大雪

HOLY SHOOT, TWO POSTS IN ONE DAY.

Let me recap the excitement of the past few days.

On Tuesday I headed over to Ueno Tenmangu to interview Handa-san, who is the head priest there.  We talked for almost two hours and he was very helpful and gave me a bunch of good information.  The situation at Ueno Tenmangu is very  different than at the other shrines I've been looking at, because it has no ujiko, no real community built around the shrine, and gains most of its revenue by performing ceremonies and selling omamori (as opposed to donations from the local community).  Anyway, lots of things to think about.  I'm hoping to get into contact with some priests from of the other shrines in the area to see if they're seeing the same sort of trade-off between commercialization and community.

I've been meeting some of the other people in the dorm, thanks to Louki.  I have also been introduced to Dutch cuisine?  Apparently chocolate sprinkles on buttered bread is an incredibly common food in the Netherlands.  Louki was horrified that I'd never had it before.  Of course, she'd never had pocky before*, so there's been a lot of introduction to foreign cuisine all around.
Also, I am no longer the absolute worst at Mario Kart, because Louki, somehow, is even worse than I am.  We were playing with two of the other girls from the dorm, and they were consistently getting in the top 3, whereas we were battling for eleventh.  WE ARE THE GREATEST AT VIDEO GAMES.

We got 15 centimeters of snowfall in Nagoya today, which basically shut the entire city down.  There were 800 traffic accidents and something like 45 injuries (plus an additional 24 injuries just from people who injured themselves by WALKING**).  I had to go to the post office to mail something, and it was really eerie, because NOBODY was out.  There were no cars on the streets, very few people were on the sidewalks...it was like the snow was actually a zombie apocalypse or something.  SO WEIRD.

Here, have some pictures of snow!

This was the view out my window shortly after I woke up...

Here's the street leading from my dorm to Nanzan.

The main road by the subway station...  There was a guy walking in the street because it had less snow than the sidewalk and there weren't any cars...

OH MY GOSH A CAR ON THE ROAD

This guy was shoveling snow...in a suit.  Yeah.  He was really not dressed appropriately. He didn't even have boots.  He looked very miserable about the whole situation.

I get to climb this hill EVERY DAY.

It was twice as much fun in the snow.

Whoo.

When I got back to the dorm, Louki and her friend Kim were outside making a snowman, so I joined them.

It was the best snowman.
Also, the dorm caretaker helped us with the eyes.  (We couldn't get the marbles to stick, so he gouged holes in the head for us with his keys.)

Also, Louki kept calling it a "snow doll" because apparently that's what they're called in Dutch.  In Japanese they're "snow daruma."

The rest of the pictures are from about four in the afternoon, when I got sick of reading about popular education and decided to wander around the Nanzan campus in the snow for a while.  The snow had already started melting unfortunately, but there was still a fair amount.

There were.

So many.

Snowmen.

Snowman #2!

#3!

...I'm not actually sure what this is.

Another one!

And another!

And yet another!

So much snow!

Some of the snowmen had just sort of turned into snow lumps...

ICICLES.

So tomorrow is Setsubun, which means that there will be SO MANY BEANS FLYING.  I'm planning on attending three festivals (one at Ueno Tenmangu, one at Shiroyama Hachimangu, and one at Gosha Shrine).  Hopefully it'll be fun!

On a final note, you might notice that there's now a "Reading list" tab on the upper right-hand side of the blog.  I'm putting a list of all the books I read there, maybe with short descriptions if I feel like putting short descriptions up.  YAAAAY.

*I KNOW, RIGHT????

**High heels + snow = bad idea.

In which I am still pretty hopeless at video games

(Click on the image to see the bigger version.)

It actually is my little brother's birthday, and that is the actual size of my oven in Japan.
SO TINY.

Moral of the story: Sometimes I draw dorky comics.

In other news, I now have a phone and an ARC, so I am pretty much set!  Just need to order business cards...

Also, I've been spending time in the dorm community room, slowly meeting people and losing a lot at Japanese video games.  There's this one game for Wii (I don't know what it's called), where you are given a series of random tasks that each take 3-5 seconds to complete.  These tasks are things like "flap your arms to fly" or "put the old lady's dentures in" or "jump over the rope" or "pick up the garbage," but sometimes you can't really figure out what the heck you're supposed to do, and your time runs out and you lose.  For example, when I was playing with a couple of the Japanese students yesterday, my first task was...something to do with cans.  The other players were yelling, "THE CANS, THE CANS!" and I yelled back, "DO WHAT WITH THEM?" and we couldn't figure it out and I died.  (Although, the winner of that round wound up being stumped on her third task, where there was a moving hole and she couldn't tell whether she was supposed to avoid it or jump into it.)
...and then we played Mario Kart and I died even more spectacularly.  I think the other players felt really sorry for me, because when I finally finished a round not in last place (I was in second to last), they all congratulated me.  Oh dear.

In other news, I have decided to try to find a cooking class, because I don't think my "oh, hey, my host mom put this in something kind of similar to what I'm making, so it must be edible" strategy for cooking will continue to work much longer.  Plus, I want to learn more Japanese cooking techniques.  I figured I would see if Irinaka Cultural Center had any cooking classes...but they don't have a website, and when I went to visit today, nobody was there.  HMM.

Final note, Japanese potato salad = mayonnaise + boiled potatoes + avocado.  And that's it.  WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT.