Cool and Dry, Baby

Electricity is expensive. I realize that's a relative term, but it is literally three times more expensive here than it was in Arlington: 30 cents per kilowatt rather than 10.

I'm guessing that's why there are so many electricity-saving measures in place here that we don't have in the US, like the ability to easily turn the hot water on or off as needed, the custom of hanging clothes to dry instead of using a dryer, or the AC units.

Each major room in the house (bedrooms, living room, tatami room) has its own AC unit, and all of those rooms have doors, so you can pick and choose what room or rooms you want to cool, which is kind of nice.

Fun fact: every air conditioner in the house works except the one in the master bedroom, and this is becoming problematic. Right here and right now, it's not the hottest place on the planet or the most humid, but it's hot enough and humid enough that we don't always sleep very well and we get cranky.

So in trying to get the AC fixed, first we had to make sure that it was broken. This is easier said than done, because none of the remotes (each unit has its own remote, too...cool, huh?) have anything in English, so the first step was to painstakingly look up each kanji on each button and each screen setting to see what was what. The index card diagram I made is pretty invaluable.



Then we tested the cooling and heating settings in each room and compared the air coming out of those units with the one in the bedroom. We determined A) every other unit is A-OK and B) when the "heat to 32°C" and "cool to 20°F" produce the same lukewarm breeze, it's broken. I contacted our person that acts as a liaison between us and the People That Fix Things and she arranged for someone to come out to look at the unit last week, but they said that they couldn't fix it and the manufacturer would have to send someone out. So the bad part is that we still don't have a cool and/or dry room to sleep in, but the good part is that we were right that it is actually broken and it's not just a case of the illiterate gaijin not pressing the right buttons. So that's something.

Today I'm experimenting - the air has been pretty sticky almost every day for the last couple weeks, so instead of running the AC units on "air conditioning," I'm just going to run the dehumidifier and see if I can tell the difference in a few hours. I just really don't want to be responsible through negligence for this beautiful house starting to mold uncontrollably.

Just Throwin' This Out There...

I've enabled commenting for everyone and anyone. If you have questions (or comments, obviously) please write something! I like feedback posts, they make me feel less like I'm talking to a vacuum. And by now you know I can speak at length about the smallest and most mundane things (like doing laundry or baking cookies), so I have no problem explaining the minutia of my life.

I'm also up for emails or other internet-based message systems. Just sayin'.

Night Life in Tokyo

Last night we met up with a group of people for a full day's worth of activities. It was all planned out ahead of time, and the guy in charge did good job of putting it all together.

We started out in Akihabara (Electric Town) with some geek stores and a five-story arcade. One store is called Super Potato and contains nothing but games ten years old or older, mostly the reeeally old school stuff. And plush Goombas.

We spent an hour at a British pub for a happy hour drink until it was time to head to the Beer Garden for dinner. This is a rooftop restaurant that offers a grilling setup on each table, all-you-can-eat foods and all-you-can-drink beer within a two-hour time frame. The food was mostly meat, of course, but they did have a small non-meat bar. I wouldn't call it a salad bar, per se, because it was more fried things than salad things, but it was a good time.

After that was karaoke, which I'd never done before. Still haven't, really, because I didn't get a song in before we left, but that's neither here nor there. For the record, song lyrics are in both English and Japanese and there were tons of songs that I knew.

Then we went to Club Atom in Shibuya to go deaf with a beat. Three floors, each with a slightly different flavor of music - one floor had hip hop and R&B, one had pop and house music, and one had electronic and trance music. It was hot and incredibly crowded (slightly less so on the floor with the electronic music), but the strobe lights were neat, the beat was pretty good, I managed NOT to kill anyone with a stray elbow, and I might have been hit on while the husband was in the bathroom.

That was fun enough for a while just to experience it, but there was no place to go to escape the monstrous music volume, claustrophobia-enducing crowds and marinate-in-your-own-juices heat, so we left after an hour or two for a McDonald's (typically open 24 hours) until the trains started running again and we could get home. Can you believe that in Tokyo of all places, a city with a population of 32 million people (the population of New York city is about 20 million according to my Wikipedia source) and an active night life, the trains don't even run 24 hours a day on weekends? I think that's insane.

We got home, showered off the gross, and went to bed about an hour after the crows started to talk.

Kochirawa Midori Tori Desu.

Recap:
Our friend and his wife have two vans, Big Bird and Little Bird.
We have what can be described as a green Little Bird.
"Green Bird," literally translated, is Midori Tori.

