Forgotten Potatoes

Who Loves Nature?

We do! We do! Today we went to our first official meeting of the Rumoi Forest Support Club in the mountain park nearby. We took down fences around fruit shrubs and reset the logs for a mushroom-growing area. Luckily there were many shitake already growing on the logs so we picked a bunch, along with some other mountain vegetables (things you wouldn't think you could eat, like fern fiddleheads). After washing these off at home we made tempura - delicious! Oh, and the best part, in the leftover batter, we dunked some snickers bars and deep fried those too. It sounds disgusting, and it was, but it tasted really really good.

In the spirit of spring, after I digested the foods above, I made a sakura (cherry blossom) brooch. The cherry blossom season is just starting (late) here in Hokkaido. It looks a lot like the one I made for my mom, but for this I added some yellow beads for the stamens.

Stuff around here is finally looking less brown and more green. . .come on spring, I'm running out of patience!

Ask Don.

I posted something about this on facebook, but not everyone has it, so please, the next time you talk to Don, ask him what he thought about eating COD SPERM SOUP.

It's a New Year

We just wrapped up the holidays here and are settling back in to our normal everyday lives. After sorting through and labeling the hundreds of pictures we took since late December, I've made these two photo albums. The first is our Christmas experience in Rumoi, which includes making mochi (basically pounding steamed rice into goo), cookie decorating with my chat club and the English club in Rumoi HS, and a gift exchange with Jim and Dave. It was really fun, but both of us felt a little homesick, having to open presents on skype with our families.

The next slideshow is of our Tokyo and Kyoto adventure. This really made us feel like we were in Japan. So many beautiful, crazy, weird, and hilarious things! This is a long slideshow, and the captions explain a little, but here were our highlights:

• lots of women in kimono
• beautiful temples and shrines, all of which have been burned down at least once in their lifetime
• eery bamboo forests
• scary statues of gods that we're sure moved when we looked away
• the biggest buddha I will probably ever see in the biggest wooden building (50 meters high) I will probably ever stand in
• sushi on a conveyor belt
• quiet cobblestone streets with little bridges to doorways of tea houses where geisha might be entertaining
• ridiculously-detailed roofs
• a whose whole second and third story are covered in gold plating
• hilarious signs everywhere
• several people pushing dogs in strollers
• transvestite being photographed by a homeless man with a disposable camera
• a rare sighting of Mount Fuji

Grocery Store!

I snapped some shots at the grocery store tonight. My favorite is the octopus tentacle. If you're wondering what product is on the bottom, maybe you should guess. . .?

Happy Birthday to Don!

The candles were so hot they melted the frosting!

Happy Birthday to Don!

A special homemade cake for my husband on his special day. 33 candles
make a pretty big fire ball!

I want to be a farmer. Stop laughing please.

Today we spent the day in Mashike, the town just south of Rumoi. We met up with Jim and Dave, and some people from the chat club, then headed to a nearby orchard. The owner showed us around and had us sample 5 different delicious types of prunes (plums?), several varieties of grapes right off of the vine, and of course, some apples. The grapes especially, put american grocery store varieties to shame. We also talked plant propagation and genetics (so you know I was happy). With gurgly stomachs, Don and I agreed that to have something like this ourselves would be amazing. Then we headed to a winery down the road that made apple wine, or hard cider. The owner of this operation explained the process to us. Also tempting and interesting. Even though both of these ventures clearly require huge amounts of hard work, I'm still fantasizing about my own farm/orchard. I also just finished Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is inspiring me (as if I needed it) to grow as much of our own produce as possible when Don and I finally settle into a house, in America, don't worry moms. The questions that remain are

1. How much of my time can we afford to devote to this agriculture adventure?

2. Will growing our own food save us enough money to be worth that time? I feel like it's worth it for our health alone, but mama's gotta pay bills. Thanks a lot NYU.

3. Are chickens out of the question? Sheep for wool? What about a horse? Ok, maybe we're not there yet.

It's Been a Busy Week!

After traveling all last week, we have finally settled back at home and gone through all the pictures and videos. Here's a run-down of the events.

Last weekend we played park-golf with an international-exchange group. Park golf is somewhere between regular golf and minigolf. There were three Americans (Don, me, and Jim), one Canadian (Dave), one Nepalese man (Raju), three Chinese girls who work at a factory in town, and a bunch of Japanese people. We had a feast afterward and played a game that involved ripping a newspaper. A picture of me golfing ended up in the town newspaper. That night we hung out with 2 coworkers of Don's and went to dinner, then to see some live music. There was an opening funk band whose name sounded like "Brown Panties," but I'm hoping we heard wrong. The main act was Madame Guitar. She was really fun to watch. For both, though, it was better when they were singing in Japanese because when they sang in English their accents were so thick that the funny-sounding lyrics were distracting from the music. It was still a really fun night, and it's always good to hear live music.

Monday night we headed up to Horonobe, about 3 hours north, through hilly farmland. It was a beautiful drive along the coast and through the countryside. Horonobe is a very cute town. It has a nature museum, a reindeer farm, a calligraphy museum, and a nuclear disposal research facility! They're drilling 500 meters into the Earth to see if they can safely dispose of nuclear waste there. Don't worry, we're not growing extra limbs yet. I met a woman here at the park and she took me around town for a little tour and brought me into the elementary school to see an art exhibit. She even came back to the junior high, where I was waiting for Don, to give me a present. I stayed for lunch at the junior high and ate with Don and students in one of the homerooms.

