A Tale of Eggplants, Kimonos, and Crepe Uncles

Kyoto story time! :D But first, our cultural activity from Friday. We played the koto! It's a traditional Japanese instrument. The instructor played a complex piece for us, then let us play a little song. :)

It's actually easier than it looks! You play with something like a guitar pick, and you can modify the notes by holding down different strings. The "bridges" on the instrument set the pitch for each string, and if you hold down the string on the other side of the bridge you can modulate the pitch. Pretty cool, huh?

Now, to Kyoto. I went with my friends Addie and Jess - we left JCMU at around 9:15(AM) and got home around 9:30(PM). The train ride took about 45 minutes, and once we got there it was a little overwhelming. Kyoto Station is huge! It has a long-distance subway hub, a shinkansen hub, AND a local hub, not to mention the shopping mall inside. XD However, we managed to get a bus pass for the day (by far the best deal for Kyoto transportation...pay 500 yen to ride all over the city, and within 2 rides it pays for itself!) and find out how to get to Inari station (home of Fushimi Inari).

Fushimi Inari was our first stop, because it was where we all REALLY wanted to go. And it was awesome! It's like most Shinto shrines, except that it is dedicated to kitsune, the fox gods. Normal Shinto shrines have lions flanking the entrance, but this shrine has foxes everywhere. There are about a million paths you can take once you're inside. There are the main paths flanked with the giant red gates (or torii), and there are also a lot of side paths that lead to little shrines. You could probably spend all day there if you wanted. We didn't get very far up the main path because we took all the side-routes, too. I'm definitely going back to do more exploring. :)

One path in particular was really really long - we walked it for a good 10 minutes. It was a beautiful little mountain path! There was an old woman walking along it who passed us when we stopped to look at a small shrine. Oddly enough, we never saw her again though she was definitely a slow walker and there were no other paths to take. It was like she had disappeared! She was a really friendly old lady...we've decided she's a spirit. :)

After leaving Fushimi Inari, we did some shopping at the next street over (which is conveniently FULL of goodies), and I got suckered into buying a kimono!
Isn't it pretty? It was really inexpensive, too. I was sort of eying it and the shop owner waved me over to a mirror to see how it looked. I was expecting her to just slip it on so I could see it briefly. Instead, she whipped out an obi (the traditional sash), and cinched me into the kimono within an inch of my life, obi and all. And it was so pretty I caved. XD I don't have any pictures of how she tied it because my camera was kind of trapped in my jacket (which I was still wearing), but this will have to do for now. :)
We also had lunch nearby - I wanted to try some of the cuisine the area is famous for. Apparently people in the Inari area eat sparrow, and this restaurant served it. I wasn't quite brave enough to go that route, so instead I had kitsune udon, a noodle soup with strips of fried sweet tofu. It was delicious!
After lunch we went back to Kyoto Station (and saw some crazy characters), then got on a bus to go to Ginkakuji, the silver pavilion that is not actually covered in silver. I really liked walking around the garden - the golden pavilion (Kinkakuji) has a garden as well, just not as pretty. I didn't realize how high we were until we got to the top of a hill and got to see the entire city of Kyoto! What a beautiful view.

On the way to Ginkakuji is a little strip of shops that have lots of souvenirs and things. My personal favorite shop? The bunny store. :3 I'm not sure if this is always here or if it's just because it's the Year of the Rabbit, zodiac-wise. But they're all adorable so it's sort of irrelevant.

After Ginkakuji, we headed to Gion, a famous shopping district in Kyoto. Geishas also work here, and you can sometimes see maiko (geishas in training) walking the streets. We saw no maiko, but quite a few people in kimonos! More than normal, actually...I don't really know why.

And I found this! There is a story about this eggplant coin purse. When I first visited Japan 4 years ago, we went to Gion and saw a little shop with a lot of cute little stuffed animals and things. And they had this coin purse. I really liked it at the time (especially the little eggplant charm!), but decided not to get it. I later wanted to go back and get it, but we never did. My dad came to Kyoto on a business trip and I sent him on a quest to find it, but he was unsuccessful. And then, walking through Gion, we happened to stumble across the shop. And, lo and behold, right where it was 4 years ago, I found the coin purse. :D It's sort of a silly story, but I was so excited to find it.

