Adventures in licorice

In case I haven't already pounded on your door in the middle of the night (sorry, Louki) and you haven't been notified by Tech House's vast and somewhat dizzying information network* and you haven't, I dunno, talked to my parents, I GOT INTO HARVARD.  It's pretty exciting!  So I'm going to be touring there during my crazy East Coast tour thing in two weeks.

Aside from that, I haven't really been up to anything terribly exciting.  On Tuesday I had lunch with Itou-san, which was really nice.  She's so cool, and, yes, I've said this a million times, but it's STILL TRUE.  Also on Tuesday, Louki and I cleaned our entire common space.  Yeah.  The entire thing.  I think it was the first time it had been cleaned in about a million years, from the amount of grime that had collected.  (Literally.  Hi-chan didn't know where some of the stuff we were throwing out had come from, and she's been living in this room for more than a year!)  We also wound up with about seven bags of trash.  Louki did most of the work, to be honest, because she is crazy intense, but I did most of the kitchen, which I think we can all agree was horrifying, because there was LIQUID SLUDGE IN THE STOVE BURNER.  I don't even have words.  There was a point, while I was scraping handfuls of oily sludge off of various objects, that I began to wonder whether it would be physically possible for our kitchen to be any more disgusting.  But it's cleaner now, so yay!
Also, Itou-san showed up at some point in the middle and gave us warabi mochi,** because she is so awesome and also she's taken a shining to the girls in my dorm.

Today I had penmanship class, and listened to a very long discussion about whether or not Gosha Shrine is actually being haunted by ghosts/angels.  It was pretty exciting.  (Also, the three-year-old son of one of the women, who normally just sits quietly and hangs on his mom's arm, became incredibly talkative when ghosts were mentioned, and informed us all gleefully that if you go into dark places ghosts will get you.)  I was also told that the reason I like research is because my parents' smartness is embedded in the DNA of my soul.  The more you know???***

In other news, Louki has discovered the joy of feeding Americans Dutch licorice.  If you have never had Dutch licorice, let me tell you, you are probably better off that way.  I am unsure why anyone believes it to be edible, let alone a sweet.  Louki takes great glee in coming to my door with a giant bag of licorice and watching all the color drain out of my face.  I have been very good, though, and tried everything she's given me, and I've only had to spit it out because I thought I was going to die once.  Salt + licorice = DEATH.
(However, I got revenge on Louki by making her eat death mangoes, which are actually dried mangoes dipped in chili powder.  She turned bright red and keeled over.  REVENGE.)

On a final note, it's currently White Day, also known as Valentine's Day Part Two, in which dudes who got chocolate from girls have to give white chocolate back to them.  It was baaaaaaaaaaaaasically a holiday invented by chocolate companies to sell more white chocolate, and it worked, except that some people thought it would be funnier to give panties in return 'cause those are also white.  Way to go, you guys.  I'm hoping that All the Chocolate goes on sale tomorrow, because that would be awesome.

*I have gotten the strangest set of emails from Tech Housers in the past 48 hours.  Some of them were normal congratulations and some of them were Tech House-style congratulations and some of them were expressing glee at the potential opportunity to insult me for living in Massachusetts.  You know who you are.

**If you've never had warabi mochi before, it's somewhat difficult to describe.  It's kind of like jelly crossed with mochi, covered in ground soybeans.  SO DELICIOUS.

***Also in the last 48 hours, I was told that I owed it to humanity to have children with Nick, because with our combined DNA, all of our children would go to Harvard.
UM.
I don't even know what to say to that except AWKWARD and also HETERONORMATIVE.
'kay, I feel like a Brown student now.

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.

Adventures in mochi

So last night Louki and I went to the mochi party at the Nagoya University international dorm.  On the way there, Itou-san regaled us with stories of when she went to Izumo Taisha (with her brother as a sort of college roadtrip) and managed to not stay in a hotel room...or pay for showers...or pay for food sometimes.  Needless to say, there were extreme hijinks which involved bathing in rivers and sleeping in cars.  Man, it makes my adventures seem so boring in comparison.

Anyway, we got to the mochi party where everyone from the Tomodachi no Kai (literally "the club of friends," but they host events for international students so they can practice their Japanese) was still setting up.  We got to see a mochi machine in action!  It is the craziest thing--sort of like a cross between a rice cooker and a bread machine.  Basically, you throw your mochi rice in with water and once it has cooked, the machine starts spinning like a washing machine and the rice turns into mochi.  CRAZY.

