Mixmaster

Sitting on a shelf in my kitchen is a bottle of shouchuu 焼酎, a kind of alcoholic beverage that has its roots in Korea, but Japanese people drink it, too. I think mostly old men drink it, but I'm not totally sure. It generally has a ABV of around 25% and there are a few kinds, mugi 麦(wheat) and imo 芋([sweet] potato), being the chief kinds. I've also had kuri 栗(chestnut) and seen but never tried goma 胡麻(sesame seed) varieties of shouchuu. It is colorless like vodka, and it doesn't have much flavor besides alcohol, but can have a very powerful smell. As a result, it is almost always mixed with something else.

A traditional drink is shouchuu oyuwari 焼酎お湯割り, which just means mixing it with hot water. That's great for making it smell and taste less strong and also great for the cold winter months spent under a kotatsu. But, as you can imagine, it isn't that great because hot water isn't exactly flavorful. So, I just invented (I have never heard of anyone doing this) a new drink, replacing the hot water with tea, in this case bancha 番茶. I think it is fantastic.

On an unrelated note, I think the light in this room is broken. It went out a couple days ago. After opening it up, I found that it has five fluorescent tubes in it, which I have tried both switching around and replacing with new ones, but it still won't turn on. It seems odd that they would all burn out at the same time, as well. So, I am in a dark room using only my computer screen for light. 残念！

I went snowboarding yesterday for the second time. I am slowly getting it, but I have to say that skiing is much easier and more fun, but I'm not willing to give up on snowboarding until I can do it somewhat properly. It is very frustrating because the means of changing direction seems very inconsistent. Even if I get the front end of the board pointing right, and regardless of how I dig the board into the snow, sometimes it simply refuses to stop moving left. I have no explanation for that. But it is fairly fun, except for the one time when I fell over backwards pretty hard and I think all the force got transferred up my spine to my head because I got a terrible headache right then and it didn't go away for hours. But, winter is almost over, so I probably won't get another chance to try snowboarding again for a while. For the record, skiing is very easy as I recall (I tried it for the first time last year and got it in a couple hours) but I haven't gotten a chance to do that again.