We headed back to Kyoto station after that, in search of dinner. We were all craving American-ish food, so we found a little pasta place.

This was so delicious. I can't decide whether I really liked it or if I just missed pasta so it tasted amazing.

We spent our last few hours in Kyoto at a big mall across the street from the station. I didn't do any shopping there, but I was introduced to the wonders of Japanese crepes.

It's Crepe Ojisan! Which literally translates to "Crepe Uncle". As you can see, they have about every type of crepe imaginable. Most of them are sweet (chocolate, fruit, gelato, etc.) but they have a few savory ones as well. Their current special was Chicken Pot Pie. o.0 I ended up getting a hot apple pie crepe. Best crepe I've ever tasted.

After munching on crepes for a while, we finally boarded the train. It was a very successful day! I look forward to traveling again. We're planning trips for Osaka and Nara next month (and of course I have Nagoya this weekend and Sapporo next weekend).

As far as life here goes, we're back to normal. :) We had lots of snow last night so the roads are treacherous once more. Classes are going well - finally got an A on a Japanese exam here. Hooray for study parties. :) Japanese is getting less intimidating now, thankfully! Class is done for the day, but there's a lot still going on. I had an internship orientation, and now I think we're baking. :D Hooray for ovens, even small ones.

Sorry, I know this is a super-long post. But I hope you enjoy it. :)

Kyoto

Hi! Just got back from Kyoto a little while ago, and I'm too worn out to post like I would normally. So, instead I'll just upload a bunch of pictures! The stories can wait until next time. :)

Kyoto Station:

Fushimi Inari:

Ginkakuji:

Gion:

Enjoy your weekend! :)

Hikone Shrine

It's snowing! Again. The blizzard hit last night, and we had some more snow this morning. As you can see, the bonsai garden is covered! I'm hoping it won't interfere with our Kyoto trip...I think we may just go anyway, though. ;)
Yesterday, we went to go see Hikone Shrine (at least, I think that's what it's called...) - it's really close to campus, so we walked. To get there, you cross Ajiroguchi (the main road to JCMU) walk around a creepy old building (complete with tanuki - raccoon - statue), cross another road, pass a bunch of graves, and walk up a mountain. :)
Here's another Japanese cemetary. Isn't it cool? :D I think they're beautiful.
It's impressive how close to the woods we are - I like that we're surrounded by nature here. We followed this path up the mountainside for a little while to get to the shrine. Here's the entrance, surrounded by little statues of some sort. I'm afraid I don't actually know what they are for! But they're everywhere. :) The gate in the back (or "torii") indicates the main entrance.
This (below) is the new shrine structure. As you can see, the shrine is completely empty right now. One of my friends went during the coming-of-age day and it was apparently packed! This building is opened for celebratory times of year.
And here's the older building behind it. I think I like it better...it's more representative of what I think a shrine should look like.
At the shrine, there's a mountain path that leads upward, higher into the mountain. It's a pretty steep hike, but you can get to a lookout point at the top. It gives you a marvelous view of the closest city to Hikone, Maibara. Maibara is about the same size as Hikone, and JCMU is right inside Hikone - the Maibara city limits are just a block away!
I don't have a good picture of the Hikone skyline - there were a bunch of trees in the way! But we were able to see something else that was cool. Fujitech is a company that has its headquarters nearby. It's an elevator company! In fact, it's one of the biggest worldwide. You most likely ride in a Fujitech elevator on at least a weekly basis. And this is their test shaft. You can go in one of their test rides and everything!Once we left the summit, we left through a different way, which had an entirely different shrine area. I likes this one too! There was a little pathway of red gates like Fushimi Inari - apparently shrine patrons will donate money and they get the big gates in return. I'll skip that picture in favor of the real thing on Saturday. ;)We ended up on the edge of Maibara, so we headed back along the lake to JCMU. It was so pretty yesterday! The sky was actually clear enough to allow us to see the mountains on the other side of the lake. It makes me glad that we went out yesterday, since today we might as well be snowed in. I don't really know much else! I hope you all are enjoying the warm weather, and have a wonderful end to your week. :)