This is Midori Tori.
There are some aspects of Midori Tori that are...not the same as cars I'm accustomed to seeing. For instance - no hood! Our knees are right up against the front of the vehicle, legs cranked to a slightly-less-than-90-degree angle, which adds to the feeling that it's a little beep-beep toy.



The steering column sits between the driver's feet. (Edit: also note that the driver's side is on the right, not the left)


This is where the battery is:


Now, think about how cool this is in the following situation: it's raining like it's Monsoon Season, and the car won't start because the battery is temperamental. The new battery is in the back seat, but hasn't been installed yet. What do our heroes do? Flip the seat back, attach the jumper cables to the not-yet-installed battery in the back seat, and jumpstart the engine without ever leaving the car. Voila!


This is where the engine lives:


This is where to insert fuel - on the passenger side, right behind the front tire.


I'm a big fan of the folding seats and the ridiculous amount of cargo room we have.



Extra storage space is a bonus...I think that's a reflective triangle, but we could fit a dozen more in there.

Midori Tori is no speed demon, but the average speed limit around here is about 50kmh (31mph) so it doesn't need to be.

Not Food...and Moar Food!

Non-Food Items!

This building is full of life!

Life service, Life up, Life enjoy, and Life support. You need it, they've got it.



I love love love the hyakuiin (100 yen store). Compared to dollar stores, there are more useful items and generally higher quality merchandise.

Once our household goods arrived, we realized that we no longer have a broom and dustpan; we had those around until the very last moment and gave them to the neighbors. So, new broom and dustpan. And they're happy!

Literally Happy.




Foodstuffs!
I know Corn Flakes exist in the US, but it's a little surreal to see the name in katakana.


Husband o'Mine saw some Final Fantasy Elixir for sale in the suupa (supermarket). He described it as "Sprite with more lime." But he really got it for the graphics on the can. I can't blame him.


I've had this before, but I had no idea what it was. It's shredded ultra-thin omelet called kinshi tamago and is sprinkled on meals as a topping.


This was in the store with cookies and candy, so I thought I'd give it a try because it was the least recognizable of the three or four flavors available. This one happens to be a very thin rice cracker with some sort of fishy flavor powder sprinkled on one side. The taste was okay, but I'll go for chocolate chip next time.


I love all the flavor packet things I can get - this is an assortment of seeds and beans that you mix with rice as you cook it.


Okay, this stuff is kind of a mystery. According to the illustrations in the back, it's meant to be a topping for noodles or rice or something to go in soup. I don't know if it's pickled and I don't know if it should be drained before adding to whatever I'm eating, but it's worth a try.


This stuff is pretty awesome. It's just the seasoning, and you sprinkle it on top of your rice before you eat it, but it's a LOT of taste packed into an innocuous-looking mylar packet. Kind of salty, the dark green is probably seaweed of some sort, but a nice flavor addition.


This is something else from the hyakuiin - garlic and chili pasta oil. Spicy enough to make my nose run a little, so it's got a bit of a kick.


I was delighted to find that I could get this size bottle of olive oil for 100 yen. For now, it's all I need. It's also all I can fit in those ridiculously high cabinets at a height that I can still reach.


Some things here are the same but different. This, my friends, is a Japanese radish. it's almost as big as my forearm and probably heavier. It has a slight tang, but not nearly as much as the radishes I pulled out of the garden when I was growing up. It's a good filler vegetable, about as much flavor as potato but not as starchy.


Again, same but different - the eggplants are miniature.

This is essentially jell-o in juice pouch form. I'm pretty sure there's no real fruit in it, but it is pretty cute. And yummy.

Cooking: An Exercise in Comedy

Tomorrow we are going to a birthday party for Onozaki-sensei. He was one of our Headstart teachers, the swordmaker. One of our friends is in his sword class.

What do you give a 60-year-old samurai for his birthday?
We're going with homemade peanut butter cookies.

This cooking attempt has the potential to be comedy at its finest. Why, you may ask? A number of reasons:

1. Untested internet recipe

2. Had to visit a different site to convert 1/2c butter into grams - turns out its 115g...not entirely sure how to measure that from a block...

3. I'm not really sure if I got brown sugar or just unrefined sugar, so I got two different shades of brown and hope one of them is right

4. I think the plastic bag with the pie cartoon is flour...

5. I have no cookie sheet or cooling rack

6. I have no oven; I have a fish griller with a sliding scale instead of specific temperature markings.





...and here's how it went:

I went to the grocery store and got ingredients.

I picked the lightest and the darkest sugars and crossed my fingers that I made the right choice.


