Food!

...so I am kind of dumb sometimes, by which I mean that I bruised my feet by walking in dress shoes yesterday.  So I really, really need a solution to my dress shoe problem.  Or I need to stop walking 13-ish miles in a single day.  (Given my average walking speed...that seems about right.  The maximum distance I could have walked is about 18 miles, but I wasn't walking the whole time, so that's unlikely.)

...also, I need to remember that if I wear V-necks, they expose more skin than is normally exposed, and the exposed skin is very pale, which means that it will burn much easier than normal skin.  So right now I have a magnificent V-neck shaped sunburn.

Did I say sometimes I am kind of dumb?  I meant very dumb.

So instead of telling you about how I hobbled around all day (DON'T WORRY; I'M FINE.  I bruised my feet all the time when I took karate, and they'll be fine by tomorrow.) and scrubbed a tub, I instead I will do something different and write about FOOD.

Dang, food in Japan is so good.  Unfortunately, produce (while pretty much the most delicious produce you could ever ask for in your life) is kind of expensive (at least compared to California), so if you're like me and want to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, prepare to be paying slightly more for food.

So here is some delicious stuff I have eaten since getting here:

Chinsukou!  Remember how I said that one of the girls in my Japanese class passed out omiyage from Okinawa?  Well, this is it.  I got a go-ya-flavored one.  Go-ya (I don't know what the English equivalent word is, or if there even is one) is this kind of funky-looking vegetable from Okinawa.  People tell me that it's bitter, but since I can't really taste bitter things (or it doesn't bother me as much as other people), it just tastes delicious~

Anyway, chinsukou is this kind of flaky-cookie...and in this case it actually tasted like go-ya!  Although sweeter than the actual vegetable.  But SO DELICIOUS.

Other Green Things You Can Eat in Japan include melon soda!  I have a kind of weird love of melon soda, especially given that I strongly dislike most soda, but melon soda is just so good.

If it isn't bright green, you've probably got the wrong thing.  Weirdly enough, it does actually contain melon juice.  Lousy melon soda tastes a little bit like drain cleaner smells, so...uh...don't drink that.  It'll probably destroy your internal organs.

In terms of delicious non-green things you can eat, there is nashi!  In English they're called "Asian pears" or "apple pears."  But Japanese ones are a lot bigger than most of the ones you'll find in the States.

...a lot bigger.

They have the consistency of pears with the shape of apples and the taste of, well, nashi.  I highly recommend them.

Back to green things!  This is komatsuna, which you can actually find at Japanese grocery stores in the U.S.  It's kind of like spinach, but not as dark and way easier to overcook.  Sort of like a spinach-lettuce hybrid?

And what can you do will komatsuna?

Well, if you're a college student with only one pan, you can make...

...Rice Egg Vegetable Stuff.

(I need a better name for this, but it is delicious, despite its lame name.)

Basically, I took a bunch of Japanese dishes, mixed them up, and came up with some horribly mutated dish that tastes really good.

To make enough for one person, you will need:

1 egg
more ginger than you deem strictly necessary, diced very fine
about two cloves of garlic, cut into very thin medallions
one bunch of komatsuna, with the ends cut off, sliced into two-inch-ish long strips
some mushrooms, sliced into strips
some onion, sliced into small-ish pieces
some carrot, sliced into very thin medallions
some rice
some soy sauce

Step one!  Start your rice in the rice cooker.  Note: Don't make dry rice.  You need your rice to pretty goopy for this to work.

Step two!  Go do something for about thirty minutes.

Step three!  Take our your vegetables, wash them, and chop them into pieces!

Step four!  In a little bit of oil (I used canola oil, 'cause that's what I have), fry your garlic and onions and ginger.

Step five!  Just as the onions start turning translucent, add the mushrooms and carrots.

Step six!  About sixty seconds later, add some soy sauce and crack the egg into the pan.  Then mix up the egg REALLY FAST so that it coats everything.  It should sort of resemble a pan of slime.  If it looks kind of weird and gross, you're doing it right.

Note: If you scramble the egg beforehand, you are cheating.  Also, it won't taste as good for some reason.

After a while, it should start looking like this.

Step seven!  Add the rice to the pan.  Make sure to stir it well so that the rice gets broken up.

