Peaches, Hollywood and a nice hot bath

Was at the hot spring near my house last night when we ran into Furu-san from Aikido. It's always humorous to see someone outside the context you regularly see them in. We tossed a few jokes back and forth and then he smiled. He's got this great warm smile that makes you feel like a kid, and then a million bucks and then a beer. Well, maybe in my case a plum wine cooler.

Then, Peaches and I went and took our baths. Japanese hot springs are heavenly. I mean, they're nothing like I could've imagined before I moved practically right next to one. For starters, all the ladies are naked along with you, and nobody looks at you. They don't even look at me, and I look different from all of them (because I'm all-western like, you see)! So there's no awkwardness. So you go in, wash off, and then just stroll around until you find a pool you feel like soaking in. Most bath houses have four or five pools, a cold plunge, and a sauna.

Yesterday I went to the outdoor spring first. The stars were out and the steam was rising like a hazy mist from the water. And I just enjoyed being legally, publicly naked--bare-bodied and free. And both Peaches and I smelled like sulphur for the rest of the night.

Peaches and I have been spending a lot of time together since the Hokkaido trip. We started an exercise regime together, and she's started coming to Aikido classes. We also learn calligraphy together. Good thing I like Peaches and she likes me because we see each other way too much now.

I've also been hanging out with Shaggy a lot, whose name is no longer Shaggy, but Hollywood. Oh, and I've been reading Catch-22; can you tell ;-P ??

Hollywood and I get along famously as well. In fact, I'm kind of smitten with his boyish charm. But most people are, I think. He's one of the most easy-going people I know, and everybody seems to be pretty fond of Hollywood. He has a knack for blurting out some totally spectacular observation about the topic of conversation(quite loudly and unselfconsciously, which is charming in itself), simultaneously remembering something like that he left his car door wide open in the middle of the street. Typically we hear something like, "That was contrasted in two different essays I read last week. The tatemae and the honne are absolutely two sides of the same coin. Oh, F!*&in s####%!, I'll be right back! Oh, man!!"

I suppose this is a continuation of the Friends Project, in which I vowed to make a truck-load of friends this year. And what are friends for but to be made, I always say. Except of course that this is the first time I've said it.
Have a good weekend!!

Not-o Natto??!!

Valentine's Day. A day of showing heartfelt love and appreciation, of giving home-made cookies, and if you are lucky enough, receiving as well...

Messiah, who works for the natto company, for reasons beyond my utter comprehension, unloaded a whole box load of the foul-smelling, indeed, yummy-tasting stuff into my fridge on February the 14th. I couldn't eat this much natto in a whole month, and I even like the stuff!!


from www.bookmice.net/darkchilde/japan/jnatto.html :

Natto is fermented soy beans. The beans are boiled, wrapped in straw and left to ferment for several days. They have vitamins, fiber and protein and thus are a good source of nutrition.

Natto dates back at least 1000 years and eventually became a favorite of people living in Edo, the capital city of Japan at that time.

People sold natto basically door-to-door. Some people added it to miso, others added minced onions and soy sauce and then poured the entire sum over some hot rice. It's cheap and has a rather strong odor.

Natto is sometimes used as a breakfast food, mixed with beaten raw egg and soy sauce, then poured over steaming hot rice. Natto is definitely not a favorite of non-Japanese, though, and even many Japanese do not care for it.

Thrills Up North

More and more memories keep flooding my head from last week's Hokkaido trip. I was in Sapporo for three nights, and Abashiri, on the north-eastern coast, for two.

Like I'd almost forgotten how on the first night, after arriving in Sapporo, my traveling buddy, we'll call her Peaches, really wanted to have some nabe for dinner. 'Nabe' in English translates to 'pot,' and in this context it means various Japanese veggies and fishes boiled and served straight from a big pot. I thought it sounded good, so we looked for a place to go. After a while of walking around and getting really hungry, I finally asked two men wearing business suits standing in front of a restaurant if they knew a good place to eat nabe. As if it was their own personal mission, they started searching around, even calling up to one of the restaurants on sign to see if they served it. Finally, one of the guys goes 'doh!' and that he's knows a place just a block down, on the other side of where we were. And just to be sure we made it there, he walked us all the way there.

