The half-way point

Howdy, readers! Sorry about the lengthy silence, but I was studying hardcore for my exams. My last one was on Saturday, so I am finally free to enjoy two months of break. Unfortunately, those two months are the coldest in Japan, so I won't be doing a lot of adventuring around Tokyo, but I certainly welcome the break.

In spite of the frigid weather, I am going to the Snow Festival in Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, next week. My friends and I found a great deal online that includes a round-trip flight, four days/three nights at a hotel, and tickets to a TV station (they happen to be popular tourist spots in Japan) and the Sapporo zoo for about $300. So around the end of next week, expect a post about the festival. I'll make sure to take LOTS of pictures!

Even though I'm on vacation, I still plan on doing a lot of work over the next two months. At the end of March, I'll have to take the placement test again, and I'm determined to get into at least level 6. So I'll be studying kanji and grammar every day. I've also vowed to only speak in Japanese with my friends as of last Sunday. It's going to be quite frustrating, I know, but it's the only way my speaking is really going to improve. It's just too easy to use English everyday. I must resist!

This is also a good time to take care of things for when I return to CMU. I need to make my senior year schedule, for starters. I have to apply for my Seniors Honors Thesis by the start of April. I've decided to do a project on Japanese video games in America (surprise). I'm very excited about it, and I hope to do some research and interviews while here in Japan. I've also started writing again. My Creative Writing advisor has agreed to do email correspondense with me for Fiction Workshop credit to help clear up my senior schedule a bit.

So that's about all that's going on right now at the start of break. Shout out to Mel: Happy 21st Birthday! We'll be celebrating with okonomiyaki tonight, a delicious Japanese dish ^_^ Also, love to Mark, who fell down the stairs earlier today, but seems to be alright. And to my fluffy white cat, who set his tail on fire yesterday. Don't worry, he's fine, but my god the mental image is HILARIOUS. Imagine a fat, long-furred pure-white cat running around with little flames on the tip of his tail, my mother running after him trying to pat the flames out. That'll teach him to sit on the kitchen counter while a candle's burning. Cheers!

New Year's Day

Howdy, homies. Forgive me if this post isn't particularly entertaining; my final exams are coming up and my brain is already beginning to fry from the mountain of studying I'm subjecting myself to. Oh kanji, how I loath thee...
But anywho, I thought I'd do a post about New Year's Day here in Tokyo. Unfortunately, I got sick the day before and couldn't go celebrate, but my friends went ahead to Asakusa, an area of Tokyo that is famous for its many temples and shrines.

Asasuka is most famous for the Sensou-ji, the oldest Buddhist temple in Tokyo. The outer gate of the temple is called Kaminari Mon, or "Thunder Gate", and is a popular tourist attraction because of its giant chouchin, or lantern, seen here.
Beyond the Kaminari Mon is the Nakamise-Douri, a 250 meter-long shop-lined street selling a large variety of traditional and modern Japanese goods and souvenirs. Here it is decorated for the new year.

Here is a look at one of the shops. I especially like the masks. Very attractive. I wonder what my sister would think if I brought one back for her as a souvenir...

On New Year's Day in Japan, families flock to local temples and shrines to pray for good fortune throughout the coming year. Asaskusa boasts one of the largest crowds in Tokyo on this day. People wait as long as two hours to get inside the temple. Maggie said they only had to wait for forty-five minutes, though.0_0 Holy cow, that is a lot of people.

By the way, major thanks to Maggie and Melanie, to whom these really great photos belong. And shout out to my grandmother, who is awesome, as always. She knows why. See you after finals!

My rice cooker makes me feel inadequet -_-

One of the toughest things for me to find in Japan has been whole grains. White rice is pretty much the golden standard here, so I quickly gave up hope of ever finding affordable brown rice in Tokyo.

And then I found it at Seiyu last week. Go figure. Remember the Japanese store owned by Walmart? Now I can buy all the Great Value brand brown rice I need to keep me well-stocked in whole grains. Huzzah!

Usually, I make rice on the stove and let it cook while I prepare the rest of my meal. But with only one burner, things aren't that easy. So today I broke down and bought a Japanese rice cooker. Though it looks ridiculously high-tech, it was the cheapest one available at Seiyuu (~$60).

I spent about 45 min reading the instruction manual (with the aid of a dictionary), but in the end I had to enlist the help of a friend who has never not used an Asian rice cooker ^^. With her expertise, we were able to determine the (hopefully) correct water-to-rice ratio and let the cooker do it's thing.

Fortunately, the rice came out wonderful. Soft, fluffy, and delicious. Much better than my stove top variety. And that is how I lost to a rice cooker >_<.

I also had some green tea and wagashi, a traditional Japanese confection, for an afternoon snack. The wagashi I had today was daifuku: mochi (glutinous rice paste) stuffed with anko (sweet red bean paste). I know it doesn't sound delicious, but trust me, it is. The mochi paste is lightly sweetened, and the core of the mochi is usually filled with sweet red bean paste or white bean paste. The one I had (shown here) is made from green tea flavored mochi and the inside is red bean paste. Wagashi are usually served with tea, especially matcha to help balance the bitterness of the powered tea, and can be molded into many different shapes. The most common shapes I've seen are flowers, fruits, and animals like rabbits and cats.

As much as I miss Ben & Jerry's, I gotta say these Japanese sweets are growing on me. At first I thought it was silly to eat a "sweet" that wasn't very sweet at all, but now that I've been removed from American-style desserts for four months, Japanese confections taste more like sweet treats to me. I think I will miss them very much when I return to the States. But until then, I'll enjoy them to the best of my ability ^_^.