Edelpils, Edelpils

"Edelpils is a premium beer with noble taste brewed from 100% fine aroma hops & selected malt."



So says the can, anyway. It's not really great or anything, just ok, but with kind of a weird aftertaste. On the plus side, it made me think of that wonderful song. One time, I was at a school here and I guess Edelweiss was the song for the month, so at the morning meeting thing, they sang it. I had that meeting with the special ed class, so I sang it with them. It was weird because they sang it in Japanese, and then again in English, but just phonetically, without knowing what it meant. Everyone thought I was awesome at it. I'm going to miss that about this job when I stop doing it.

I realize that some of my readers are dealing with hot summers right now, and I sympathize, but I'd like to complain for a minute that it is constantly disgustingly humid here, and always over 30 degrees Celsius during the day, so you just sweat and sweat and none of it evaporates at all.

Also there are so many bugs here it is crazy. My house is conveniently protected by a veritable wall of spiders, so it's not so bad right here. I mean, there are at least 10 different spider webs, each with a spider ranging from smaller than a dime to larger than a quarter, just on the stairs up to my apartment. I have purposely done nothing to hinder these spiders, and actually have tried picking up some of the slower bugs and tossing them gently into the webs just to help them out because I hate the mosquitos and I want an army of spiders eating them for me.

From being outside for maybe an hour and a half last week at a festival, I got 11 mosquito bites on my left leg and a few on my right, to boot. I think these mosquitos are tiger mosquitos or something. They are terrible. As in, I was standing there fanning people off, as was my job, and then I would suddenly feel a sting that felt the size of a hypodermic needle. I'd look down and see only the bite, the mosquito having taken off. The bites are disgusting, not like a normal mosquito bite, which just looks like a red bump. These bites look like bruises, and at first I could actually see the hole that the mosquitos made because there was still blood where their proboscis had been. Like it was bleeding for a second, but then stopped.

So, the spiders and the frogs and even the couple of lizards who live behind an outdoor light on the wall can stay and eat as many of those bugs as they can. I will stay inside my house and drink my Edelpils.

Doing Stuff

Hello again, faithful readers.

This weekend was a holiday weekend, specifically umi no hi, or Marine Day. Marine Day is a secular holiday that only became a national holiday relatively recently, so there aren't any traditions associated with it or anything, but people like to go to the beach, which I suppose makes sense. So, that's what I did. Actually, first I just drove around looking for a good beach and ended up driving on the tiniest roads I've ever been on, which also weren't paved and many of which ran right alongside cliffs. So, while I was driving, I had to stop to move a turtle out of the road, as there was nowhere to drive around it. I decided just to take the turtle with me, and put it in the back of the car. Then later I went swimming in the ocean. Some guy I've never met asked me where I was from and all, so that was nice.

Earlier in the weekend, there was a festival here, so I went to that. It was mostly just watching a group do kagura, a traditional dance-music-story thing with costumes. I guess it's kind of a big thing in this region. Anyway, then there were a few local tv celebrities who played music and talked in goofy voices. The one guy even shouted out some things in English, "I like MUSIC!"

Yesterday I was at a kindergarten because some kindergarteners go there even though it is summer vacation. Kindergarten hardly qualifies as school from what I can tell, anyway, so it's not like they really need a vacation. We played in one of those little kid pools, and I brought them the turtle to keep as a pet because they have all sorts of animals like rabbits and whatnot. Plus, I didn't actually want to keep a turtle. When I left, they gave me a whole box full of vegetables, partly from the garden there (kinderGARTEN!) and partly from one of the kids' grandma. Anyway, I'm quite pleased with that.

Link Madness

So, I was trying to add a new link to the links section and I accidentally deleted them, so I had to add them all again. I'm missing one or two, but they aren't ones that get updated, so probably not a real loss.

More importantly, the new link goes to the blog of a friend who is going through physical therapy and what not. It is far more interesting than mine and definitely worth a read. Check it out now, stop reading this and check it out!

Here it is!

Fun Times

I had some fun last weekend. Went to a party for the folks leaving, which was alright. More importantly, the next day I was in Izumo and saw the new Indiana Jones movie at an actual movie theater in an actual mall. I was surprised because I had heard that it was terrible, but it turned out to be at least as good as Temple of Doom. I mean, the ending was kind of dumb, and there was occasionally some cg that had me almost shaking my fist at George Lucas (this was obviously his main contribution), but on the whole, it was a fun movie that kept with the tone of the original trilogy.

Also at this mall, I bought a new swimsuit. I saw some teachers with swimsuits that have shirts with them, and I wanted one, as I've been sunburnt too many times. Also they just kind of look cool. So, anyway, I got a new black one (or rather two new black ones, as the pieces are separate), and I look pretty awesome in it. Or so say the teachers, who all said I look 格好いい, kakkouii.

A lot of the schools have pools here, so the kids have swimming as part of their PE and I get to swim with them. So, that's neat. Summer vacation starts for the kids this weekend, which is a long weekend. Monday is umi-no-hi, or Marine Day, which is a ridiculous made up holiday. I'm not sure what exactly I'm going to do yet. Probably just die in the heat and humidity.

Delicious

Last Monday I was at a kindergarten. We were going to go swimming, but it rained most of the day, so we couldn't. Instead, we made sasamaki, 笹巻き, at least I think those would be the kanji. My computer isn't giving me the right options, but that first one means bamboo grass, and that second one means wrap. That's pretty much what it is.

To make sasamaki, what you do is mix rice flower (I think that's what it was) and water, and basically just knead it until it has a soft consistency. You make this into balls, which are called dango. Then you skewer the dango with a stem from the bamboo grass. Then you wrap it all in leaves (there is a somewhat complex method to this) and tie it up. Once it is wrapped up [somwhat] watertight, you can boil it all. It gets really soft and gooey. To eat it, you take the leaves off and eat it like carnival food, on a stick. It is really good with soy sauce and a little sugar. Almost tastes like bananas for some reason.



Sasamaki! Not yet boiled.



Boiled and unwrapped, with some soy sauce on it. The breakfast of champions.

More Reviews of Stuff

I know that you guys love to read about stuff that I eat, drink, watch, and listen to, so here goes. I've had a couple of different drinks over the last few weeks:



I found this beer, which is from Kirin and called something like Brau Master, in a little convenience store that I stopped at on the way home from out of town because I was hungry and wanted something I could eat in the car (not the beer). Anyway, it actually has German on it, which is both the first time I've ever seen German anything in Japan and a sure mark of quality in a beer, or so I am led to believe. It was pretty good.



This is Kirin something or other. It's a premium beer that I only found in a supermarket about 40 minutes from here. It was a little pricer than other Kirin, but totally worth it for one bottle. Delicious.



Here's a new version of a beer I'd already had. The old version was alright, and this version was pretty much the same, as I recall. I don't actually know what is different. I took all these pictures over the course of a couple weeks, and I don't feel like going through the bottles and cans (I can only recycle these things once a month) to read the names. Also, I don't remember how they really tasted, just kind of vaguely if they were good or not.



That bottle of orange crap, if you can't read it, says Campari. The front of the bottle leads me to believe it is some sort of Italian stuff because it says Milan and Italy on it. The back label, which is in Japanese, claims that it was made in France, though, and imported via Osaka. Nowhere does it say what it is supposed to taste like. There are two suggestions on the back for cocktails, however. One is Campari and soda, one is Campari and orange juice. Of course, both recipes just say 30 ml of Campari and a suitable amount, 適量, of the other ingredient. Incredibly helpful. After experimentation, I found that the suitable amount is "as much as possible" in order to kill the atrocious taste of Campari. It basically tastes like nothing at first, but leaves a distinct bitter, unpleasant aftertaste.

Since soda water has no flavor, that made for a particularly bad cocktail. I tried Coke Zero (to watch my girlish figure), which did an ok job of masking the aftertaste, but still left me feeling like I had been drinking New Coke with Rust. That metal bottle/can with the little blue dude on it should be familiar to people who frequent Japanese vending machines and/or McDonald's. It's the orange version of Qoo (pronounced ku-), which is some sort of partial juice concoction that would no doubt fail in markets not comprised of people who like yogurt and chunks of aloe in their drinks. I basically didn't want to buy 1.5 liters of orange juice, so I settled for this, instead. It actually worked the best, so if I ever mistakenly buy Campari again, I will be sure to wash it down with 20% actual fruit juice goodness.

I was at a kindergarten today, and we made some Japanese food, but when I have pictures of that, I'll post more about it.

Fun Stuff

Fun stuff that I did this week:

On Thursday, we planted Shiitake mushrooms. How do you plant mushrooms, you may ask. Well, you drill holes into logs and then hammer in these weird little peg looking things. All the kids at the school I was at did it (all sixteen of them), in addition to most of the teachers and me. I have pictures, but they're not conveniently on my computer yet, so I won't post them, at least not right now.

On Friday, the school I was at went with a bunch of the other schools to watch a play. It was a very Japanese thing, with the performers carrying big origami animals, but still conveying the motions and emotions of the animals with their movement and facial expressions. They also had very novel ways of making animal sounds. The story was really a lot of short stories about various animals put together, telling the story of a mountain through the four seasons. Also, the obsession with four seasons is a very Japanese thing. It was excellent.

That's all I've got right now.