Because I have no new pictures, here's another one of Hikone Castle's garden area. Except for the fee to get in, it seems like it would be a great place to sit and study/read when it gets warmer! :)

So, I have a random Japanese word of the day. :) We learned it in class: gorogorosuru. It's a verb, that means "to be a couch potato", essentially. Gorogoro, incidentally, is also the Japanese sound effect for boiling water in a pot. Sort of sounds like a sinister bubbling cauldron to me! :)

Once again, nothing really exciting has happened lately. Sorry to disappoint! We've just been doing homework and watching shows and playing 42 (and the count of people, excluding me, who know how to play is 6 now!). I suppose life is starting to settle into a routine, now that I've been here 3 weeks (which is crazy, by the way. I somehow manage to forget that I'm in a foreign country sometimes...then I look around and see all the kanji and feel silly for not noticing). This weekend, however, we are heading to Kyoto (and it's a definite trip this time, because I'm in charge of figuring out when and where we're going. :P).

Japanese class is about the same...I'm sort of getting used to having 3 hours of language class a day but I don't think my speaking skills are improving any. XD The history class is still awesome, and really interesting. We just finished covering the Tokugawa period, which is from 1600-1850, and I believe that we'll get to the modernization of Japan next class! Right now we're watching a drama that's actually on-air right now, called Gou: Himetachi no Sengoku (Gou: The Warring States of the Princesses). Oda Nobunaga, one of the 3 men responsible for the unification of Japan and the Tokugawa period, had 3 nieces, all of whom grew up to be very influential and powerful women. Gou is his youngest daughter, and the drama follows the story of her life, starting with her parents. We watched most of the first episode in class, and now I'm hooked - it has awesome music and a good story. If you're interested, you can watch it here (and don't worry, it has English subtitles).

Also, I found out today that I got the elementary school internship that I wanted! I don't know exactly where or when yet...we have a meeting on Monday to talk about it. But it should be fun. :)

Have a wonderful week!

Lazy Weekend

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Tea and Cake (or death?)

Hello! I hope you all are well. :) I'm unfortunately feeling a bit under the weather. Thankfully I don't have the cold/flu/whatever it is that's going around JCMU...just a really upset stomach and a lack of good sleep (3 days of not sleeping well will do that). My exam grade today probably suffered because of it because I decided to forgo studying in favor of sleep, but it will probably turn out okay.

Speaking of things that have turned out okay, I have 2 separate kitchen triumphs to talk about.

The first is just a quick one - Gyuudon was successful. It's basically thinly-sliced beef, onions, and mushrooms in a sweetish soy-based sauce(made from scratch, of course!). My roommate is allergic to beef and still was tempted to try it because it smelled so good. Definitely going in my recipe book.

And the second is carrot cake! :D

Let me first explain why making carrot cake was so difficult here in Japan. First, finding a recipe is a challenge. Japanese grocery stores have a lot of things! The problem is that the types of things they carry differ greatly from that of American grocery stores. So, my baking ingredients are a little limited. Any recipes with things like molasses, apple sauce, buttermilk, and the like are out because I just can't find them here. So, it took a while to find a simple-enough recipe (and you've already heard of my travails at the grocery store trying to find all of the ingredients).

