the long and winding road

So, dear readers, I am sure you have all been anxiously hitting f5 wondering when the next time I was going to write anything would be. I don't know how far into my journey I will get, since it's 9:30 at night, but I will at least start.

Thursday:

I went to meet my mom at the airport. Rather uneventful. I ate some leftovers for dinner, she wasn't hungry. Also had some mochi.

Friday:

We walked to my school and back and went to the grocery store and the 100 yen shop. We bought some sushi in the train station and had that for lunch and made rice and had crab on it for dinner.

Saturday:

We took the train to Asakusa and then got kind of lost walking from the JR station to the touristy area to avoid taking the second train. We wandered a bit and had a lady ask us if she could lead us around. Apparently the Japanese government pays people to be English guides at major tourist attractions. She was very nice. We saw the temple and the shrine and some sad looking monkeys being made to stand up straight and bow. We ate yakisoba and crepes and then walked back through the shopping area and bought stuff and then walked over to Kappabashi, the area with all the restaurant stores. Most of them were pretty boring and sold a lot of dishes, but there were a few of the plastic food shops open and I got a mochi keychain. Then we walked back to the train and made it just as it was starting to rain. For dinner back in my room we used up the last of my frozen hamburger from Costco and cooked some onions and had it on the noodles I'd used for the beef and broccoli.

Sunday:

We left and headed to the train, and went to Tokyo Station, bought my Shinkansen ticket and got on the train for Kyoto. It took about 3 hours to get there. The information booth was on teh 8th floor of a department store, but the lady there gave us a map to get to the ryokan (japanese style hotel) we were staying at. It was a bit of a walk pulling the suitcase and wearing my backpack, but the map was accurate. The landmark to turn off the main street was a Tony Lama western wear shop. The street it was down was narrower than American alleys. Once we got there, they were very nice and showed us our room andthe bathroom and the shower. The room was very cute, it had tatami floors and the futons were folded up and had sliding doors. We left pretty fast and looked at a couple temples on the Eastern side of Kyoto. It was pretty dark when we were done (and actually the one temple was closed both Sunday and the next day by the time we got there). We walked through the entertainment quarter, but it didn't look too entertaining to me, it was all shops. Eventually we got to a big department store and went in the basement and bought yogurt for breakfast and a loaf of french bread and some yakitori (grilled chicken on a stick) for dinner. Then we ran into Jesse, the Canadian guy, on the way out. We went back to the hotel and ate and slept.

Monday:

We got up and ate our yogurt and walked to the former Imperial Palace in Kyoto but were too slow and missed the 10 am english guide, so we went on an 11am tour in Japanese of a different palace, which was very nice and they had pretty gardens andit was a nice small group. We ate lunch at the palace cafeteria, I had udon with a piece of sweet fried tofu on top and my mom had something with seaweed and other things. Then we went on the english tour of the palace, but it wasn't so photogenic and the group was wayyyyy too big. A lot of the people on it didn't speak english as their first language, so they were talking and the guide had areally strong accent so she was pretty much impossible to understand anyway. Afterward, we walked up to another temple and managed to get there before they closed, even though we walked around pretty much the whole wall before finding the gate. It was getting cold and dark onthe way back, but we'd seen a grocery store the previous day so we stopped there and bought sushi andmore yogurt.

Tuesday:

We took the bus in Kyoto to a building entirely covered in gold, inventively named the Golden Pavilion. Then we walked to a rock garden that sounded much more impressive than it actually was. On the way we stopped and had bowls of rice with toppings. After the rock garden we walked back toward the train through a complex that had a bunch of temples in it. Near Kyoto Station there was yet another world heritage temple and we managed to get there before they closed too. We started walkingback to the hotel and weren't very far when mom decided she wanted to look at themap to decide whichwasthebest way to get to the hotel and a older Japanese lady decided to help us. Theonly problem being we weren't lost. And the fact that she didn't know where ourhotel was and started going in the wrong direction was not so helpful either. Eventually she asked someone and the guy told us to keep going down the street we had been walking on until she made us turn. She was very nice, though, and walked all the way there with us and then gave us some little origamis she had in her purse. We went up to our room and dropped off some stuff and then ventured back out to the grocery store. We got gyoza, which were really good, and tempura, which looked really good, but the breading was kind of greasy and not so tasty.

