Of Friends and School

Before we begin this post, I wanted to bring up a few things from a previous post real quick. You may remember my brief little blurb about メロンパン (Melon Pan, aka Melon Bread). It really is exceptionally delicious due to the fact that the inside is light and fluffy and the outside is a sweet crispy crust. Well, thanks to a friend of mine here, I now have the recipe to share with you. I haven't tried it myself, but it looks pretty good. You can find it here: Melon Pan Recipe. If you need anything else, or if you have comments on it, please contact me. I hope all of you can enjoy it as much as I have!

Secondly, you all may remember my comments about the shower mirror and the suicide doors the other day. I finally figured out how to use them. Japanese typically look at the mirror instead of looking down when soaping up and such. Men shave their faces in the shower, and women take off their makeup in the shower.

The suicide doors are for the firemen. They mark the easiest place to enter the building in case of an emergency. They can then evacuate individuals and put out the fire faster through the doors. Unfortunately, not as exciting as a glitter firemen's pole, but there's the answer.

And now onto the new information.

So I've been placed into Intermediate level Japanese here. Considering that's where I should be, I'm pretty content. There are two intermediates: lower and upper. I'm in lower. Hopefully I should be there, but we'll see. I'm excited to begin class though. All classes meet for 1.5 hours here. My Comprehensive Japanese class meets 5 times per week, Japanese Listening and Speaking meets twice in a week, and Japanese Studies meets once a week. I'm also looking at taking three cultural classes to have a total of 15 credit hours this semester. We'll see if that's too much or not. I'm interested in taking Japanese Society, Japanese Culture, and either Japanese Economy or Foreign Relations of Japan. Japanese Economy and Foreign Relations look really similar. They both meet really late though 4:10-5:50. Japanese Economy meets on Tuesday though and Foreign Relations meets on Friday. If I take Foreign Relations, I'll be in class from 10:40-5:50 on Friday. That's rough, so I'm going to try for Japanese Economy. Hopefully I'll do ok. Most classes in Japan meet once a week by the way, so it's a little different than the US.

The other day, I had the best night with people. We got all of the Japanese buddies with us to all go to okonomiyaki. Okonomiyaki is a type of food that's a little hard to describe. It looks somewhat like a Japanese style pancake. It's egg, cabbage, and whatever else you put in it. In our case, we had squid, pork, and a mixed one. They you put on Kewpie mayonnaise (a sweet mayonnaise) and oyster sauce. Finally, you sprinkle on some dried bonito flakes and some nori (dried seaweed). It's all made on a huge sort of grill, and it's really good. Now, our Japanese buddies kind of forgot that we ate about 4 hours earlier, so they decided that foreigners eat a lot and that we needed three large okonomiyaki and an order of soba (a type of noodle).

We were so full about half way through, but we couldn't let all of the food go to waste, so we had to keep eating. Now keep in mind all of that food and the fact that the six of us had just eaten lunch a four hours earlier. And now, I think you'll be able to appreciate this next picture a little bit more.

That's right. We ate all of it. We were so full; we were almost sick in fact. We were supposed to head to a nomihodai with our group of about 150 people, but we didn't have bikes, and the bike ride was about 45 minutes. If we went by foot, it'd take us an hour and a half. Considering how much we just ate, we thought we'd be sick if we even thought about a nomihodai. Nomihodai are an interesting idea actually. You pay a set amount, let's say 1100-2000 yen (11-20 US dollars). For the next 90 minutes, it's all you can drink. If they did this in the States, they'd go out of business, but somehow it manages to work in Japan. Now, keep in mind "all you can drink" in Japan is a little different than back home. I can honestly say that it would mean serious binge drinking and getting sick in the US. But the Japanese normally bike everywhere, or take trains and busses. They have to get home somehow, and the idea of being drunk in public is completely unacceptable here. So "all you can drink" is normally done within reason. Still though, we thought we'd be sick, so we skipped on the nomihodai idea and instead went to something called an izakaya (a standard bar) to just go talk and have a drink before splitting up. It was really nice. I enjoy the drinking scene here more actually. The emphasis is always on the group here, rather than on the individual. So people go to a bar more to see other people than to honestly drink.

The next day we went exploring to a huge shopping area along with a famous market. The market is called Nishiki. It's known for having some crazy food like cow's tongue and octopus on a stick and such. Honestly, we went there because one of our buddies had mentioned that cow's tongue was delicious and that we needed to give it a try, but we couldn't find it unfortunately. Instead here's just a couple pictures of a dried bonito flakes machine and some sweets.

Michelle