their eyes and ran their hands over their picture, it would feel really neat. The results were great!

One jump ahead of the spin cycle

So, laundry in Japan is a serious business – something that is part art, part science. One nice thing about this is that the washing machines are pretty sophisticated. For example, on our machine, you can actually fill it with soap and clothes and then set a timer to tell it when to start.

Why would you ever do this? While the crazy washing machines are standard in each house, clothes dryers aren’t. So people hang their laundry outside. But, if you live in an apartment, your balcony/side of the house might get sun only for a few hours a day, as is the case with us. If this “sunny time” falls in the morning for you, you’d have to get up extra early to start the wash or have wet clothes in your house overnight.

Well, we’ve set the timer a few times, but, well, the washing machine isn’t exactly quiet. After a few mornings being awakened by what sounded like a train running through our house, I came up with a new solution:

(TA-DA!)

I’ll just wash the clothes without the timer in the afternoon, hang them wet at twilight, let them start to dry all night long, and then let them bask in the early morning sunshine (while we stay asleep in bed).

I think this is a great plan. However, it meant that I was hanging out wet laundry just at the exact moment that every self-respecting Japanese housewife was taking her laundry in for evening, thus furthering the idea that we really are crazy Americans who can’t understand the way things work in Japan. I swear my neighbors were laughing at me. But I am actually quite proud of this system!

Also, I can’t believe I just made a whole post about laundry.

Zoo Nealand

(as my super-clever friend, SYL, calls it)

Was awesome. I had a good time with my Mom, and it was neat to able to be traveling around with her – first, because of school and such, this is not often an opportunity I get; and second, because my mother was so genuinely excited about New Zealand, since it is a place that she never thought she’d get a chance to visit.

We did, like, the grand circle tour of the south island. We started in Christchurch, the big “city” on the south island. Then we went to Mount Cook, Queenstown, Milford Sound, Wanaka, Franz Josef, Nelson Lakes National Park, and the Marlborough wine country.

Some general points about New Zealand:

1. It has a lot of sheep.

Also, cows.In fact, one night, after an especially long hike, my mother and I were driving (which is to say, I was driving, and she was musing about how backward things seem when you have to drive on the left side of the road) on this dirt road WAY out in the country. It was dark, and suddenly, there was a herd of cows on the road. AND THEY WOULD NOT MOVE. So I drove the car slowly toward them, really, really glad that we had taken that extra insurance on the rental car (“Oh, that? Cow damage.”). I was afraid to honk the horn because I didn’t want to freak them out – I just wanted them off the road. Some cows ran, some cows ambled, and some cows just sort of lowered them heads and glared at us and refused to move. Luckily, these were not bulls, but the experience was slightly strange all the same as I tentatively crept through a herd of, like, 80 cows on a dirt road in New Zealand in the dark. Later, we learned that the cows come down onto the roads at night because the roads are warmer than the surrounding fields, and the cows like to sleep on the warm roads. Consider yourselves fairly warned.

2. It has a lot of spectacular vistas that look like Hollywood backdrops (funny thing, that).

3. Try as I might, I am not really a boat person. Boats are sort of like a necessary evil – you have to take them to get to neat places, but you don’t have to like them. What I do like, though, is the sort of romantic aura that attaches itself to boats and sailing.

4. It is possible to have fun with your mother.

In the spirit of having fun, click here to see a short video that my Mom and I made in Milford Sound. I told her to pretend that she was a "Daily Show" correspondent [the background to her story is that we had pretty foul weather in Milford Sound {see #3}. It POURED - which caused all these waterfalls to just start flowing from all the surrounding mountains].

5. There is good food to be had New Zealand. I also learned that I do not like cabernet.

6. There are also strange signs to be found in New Zealand.

7. Try as we might, we did not find any hobbits (better luck next time!).

A Post by Jenny and Todaiji Digest (Eliza)

J: So we have had an unbelievable time in Japan so far.

TD: Yeah.

J: We have done so much on this trip that it is hard to decide what to talk about.

TD: A definite highlight of Tokyo was our sumo wrestler hunt. Jen and I ran around the Ryogoku area with out cameras looking for sumo wrestlers. We were fortunate enough to see several, and got some good pictures. Sumo wrestlers are easy to spot by the robes they wear, their hair style and obviously since they are rather large.

J: I love sumo wrestlers. It was great to see them in their natural habitat. They wear special split-toe socks to go with their thong sandals. We accidentally snuck into the sumo arena (the door was propped open for cleaning and we couldn't read the "do not enter" sign in Japanese), so that was exciting. We got kicked out.

TD: Another favorite stop was Kiddy Land, a 5 story toy store in Harajuku. It had toys/merchandise of every animated character you could imagine and is enjoyed by Japanese kids and adults alike. I witnessed a woman in her late-twenties purchase a Hello Kitty rolling suitcase.

J: It has been awesome to hang out with Michael and see where he lives. Before coming here, we spent a day in Nara, where we saw a huge bronze buddha with 5-foot nostrils, sacred deer that bowed, a shrine with thousands of stone lanterns, and many other interesting and beautiful things.