Those two crabs are going to stick with me for a long time too. In both Sapporo and Abashiri we stayed in youth hostels, which was a first for me. I didn't really know what to expect, so I didn't have much expectation. The hostel in Sapporo wasn't so much to speak of. The hosts gave us our sheets and told us our room numbers. We met some American girls who were JETs in Kyoto there. The beds were lumpy and the heater was turned up so high I sweat through my pjs. But the hostel in Abashiri was completely different. It was more like a B&B. They took us to a snowy hot spring at night, the guests were friendly and chatty(we were the only non-Japanese, btw, except for this kid Tony, who was half-Japanese, half-New Zealander) and they offered home-cooked breakfasts and dinners. The dinners are what I would like to talk about right now.
On the first night, we had crab legs. These were beautiful, meaty, and delicious. They were served with the most delicate-looking scallops I've even seen.






This was served with salmon rice, curry, and several small side items like spinach in a peanut dressing.



The second night, we signed up to have dinner again, and to my utter delight, and slight wooziness, we were served this 'hairy crab':


Mine had so much meat I just kept on eating more and more, and it was absolutely delicious. I petted the crab's shell. It was fuzzy, like a big fuzzy spider. Ick. But yum. It was served with crab rice, and several other side items too. Both of these meals, amazingly enough were about (US) $13. I noticed a little later on when we went to some food stands downtown that each of these crabs on its own, for a whole crab(we ate half crabs) were around $35-$50.

Snow-mobiling has to be one of the most fun things to do on the entire planet. But let me start with what we did on our fifth morning--something myseriously entitled 'Naturing.' If you don't know what that is, you are in the same boat as Peaches and I were that morning when we got to a frozen-looking ocean and got handed wetsuits. Turns out naturing means going out to play around on drifting ice blocks and floating leisurely around out off the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk One of the highlights was that Tony found this little creature with his see-through bucket called a clione . They are shell-less, tiny little floaty things that bear a striking resemblance to, of all things, angels. And they live in, of all places, freezing cold water. Peaches and Tony spent a long time watching the little thing flap its angelic wings, while I lay on my belly, face 2 inches from the freezing depths, looking for more. Didn't find any more though.

Then we went ice fishing. Well, -they- went ice fishing while Peaches and I watched. Then we went over to the look at snow sculptures at a nearby festival site. This is all taking place in Abashiri, remember, not Sapporo. Sapporo had its own huge festival going on too, but hopefully I'll get to that later. At the little site in Abashiri, we saw some snow mobiles and also some snow rafts. Since we'd tried snow rafting already back in Sato Land in Sapporo, we thought we'd like to try snow mobiling. So we bought our tickets and went out to the snow mobiles. There was no line, and the guys signaled that we didn't need helmets, so we just went right up to them. The guy told me to sit down, so I did, leaving room at the front for him to sit. But then he motioned for me to move to the front and for Peaches to scooch in behind me, which surprised us both. He gave me a 20-second tutorial on how to work the thing, and then he left!! So I'm sitting there in the front grinning ear to ear. And poor Peaches grabs me and hangs on for dear life. I comment to her that they have no idea what they just did, pump the gas once and shoot off down the course at full speed. And my heart was pounding from the thrill of that trip until late into the evening.

Yes!! I want to write more about this trip!

We Get What we Deserve

Shaggy left me a message saying "Did you get yours??" and I had to think because I hadn't gotten anything. But I looked again, and there, buried in the bottom of the plastic orange wanna-be mailbox was the cheap waxy papered postcard I've been waiting for since December 2nd of last year. For those of you who have been anxiously awaiting the results of my Japanese 3rd Level Language Proficiency Test (as I have), they came today.

Here's the breakdown:

Writing/Vocab: 96/100
Listening: 83/100
Reading/Grammar: 176/200

Total Score 355/400
Passing percentage: 60%
My percentage: 89%

WooWeeee! I'm so psyched!!! My goal was a 90%, and I came thiiiiis close! I studied so hard and it took so much effort but I passed and got decent score. Of course, I'm aiming for even higher for next time, but for now, I really couldn't be happier.

For comparison's sake, last year I scored a 94% on the 4th level test.

I leave for Hokkaido tomorrow on a 6-day trip to go to the Snow Festival and do some other cool stuff. Report and photos to come...