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...?

Ise Adventures

Tonight's post will be a bit sparse on details, because I'm currently EXHAUSTED.  You'll see why shortly.

So this morning I woke up at an ungodly (unkamily?) early hour to take a subway to a subway to the train station to meet with the rest of my advisor's seminar and take the train to Ise.  (If you don't know about Ise, it's the single most important shrine in Japan.  REALLY, REALLY BIG DEAL.  Imagine something like Vatican City for Catholics.)  It was very exciting, because we got our own train car.  I also had no idea what people were talking about for most of the ride, because all the other students in the class are studying Christianity, so their conversations sounded a lot like, "[something something something] church [something something something] priest [something something something] mass [something something] that guy from the anthropology department."

Anyway, we arrived in Ise after a one hour and twenty minute train ride and went to...

...the outer shrine.

There was a lovely walk in.  All of the Ise shrines are smack-dab in the middle of REALLY, REALLY old forests.  REAAAAAAAAAALLY OLD.

This is also the post where you get really good at recognizing the backs of the heads of my classmates and advisor!  YAY.

Here's the outer shrine.  Ise Shrine has different architecture than pretty much every other shrine in Japan; a lot of people consider it the "original" Japanese architectural style, rather than the more Chinese-influenced style of most shrines.  Other people have pointed out that the architectural style of Ise bears an incredibly strong resemblance to the rice storage huts used in ancient Japan.

Also, random factoid!  The Ise Shrines are rebuilt every twenty years, and the kami have to be moved into the new shrines (which are right next to the old ones)!  This takes a pretty long time, because there are a lot of kami enshrined in Ise.

When we left the outer shrine, we discovered that there was a street-fair-like thing going on.  Apparently it was a meeting of the "Ise Chef Club," so they were selling all sorts of (really expensive) gourmet food.

Then we hopped on a bus and went to...

...this museum!  It has a bunch of artifacts from Ise as well as Really Old Books and Calligraphy from Oda Nobunaga?  Yeah.  It was pretty cool.

There was also a museum of agriculture right next door, which apparently has some of the oldest material culture artifacts from Japan, but we didn't have time to go to that.  (Plus, the boys in the class were already teasing the other girl and I for Actually Bothering to Read the Signs in the museum, which meant that we finished way after they did.)

So then after some misadventures involving nearly getting on the wrong bus and being bitten by mosquitoes a lot, we got on the right bus and went to...

...the outer shrine!  Or actually the shopping district around the outer shrine.

All the buildings are done in a much older architectural style (probably Edo period), which was really cool.

So then we grabbed lunch (we picked our restaurant based on where we could get the best view of the river), and I ate something called tekone sushi, which, as far as I could tell, was just slabs of raw fish marinaded in something on rice.  Apparently it's an Ise meibutsu*, and it was delicious.
Also, I got to sit through the inevitable "can you eat" questions.
"Can you eat sashimi?"
"Yes, I can eat anything."
"Can you eat udon?"
"...yes, I can eat anything."
"Can you eat anko**?"
"...yes, I can eat ANYTHING."
"Can you eat tempura?"
"I CAN EAT ANYTHING."

So then we headed to the inner shrine!  Which, by the way, was a beautiful walk.  Here, have a river!

...and have a torii!

This is the river by the shrine.  A lot of people wash their hands in it, because it's supposed to purify your body and your heart/soul.  In Ye Olden Days, people stripped naked and bathed in it.  That's probably not such a great idea now.

Small child washing hands in river as mother apparently is not concerned that she will fall in.

My advisor, on the other hand, was concerned that WE would fall in.

More river!

Then we walked through a whole bunch more forest.  There were HUGE trees; two of us couldn't have joined hands around some of them.  People kept touching them, because their age is supposed to give them special powers.  An older woman behind us was leaning against the tree, and she said, "If you touch it, you can just feel it LIVING."

This is as close as you can take pictures of the main shrine from.
I think my English failed in that sentence.
Hopefully people will know what I'm saying.
Need to stop typing and go to sleep.
ALMOST DONE.

MORE AWESOME RIVER PICTURES.  They will distract you from my failing English.  DISTRACT.

There was a pond as we were leaving the shrine, and in the pond were...

...the biggest dang koi fish you have ever seen.
Japanese girl: They are like the bosses of the koi fish.
Filipino guy: I'm gonna touch one.  *spends the next minute trying to touch a koi fish before finally succeeding*
Japanese girl: You know, when they get this big, they're just...really creepy.
Filipino guy: I wonder if you can eat them.***
Advisor: DON'T EAT THEM.

Also, as we were leaving, we ran across a group of random chickens, which one of the Filipino guys attempted to entice over by making chicken noises.  Apparently he wanted to eat them too.

MORE RANDOM RIVER PICTURES.

Then we had green tea ice cream, which is, by the way, one of my favorite things EVER.  SO GOOD.

We all had free coupons to eat this thing, which I have no idea what it's called.  It's basically soft anko surrounding a mochi core, and it is DELICIOUS.  Also, I ate one of the other students' as well, because he thought it was too sweet.  Apparently he can't eat anko.
I think I managed to impress everyone today with how much food I can put away, because I was one of the few people who finished my entire lunch (and one of the two who did it without complaining about how much food it was).  I also managed to impress everyone by not complaining about how far we were walking.  A twenty minute walk is nothing when you've spent five hours trekking around Nagoya.

Due to a series of really (not) exciting events, we wound up walking back to the train station.
As we were walking back, I discovered that I know a lot of random things about Japanese culture that other foreign students don't.
For example, in Japanese there was originally no word for green.  Green and blue were the same color, but were differentiated by shade, so you would have "grass blue" and "sky blue" and "leaf blue" and "sea blue."  There's now a word in Japanese for green ("midori," which originally meant "fresh" or "young"), but there are still some things that Westerners would call "green" that are referred to as "blue" in Japanese.  Case in point:
Filipino guy: Quick, the light's green!  Run!
Me: The light's blue!
Filipino guy: ...what?  No, it's green!
Japanese girl: It's blue.
Filipino guy: WHY DOES EVERYONE KEEP SAYING THE LIGHT IS BLUE WHEN IT'S REALLY OBVIOUSLY GREEN?
Advisor: Because it's blue.
Filipino guy: NO, IT'S--oh, wait, now it's yellow.

Yep, in Japan the traffic lights are red, yellow, and blue.

So then we rode the train back to Nagoya, and decided that today was so awesome that we will be having a third field trip to Izumo Shrine in January, after finals are done.  AWESOME.

And now I am going to collapse, because I have to wake up at an ungodly hour again tomorrow.  GOOD NIGHT.

*Special product.  Meibutsu are insanely important in Japanese culture, and you will very quickly learn what each place's meibutsu are.  Ise's meibutsu are Ise udon, tekone sushi, and the strange anko thing that I don't know the proper name of.

**Red bean paste, also known as That Thing in Every Japanese Sweet.  I think it's delicious, but apparently a lot of foreigners can't stomach it?

***If this seems like a really random statement to you, you've obviously never been to a Japanese aquarium.  The most common statement you'll hear is not "wow, that fish is cool" but "wow, that fish looks delicious."
...also, as it turns out, you can actually eat koi (just not the ones from Ise).