SNOW!!

It's snowing in Isahaya tonight. Quite unexpectedly, it seems. We are told they get snow, but there was none in today's forecast. Nevertheless, there was some around lunch that I missed and more as I picked Chrys up from work. At this point it's varying between so white you can barely see outside to still snowing, but not obviously so.

Chrys was told that if there's snow on the road, no one drives. I guess they don't have snow removal equipment. I wouldn't know where they stored it if they did. Apparently, though, once the road is black, you go in regardless of how much is elsewhere. That leaves me a little concerned about black ice, but we'll see how it looks in the morning.

Right now, though, it's sticking to the cars, but not the ground or road just yet. It's pretty cool. I love snow, as long as I don't have to shovel my car out of it.

Did I mention we have covered parking?

Sakura

Suddenly I understand a society's infatuation with cherry blossoms. We saw our first today at Shimabara Castle (more on that later, I promise).

Not only are they gorgeous, but the smell is intoxicating. There were only buds on a few trees, but the scent was overwhelming. There was one point on the path that I stopped and it just washed over me. It's rich, sweet...indescribable, and like nothing I've smelled before.

Chrys said it was almost as good as smelling cassia (and that's saying a LOT for him). Even Roo was in love with them and smelled and 'oooooed' repeatedly. Simply amazing.

Now, I cannot WAIT for spring when they will be everywhere. I think I must plan all of the places to visit during those weeks so I can enjoy the sweet high from these flowers. It's a shame they are open for such a short time. No wonder there are celebrations to mark their arrival.

I hope I can find them (and get them to grow) in Texas because I want about a dozen in my yard!

My first word

My Japanese language skills leave MUCH to be desired. At this point, I am best able to tell people "Nihongo ga wakarimasen" (I don't understand Japanese). At that point they laugh, say something else and I shake my head. Some will still try to communicate with me. Others just politely bow and walk away. I find that the language CDs got me familiar with some words. I can fake my way through an order at a restaurant because I know to listen for tabemasu and nomimasu (eat and drink). I can count to 10, maybe even 99. I am far from conversational, though.

To that end, we're working on hiring a tutor. The first one is not available anymore so I need to find some time during the day to go downstairs and talk to the woman there that had offered to teach us. Hopefully she's still willing and able and I can finally understand what they're yelling when I walk into the market.

The written stuff is hard. There are 2 'alphabets' that are commonly used for phonetic spellings. In addition there are some thousand kanji. The problem I have with the phonetics is that even if I can sound out a word, it's in Japanese and I still have no idea what it means. Santa gave me a Japanese-English dictionary that has romaji in it that I put to use for those, when I remember. Before that, I had a few words in the back of my pocket helpful situation book and some random words in my kana crossword book (how I learned most of those 'letters' in the first place). I also had my translator and my cell phone, but those like me to enter the symbols and that can be very time consuming when you don't quite understand the order they're in on the keypad.

Nevertheless, I read and understood my first word on the fly the other day. Well, honestly it's probably my third word - I know the kanji for Nagasaki and Isahaya, but I'm not counting those. It was on an LED sign - ガソリン.

This is important for many reasons. 1) I actually bothered to look at a sign, even though I figured I wouldn't know what it said. 2) I took the time in my brain - which was painful, I assure you - to work it out as I sat at the stop light. 3) I figured it out in time to point it out to other people in the car - which meant it couldn't have taken THAT long for me to get it.

It made me feel good, as silly as the word is. It fueled me want to learn more and get better. It pumped me up to read signs and try to decipher them, knowing I have a book with the romaji once I get close enough. This illiterate has made progress and now wants more. It's amazing what the smallest sense of victory can do for your drive.

Oh, yeah...what does the kana mean, you ask? Gasorin. ;)

This is safer?