Wedneday:

We packed up and left Kyoto for Nara. We went to the hotel and left our luggage - I thought the guy wasn't going to be able to pick my backpack up. Then we ran out and saw the three big Nara attractions - a temple with a pagoda, a giant buddah and a temple with lots of lanterns. We had been planning to get ice cream for lunch but Nara was full of deer and stands selling deer cookies, and they kept coming up to us looking for food. So we didn't eat. We went to a grocery store and got a half pizza and gyoza and a carton of yogurt and a box of granola for breakfast. Then we walked past a bakery and got two pastries and a half loaf of french bread with pesto paste and a bun with cheese. We ate lots for dinner.

Thursday:

We got up and ate yogurt and went to the train and took it to Horyuji temple, outside of Nara, which has the distinction of having the oldest wooden buildings in the worldd, dating to the 7th century. It was very nice. Then we went back to the train, stopping to eat ice cream (finally!) and at a bakery, where we got two pastries to compliment our ice cream cones, a small loaf of bread and a bag of miniature crossaints. Back in Nara we went to another temple, but didn't pay to get in and just saw the outside, but then walked around in what the information lady had said was like Japan 100 years ago. There was a model of what a house would have been like and it was pretty interesting, although it did look an awful lot like the samurai house. Then we did some shopping on the way back and went to a restaurant for dinner - I had tenzarusoba (cold buckwheat noodles with tempura) and my mom had a tempura set that came with udon soup and rice.

Friday:

We took the train to Osaka. I had wanted to not take the shinkansen because itwould be cheaper, but it wouldhave taken 6 hours to get to Hiroshima and only been $40 less, so we went to the shinkansen station and were to Hiroshima by about 1:30. We took a streetcar to the ryokan we were staying in. The lady there was extremely nice. Then we went to the peace museum (which the guidebook said would take half an hour but we were there for 2 and didn't really get to look at the end very much because they were closing). We walked through the park and saw a burned out building. Then my mom wanted to see the castle so we started walking there and went around their baseball stadium and eventually got diagonally across the corner from it. But there was no way to cross the street, so we went back and found a grocery store and got more yogurt for breakfast and a fancy bread pastry thing and sushi for dinner.

Saturday:

After eating breakfast, we walked to the train and took it to a ferry, where we went to an island that has a temple gate built out in the water so it looks like it's floating when the tide is in. The water was actually coming in and we saw it surrounded by water. Miyajima was nice. We ate oysters (a regional speciality), I had deepfried oysters on rice and my mom had oysters on noodle soup. We had been planning to take the cable car to the top of the mountain and walk down but the cable car was closed for maintence, so we walked up the mountain. It was a very slanty mountain. It was nearly 5 when we started going back down but that turned out to be okay - we saw a whole group of wild monkeys! They were very cute but also very loud. It was getting pretty dark by the timewe got to the bottom. We got to see the gate illuminated in the dark too, but the tide was all the way out and people had walked out to it, so it wasn't reflecting. The shops were all closed. We took the ferry back and stopped at a store on the way to the train and I got some ice cream. After getting off the train we went to another convienence store (it was about 8:45) and bought some premade steamed buns and ate them when we got back to the room.

Sunday (today):

We slowly walked to the peace museum and hit the shop because they were closing when we were there friday. They didn't really have much, though. Then we walked to an area that had a lot of okonomiyaki (a thing with pancake on the bottom, cabbage, bean sprouts and meat and an omlette on the top) restaurants. It had just opened, though, so we watched some Japanese people's food get cooked and then went there ourselves - it was very filling. And tasty. Then we went to the train on the streetcar. The next shinkansen back to Tokyo didn't have any seats, and the next one from Hiroshima to Osaka had nonsmoking seats but the only seats from Osaka to Tokyo were in the smoking car, so we decided to go with smokey seats but be guaranteed to be able to sit for the 3 hours. It wasn't nearly as smokey as I had expected it to be and there weren't many people smoking. We got lucky at Tokyo station and didn't have to wait long for a train going all the way to Chiba, so we got off the Shinkansen at 7:15 and were back to Inage by 8:15.

Now I am going to bed, as it's taken an hour to write this.

100th post

Kind of underwhelming. I meant to write something interesting and insightful about having been in Japan 100 posts' worth of material, but I would rather go to sleep instead. Maybe at 200.