I was reasonably certain this is flour.


This is baking powder! With a logo of itself, so it goes back into infinity.


I owe the iPhone a debt of gratitude...I only know this is baking soda because I looked up the kanji in the J-E dictionary.


Note how our mixing bowl is tupperware. Our household goods will be delivered on Monday. With it, our actual mixing bowls.


The recipe called for wrapping the dough in plastic and refrigerating for a couple hours. The only usable plastic we had was an unused garbage bag.


How would YOU use this oven to bake cookies? No temperatures!


Damn randomly rotating pictures.
Batch #1, Fish Griller Method, go!


SUCCESS!


Batch #1, Microwave Method, go!


BEHOLD THE GLORY OF...ugh.


Okay, so the fish griller was the lesser of two evils in this case, so we refined the method a little. By putting one teeny aluminum pan on top of the other, it distributed the heat a little more evenly.


Definitely a step in the right direction. Smaller cookies, 4 at a time, heat on the lowest possible setting, checking every 5-8 minutes, and this is ultimately what we got:



In total, four molten microwave puddles, five cookies modeled after the marshmallows you put on a stick then stuck directly in the campfire, five burnt to hell, and 14 decent cookies.

Can You Read Me Now?

My reading is coming along fairly well. I can now identify two out of three writing styles. Not quickly, but I can do it and sound words out. I was pretty proud of myself that I sounded out "Habanero Boneless" at KFC. I also sounded out a setting on the dryer and looked it up in the J-E dictionary and learned that it means "Take Wrinkles." That's a good thing to know about!

Reading comprehension, however, is another story. If I sound out a sentence, about half of it might mean something to me, and it's usually Japanese-ified English words or simple vocab like "this" or "was." It's a step forward. My overall reading level is now less like "Hangman" and more like "Wheel of Fortune." Same basic concept, but I have more clues now.

Speaking isn't markedly better than it has been...it was downright comical when the repair guy came over to fix a couple minor things and we discovered that we only overlap vocabulary by "hello," "goodbye," "okay," and "sorry." I can say a bunch of sentences, but none of them were helpful.

I've met with a tutor twice, and it seems like that's going to work out pretty well. Not necessarily like a hey-let's-hang-out relationship, but definitely a good teacher-student relationship. I think it helps that I went into it knowing more than she expected.

---

Our friend and his wife have two vans. Hers is about the size of an average minivan, his is one of those teeny utility vans that's the size of an Accord but shaped like a VW bus. They're nicknamed Big Bird and Little Bird.

We now have a car (I haven't seen it yet, but the Mew should be able to bring it home this weekend or next week) that has been described to me as a green Little Bird.

"Little Bird" in Japanese is chiisai tori
"green" is midori

Our new car will henceforth be known as Midori Tori. (Green bird.) Say it out loud, it's fun!

It turns out that cars here, at least used ones at an auction, are ridiculously inexpensive. Not that we can bring it back to the states. Well, we can, but it wouldn't be considered road worthy after the government-mandated engine adjustments. Something about the classification of the vehicle, I don't know the details.

---

Single serving wine coolers in cute little glasses:


Blueberry on the left and honey apricot on the right. Small quantity (about half a cup) and only a little more alcohol content than a beer, so not really a party drink, but it's a nice little dessert beverage.

Followup Tour: The Back Yard

Looking out through the living room door.

Approaching the back corner of the house...


And the full expanse of the yard in all its glory. Marvel at its breadth!


And as a bonus, some miscellaneous food and drink items:
Darn you, mysteriously rotating pictures!
Anyway, these are marshmallows with pineapple goo in the middle. This style of yum comes in several flavors, but so far I've only tried this one.


Again with the weird picture rotation. What's up, blogspot?
Pretz also come in a variety of flavors; all but the original are you-gotta-try-this good. The original are okay, it's just that all the flavors are way better. These, for example, appear to have been scientifically engineered to compliment beer. Next time I might try the edamame (soybean) flavor.


Yogurt-flavored gelatin-cube drink. It's not bad, really.



This is something I'd never heard of before. It's plum wine, complete with plums. The wine is kind of tangy, but palatable; the plums are mouth-puckeringly tart, but I think it's part of the whole experience.


Random hard candies. I can't quite put my finger on the flavor...it's like raspberry, but not.
(Edit: it's lychee. Thanks, Elizabeth!)


Haven't tried this yet, but I'm kind of excited about it - it's a single serving of cherry sake.
(Edit: It has a nice flavor, but it's pretty watered down. Next time I'll go for the blueberry or honey apricot wine)