Also, as it turned out, they needed someone to make an announcement about the party over the dorm intercom in English, and Itou-san elected me to do it, so I got to announce the party.  It was exciting.

Once the mochi was done, it was time to eat SO MUCH MOCHI.  You have never seen so much mochi in your life.  We had mochi with black sesame (definitely my favorite) and mochi with ground soy beans and mochi with red beans and mochi with grated daikon and mochi with spinach and fish flakes and mochi with cheese and seaweed (which is strangely delicious?).  Oh, and one of the students from Laos brought some kind of excessively delicious soup that I might have been way too into.
Also, while eating the cheese-and-seaweed mochi, something went horribly wrong and Louki wound up with both her hands stuck to the mochi...which was also stuck to her mouth.  The fact that she was laughing while trying to get unstuck wasn't really helping matters.  Itou-san decided to be helpful by taking a picture.

Also, all the guys in the Tomodachi no Kai kept telling us, "Mochi has twice the rice of normal rice,* so don't eat too much or you'll get fat!" and all the women kept telling us to eat more.  Clearly the women had their priorities straight.

As it turned out, most of the students from Nagoya U. who came speak absolutely no Japanese.  (Literally no Japanese at all.  I have no idea how they take classes, but maybe Nagoya U. offers them in English?)  Some of the Tomodachi no Kai members speak English, but a lot of them speak very minimal English, so they were THRILLED OUT OF THEIR MINDS when they discovered that we could actually understand what they were saying.  So a whole bunch of people came over to talk to me and Louki about a whole bunch of things, which was pretty cool.

...also there was this really awkward moment where this old guy asked if Louki and I were planning on getting Japanese boyfriends, and Louki (very sensibly) gave a very noncommittal answer while I said I already had a boyfriend.  Then he told me that Japanese boys were cool.  And I said I was sure that was so, but I kind of like my boyfriend 'cause he's pretty awesome.  And then he told me that when I break up with my boyfriend I should let him know so he can hook me up with a Japanese guy.  One of the older women overheard him and was horrified and told him he was horrible and made him apologize.
Yeah.
It was exciting?

There was also a guy who kept trying to convince Louki that Japan has significantly more equality than the Netherlands by citing the fact that less than half the population in the Netherlands is allowed to go to college.  Except, of course, that's not true and we have no idea where he got this statistic from.  (He appeared to believe that certain people are forced to become farmers because of their social class?  Maybe he was confusing the Netherlands with the Edo period...)
The same guy tried to convince me that atheists don't exist.
It was an exciting conversation.

But I had a cool conversation with a Japanese woman who just finished up her master's at Nagoya U. in foreign language studies and with a bunch of older ladies who foisted food on me and with some Chinese master's students in engineering.
Also, this random guy called me cool?  He said, "You strike me as the kind of person who, if a cockroach suddenly appeared, would calmly kill it while everyone else freaked out."  Ahahahahaha.  That's definitely not happened before.

So, yeah!  It was fun!  We ate SO MUCH MOCHI.  And it was delicious.  And we were invited back any time we like.  Apparently they have activities every Thursday, so I might start going to those.  It seems like a fun group, even if some of them are committed to seeing me with a Japanese guy.
I...I really don't know what to say about that.

Anyway, I am currently writing this post from a hotel room in Izumo!  I took three trains (uggggh don't even talk to me about it) with my advisor and Torii-san (the only other girl in my advisor's seminar) to get here.  It was about 8 hours in transit.  UGGGGGH.  There was some serious freaking out on the way (not on my part) 'cause there was no snow in Nagoya and then there was SO MUCH SNOW in Gifu and somehow my advisor heard that there was a foot of snow in Izumo and when we got to Tottori there was about a foot of snow and it was snowing and everybody (except for me) was freaking out everywhere...and then we got to Izumo and there was no snow at all and it's above freezing.  LAME.  I miss snow.  Which is ironic because I've only really had one winter with proper snow.  BUT WHATEVER.

Tomorrow we're going to see Izumo Taisha and also a museum related to Lafcadio Hearn...?  And probably other things that I don't know about yet.  But hopefully it will be exciting.  Two of our other classmates are taking a night bus up, so we'll see how awake they are...

*I think they meant that because mochi is basically super compacted rice, it's twice as dense as normal rice...?