The Misadvenures of Sara

It's really incredible the sort of mistakes I'm making here - all because I can't read anything! I don't remember making mistakes of this order in Kenya, but then again, I didn't have the resources in Kenya to make many mistakes!
I tried to make rice a few days ago. The rice here in Japan is very different than the rice at home, and of course I just grabbed a package off the grocery store shelf, with no real idea of what I was buying.
I made it the way I would make rice at home - throw it in the pot and add an equal amount of water. Well, it burned and still wasn't cooked through. Then I thought I had a rice cooker so I pulled it out this morning for another attempt at making rice. Well, it's not a rice cooker, it's a space heater (this was immediately apparent from the kerosene odor emitting from it). Scratch that! So I looked on-line and found some instructions on making Japanese rice. It's very complicated for plain ol' rice! First you rinse it, many many times until the water runs clear (my water never did, and I lost patience for the process after a bit). Then you add the water and let it soak for an hour! Good thing I didn't need this rice right away! Then you boil it for 15 - 20 minutes. Then you steam it for another 10 minutes! Wow, I would have starved to death had I been counting on this rice. But it turned out OK, just a little bit browned rice on the bottom. I put it in the fridge to make rice pudding out of later. I'll let you know how that turns out!
If I can't cook rice properly, it doesn't look good for the rest of my cooking skills here. The other day, I bought a noodle package (kind of like the ones you can get in America, where you add some butter and some milk and water and make it on the stove). So I thought I could handle that here, no problem. I even figured out the amounts of milk and water to use. Then I added the "seasoning" packet. Well, it wasn't seasoning; it was a serious thickening agent which immediately made the liquid so thick the pasta couldn't cook. Another failed meal.
On to housekeeping. I have lovely wood floors which demand a lot of sweeping. And I have a Swiffer like thing. Today though, I decided the floors needed a bit more attention, so I pulled out an Orange cleaning solution and sprayed that all over the floors. Apparently that was way too much, because now, while my floors are clean, they're also very soapy and dingy. Rinsing as best I could with water several times over was only a partial improvement.
But I did find a persimmon today at the grocery store! They're about a dollar apiece (seems to be the standard price for fruit in season. You don't want to know the cost out of season!). It may not have been quite ripe, but was tasty - maybe a bit like a peach...

Life at Elementary Schools!

On Thursdays, I rotate between three elementary schools. These students haven’t really had any formal English instruction yet, but my role is to get them excited for when they learn it later. The elementary schools are lots of fun. The teachers give me the lesson plan and tell me exactly what to say. I pass out lots of stickers with lots of smiles and say “good job” many, many times! This week I was given a lesson plan on foods. So we went through a poster of foods and I taught them the vocab. Usually the elementary school teachers speak very little English, so I’m pretty much dependent on charades to get my message across. The kids all claimed to like practically everything except eggplant! And they appeared to know what a persimmon is, while I pretended to!

When there is a period when I'm not teaching, I am usually brought to the Special Education room to play a game (not in English) with the kids. This week we played a game of scooping paper turtles into cups. We all counted how many turtles we got, and we got a slip of paper according to how well we did. One little girl proudly brought me her yellow slip of paper. I sounded out the word on it and asked the teacher what it meant. They headed for the dictionary and then showed me. It means "pitiable, regrettable"! Another slip of paper translated as "disappointing"! Luckily the kids didn't seem to know what these words might mean because I would never want to play a game again if my score was "pitiable"!

The most interesting thing at the elementary schools is lunch time! About seven students put on white chef coats and hats, and a face mask (like a surgeon’s mask) and head to the school kitchen. There the cook has pots of food prepared and labeled. The students take their classroom’s pot, bread, 36 trays, bowls, sets of chopsticks, etc and go back to the classroom. In the meantime, their classmates have transformed a little table into a serving counter and put on a tablecloth. Each student puts on a face mask and takes a tray. Other students are serving the food into bowls. Everyone gets a little carton of milk and sits down to wait for everyone to be served. Someone says the word “itadakimas”, I guess it’s similar to Bon Apetit (it literally means "I receive") and everyone digs in. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this yet, but the Japanese are really fast eaters. I’m always the last to be done eating by far! And the school lunch meals are quite big – a big dinner roll, soup with noodles, and a main dish. Plus milk and sometimes cheese. When they finish eating, all the students rinse out their milk cartons and fold them in a special way so they can be stacked for recycling, and then put their bowls, plates, chopsticks, etc in the appropriate containers. The teacher checks that they’ve eaten enough, and sometimes sends them back to finish their food! I felt very badly the first time, as the dinner roll had walnuts in it and the main dish was deep fried tiny sardines. Luckily, he didn’t send me back to finish my food!