Japan (at the very least our little part of it) has some brand spanking new laws about not talking on your cell while you drive. In general, I like this law. I liked it when I found about it in New York. I wish Texas would implement it because it seems whenever someone does something stupid while I'm driving in Austin, they're on a cell. Here, I'm not sure they're getting the desired result.

Granted, I don't see very many people talking as they drive. That much is goodness. However, there are times that I'm driving down the road and the person in front of me will suddenly slam on his/her brakes and pull over. I use "pull over" very loosely because when you're using a 1.5 lane road as 2 lanes, there's not a lot of room to really pull over. I end up swerving around and very frequently see the person putting a cell phone up to his/her ear. I'm at a bit of a loss as to which is really more dangerous - talking while you drive or stopping suddenly to take a call.

I guess I'll just stick with driving carefully, down the middle of the road whenever possible, and trying to get out of here before I hit someone. Maybe the AP will carry updated statistics on Japanese driving safety once they get that all settled out.

Reflection of the people?

Maybe I'm just a crazy American - well, of course I'm a crazy American, but we'll just end that train of thought right there.

Anyway...I'm used to advertisements trying to depict who I'd like to be and how their product can get me there. I mean, diet pills = hot skinny girls, Swiffer = happy mom with gorgeous floors, listerine/toothpaste = white shining (with a pretty CGI sparkle) teeth. The correlation is that all of them have supposedly average looking fellow country...uhm, people, yeah. Granted I don't buy into the 'average looking' part, but that's part of it - I mean, I'll look physically better if my floors are clean, no?

Well, I'm perplexed. Here I am in another country, but probably 75% of the people staring back at me in ads (especially printed ones) are Caucasian. Now, maybe I'm just in a small town, but I'm pretty sure 75% of the population here isn't Caucasian.

Maybe the mentality is different. I mean, I've heard it was popular (post-WWII) to have plastic surgery to round the eyes. Maybe some of the people here would prefer to be sold products by a Caucasian (have I used that enough, can I just say white guy?) Maybe "we" are more pushy so they feel more compelled to buy the product. ;) Maybe I'm some sort of weird backwards racist that can't understand why a people would prefer to be sold products by someone other than their own race. I mean, I don't think less of a product offered by an African American so maybe I should just look at it that way. Nevertheless, it goes against my conditioning.

One thing that is interesting, though, is that the ads, regardless of the race, are usually focused on the face of the person holding the object near his/her mouth. Sometimes it's just a face. I find it very easy to forget what those ads are about, but the image of the face lingers on. I can still clearly picture the girl on the poster in McD's (Asian, maybe for the Red Cross) and the guy (white) selling me a little wooden car...wait, no, he wanted me to buy a real one, but probably couldn't get that up by his mouth. Interesting technique...even if it's not what I'm used to.

I can cook!

I had a cookbook with that title when I was younger (7-12, I guess) and I used to get the biggest kick out of getting my dad to help me make stuff in it. I've never been big on cooking. It was always a huge hassle. I think I just picked stuff that was too complicated.

Turns out, I really enjoy cooking. I cook pretty much every night and it's fun. At this point, I have a pretty well stocked Japanese kitchen. I've played with deep frying (something other than chicken and catfish), a wok and my steamer. It's all pretty cool to use. I use lots of sake, mirin (sweet cooking sake), soy sauce, garlic and onion. I've even used green peppers (and, mom, you were right...I hit 27 and BOOM, they're good. I still say the ones here - which are MUCH smaller - are sweeter and taste better, though, so we'll see what I think of them once I get back to the US.)

We eat Japanese about 75% of the time, I would guess. It's easier to find those ingredients, obviously, and much better for us. We're losing weight, which we all like. I think we'll end up keeping many of the Japanese recipes in the 'rotation' once we get home just because they're tasty, easy to prepare and (did I mention?) healthier.

I'm still not to the point of being comfortable enough to cook without a recipe by my side, but I'm certainly getting more confidence in the kitchen. I'm starting to experiment a bit more. I'm even risking more complicated recipes and adding little notes to my cookbook on things they don't mention, but I've learned after doing the recipe a couple of times - reminders to myself for the next time.

