japandroo

July 8, 2009

Making Umeshu / 梅酒を作る

A friend of mine came over the other day with a kilogram of plums and said "let's make plum wine!" You throw rock sugar, plums, and some alcohol in a jar and in 3 months you have delicious plum wine!

この間友達が梅を１キロ持ってきて「梅酒作ろう」って言った。砂糖、梅、酒をビンに入れて三ヶ月が経ったらおいし～い梅酒が完成！

Wash plums and puncture the skin with a fork so the juice will come out.

Dry them well.

Layer them in the bottle with sugar

We made one with brandy and one with Japanese sake

Adding honey to the brandy version to make it a bit sweeter

In goes the good stuff!

Me adding sake to my bottle

This is more or less how it went into the closet for 3 months :) I'll put another post up when I know how it tastes :D

June 29, 2009

Taiko Update

So I just got back from playing a show at a festival at a Kyoto Temple. It was my first time playing a song called Sato no Uta, and we placed two songs that I've played before, Miyake and Kassen. I believe Kassen and Sato no Uta are original Wadayama Torafusujindaiko pieces, but Miyake is a song that's played in various forms by groups all over the world.

Miyake is played with the drum placed horizontally and struck from the side. You spread your feet, keep your back straight and bend you knees so your weight is supported by your thigh muscles. When the inside hand closest to the drum strikes the head, your weight is shifted over your outside leg. When you use your outside hand, you shift your weight over your inside leg to allow your bachi to reach the drum. Solos and the basic rhythm require a great deal of shifting back and forth, which means lots of work for your quads. A ton of fun, but for it to look really cool, you've got to get down low and stay there the whole time...tough for someone as inflexible as me.

For Kassen, I play the odaiko or large drum. It's got a drum head about 3 feet wide and is placed on a stand at about chest height. Playing is done with your elbows at shoulder level and your elbow acting as the only pivot. It kills my triceps, but is maybe the funnest one I've played so far.

The song I learned most recently is Sato no Uta, and it's got a combination of choreography and complicated sticking that took me forever to get down, but looks really cool when everyone is playing in rhythm.

I'll try to get some video up at some point, but here's some pics of our group.

Sanjinsanjin Ramen 山神山人

Was in Akashi taking my written driving test last week (jeebus, 5 hours in the DMV for a test that took me less than 2 minutes) and stopped in Nishi-Akashi on my way back for lunch. One of the teachers at my base school had given me a card of a place she went to in Kobe. Sometimes it's nice when you blab the same thing about yourself (I love ramen) so much that they remember :) Anyway, I found Sanjinsanjin Ramen pretty easily.

It was fairly quiet because it was about 2 pm on a Wednesday, meaning their main clientele (you know, people with jobs) had already come and gone. I ordered a set menu that came with their normal ramen and a pork bowl.

The ramen was darn good. Some of the most addictive soup I've had in a long time, better than the stuff I had in Tokushima at Toudai, better than Ichi-ran in Tokyo and certainly on par with the stuff I get at Jaran every other week or so. It was thick, almost creamy, with none of the gross fatty bits that contaminate the sight of the soup (I don't care if it's in there, I just don't like seeing it). The pork was thick but SO soft and succulent and the noodles were very thin and firm. Great stuff and I can't wait to try and go back on the 14th after my driving test :)

June 13, 2009

Ramentary: Zundouya Ramen

Feels like forever since a ramentary, dudn't it?

So my buddy Mark's co-worker suggested a spot called Zundouya Ramen in Himeji and since we were heading down there to look for gear for Taj Ultimate (the ultimate frisbee tournament next month), we stopped by for a taste.

There's 4 spots in Himeji alone, with another slated for Osaka in 2011. It's a pretty funky little spot, with reggae music in the background and all young folks working there. Our cute waitress had like 4 wristbands and a sweet blond hairdo underneath a towel. Zundouya does tonkotsu ramen, with varying degrees of thicknes (4 levels from assari to kotteri) and they also allow you to choose the kind of noodles you want (we both went thin). Mark got the chashumen with kotteri broth and I got the normal ramen with normal broth. We also sprung for fried rice and gyoza (because hey, a bowl of meat and noodles floating in fatty pork broth just isn't bad enough for you).

The table had garlic cloves and a garlic press in case you wanted to up the deliciousness at the expense of your companions' noses, but we abstained. My ramen came with negi, some absolutely melt-in-your-mouth-like-butter pork slices, a slice of nori (seaweed), a full soft boiled egg and a fair sized serving of those afore-mentioned thin noodles.

It was pretty darn good. The oil in the broth kept the heat locked in the broth so when you pulled a serving of noodles, they were far hotter than the soup you'd sip from the top of the bowl. The entire bowl was fairly well put together, but I felt like the noodles were a bit too soft considering I asked for them to be firm.

The real star of this meal was the fried rice, in my opinion, which is saying something considering I liked the ramen. A little smaller than most ramen places I go to, but with some nice ingredients and without any hint of oiliness. The gyoza was average.

June 10, 2009

When did June get here?