My mom got here on Thursday afternoon. We're going to Kyoto tomorrow and are going to be off looking at things for a week... more photos on my return, I suppose.

It's unfair that she is not tired and I want to go to bed. And it's not even like it's early, it's 9:35 pm.

breezy

It was raining slightly when I went to school, but I didn't really get wet. On the way home, though, it was raining a lot harder and the front of my pants from themiddle of the thigh to the bottom got soaked. It wasn't actually all that cold out, and later (after the rain had stopped) I went to the store and bought some plastic rain pants. It's freakishly warm out, and windy. My clothesline is swinging wildly in the breeze. If this was Illinois, there would be vast tornado watches. It's supposed to keep being windy until tomorrow afternoon, but hopefully the wind lets up sooner than expected because my mom is coming tomorrow. It's not as windy as it was when I came back in January, though. And hopefully the snow in Chicago stops so that her flight is not canceled on that end. It was so warm out that I had the door open for a couple hours, fresh air was definately needed in here. I have the little window open but I might close it since the wind is rather loud.

I'm very ready for Japanese class to be over, the final is tomorrow. But today the teacher said it might be on more chapters than the 7 it says on the syllabus. It's also supposed to be an hour and a half long test instead of an hour like the first two.

I got some miniature oranges, they are very small and cute. And yummy.

My anthropology advisor never emailed me back :(

the view out my window

It's ridiculous. That small round shrub has pink flowers. Flowers! Outside! In the middle of February! This is abnormal.

In other news, I got a second camera battery today, so I no longer have to worry about running out of power while in the middle of a photographic spree.

I also got koala cookies that are cafe au lait flavored.

more pictures

more pictures. less words.

snow festival

Okay, I know I wrote a very short entry about Wednesday (I had forgotten I'd set it up so I could email posts, like from my phone). But I'm going to start at the beginning again to avoid forgetting anything.

Wednesday

We left the dorm around 11:30 and got to the airport at about 1. We ahd to go to the travel agency desk to get our tickets and then went through security. No one ever asked for our ID to make sure we were really us. There was a yellow airplane with pokemon painted on the outside and it was parked at our gate... and then it even turned out to be our airplane! The headrests and curtains had pokemon on them, and so did the paper cups and the flight attendants aprons. We were sitting right in front of the wing on the window, and there was no one next to me so we had the row to ourselves. Landing was uneventful, except for all the snow. I was really excited. We took the train from the airport to Sapporo (I put my boots on and my gym shoes in my backpack). Then we had to find the hotel. It was snowing pretty hard and by the time we got to the hotel we were all snowy. A lady ran out into the foyer and brushed the snow off us and took our backpacks and put them on a cart for us. The hotel asked for our passports to photocopy. The room was huge. We had three two person beds (that were not a full double bed) and a table and a flat screen tv and a really big bathroom with a separate room for the shower. After we put down our stuff, we went back out and looked at the snow sculptures, walking from the east end to the west end of the park and back. They didn't photograph that well at night. I got a venison steamed bun that was really good. After we were cold, we went back and decided to go to the mall attached to the hotel by an underground passage. Which ended up not being heated. Then it was past 8 so the stores were closed, so we had to runoutside to the building with the food court. I got a bowl of noodle soup, with a shumai and a dumpling and a miniature steamed bun from Mr. Donut. I also bought a hello kitty for my phone that is dressed like a snow bunny that is on a lot of hokkaido posters. And a hello kitty sitting on an ANA airplane.