That afternoon we headed south for Teshio. This was a much smaller town with less to do. Luckily the teachers invited me to come for the whole day with Don, and I got to see him teach and arm wrestle. The students were very shy and there was near-constant giggling as we walked through the hallway.

Afterwards we headed further south for Enbetsu, where we stayed at a ryokan, a traditional Japanese guesthouse. We slept in a small tatami room. There was one squat toilet on our floor. The showers and giant bath were on the ground floor. Now, the way the ryokan works is this: you arrive a the hotel and you shower and clean yourself, then you take a dip in the huge scalding-hot bath tub, then throw on your yukata robe and head to a homemade dinner in the giant dining room. Same sexes commonly bathe together, and the water in the bath is only drained at the end of the night. This may sound gross, but you are supposed to clean yourself before going in, and that water was so freaking hot I'd congratulate any microbe that could stay alive in it. Dinner here was amazing - crab, sushi, fish, porkchop, soup, salad, pickles. . . By the way, we are eating meat like it's our job here. #1 it is delicious, #2 it's everywhere, #3 it's hard to explain the vegetarian-but-fish-is-okay thing, #4 it's DELICIOUS! Back to Enbetsu, the high school here is an agricultural highschool so the kids are under less pressure and generally more fun and outgoing. Don played soccer with some boys and did a great job as goalkeeper. He also taught the staff what TGIF meant. The school here was gigantic and new and beautiful.

We headed home that night and collapsed after the long week, that wasn't over yet.

The next day we had a cooking club in the morning with Alaina, a woman from Washington that married a man here and now has 3 kids. She does a lot with the community, including this cooking thing where she connects farmers with people in the town and introduces new foods and recipes. We made tacos from all-fresh ingredients except for the Kraft shredded cheese. They took pictures of my taco and said it would be in the next newsletter. I knew I would be famous in this town! That night we went to a BBQ with the man selling us a car and a younger kid we met at a sushi restaurant. This was a real meat-fest, beer-fest, sake-fest. It was awesome. We had some really great conversations with the people there and then I convinced them all to come to karaoke afterwards. Don must have really had a lot to drink because he sang more than me! And he did a great job! I was very proud. They sent us home with a bag full of vegetables and two watermelons.

Sunday, Don hung out with Dave at a open-air market in town while I hung out with two women from the chat club, Kayoko and Ikuko. We made tempura, ate it, drank coffee and talked. I can't wait to make it again. Our little informal cooking club will meet again in October and I will show them how to make hamburgers.

This week should be a little more relaxing. We don't have to travel anywhere! We'll be far from bored though, with volleyball games, dinner invitiations, dance recitals . . .

I recommend clicking on these and going to website b/c there are quite a few videos and a panoramic picture at the end.

$5 Lunch

So today I ran out into the rain to pick up a lunch to bring back to my hotel room. It was 495 yen (about $5) and here's what I found in the box:
1 salmon filet on a bed of rice
1 small portion of fried noodles
1 shrimp tempura
1 octopus and onion tempura
1 side of steamed and seasoned veggies/tofu, and something that looked like jello made from seawater (tasty)
1 small portion of sweet beans

Only $5 spent and I'm stuffed. If I wasn't so hungry and didn't scarf it down I would have taken a picture. By the way, I purchased this little box-of-deliciousness at a 7/11. Forget slurpees, give me seafood!

The better half is sleeping.

This is Don this time. i don't think i can do as good of a job as Chrissy (sorry only two pictures) but here it is. Tokyo wasn't so fun a few weeks ago. All I saw was the inside of the hotel. Nice hotel though. I think you already know about the toilet.

Rumoi: we are now in our home in Rumoi and I have been going to the office everyday for the past two weeks. I sit at my desk in the corner of a big office filled with 32 people who don't speak English. It helps that I have absolutely no work to do right now. The students are on summer break so I am not sure what anybody else is actually doing either. I sit at my desk and make flash cards and read a million different Japanese language books for hours on end. NO INTERNET ACCESS. NO EMAIL. Lunch gets my blood going though. We order our food by going to a vending machine and getting a ticket which we hand to the lunch ladies. Since I can't read Japanese I never know what I am getting. Most days I get lucky and the food is really good (except for the bowl of cold noodles soaking in what looked like human spit [not joking]).


This week they threw us a curve and invited us to an "enkai"- or work party. They took Chissy and I out to a what we think is their version of TGI Fridays. It is thier big chain restaurant that is in every town and has a large American style selection on the menu. We had a great time. The men were all trying to drink really fast and commented a lot that gai-jin "are strong for alcohol." I think they wanted to test their metal. They sat us with the bosses and they pounded their first three or four beers before we even had food served. We think they chose the place in honor of us because it had American style food but we ruined their plans and ordered sushi anyway. Next came out a huge bottle of sake for the big boss' birthday (who introduces himself as "boss"). For the first time since we have been here we were really able to communicate because they sat us with a former English teacher who translated for us. It wound up being a lot of fun.

After dinner most of us (including all of the bosses) went to a karaoke place. We sang "We Are The World" as a group!! They sang a lot of Japanese folk songs that put me to shame (Chrissy always holds her own though) and they had bottles of whiskey on the table and a a matron who sat and drank with us that kept filling our glasses. We were fine before we got there but with her filling our glasses everytime we looked away the bike ride home was was dangerous. We made it home OK and our first night out in Rumoi was a success! Next morning, show up to work, me and my 32 new friends go back to ignoring each other for 8 hours like nothing happened. Weird.