But except for lunch, the elementary schools are lots of fun. The kids ask me to autograph their school supplies! And they make origami, and crocheted necklaces, and other little things for me! I really look forward to Thursdays because you can never have too many origami cranes!

Every day is a school day - for me!

I'm amazed at the things I'm learning here! Today, the lesson plan for my classes at the elementary school was faxed to me. It had drawings of some fruits and vegetables for me to teach the students on Thursday. One was of a persimmon (I had to ask another teacher for this answer!). I have heard of the word "persimmon" and somehow knew how to spell it. But I don't know what a persimmon is! So tonight when I got home, I looked it up on wikipedia (the source of all knowledge). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persimmon Apparently it's a fruit that's like a date and plum. Still don't know what it is.

But according to wikipedia - "The persimmon also figures prominently in American culinary tradition. It can be used in cookies, cakes, puddings, salads and as a topping for breakfast cereal. Persimmon pudding is a dessert using fresh persimmons. An annual persimmon festival, featuring a persimmon pudding contest, is held every September in Mitchell, Indiana."

Now I ask you - have any of you ever had a persimmon?? Much less been to this festival? Am I alone in my persimmon ignorance? I need to try one of these. In fact there is a tree full of fruit that I pass every day on the way to work and every day I wonder what kind of fruit it is. Maybe it's a persimmon!!

Enlightenment and Deer Feeding at Nara

Yesterday, Trisha and I took the train to Nara, Japan's first real capital. We first visited the Kofuku-ji temple which has a five story pagoda that is a symbol of the city [there seems to be a "Hello Kitty goes to ___" theme here in Japan. In every city they have souvenior crap with Hello Kitty and whatever the city's symbol is. So in Himeji, there is Hello Kitty and the castle keychains and sweat rags (really they're washcloths, but the Japanese use them to wipe the sweat off their faces so we call them sweat rags). In Nara, it was Hello Kitty and the pagoda/deer/Buddha trinkets. I should start a collection!]

("Hello Trisha goes to Nara")
But back to topic - we walked on towards the temple which houses the Great Buddha, and on the way were attacked by aggressive deer looking for food! These deer are another symbol of Nara and in pre-Buddhist times were considered messengers of the gods. They appear to have a status and attitude similiar to cows in India. They know they're sacred and they're not afraid to remind you of that! We bought some deer cakes to feed them and they went wild! One actually jumped up and put his foot on my chest when I held the biscuits over my head! Another bit Trisha's shirt! It was incredibly bold for deer! There are about 1200 deer in the city and they roam freely, on the sidewalks along busy streets and in the walkways to the tourist destinations (where they know they will encounter tourists with snacks!)

Finally, we fought our way through crowds of deer and the tourists feeding them to our real destination - the Great Buddha statue! The temple building which houses this statue is the largest wooden building in the world! This bronze statue is huge... 16 meters high - the handy converter on my cell phone tells me this is 52 feet high. Supposedly it was built as a charm against small pox. Around the back of the building, one of the pillars had a hole in it, exactly the size of the statue's nostril, maybe a foot wide and a foot and half tall. Those who can squeeze through this hole are ensured of enlightenment. Little kids wiggled through it with no trouble. Trisha went first and had considerably more difficulty. It took her a few times, but she finally made it through to a round of applause from the crowd watching! I also made it through (you can see the top of my head in the photo as I am about halfway through) and am therefore ensured of enlightenment! Maybe when I get back to the States, there can be a statue of me, and people can wiggle through my nostril for enlightenment!

After we were ensured of our enlightenment, we continued wandering through the great park. There were many more deer, and many more temples, and many more shrines.

And one shrine in particular with many, many stone lanterns which I couldn't stop taking photos of.