What I've been up to lately:

- Colin and Yuka's wedding party (they got married in February in Hawaii, had their Japan party a few weeks ago. Was sick, so wasn't feeling great, but had a good time :)

- Went to Yoshi's birthday party at a billiards bar called Pool Fool Cool. He's 33 now and the only Japanese guy I've ever met with a Australian accent. We made him a cake

Those are almonds we roasted, strawberries with chocolate, strawberry pocky, and whipped cream. It tasted aight, but it was a bit dry. That's what we get for buying the cake part pre-made :D

- Ran into my buddy Matt at frisbee practice (literally) and scraped up my knee. Took a while for the blood to stop, even though it wasn't that big. A lady in my taiko group laughed and said I have the same kind of injuries as my students :p

- Went to a beach party in Takeno last weekend for a little bit, then went clubbing. The highlight, other than me trying to teach my friend how to dance just a little, was RaiRaiTei ramen beforehand! The green stuff is negi, or welsh onion.

The next day, we went to a spot called Pine Needle that is pretty funkay. Cool sign

And here's the めちゃスペシャルオムライス (mecha special omurise)...mecha is kind of a Japanese word for super/hella/totally but can also mean a lot in terms of quantity. Basically they called it a super special omurice, and I agreed. Pretty good.

May 21, 2009

Stuff I Look at Everyday

Stuff on the walls in my apartment...this is what happens when you're sick, I guess

A note from one of my Ookura 1st graders (now a 2nd grader), Aya. It reads: Thank you for teaching us English, Aya (Japanese often refer to themselves in the 3rd person, especially young girls) loves English!

Scroll bought in Korea featuring persimmons

Guinness poster...which is funny, because I rarely drink Guinness over here

Hanshin Tigers hat

Name tag from Non-chan's takoyaki party. Handmade, it reads "Andrew" in hiragana, one of the Japanese alphabets

Map of where the Hyogo JETs were placed with my group...imagine my disappointment when I was one of only about 10 JETs in the upper half of the prefecture. Now I love it up here.

Angels hat and Kuromi-chan mask

Note from folks at Dash, a place I hang out at fairly often. They have darts, billiards, PC games, karaoke, ping pong and a great bunch of folks. You can bring your own drinks/food in, or buy it there, and spending the night is also possible. This note reads "To Andrew, did you sleep well? Yesterday's tab comes to 5,000 yen."

Pictures of parties, Sapporo Yuki Matsuri, and my taiko group.

My shopping bag and a protection charm from Koya-san Temple in Little Tokyo, where I used to play taiko

A stocking ornament that used to have candy in it, ninja stars from the ninja trip to Mie-ken, and a name tag from my buddy Shota's BBQ...it reads Andrew in a different Japanese alphabet and is made of cardboard.

JET calendar...aiming to have one of my pictures in one these guys before I leave :)

Hospital Visit

With all the craziness surrounding the swine flu in Hyogo, I was very hesitant to go to a hospital for a cold because I figured folks would overreact. Well, today I woke up, called in and was basically told to go to the doctor's for my illness and report back whatever it was. I guess my co-workers didn't appreciate me being sick in their presence.

Went to Yanase Hospital, the same place I went when I busted my finger back in August and walked up to the counter. I was sans mask, and the lady (same one who helped me back in August) actually recoiled when I told her I had a cold and didn't have a mask. She quickly provided one, and asked me if I had a fever (no), a sore throat (no), a phlegmy cough (sometimes) and a stuffy nose (hells yes). Then she poured some hand sanitizer into my hands and asked me to sit not in the waiting area, but in the genkan, the part where people take off their shoes between the entrance and the exit. Basically all that's out there are shoe cubbies that aren't being used and wheelchairs.

So I'm out here in this area by myself while old folks are walking in, and the same lady asks if she can take my temperature. I say sure, take it, and it comes out 36.6 C (around 98 F), .1 lower than it was yesterday. She takes the results and goes back inside. 4 mintues later she comes out and asks me a series of questions:

have you done traveling recently? [Korea, Osaka and Tokyo]
have you come into contact with foreigners ? [Yes, lots of them]
are you hanging out with middle schoolers? [no]
have you been to any big sporting events lately? [no]
did I come by car today? [yes]

That last one kind of caught me off guard, but I obviously answered honestly. She then asked me to wait in my car because other patients were coming in and out rather frequently. WTF?

So I'm sitting in my car reading for about 5 minutes before she comes out and tells me it's probably ok to come back inside again...ok...This time a different lady takes my temperature with the same result, and asks me the EXACT SAME questions about my symptoms. After she's done, it's another 5 minute wait before I get called into the doctor's office.

The doctor seems nice and we're talking and I'm trying to describe where I've been, who I've been with, how I feel, and what kind of checks I've been through. I'm struggling to explain the thermal camera at Kansai Airport when he says "eigo no hou ga yokereba, douzo" or if English is better, go ahead. I'm a bit taken aback, but go ahead and describe the camera in English and the guy actually understands me! Apparently he lived in Cincinatti for 6 years and his son is a student at one of my schools. This kid speaks great English (basically the only one who I can have a conversation with) and now it all makes sense. He prescribes me some anti-biotics and sends me on my merry way.

The crazy thing about Japanese medicine is the volume. They give you a LOT of medication:

One of is to stop my cough, one for my nose, one to prevent/lower fever, and I think one to stop the phlegm. In fact, it's all explained here on this handy chart:

I also got an inventory and a cute book that lists all the medication you get in Japan. This is actually a great idea, because you use it not just for one hospital, but any hospital in the country. Good for folks like me who can't remember names of medication or what they were for: