It’s Log, It’s Log, It’s Big, It’s Heavy, It’s Wood!

 Japan, Photos, Travel  Comments Off on It’s Log, It’s Log, It’s Big, It’s Heavy, It’s Wood!
Oct 232007
 

Something I saw yesterday that I forgot to mention– I was walking by the local high school, and it sits on top of a pretty steep hill. Well, I saw the baseball team out there, in their uniforms, acting lively and cheering, while someone was blowing a whistle. Intrigued, I looked as I passed by, and I swear I saw something right out of a sports manga, or a Jackie Chan movie– the players were doing a drill where they had to run up the hill, each one carrying a log.

Here’s where I saw them running:

Okazaki on the way to class-- local High School

Yes, log. All kids love log. Log will even make you a great baseball player!

Everyone is trying to find an edge. Here, the edge is log!

Come to think of it, logs are probably cheaper than a room full of weights. And instead of managing problem athletes, you can just hit them with Log until the problems go away.

After the Kvetching, that Nostalgic Feeling Grows

Today was pretty slow, otherwise. I went to the conbini for lunch, then to ZigZag for dinner. Okazaki is really starting to grow on me. I know I complained about it a lot at first, but now that I’m starting to get used to things here, I’m feeling a little nostalgic about the place before I even leave.

A few things I have noted, though:

Carabiners ROCK. They’re great because you can use them to hook bags to other bags, so they don’t fall off or get lost. For the next trip I take, I’m getting some bigger ones, like the ones real rock climbers use.

Smoking is being stomped on very vigorously in Japan now (well, except for the vending machines), and tonight while doing laundry, I noticed a woman sitting in her car smoking and reading a magazine. I bet she wanted a cigarette while waiting for her laundry. Japan is getting more and more like America in that respect.

Daily Brush With Death

Sidewalks are kind of hit-and-miss here. Every day I walk to school, I feel like I’m taking my life into my own hands. On one side of the road, there’s this giant white barricade wall that cannot be breached which guards the sidewalk. It’s too high to climb, but it offers protection from the drivers. On the other side of the road… well, there’s nothing. Just a slim shoulder of road. The problem is that in order to get to the barrier on the other side, you have to walk a few blocks on the dangerous side.

Here, experience my peril first-hand!

See that safe-looking white barricade? Yeah, you can’t get to the sidewalk behind it from here. (I’m actually looking backwards, towards the dorm.)

Okazaki on the way to class

Enjoy the sidewalk-free lifestyle. You can cross over to the barricaded side here at this crosswalk:

Okazaki on the way to class

We’re finally on the safe side of the barricade, just as it’s about to run out.

Okazaki on the way to class

See that tunnel up ahead? It’s designed so you can cross under the street. Actually not bad:

Okazaki on the way to class

There’s even a warning against suspicious people!

Okazaki on the way to class

So you come out the other side of the tunnel and– wait, where’s the sidewalk???

Okazaki on the way to class

Okay, back over to the other side, where there’s a sidewalk-ish thing:

Okazaki on the way to class

Then we turn the corner and, oh, it’s gone again. Or is it? Just don’t fall through the loose gutter covers!

Okazaki on the way to class

There just aren’t a whole lot of places for pedestrians on the side streets here.

Tomorrow I’m going to try to go to Okazaki Castle, and a few other places before class.

If I don’t get squashed.

The Trash Heap Has Spoken!

 Food, Japan, Photos, Travel  Comments Off on The Trash Heap Has Spoken!
Oct 232007
 

Yesterday was interesting.

I got up at 8 a.m. I was freezing, and my throat was killing me. The window had been leaking cold air into my room, and it was right above where my head is on the bed. (Or was– I moved the other way on the bed so my head and feet are reversed.)

I felt lousy for most of the morning. The funny thing is, most of the people I saw on campus were coughing and hacking too. So apparently I wasn’t the only one who got caught in the draft. And no, the window was closed. It just wasn’t well-insulated.

Class got moved to from 12:40 to 1:40, only I didn’t remember being told that. They probably told me in Japanese, which explains why I screwed up. The rest of my classes this week will go from 1:40-4:40, so now I have mornings totally free. I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with that now.

Denny’s

After class, I finally went to the local Denny’s. First off, I saw no chopsticks. All I saw was silverware. Sorry, guys. No souvenirs for you.

Okazaki on the way to class

Let me just say that every meal I’ve had in Japan up until now has been very good. I was surprised to discover that Denny’s in Japan is somehow worse than Denny’s in the U.S. My server was very nice, but the food she brought me was poison.