We stopped for lunch and hoped for the drizzle which had turned into a steady rain to stop. It sort of did, but we decided to visit Nara's museum as a respite. That was more incredible than we expected, and we were so glad the rain had made us head indoors. The museum had absolutely beautiful statues of Buddha, and Shinto gods, and some other creatures (apparently companions of some sort to Buddha). They were really amazingly well preserved and wonderful works of art.

My Apartment

Finally! I've been here almost a month now (hard to believe) and I finally am settled in enough to take photos of my apartment. The previous tenant had left a fair amount of stuff, so it took me some time to decide what I wanted to keep, and what to get rid of. It took me almost a month to convince myself that the apartment is better without the couch he left.

My apartment is long and narrow. As you enter through the front door, there is to the left the room containing the infamous toilet shower! I've taken a couple of photos of it - showing the console where you can select a butt massage or seat heater. And once flushed, the tank refills by sending the water through the faucet so you can wash your hands right then and there. The problem is that there is no place for soap (in fact, in many public bathrooms there is no soap), so I never use this faucet.

If you head to the right after entering, you go through the hallway/kitchen. There are a couple of photos showing that "room" from each end. The kitchen is little, the fridge is little, the stove is little, the cupboards are tiny, the freezer is tiny, and there is no oven. So I eat out fairly often!

Here is a photo of the vanity that is in a little room across from the kitchen. This room also has a washing machine. Attached to this room is the bathing room. There is a large tub, and a shower. The shower drains through a drain in the floor, not into the bathtub. As you can see from the hangers abover the bathtub, this room will also serve as my clothes-dryer once winter sets in. I currently hang my laundry on the balcony.








The main room of the apartment is the bedroom/dining/living area. It's quite narrow. I can reach from the bed to the table with no problem. I have a small closet, and drawers under the bed. The AC unit is in this room, so I often will close the door to just cool this room rather than the rest of the apartment.

So this is where I live. I don't spend much time in here though. It seems like I'll just get home and have to leave again in 15 minutes for the next social event. Today (holiday) is the first day I've been home for several hours at a stretch! But I'm off now to run some errands and shop!
Happy Autumnal Equinox!

A bit of beach time!

On Saturday, a bunch of us went to Ieshima, a small island about 45 minutes by ferry from Himeji.

Me, Katie and Taube on the ferry deck

The first island the ferry stopped at.

Our destination - an unhabitated island with a nature center and cabins for rent.

We went with several Japanese friends. For them, the main event was barbequeing. We Americans headed right for the beach! But we were very grateful for their barbeque skills after our dip! It certainly wasn't an American style BBQ. They brought lots of veggies along and noodles, as well as different meats, corn on the cob and potatoes in foil. The main dish was stir-fried noodles (I've already forgotten what they're called in Japanese) and they were delicious!

Homeward bound - RJ, Heather, Mitch and Merry

Today is a holiday, Autumnal Equinox, so I have the day off. After such a busy weekend, I plan to just relax today, maybe do a little shopping, and just maybe a bit of cleaning so I can finally take photos of my apartment to post on this blog!

Kyoto

Yesterday, I took a day trip to Kyoto. It's one of the major touristy cities in Japan and is only an hour and a half by train from Himeji. I went with Suvanya ("Sue"), a JET from South Africa who lives in our building. We didn't have any major plans, just wanted to see a few sites. We certainly accomplished that!

We first went to Fushimi Inari, a Shinto shrine with hundreds of red torii gates (the toriis generally indicate that it's a Shinto shrine, rather than a Buddhist temple). It was amazing - scenes from Memoirs of a Geisha were filmed there. There were several main buildings,

then thousands of red toriis going up paths into the mountainside.

All along the way are lots of statues of foxes and little praying places (don't really know how to describe them otherwise)

After visiting the shrine, we headed back towards central Kyoto and saw a Buddhist temple there. We weren't allowed to take photos inside, but it wasn't really as stunning as Fushimi Inari was. Then we stopped at a beautiful Japanese garden to wander around until our feet were too sore. Rain looked imminent, so we headed back to the amazing Kyoto station (really incredible architecture - very modern) for some window shopping and to look for the observation level (which Lonely Planet said was on the mysterious and apparently non-existent 15th floor). Just as we got to our train platform, it started pouring! There are still lots of sites to be seen in Kyoto, so I plan to make several more day trips there!