At this point, I have only one problem. Anyone know how to make my hands NOT smell like onion and garlic all the time? :)

Brought to you by Coca-Cola

Well, not really, but my blog is one of the few things in Japan that might not be bottled by Coke. Coca Cola definitely dominates the vending machine industry. I'd say 75% of the machines I see are Coca Cola. They also bottle everything - water, soda, tea (green and not).

But the big thing is how great Coke here tastes. I can only guess it's the whole sugar not corn syrup thing that I keep harping on. Whatever it is - whoah - it's going to really stink to leave this stuff behind. Oh, and out of the fountain...that's bliss, baby.

Chrys has apparently been researching so that we can make our own Coke once we get home. We all bought bottles while we were there for Christmas and came the unanimous conclusion that it just didn't taste right, or even good. Given that, I guess we're bottling our own, living with the stuff that not quite right (but now better than Coke) from Whole Foods, or permanently giving up Coke in favor of Mt. Dew.

Holiday Cards

I finished our holiday cards the night before we got on a plane for the US. It was important to me to get them done and out since I've been pretty lax in the past few years (not that I haven't had plenty going on, but I've still felt bad). I learned a few things about holiday cards in this process.

1) Finding Christmas cards here is not easy. If you do, they're pretty big and ornate (and likely pop-up) and cost big bucks ($2-$5) for 1 card.

2) Finding New Year cards is much easier, but you still can only buy them in packs of 10-15. These run in the neighborhood of $5 per pack.

3) It's very easy to find blank cards and supplies to stamp, paint, print your own.

4) The stamping, painting supplies are relatively inexpensive for the number of cards you can make.

5) The stamping, painting process looks easy on the back of the package, but is actually pretty time consuming.

I ended up buying a package of 100 blank cards and using about 70 of them. I bought 2 stencils and 2 packs of painting stamper things. The stencils had the same design - 4 chicks. I picked that because there are 4 of us. They are chicks because it was either that or roosters - I'm guessing 2005 is the year of the rooster. Contrary to what some think, they don't say our names. The first two say "Happy" - it apparently takes 2 symbols to do that and that "Happy" only works in front of "New Year". The next two say "New" and "Year" respectively.

The painting things were little pads with paint stuff on them. They were about 1cm in diameter and some were more moist than others. This made for a challenge as some of them you had to beat on the page to get any paint on the card and some you barely had to touch to the paper and you'd get a flood of paint. They're now in the hands of my little sis and hopefully she'll have some fun with them.

The painting process wasn't hard. I made it harder. I decided to do multiple colors on the cards (like the silly sample on the stencil pack). It was pretty quick once you got into the rhythm, but insanely dull. Chrys helped me out so we had cards with 2 color themes. I liked it that way.

Note for next year, though - figure out how to order the neat picture cards that say Happy New Year. Barring that, buy supplies early and start cards early so you don't get overwhelmed. Barring that, just try to get them done before we leave the country, again.

I *heart* my toilet seat

Somehow we left Isahaya during the fall and came back in the throes of winter. I'm not impressed. It has, however, brought on a new fondness for the heater function of my toilet seat. I've also garnered a special appreciation for the bidet functions once a month or so. I even figured out that I can control the temperature of the water...mostly because I'm sure it was just shy of boiling when first I used it this time.

Roo's not so impressed with it. In fact, I think she's scared of the water ever since she sprayed it up her back. This doesn't stop her from turning it on every time she sits up there. It also doesn't prevent her from lifting the door to the temperature knobs and playing with those - which I'm sure is WHY the water was so hot.

Nevertheless, this may be a temporary romance. Looking through the stores, these seats seem to cost anywhere from 30,000¥ to 70,000¥. Chrys fears he may be strapped with me wanting one once we get to the states. I'm not sure I can justify that much cash just to avoid that little squeal when I sit down on a cold john, though.