Thursday

We left pretty early, stopping to take pictures of a clock tower building in Sapporo that's supposed to be the only remaining Russian structure, and took the train to an outdoor museum. It had a lot of historic buildings that had been moved to the site and you could go inside them all and look at what the interior looked like in the olden days. Luckily I wore my boots that are easy to take on and off, because you had to put on slippers for all the buildings. We also rode on a sleigh pulled by a horse. We walked around the entire place, which took about 4 hours. Then we walked back to the train (we had taken a bus there because the japanese lady we asked how to get there took us to the bus stop on the other side of the station and the bus went straight there and was due in five minutes). There was 15 minutes before the next train so we went to the grocery store next to the station and bought food for lunch. Then we took the train to a different station and walked to a chocolate museum/factory run by a company that only sells their cookies in Hokkaido. They gave us a sample one and it was really good. The building looked very European, kind of like a castle. It was pretty near the mountains, and it looked very pretty in the snow. Inside was really fancy and castle-y looking too. They had rooms of hot chocolate cups and chocolate packaging and a place where you could watch the factory make the cookies. They had snowmen with different faces lined up around the top of the building and at the store at the end, they had ice cream in snowmen and I got raspberry ice cream. My snowman is scowling. Then we walked to the subway and took it back to downtown. Silke wanted to go up the tower at one end of the park, but the wait was 40 minutes to go up. We'd found onthe map of the mall a grocery store so we went there and bought food for dinner and breakfast. We went back and ate and watched this tv station that had english-language movies with japanese subtitles. The movie was about a pretend evil version of microsoft. It was kind of confusing.

Friday

Friday morning I decided to wear my gym shoes because my boots were making my feet hurt walking around all day. We checked out of the first hotel and put our backpacks in a luggage locker at the train station under the park so we wouldnt have to carry them around all day. It was nice. We looked at the snow sculptures in the daylight and took pictures. We also went to the greenhouse in the botanical garden, which was very green and humid. Then we finished looking at the snow sculptures andwent into the underground mall to find something to eat for lunch. We ate at a bakery and I got a pizza calzone and a chocolate chunk scone. Then it was almost time to go to the new hotel, so we got our stuff from the locker and went to the fish market and looked at lots and lots of crabs and fish. I bought some dried salmon. It was the least intimidating thing there. And was tasty. It made me really want to eat crab, though. The sheet of paper we had from the travel agency had one hotel on it, so we went there and tried to give them the room ticket and then it turned out we were at the wrong hotel, so we had to walk to the other one(which we had been very close to at the fish market). We went and put our stuff down and sat around resting for a while andwatching the BBC. Around 4 we headed out to the streetcar and went to a ropeway/cable car thing that took you to the top of the mountain. It had started to snow, though, so it wasn't as clear as might have been hoped for going to a lookout, but it was still very pretty to see all the lights at night. Also, I'd never been to a mountain in the winter before. They had a bus with caterpillar wheels to take people from the top of the ski lift to the building at the top of the mountain. We wandered around and took some pictures and shopped in the store (I bought a magnet, a couple keychains and a stuffed hello kitty (well, it was actually Daniel, Kitty's boyfriend) dressed as an Ainu. He is very cute). Then we went back on the caterpillar snow bus and at the ski lift there was a bar inside an igloo that hada lot of icicles and lights inthe walls. It was really pretty but also kind of small. Then we took the cable car back down and took the streetcar back to the end. We went to the department store across from the streetcar terminal and got some food in the basement for dinner and breakfast and lunch the next day - I had a little package of spaghetti that I didn't eat the previous night and I got a package of crab meat to go with it. I also got a small loaf of brown bread with raisins and a yogurt. We looked at about half the ice carvings that were in the street outside the department store onthe way tothe hotel and went back and watched the BBC some more and went to sleep.