Step eight!  Add the komatsuna.  You shouldn't need to cook it for more than about two minutes, tops.  Also, you might need to add water at this point, if you made your rice too dry.

Step nine!  Enjoy!  (It's also really good cold, for some reason.)

Step ten!  Wash up your dishes.  Seriously.  When you have one pan to share among four people, you have to do dishes really quickly.

And thus concludes this episode of How to Cook Like a College Student with Only One Pan.

On a final random note, remember how I was saying that I had forgotten all my useful Japanese, and could only remember words like "sexual generative organ"?

Well, guess what word came up in my reading for class.

Yeahhhhhhhhhhh.

Fieldwork, or Ow My Toes

So this morning I decided that I would spend the day finding shrines in the area.  Google turned out to be very helpful in this respect, because it shows shrines on the map whereas most paper city maps don't.  Unfortunately, using Google to get directions wasn't particularly helpful, because the Google map directions look like this:

南山大学名古屋キャンパス 名古屋交流会館 〒466-0824 愛知県名古屋市昭和区山里町５０

〒466-0805 愛知県名古屋市昭和区伊勝町２丁目９９ まで歩く

約 14分 (1.2 km)

伊勝八幡宮 〒466-0805 愛知県名古屋市昭和区伊勝町２丁目９９

If you can't read Japanese, let me translate:

Start at Nanzan University
Walk to Ikatsu Shrine (about 14 minutes)
Destination Ikatsu Shrine

AMAZING, GOOGLE.  I AM BLOWN AWAY.

Of course, it's not entirely Google's fault, because in most of Japan, streets don't have names.*  In fact, the only streets in Nagoya that have names are the major roads, and they are named things like "153" and "220."  This would be why most directions in Japanese go something along the lines of, "Go straight and then turn right at the blue house and then turn left at the high school and it should be just past the weird-looking tree."  Also, addresses are given in the form of the city then the district then the neighborhood then block in the neighborhood and THEN the house number, because buildings are numbered in the order they were built, so #1 and #2 could be ten miles apart on the same road.

Oh, and if you think you can use street signs to navigate?

Awesome!  I'm on Child Welfare Center East!  Sure, that's a weird name, but whatever.  What's my cross street?

Oh.  Uh...wait, what?

I really haven't a clue what the street signs are supposed to accomplish, honestly.  Sometimes they tell you what neighborhood you're in, but that would be like if you were in San Francisco and the street signs said, "Sunset District."

Anyway, I wrote down directions as best as I could from the map I pulled up on Google, changed into business casual clothing (I figured it was better to be safe than sorry), and then packed my bag with all my handy-dandy research tools.

My camera bag (I couldn't take a picture of my camera, obviously), my passport (I have to carry it around with me until I get my ARC), my inhaler (you never know when you might need a punch a bear), a handkerchief, a notebook, and some writing utensils.

And then I went off.

The first shrine I stopped at was Ikatsu Hachimangu.  (It is also the only shrine that's name I'm sure I'm pronouncing correctly.)  It was about a fifteen minute walk from my dorm, and despite it supposedly opening at 9 a.m. and my getting there at 10:30 a.m., they were still setting up for the day.

Here's a dragon spigot that was at the hand-washing station.**

The shrine seems nice overall, but very small.  As far as I could tell, it has a staff of two (one man and one woman).  I would have gone up and talked to them, but they seemed very busy cleaning up something (perhaps because yesterday was the autumnal equinox?).

It turns out that the shrine will be having a festival on the sixteenth of October, so I'm going to try to visit again for that if not sooner.

 As I was leaving, the gentleman was dragging a tarp full of thousand-crane chains from the main shrine building into the shrine office (presumably for ritual burning).  As you can probably tell, some of the cranes escaped.

So then I started walking toward shrine #2.

On the way I passed this really nice lake/park.

And then I found the shrine.