Something new

Owl and I have decided that we need to try to do something new every day. Nothing major, just something different.

Yesterday we decided to drive to New Town/Nishii-Isahaya. It appeared to be mostly a bedroom community/residential area. I did see a free-standing Kuro Neko (the Japanese UPS), though. Some day, we'll have to see if they'll box and ship stuff for me or if I have to keep doing it myself at the post office.

Today, we just went to a new store. It wasn't very big, but it had some awesome produce. I got a HUGE bunch (a dozen, maybe) of bananas (Roo's new favorite food) for 198¥, which is about what I pay for 4-6 of them at San-ai. I also got a small package of strawberries for 298¥, about half what I paid the day before at the M-dot store. We liked the look of their spinach and their potatoes were larger than we'd seen before. I suppose I should wonder what's become of me that I get this excited about good produce, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Black Friday, err, Saturday

When we went shopping on the Friday after the American Thanksgiving, we didn't expect a crowd and we weren't disappointed. What we didn't expect to see when grabbing lunch at Jusco on our way back from the airport was a HUGE crowd. This was the Sunday after New Year's and the store was crazy with people and SALES!

Apparently New Year's Day is the big sale day in Japan. They had practically everything there on sale. The highlight were bags that contained many items for some even price. I looked at one that had 6 items of clothing (for a toddler) that could mix and match into various outfits for 5000¥. That struck me as a pretty good price, but I refrained from buying. (Even though I think I know what Roo's size is right now, she has tons of clothes and I have no idea when I should expect her to be in the next Japanese size so I can't pre-buy for the next year.) There was a bag of various Legos for 3000¥. They even had bags of clothing for adults that were less than 10000¥. Interesting concept.

Anyway, Chrys and I pondered on this disparity in economic trends. While Christmas isn't a big holiday in Japan - even though they give gifts, no one gets the day off - New Year's is huge - most things were closed through Monday, if not later. It's also an interesting concept to have your biggest shopping days be the first days of the year which puts you in a nice position to assess what is necessary for the rest of the year to achieve success. In America, many retail companies can't give a good prediction of their year to year trends until after Black Friday, at which point it's really too late to clean up if things aren't looking good. Conceptually, the Japanese way makes more sense to me and it certainly seems more in line with their way of thinking. Wonder if the American economy will ever succeed in making the New Year enough of a holiday to warrant that switch in shopper mentality. Probably not in my lifetime.

There and back again

We survived the journey back to the US and to Japan once again. We had heard that the trip east was easier than west and, now, we have to agree. We barely suffered from jet lag and it only took us about 2 days to be completely adjusted to the time change in the states. Headed west, though, we're headed into day 5 of being home and we're still screwy.

Our New Year's Celebration was uneventful. Somewhere during our journey, one of the flight attendants turned off the screen she had been watching across the aisle from me and said "Happy New Year" after explaining that we had just crossed the International Date Line. No ball dropping, no big celebration. Just the anticipation of more sleep.

We brought a few more comforts from home with us this time. More toiletries since we'd used up some of our stash. Mom got me some spices. Chrys brought Code Red and Wolf chili - hopefully I can muster up some decent tasting tortillas and something close enough to cheddar cheese to satisfy his Chilito craving. (Trivia tidbit for those Taco Bell lovers - You can't get a Chili Cheese Burrito in the state of Arizona, or at least the city of Phoenix.) We also snagged a few medications we figured we might want - NyQuil, DayQuil, Robitussin. Hopefully we won't have to put them to use, but at least we've got them if we need them again.

Oh...and Owl got his visa. There was some initial panic on our part since we didn't understand what all of the dates meant, but he's cleared to live here for a year. He had to spend some time getting processed by immigration when we landed in Tokyo, but we were assured it wasn't a big deal and they didn't send him home so we won't worry.