Part 2 was the lack of utensils. Instead of an oven, we have a little convection oven (ie our microwave). It actually works just like a regular oven - you preheat it and then just set a bake time and it cooks. So, that was easier than I thought. Another problem is Japanese cake pans - they have a diameter of roughly 6.15 inches (which doesn't even translate to a round number in centimeters!). This is very different from the 8 or 9" pans we have. Japanese pans are also taller. Plus, my recipe suggested a 9x13 pan would be best to bake this cake in. That wasn't going to work. So now, I had no reliable batter amount (should I halve the recipe or leave it whole?), no reliable cook temperature AND no reliable cook time. Yay! Luckily, allrecipes.com came to my rescue (love that site, by the way - check it out sometime!) with a conversion article. While it didn't address Japanese cake pans (what a surprise!) I was able to apply the information and figured out that 2/3 of the batter amount would work (though measuring 2/3 of 4 eggs would be an interesting challenge).

Part 3: the mixing of the cake and icing. Of course, there were 3 more minor issues: I had no measuring spoons, so I just eyeballed the spice additions and hoped they would work out. AND I had no hand-mixer/wire whisk so the frosting had to be mixed with a fork. AND my grater was about the size of a can of soup (the small ones), so it took about 45 minutes to grate all the carrots.

By the end, it actually started to look like carrot cake. I was getting pretty hopeful. All that was left was the baking. I decided to stick with 180 degrees Celsius (roughly 350 degrees) for 20 minutes. The bottom tier took about 28 minutes and the top tier took more like 35 (because there was more batter in the pan the second time). But they came out beautifully golden brown so I was happy. All that was left was the icing and then the taste-testing.

Success. :) Because I'm nitpicky, I found the cake to be a little denser than I wanted, and lacking in a bit of cinnamon or salt (or probably both) - the cream cheese frosting wasn't too cream-cheesy, either. But it was pretty darn tasty, and neither undercooked nor burnt. And, most importantly, my roommate loved it.

In other news, today we had our second cultural presentation - tea ceremony! It's a very ritualistic tradition that's now mainly done as a hobby in Japan. The tea you drink is macha, or green tea. It's a lot stronger than the stuff we have in the US, and pretty bitter. I'm starting to acquire the taste, though.

We performed the tea ceremony in the tatami room, a special room in the academic building designed like an old-fashioned Japanese room. It has tatami floors and rice-paper sliding screen doors, and is only opened for special occasions. Very cool. :)

The ladies performed the ceremony for us twice - the second time, we got to join in. Traditionally you're served a season-specific sweet in addition to the green tea. We had "Nightingale mochi", so named because nightingales are some of the first birds to be heard in the spring. The treat is mochi (a gluey dough made from rice) filled with the red bean paste I've talked about before (yum) and coated in some kind of soybean that tastes like the green tea. You're supposed to eat the snack to sort of counteract the bitterness of the tea to come.
All in all, I enjoy watching tea ceremonies. They're very unique, and I love the exactitude the ceremony requires. It's like a very well-choreographed dance performance, and the guest has a part to play in the ritual as much as the host. There's a specific method to pouring the hot water, serving the tea, drinking the tea, and even eating the dessert ("okashi" in Japanese; it refers to any small sweet snack and is such a lovely word. ;)).

The rest of my day should be fun, provided I'm feeling better. Tonight I'm playing 42 with people (its popularity is spreading!), then we're going out to a bar for my roommate's 21st birthday. Considering I've never been to a bar, this will be an experience in more ways than one. XD The drinking age in Japan is 20, so turning 21 isn't as big of a deal here but she intends to celebrate like crazy anyway. :) I think it will be fun.

Happy Friday! (or, at least, Happy Almost Friday.) Enjoy your weekend. :)

A Quest for Baking Soda

Hi! It's still snowy here. :) We're supposed to get snow this evening and tomorrow, so I may not ever be able to ride a bike around here again. I've been walking around town instead, which I kind of enjoy. You get to stop more and enjoy the sights. I love how pretty everything looks with a nice coat of snow. It's really beautiful!
It's the Ogawa River, I think. This river is about 3 minutes away from campus. You can see a guy fishing in the shadows - usually they just catch them, then throw them back.
A Japanese cemetary. All of the monuments are little obelisks and they're clustered really close together. I don't really know the traditions relating to burial here, though I am curious. I feel like it's a little rude to ask, though.