Drinks. What would I like to drink? How about ginger ale? No, they don’t have that. So she gave me a colorful drink menu to choose from. Hmm… Okay, how about pink lemonade? It can’t be all that bad, right? She brings me something bright pink. It turns out it’s pink lemonade soda so sweet it would put a 5-year old into insulin shock.

I’ll have water then.

Then the puzzle of settling on actual food to eat. My confidence unshaken, I perused the menu. Hmm… American Club Sandwich. I can’t read this other stuff, but the picture looks good.

Well, it looks like a sandwich…

I’ll get a side of fries with that, too. What the heck.

The fries came as an appetizer. They were taramasala mayo fries, I think. All I know is that they came with a pink sauce with little red dots in it. It wasn’t bad. It tasted like mayo mixed with something. So far, not bad.

Then came the sandwich.

I’m getting nauseous just thinking about it. It was a double-decker club sandwich all right, but the first deck consisted of bacon, 2 fried eggs, and ketchup.

Where I come from, that’s already a meal.

We call it breakfast.

The second deck was some sort of chicken in a sweet sauce or gravy, lettuce, and mayo.

And that’s something we call lunch, or maybe dinner.

You might think it doesn’t sound too bad.

And you would be wrong.

They are all foods I like.  And I’m actually amazed that I got it down without bringing it back up. Describing it later to someone, I could actually feel the normal meal I had later try to make an escape from my stomach.

So yeah, Denny’s. Service was great. Food… ugh. Throws self on sword to relieve stomach pain.

I don’t know of any Americans who would think, “Hmm, I think I’ll have a club sandwich. Esther, let’s fry some eggs and bacon, and hey, get some of that chicken and gravy out!”

Just as much as Americans don’t understand Japan, Japanese don’t get us. “American” gets stuck on the most random stuff here: it’s put on stuff that no American (well, no American in his right mind, anyway) would ever eat.

I think it’s just an excuse to for one group of Japanese to try to fool the rest of the country into trying to eat something they wouldn’t ordinarily eat.

“Hey, I know you wouldn’t normally eat a bacon and egg and chicken and gravy sandwich, but you know, those Americans do, and they’re so wild! Now you eat it too, so you can be wild!”

“Mmkay.”

“Now have this American ice cream. We filled a big paint bucket with ice cream…”

Not much else happened yesterday. I spent the evening recovering from that meal mistake, then got a snack at the conbini. Thank you, conbini. You saved me again.

All Hail MiniStop!

My heeeero!

Oh I Looove Trash

Trash sorting is the most disgusting thing ever. I’ll have a hard time taking the shoe-switching thing seriously now that I’ve seen what the landlady does to improperly sorted trash.

If you’ve never been to Japan, let me explain. It’s a small country, with little room for things like landfills, so you’re not allowed to throw anything away.

You have to pack out all of your trash with you, because you will never see a public trash can. If there was such a mythical beast, it would be crammed full of trash that people didn’t know what to do with, or just got tired of carrying around with them all the time.

Okay, that’s only half true.

Trash is supposed to be sorted into burnable trash, paper, plastic/non-burnable trash, PET (plastic bottles), cans, and glass. I’ve been sorting as best as I can, and taking it down to the kitchen, which also serves as Sorting Central.

But apparently, people fail sorting on a daily basis, and the landlady has decided that if you don’t put trash in the right place, she’ll put it ON THE PREP TABLE BY THE TRASH. So when you come into the kitchen, you can see a lovely (and by lovely, I mean repulsive and disgusting) pile of Other People’s Rejected Trash. Things like Kleenex with hairballs, old food containers, old dirty chopsticks, cigarette butts… I even saw a pair of torn dirty underwear.

Let me repeat that last item again, just in case you missed it. Someone threw away their underwear because it was in such terrible shape, and instead of winding up in the trash, it wound up on the prep table in the kitchen by the trash can.

This is the same prep table people make their food on.

So yeah. Japan? Never taking the shoe thing with a straight face again.

Oh, and I’m staying the hell away from the kitchen.

Now I’m hoarding all of my trash until the last day, where I’ll just ninja-sort it and flee, unless I can find a trashcan, which will probably be next to the unicorn and the leprechaun.

By the way, hotels are great for the simple reason that they have trashcans in the rooms, AND YOU DON’T HAVE TO SORT IT.

Oh, you can find recycling bins for the various things you buy from vending machines, but that’s 99% cans and bottles, which does me no good at all.

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