As I was standing outside of the main gate trying to make sense of the kanji,*** an elderly Japanese woman called to me and asked me if the shrine had caught my eye.  I said yes, and then she asked where I was from. I said America and she reacted like I had said I was a superhero or something equally amazing.  And then I said I was studying shrines, and she was so thrilled.  She immediately began telling me all about the man who runs the shrine (apparently she knows him and she said I should talk to him because he would love to help me and knows lots about Old Things) and how young people these days don't appreciate shrines like they used to and how she and her neighbors gather at the shrine on major holidays and make delicious food and eat it together.  I could only catch about 60% of what she was saying, unfortunately, because she was talking really fast and had a really thick accent.  (I really need to learn older Japanese.  I have so much trouble talking to anyone over sixty, because the Japanese they use is so different than what I'm used to.)  But she was really friendly and I thanked her for the information and then she rode off on her bicycle.

And then I went into the shrine, which seemed to be set up in someone's backyard.  All the shrine gates were obviously hand-painted and probably built by hand as well, given that a few of them were a little bit crooked. Also, one of the shrines was:

...the entrance to a house.  (There's a normal room inside.  You can see the boxes through the window.)

Also, there was a motorcycle parked right in front of the shrine office.

Unfortuntely, the owner/priest/caretaker of the shrine didn't seem to be around, so I couldn't talk to him, but I will be going back, because that has to be one of the most unusual shrines I have ever seen.  Plus, I would generally like to talk to anyone who would want to set up a shrine in his/her backyard, and who also comes at the recommendation of friendly old ladies.

So then I walked around the block and found this shrine:

The shrine's name is 須佐之男神社, which I think might be "Susanoo Shrine" (yes, that Susanoo).

No one was at this one either, although it's also very small so it probably doesn't employ full-time staff.  There's a festival on the seventeenth of every month, though, according to a sign, so I can go back for that.

Random Japanese culture lesson of the day!  These two lion-dog-bear (nobody's really sure what to call them) statues appear at the entrances of shrines and temples.  The one on the right has its mouth open (and is making the sound "ah") and is male and the one on the left has its mouth closed (and is making the sound "n") and is female.  The male one represents beginnings, and the female one represents endings.  (The "ah" sound is the first letter in the Japanese alphabet, and the "n" sound is the last!)

Also, the female one is stepping on a small lion-dog-bear.  I'm not really sure why.

Aaaaaaaaaaand then I walked and walked and walked a bunch more, and stumbled upon a shrine that somehow wasn't on my map!  What luck!  The name of the shrine is 五社宮, which, I'm going to hazard a guess, is Gosha Shrine?

More dragon-spigots!  (You can actually see the ladle this time.)

Once again, nobody was there, although just as I was leaving, a little girl (probably about two-ish) and her dad went strolling through the shrine.  (Or, really, the dad was strolling, and the girl was chasing pigeons.)

Here's a place to hang up ema.  Normally they're hung on racks, but here they're hung on a string.

And then I proceeded to get massively lost and wind up at a grocery store instead of the shrine I was trying to reach.  I kept seeing signs for shrines, but they would point toward parking or wouldn't have any directional arrows.  So I gave up and walked toward the last cluster of shrines...and wound up getting lost there too, somehow, despite the fact that I knew EXACTLY where the shrine was supposed to be and I kept seeing posters for the shrine.

...so eventually I gave up, because my feet were really hurting.  (Walking around for five hours in dress shoes isn't the greatest idea.  I don't think my toes will forgive me any time soon.  I'm really going to need a better solution if I'm going to keep walking around as much.)  So I stopped off at a grocery store and bought soap.

Because nothing says "beautiful" like the majestic cow.

*Kyoto is one of the few exceptions to this rule.  Kyoto was also built on a grid, which means that it's supremely easy to navigate.

**Before going into a shrine, you have to wash your hands to purify them.  This is a fairly simple process.  Pick up the ladle with your right hand and pour water over your left hand.  Then switch the ladle to your left hand and pour water over your right hand.  Then swish some of the water around your mouth and spit it out.  (Most people opt out of this part, 'cause shrine water can be pretty grungy.  Acceptable alternatives are wiping your still-wet right hand over your mouth or pantomiming taking a sip from the ladle.)  Tip the ladle so that the remaining water runs down the handle (note: this is really hard and most people don't do it because it's REALLY HARD and requires hand-eye coordination) and then put the ladle back where you found it.  Yay, you're done!

***The name of the shrine is 白髭稲荷大明社.  Shirohige Inari Taimeisha?  Basically, it's the White-Facial Hair (the word can mean beard or mustache or both) Inari Shrine.