I have to insert a random kanji (Japanese character) interlude today. As a quick background, kanji are Chinese characters that have been adapted to Japanese. A lot of them are kind of pictographic. Most complex characters are made up of a bunch of simpler characters called radicals. Some radicals have a specific meaning in every kanji. For example, all kanji containing イ have something to do with people (ie 使う, use), all kanji with シhave to do with water (洗う, wash), and so on. So, sometimes you can piece together the meaning of a character by looking at its radicals. It's a really clever system. Here's an example we learned today: the character for bird is 鳥. It contains the radical that means white, 白. ((By the way, I hope you can read all the characters...just realized that might be an issue)) The character for "crow" is almost exactly the same, except for one thing: 烏. If you would notice, the white radical has a line missing. That's symbolic of the fact that because crows are so dark, you often can't see them. This is why I love learning kanji - absolutely fascinating.

Yesterday, after class Amanda and I finally caved and had to go to the grocery store. It was still treacherous getting there by bike, so we decided to walk. No big deal, right? It was a 40-minute walk to the store. Honestly, though, it wasn't bad! I totally didn't notice the time until we got there and then I was a little surprised it took as long as it did. Once we got there, we tried this little snack called taiyaki. They're little fish-shaped (not -flavored, thankfully) pancakes that are filled with something. I tried the custard- and red bean-filled, but I've heard the chocolate ones are also good. :)

I was doing pretty well with finding things in the grocery store, except for baking soda. I needed it for Amanda's cake, and while I found the baking aisle (which is really about a third of an aisle, and full of sprinkles and not much else) I could not find the baking soda. So, Beisia shop clerk to the rescue! Sort of. In our pidgin Japanese, Amanda and I attempted to explain what we wanted. "For baking a cake." We started with. He grabbed a fellow clerk to come help us. We tried to tell him its name in Japanese but apparently garbled it because they both looked at us funny. Then, I tried to explain that it makes the cake rise, but ended up just saying, "When you're making a cake..." and making rising motions with my hands. They were still confused, not surprisingly. I told them the name in English, and they said, "Aa! Baking powder!" "No, not quite..." I answered, at which point he started grabbing boxes off the shelf to show us. And, wouldn't you know it, the baking soda box had "Baking Soda", in English, clear as day, written on the side. Fail. But, the important point is that we now have baking soda, so I can make her cake tonight. And Japanese grocery store workers are exceptionally helpful. I cannot tell you how many times I have asked them, "Sumimasen, ____ wa doko desu ka?" (Most useful phrase ever: "Excuse me, where is ____?", and they are always super-nice and usually take me right to it. I love Japanese customer service.

After shopping, we grabbed dinner (because every grocery store here also has a food court!) - I had ramen while my roommate had McDonald's. Remember the Texas burger? It's not the only one! There's a whole series of 'em: Texas2(with chili; they had the original Texas burger last year with fried onions and barbecue sauce), Idaho(with a hash brown and bacon), Manhattan(with what looks like a deli sandwich crammed in there), and Miami(with nachos on top). :D They all look unappetizing to me!

So, after that adventure (and buying TONS and TONS of food, it seemed like), we took a cab back to JCMU because it was cold and icy and we had lots of groceries. And my roommate called a cab all by herself! I was very impressed. Hopefully I will get to that level of confidence in my speaking skills someday.

Today's been pretty uneventful so far! Besides a bread adventure for lunch. We walked through sleet to go get Vidal, and I have now had tasty custard-filled bread and an orange-chocolate loaf waiting for me for breakfast tomorrow. :D We just had 2 hours of class (and a listening worksheet to complete on our own) today, and besides a quick meeting with one of my teachers I have a free afternoon. My plan is to make something new for dinner (gyuudon, a rice bowl with marinated beef and onions on top, mmmm), bake a cake, and play 42. I promise to have pictures of the carrot cake odyssey...I'm hoping it turns out okay, because I've been craving cream cheese icing.

Have a lovely week! Enjoy staying warm...I keep seeing the weather in Dallas and being a bit jealous.