Saturday

Saturday was a veryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy long day. Again we ate and left the hotel by 9 and put our stuff in the luggage locker at the subway station. We took the subway to the zoo and walked around there for 4 hours. It was kind of sad because the animals weren't in natural-looking habitats and the cages were smallish and plain. Thereseemed to be a lot of outside space but mostly it didn't look like they cleared the snow for the animals to go out in the winter. They had the oldest lion in Japan and he kept roaring and the little kids were hiding. There was a pretend mountain with lots of Japanese monkeys (like, the kind that live in Japan natively). It was surprisingly big but almost all the buildings looked really old (which is probably why they had old looking cages and not nice modern natural looking ones like in America). They did have a bird house with a huge open room with a lot of tropical birds and a flock of flamingos in it. And the seal trainer had a seal doing its checkup stuff on the sidewalk (granted, it was covered in snow and the other seals looked jealous) outside the seal area instead of like at lincoln park zoo where the trainer goes in to the exhibit. It was kind of weird. Silke said she hadn'tbeen to a zoo since she was a small child and that this zoo was somuch bigger than the one in Germany that she'd been to. We went back to the subway and went back downtownand looked at all the icesculptures in the daylight. One of the kids from my Japanese class last year at UIC is teaching English in Hokkaido and hewas going to the snow festival too, so we met for ramen for dinner. The teachers at his schoolhad given him recommendations, but the first choice wasn't open yet, so we went to the second choice. It was really good. Ramen is supposedto be one of the local specialties in Sapporo (Hokkaido seems to havea lot of flavors of candy and types of cookiesthat you can only get there). It was nice to see someone from home, and he said that I was the first person from Chicago he'd seen since he came to Japan in August. It made me really sad on the airplane back to Tokyo, though, I wished I was going back to Chicago. We walked back to the luggage locker and got ourstuff and walked to the trainto get to the airport. It was starting to snow again. We got to the airport too early, but it was nice to sit down and not do anything for a while. I got a pudding in a little glass jar. It was tasty. Our flight ended up leaving 10 minutes late. In the airplane, we had to go up a staircase to the second level of the airplane. We had windows, though. I got lemonade to drink. Silke for some reason had bought "Breakfast at Tiffany's" in English (with some things explained in Japanese) and I read that on the way back. I think I've read it before, though, and I know I've seen the movie. It was just past 11 whenwegot off the plane. The train line we took to the airport had already stopped running, so we hadto take themonorail and thenchange trains twice. It was a little worrisome that we might miss the last train, but we got on the second to last rapid train going in this direction (but it didn't go as far as Inage) and then switched to a slower train where it ended and were back to the dorm by about 12:45 am. I wasn't really tired yet, but I took a shower and went to bed.

snow everywhere!!!

we left the dorm around 11:30 and got to Haneda airport at 1. we had to pick up our tickets from the travel agency desk and then we went through security, never being asked to prove we were ourselves. The airplane had pokemon painted on the outside and the curtains cups and headrests had pokemon too.

It was snowing pretty heavily when we landed and still when we got off the train here. There is, literally, snow everywhere. the sidewalks and streets are under a layer of packed snow and theres almost no salt.

We found the hotel and left our stuff and wdnt to the snow festival.We walked the entire length of the park in both directions-but there was a lot of snow on many of the sculptures. Eventually we went back to the hotel and decided
to go to the connected mall to look for food. It was kind of confusing but eventually we found cheap food by running outside to a different building that was attached.

now its morning and the snow stopped. We are going to go to an outdoor museum that has many old buildings and maybe to the top of a mountain.

I forgot

to make a joke about how I am going to the Great White North of Japan.

Eh?

snow!

I'm leaving tomorrow to go to Sapporo for the 雪祭り (snow festival, for all you anglophones). So when I get back on Saturday night, I will go to bed and then post some photos on Sunday. In the meanwhile, you can look at this guy carving an ice sculpture at Lincoln Park Zoo. I think it's meant to be a zebra.

cubs lose, cubs lose, cubs lose

oops. I meant to say that the Bears lost. It would have been nice if they'd won, but really, that was expecting too much.

Today was kanji... I have been studying a bit more and that is definately helping my quizzes... and she gave us a sheet with all the kanji that will be on the test next week. We supposedly learned 298 kanji this semester, on top of the 220 from the first book (many of which I already knew). So if I knew them all, I'd be not quite a third of the way to being fully literate. gah.

I used to really dislike the Grateful Dead, but they are growing on me. I only ever heard them on Sunday nights when we had gone to my grandma's and XRT had this thing called "The Grateful Dead Hour" on which they played lived recording from concerts. I hated it because they'd play the same song for a good 20 minutes. I never noticed when they played regular, studio recordings on the radio during the daytime, though, because it wasn't like they were playing "Sugar Magnolia"'s refrain for 10 minutes.

Tonight for dinner I decided to use up the last inch of pasta sauce and I made risotto with it, adding fennel and oregano. I cut up some garlic too, but since it didn't cook for hours and hours, the garliciness didn't really get to permeate through the sauce. Also, it was convienent to make risotto with the end of the sauce because I got to rinse out the jar and then put the water in the pan, thereby using up all the tomato residue.

I'm going to Sapporo on Wednesday for the snow festival... I will walk around and look at sculptures made of snow and ice. And then my feet will get cold. Actually, hopefully the fleece socks I bought will help prevent my feet from getting cold. I'm really looking forward to taking a shower in a full-size bathroom. That was one of the nicest things about being home, a regular bathroom with a sink attached to the wall and a separate area for taking a shower so the floor wasn't puddly all the time.