TD: Nara is also home of the amazing Todaiji Temple, the largest wooden structure in the world. The buddha with large nostrils sits inside as does a miniture replica of the original Todaiji Temple (33% larger than today's) that was constructed by researching the Todaiji Digest.

J: Before Nara, we were in Kyoto, where we stayed for two nights at the Ana Hotel. Ana is also the name of TD's niece. We did some major temple hopping in Kyoto, saw some Very Important Moss, walked on beautifully squeaky nightengale floors at the Nijo Castle, and found T-shirts at a thrift shop that said things like "Birmingham-Bloomfield Safety Town" and "I'm going to kindergarten in Kalamazoo!"

TD: Speaking of fun t-shirts, if the shirt had fit someone bigger than a 3rd grader, I would have totally bought a shirt that said "I heart Jennifer". Jennifer is a monkey (with glutton friends) that has a line of clothing in Japan. Jennifer is also the name of my favorite traveling partner.

J: Thanks! Mine is named Eliza, but she is getting her name officially changed to Todaiji Digest for some reason. There was also a T-shirt that said, "My Monkey Name is Jennifer." The back of the shirt said, "A thing of banana is a joy forever." So before we went to Kyoto, we were in Osaka. At our hotel in Osaka, there was one control panel on the wall that controlled the alarm clock, the radio, and all of the lights in the room. The radio played through speakers in the ceiling, and there was an overwhelming variety of radio stations to choose from. There were some broad categories of stations like "Japanese Pop" and "Classical," but there were also some extremely specific stations, including one called "The Theme From Rocky" which literally played the theme from Rocky over and over again. There was another station that only played Auld Lang Syne over and over again. There was also a bird chirping station.

TD: Another great thing about our hotel in Osaka were the heated toilet seats. We kept ours on high the entire time. The hotel reception also provided us with an English map, labeling things like every beer machine in the area.

J: Well, it's Buddha's birthday today and we're going to celebrate by having some kaiten sushi and doing some karaoke.

TD: Hopefully Jen will be able to join us for sushi and karaoke, she was unfortunately attacked by a cat-like robot from the 23rd century this afternoon. She is expected to have a full recovery and it would be so sad if she missed my last night in Japan.

SYL (who still owes us some guest blogging!)

Had a fabulous time with SYL. The first day she was here, it was so windy and cold (but, mainly, windy) that a) the Tsukuba Express was under wind delay mode and it took us like, 2.5 hours to get from Tokyo to Tsukuba, and b) [on a related note] we came back to Tsukuba and instantly started looking into fares to Okinawa for a little beach getaway.

Alas, it was not to be. Heed this warning: if you want to go to Okinawa, plan early!

But we still had fun in Tokyo, doing the guestly things. We made friends with the locals:

We also went to Japanese Folk Arts Museum, which, while a little expensive, was very lovely. It was also housed in this beautiful building that had the nicest blooming tree right outside.

Also, during this time, Mike bought a new dictionary. He was (and still is) very proud of his dictionary, showing it off to everyone who wants to see.

One night we sought out this Thai place based on the following directions in a guidebook: “above the crowded streets of kabuki-cho [a neighborhood], this restaurant offers great food.” The map in the guidebook was so not helpful and the neighborhood was sort of an overwhelming neon entertainment district. But, miracle of miracles (and after 30 minutes of walking in circles), we did find the place, mostly owing to SYL’s persistence. She is persistent, that one!

We had a little cherry blossom party the Saturday before she and I left. [I would just like to say that I totally missed the cherry blossoms while in NZ – all the trees are leafing out now, but IT IS STILL COLD. How can this be???]

We also ate a lot of sushi. Once, we waited in line for an hour to eat at this place near Shibuya. And it wasn’t even as good as our place near Akihabara. Just so you know. Also, with SYL, I broke my no-sushi-before-airplane-rides rule. And it was okay.

SYL was also very into seeing the freaks at Harajuku on Sunday. And so we did.

I also think there are more SYL visit pictures, but I can't find them right now, so just consider this post like the down payment - more is coming . . . .

The last few art projects

So I am back from New Zealand and will be posting some pictures (and a short video!) soon. I was just sorting through old pictures, though, and realized that I haven’t blogged about the last few art classes or SYL’s visit.

So here’s art – I’ll put SYL in a separate post.

Sadly, I don’t have any pictures from when Meredith made books with the kids. But, here are some pictures of other recent projects.

There’s paper weaving – we talked about how you go and under and over and then over and under (not such an easy concept, that). And we looked at pictures of woven crafts from India, El Salvador, Mexico, and Africa.

This was our spring project – a flower garden. The kids really got carried away with making the flowers “pop” out of the paper. Some of these were just fabulous.

And here are a few shots of the cave painting project we did.

Table Tennis Friendship Club

The new school year is beginning in Japan, and a lot of student groups were advertising around campus today. One those groups, the Table Tennis Friendship Club, caught my eye. They distinguish themselves from the normal table tennis club, because it is just a chance to get together and have fun and meet people, even if you have never played before. In addition to regular table tennis events, they have an upcoming event called the "sweet things tour." The description says "for people that really, really, really, really love sweets, and for people that just like them. We will eat an extremely extra large parfait."

New guests

My sister Jenny and her friend Eliza have arrived in Tsukuba! More blogging to come.