Thanksgiving 2009.

I spent Thanksgiving in Tokyo again this year.  It was my second.  This year, like last year, I had to work on the big day.  Depressing at best.  However, the work week ended and then I got in a quick phone call to the family as it was all winding down over at my my brother and sister-in-law's place.  So, that was nice, although it was definitely a sorry-ass substitute for eating and drinking with my family. 

Over the weekend, Jun and I celebrated properly.  We (rather, she) managed to find whole chickens at one of our local butcher shops.  They are awesome.  The evening before, we also picked up some bread and herbs for the stuffing, and a few nice microbrews and wine.  I looked for pumpkin pie, but failed terribly.  I think I'll probably just have to make one from scratch, if I can find the ingredients.  On Saturday, while I assembled our new storage box out on the porch, Jun skillfully whipped up the stuffing and threw the bird in the oven.  It's funny how we easily slipped into the stereotypical gender roles, although that's not always (or even usually) the case.  Later, as bird-eating time approached, I peeled up some potatoes and mashed them mercilessly and Jun completed the meal with a gravy, her first attempt.

Everything turned out great, except the gravy...although it tasted fine, it ended up looking like greasy, brown cottage cheese.  My potatoes were a bit on the dry side.  Next time, I'll be using more milk, I think. 

This year, I am thankful:  That my father is still alive.  That I have a wonderful and caring girlfriend.  That I have a fantastic family and friends.  That I have a stable job.  That my health is reasonably good.  That I can get up out of bed and walk, every day.

Assorted things.

For the last week and a half, I've been adding a single new Japanese word to my vocabulary every day.  I call it The Word of The Day, or Kyo No Tango (今日の単語) in Japanese.  In order to increase the impact of The Word of The Day, I'm thinking about starting a new blog called...this is creative, now...The Word of The Day.  See what I did there?  Creative, huh?  Today's word is kitsuen (喫煙), which is a noun that means "smoking."  It's relevant because I caught some junior high kids smoking last week (先週、中学生を喫煙して見たから、その単語は大切です。）

Yeah, well, we'll see how it goes.  I have to set it up from home, and I have some other things keeping me occupied at the moment.  I'll update in this space later.

One of those things that will be keeping me busy is that I recently discovered that I have the ability to mix with my laptop and keyboard, using the keyboard as my external controller (instead of CDs or turntables).  The upshot of that is that I can compose and practice sets from home in advance of shows, and I can practice my little heart out and train up my ears.  I had been going out to various electronics stores and hijacking their systems for practice, which is amusing but not very practical. 

Finally, Jun and I got some bad news on Friday.  It wasn't unexpected, but it's pretty personal, so I'm not going to post it here.  Anybody who wants to check in should feel free...otherwise, my good friends will probably hear about it sooner or later.  We'll just chalk it up to one of life's little challenges, but I'm a strong believer that those things make us stronger and better people.  I've made a point of leading an interesting life, and it wouldn't be very interesting if it were always easy, now would it?

Gonna be a long day.

I'm at the junior high right at the moment.  In about 50 minutes, I'm scheduled to start the first of my classes for the day.  The teacher I'm with tends to be a little bit difficult in the classroom, so it's always interesting. 

On Saturday, Jun and I went to Asakusa to meet her parents.  Asakusa is really freaking cool.  So much of Tokyo looks exactly the same, and it has this tendency to just kind of melt all together, visually, but Asakusa has this old-school noir vibe that I haven't felt anywhere else.  The streets are wider and the buildings are older, and it has this beautiful, enormous shrine, complete with pagoda, at the end of a long, outdoor market, carefully lit up with rows of the most beautiful lamps.  Around the shrine are a number of open-air restaurants, one of which we went to and had beer and sake and lots of Japanese snacks, which I can't currently remember the name of.

So, first we met up at the Kamiya Bar, a famous bar housed in an extremely rare pre-war building in Tokyo.  It's fair to say that most Americans aren't aware of this anymore, but Tokyo was firebombed viciously during WW2, and very, very little architecture survives as most of the city was burned to the ground.  More people died in that single firebombing than at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.  So, old architecture just basically doesn't exist here, which is incredibly tragic just on humanitarian grounds and also personally problematic, since I am a known and epic architecture-phile (thanks Dad).  The good news is that many shrines were rebuilt in the classic style, but most of Tokyo's western influenced architecture, of which there was *a lot*, is simply gone forever.  Kamiya Bar is one of those old buildings, though.

So, we met at Kamiya Bar and had a couple of drinks and then headed out to explore Asakusa.  First stop was the shrine and outdoor market.  The market is sandwiched between a couple of massive gates, which are particularly popular in Japanese and Korean tradition, and probably Chinese, as well, although I'm not familiar enough with China to say definitively.  Asakusa is really popular with tourists, so there were lots and lots of foreigners (but mostly Japanese, per usual).  Second stop was at the outdoor bars and more beer, snacks, and some sake.  Last stop: a really nice little soba shop, and then back to her parents' place.

Sunday night was shabu shabu, which is kind of like fondu, but with more veggies and a very light broth instead of oil.  Somebody sent Jun's dad a bottle of really freaking expensive sake, which we cracked and imbibed freely.  We're talking Dom-priced sake here.  God help me, I'm going to be a massive sake snob when I get back to the states.  Guess I can add that to beer and coffee and my other little proclivities.  *sigh*

As usual, the trip was great for my Japanese, since Jun and I speak English about 70% of the time, and her parents were really nice to me.  As usual, listening is the big problem...I can generally communicate more or less what I want to, but understanding the answer is usually a nightmare.  I'm doing my best (頑張っているよ).

Interesting thing about language acquisition.

So, obviously, I've been working on my Japanese since I got here, and there's been definite improvement.  I've noticed, though, that most of the foreigners who speak solid conversational Japanese have either spent a minimum of a 3-4 years in Tokyo or work in a field that requires them to use Japanese almost constantly.  Part of the reason why I'm here is, indeed, to develop a solid command of the Japanese language, but I hadn't really fully considered the amount of time that it will take.  I thought maybe a year or two would do the trick, but I've realized that, in fact, it'd take a year or two of nearly constant study to achieve fluency in that amount of time.  I study, but not constantly.  I have to at least maintain the thin illusion that I'm working, and it's just not possible.

Anyway, I'm learning.  I don't know where I'll be in the year and a half or so that I have left here, but I'll be working on it.  We'll see.  Who knows, maybe the States will explode in a further shitstorm of economic meltdown and I'm forced to stay longer.  Anything is possible, right?

Post office.

So, the post office here is incredibly horrible. My parents sent me a package weeks ago, and it has yet to arrive. The package contained, of course, my incredibly expensive turntable head shells and needle cartridges. The post office apparently tried to deliver the needles, but was confused by the fact that I hadn't notified them of my change of address. Notification followed, of course, but by this time the confusion had already occurred. Now, of course, the office is basically refusing to acknowledge the existence of any such package. Jun is on the case, however, we are both very...very...frustrated. Ugh.