A pigeon keeps going on the balcony and landing by the door. I banged on the window really loudly a couple times and I heard my neighbors both bang on their doors, hopefully it got discouraged and went to harass some other area. The 3rd and 4th floors all have green mesh screens to keep birds out, I'm jealous. I went to the office and told them and they started talkingto each other about the mesh, so maybe other people have been complaining and we will get bird protection.

John Reed and Sen Katayama did not serve concurrently in Comintern

expensive pastry
That is what I learned today while finishing my economics paper. I don't think that it is a particularly useful fact, other than to know that Reed died in 1920 and Katayama joined in 1921. But they were both buried in the Kremlin.

It's very windy out, the clothesline was swingingly wildly and the emergency door in the hall is rattling on its hinges.


I got a crossaint stick this morning, it had chocolate and almonds and little bits of candied orange peel on top. It was very yummy. So was the small loaf of bread I got (and ate most of it, with butter for lunch, and with a repeat of egg lemon soup for dinner). But these Japanese bakeries make Dinkels look like an absolute bargain. For some things, at least. A pastry this fancy looking would probably cost close to the 168 it cost here. But it was soooooooo good. Now that I started eating the expensive and really good bread from the bakery, all I want to eat is bread... bread and more bread. And perhaps with a smudge of butter... I miss Chicago, where good bread was much more readily available and much more reasonably priced.

Superbowl tomorrow! but really, it's on Monday morning... so the day after tomorrow. Hopefully the Bears will win, or at least choke early in the game so as to not make everyone too anxious.

econ gathering

Today I met my tutor for lunch. I got something that was like udon noodles but the noodles were flat instead of round. It was pretty good. There were squares of sweet tofu on the top.

This afternoon was the econ party. It's a good thing I went because it was all Japanese students, save for me, Silke and Scott. Apparently the others couldn't be bothered to show up. It was a much less stressful party than a lot of the ones at the beginning of the year because these kids actually wanted to talk to us, and they wanted to talk to us in English. There were some snacks that were tasty and we played a couple games. It was definately a lot of fun and I am glad that I went. I mean, I had been planning on going, but it wasn't so boring as I was expecting.

I made another soup for dinner... today I cut up a carrot and cooked it in some water with oregano and fennel and then added a cup of milk and a scoop of potato flakes. It was quite good. Although I can see myself getting tired of soups made creamy with instant mashed potato pretty quickly. No bread with it today, though, so that was probably more healthy.

brr... it's kind of chilly in here. I wanted to buy a thermometer for my room but the only one they had in farenheit was really small and it only went down to 60 degrees, so not that useful. I may have to spend more than 100 yen on one, I guess. I'm not sure where to buy one, though.

Avgolemono Soup

I finally gave in and bought somenice crusty bread from the bakery near the station. I managed to restrain myself and got out of there with only my one overprices bun and no crossaints drizzled in frosting with almonds or other elaborate pastries. I was trying to think of what to eat with it as I was walking around in the grocery store and decided to get some chicken... and then I ended up making egg-lemon soup. It was actually really good, but I had to add some of my potato flakes because I clearly did not add enough rice or else I picked a very liquidy recipe. The spoon of potato made it the right creamy consistency. I didn't manage to stir the egg into the liquid with the chicken smoothly enough because I ended up with a few egg clouds (like in Chinese soup) but it tasted really good. And went very well with the bread.

Today I had two different middle aged ladies try to get me to sign up for credit cards with hello kitty on them. I would think that I wouldn't be their target demographic, as I am not Japanese. But I guess it's nice of them to offer. Jose, the guy from Costa Rica, got a Japanese credit card, but he couldn't read all the paperwork and brought it with him to class the other day.

It's been kind of boring because now I only have Japanese in the morning, all my other classes are done. So I have a lot of free time and nothing much to fill it with. I have one more paper to write and then I guess I will turn my attention to my anthropology project... speaking of which, I emailed my Honors College fellow last week and she still hasn't emailed me back yet. Hrm. I guess it's possible she's out of the country or something doing archaeology, but you think she would have an automated response or something. I guess I will email the regular undergraduate advisor on the weekend to see what she says.