Tag: food

Daytripper

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through the changing weather it’s you’ve gotta take what you can get. So many days now I come to school wearing a light jacket only to have it dark and freezing by the time I leave. Often it’s begun to rain. Sooner than last year I expect it’ll start to snow. Sometimes I wonder if I should go for a run, or wait until I’m free in the evening with less errands to do. Too many times I’m stuck at 9:00 bundling in gloves and long pants, when during the day I could’ve gone out in shorts.

Thus before I’m completely shut in for Winter, I’ve been able to go out and enjoy the season just a little bit more. This has probably fatigued me a bit, being my weekends have been booked completely since Halloween, but I’ve also at least been more active than I would’ve otherwise.

The first weekend trip followed a day where I volunteered as a judge for a high school English debate tournament. Seeing the dozens of students compete in such advanced English made my average work seem inadequate. I doubt there are many opportunities in a junior high school where they can learn such enabling English, even after three years they’re barely learning how to use prepositions to connect verbs with nouns. I did find a reward though meeting one of my students who graduated last year. During the last round he asked me to sit by him and we talked pretty fluently about the points each team was making, as well as how he studied English, and what he was enjoying in high school. At least that gave me some hope that not every student I teach will go on to expel any hint of English by the time they graduate high school.

I woke up my usual weekday time on Sunday morning to car pool with some neighbors to the train station where we’d be picked up by a Japanese lady. I must admit I didn’t really have any clue what I was signed up for. Another American English teacher who arrived in the summer had invited me to go, so I didn’t even look at any of the details. Just that we’d be taking a tour of some ruins basically only famous in our prefecture. Maybe they were some sort of heritage site, but on that I can’t be sure. I didn’t even know how to dress. For some reason I had the impression we’d be hiking a mountain, so I packed extra snacks and gloves in my backpack just in case.

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We drove out of the city and arrived to meet two other cars of people at the entrance of a small museum. Literally, it was the most budget friendly museum in just an open foyer and a single humidified room. Most of the objects in glass casing lining the walls were broken pottery somewhat assembled back together. There were some scale models of what the area looked like hundreds of years ago, but the most interesting object to me was an old sword.

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After that short tour we drove out to the actual valley where these ruins were partially reconstructed. From what I gleaned a ruling family, Asakura something, had set up shop in the area about 500 years ago. Even more surprising was at the time it was the 3rd most populous place in Japan right behind Kyoto and Tokyo! The inaka countryside that I’d been living in for over a year used to contain the center of Japan. How things have changed.

Seeing the ruins and replicas they built was definitely not spectacular, but there was some solace about the place. If you imagined the type of people that would have lived there and the strains that society has taken to evolve into the present. Even among the inequalities and famines, the simplicity of the life appeals. This is certainly a weather-changing-another-year-overworked-pessimistic-me point of view, but the focus on living instead of life has some advantages.

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One of the best uses of the day came while strolling down the village street and finding inspiration to write. Actually through the whole day I realized I’d been gaining experience helpful for any sort of fantasy or old-world story I might dive into. Just being there and seeing what life was life gives my writing a bit more authenticity.

I’m quite surprised I’ve made it this far in my description because at the time I really didn’t seem to feel so affected by the tour. I suppose I was happy to be out in the nice weather, but to be honest I was more distracted by Pokémon Go half the time. Then again, there really wasn’t much to look at.

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Maybe the highlight of the day actually came in the afternoon once the tour was finished. We moved from the outdoors more into the valley to an old restaurant lodge specializing in soba noodles. They had an entire hall full of tables to teach how to make soba. Of course, you’ll remember from my post last Christmas about how to make soba. Well, maybe you won’t, I almost didn’t. It was fun to make again, especially since our tiny grandma of a teacher kept interrupting what we were doing to fix any mistakes. This time we left the cooking to the actual chef, though, so the end result lost some of its majesty.

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Still delicious, and I topped it off with a beer from the cooler.

Thanksgiving

For me there is hardly a day worth celebrating more than any others. When I was a kid I used to pout at my own birthday parties. I’ve had the hardest point remembering anyone’s birthday (a bane because everyone can remember mine falls on a holiday), and really one of the days I’ve enjoyed more than others in the past years is Black Friday. Maybe that particular attention is why I’m only now realizing how different my timeline is in Japan. I mean, after all, Halloween was seen and talked about pretty well among the students and commercialized places, but I haven’t seen a single display for Thanksgiving and thus–almost thankfully–nothing about black Friday.

Obviously Thanksgiving is a truly American holiday–food, family, and football–but for me its always been a little more. Through the past couple of years I’d gotten into looking at Thanksgiving as a time to do something nontraditional in my life. One year I traveled to Charlotte to eat soul food with the family I’d only heard about in stories (or even letters to prison). Another year I traveled to Tacoma to make a truly college but independent dinner with a completely different type of family (#trackhouse). Christmas would later be the time for the family I saw everyday, so it seemed that in times of thanks I needed to reach out and be with the people that I didn’t always show gratitude for.

OK, and that above has convinced me to completely change my direction on the feelings I had for this post. Originally I was planning and pointing out how much I missed Thanksgiving this year, when really I guess I did what I normally would (even if it did technically come a week later). I should mention the weird feeling I got explaining Thanksgiving to a class of kids who literally had no clue what I was  talking about, but really I think those moments do more to remind me everything I miss from America.

Anyway, living in a foreign country full of people in the same situation with a pretty strong network of events or communication it seems pretty obvious that there’d be more than one somewhat traditional Thanksgiving celebration. Even the night before, gathered in an apartment for a “California beach” party wearing shorts and eating Costco sheet cake, a group of us were discussing what types of foods we’d contribute to the weekend potluck. I’d really considered trying to put something together at the last moment: mashed potatoes, fruit salad, steamed vegetables. I think apart from laziness I just lack any sort of equipment to make a decent dish (in my small sized kitchen), and despite being days away from a paycheck I was (as it always magically seems to be around this time of the month) strapped for cash. Thus, I decided to just pay the fee and enjoy the joys everyone else felt like sharing.

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I think we were there for a good four hours, and damn I was glad we got there early. I think the last time I was at a potluck was my senior college year of cross country running, an annual event after our first home race, and that–after from delicious baked goods–had nothing to compete with this. There were Japanese, Irish, Vietnamese, Chinese, American, and so on dishes of all variety. It seemed like every time I finished my plate and felt like I was finally full, someone new would show up and put a different dish on the table. (Really, I should’ve thought ahead before typing this and eaten something because now I’m craving it all again). It really was a Thanksgiving dinner because I kept eating and feeling good and eating some more.

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Apart from the food, it was really just good to see everyone again. I mentioned earlier about how obvious it would be that the powers that be would organize an event to get all us (majority American) foreigners together for the holiday, but I often forget just how many of us foreigners there are (a really bad problem when I have to avoid using someone’s name I’ve forgotten after three months). Not only foreigners, but also local Japanese people showed up to join in the celebration.  As someone who usually spends a Sunday cleaning, vegging, or just generally sticking to his apartment, it was a good occasion to get out and enjoy the community that I can’t always interact with.

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And the food, again, was fantastic. I even had to pull off the remnant of one of the five or so turkey’s they brought in because of how quickly they were devoured. Really between the Irish soup, the home-baked bread, the eggnog, and the no-bake cookies, the turkey was the least of my options. I really need to practice more varieties of cooking now, or at least figure out where everyone gets their ingredients. I think the biggest hub is Costco, and oh, how I long to get to Costco.