Listen to the Rain

ae were originally planning to go visit sashagee's family in January, but her wisdom teeth removal took a lot out of her so she was down for almost a month. Recently she's recovered enough to actually travel, though, so we borrowed her parents' car and on Friday, after I finished work, I met her at a train station (she and Laila having already gone to her parents' house the previous day) and we drove down to Muncie.

We were there through Sunday and we didn't really do anything touristy or exciting. We were there to see sashagee's grandmother and mother, and that's what we did. Laila ran around her great-grandmother's house, grabbing pens and wanting to draw, playing with teacups, asking to watch Ghibli movies, while we played with her, ate some cheesecake that sashagee and her mother made, relaxed, and slept on the incredibly uncomfortable beds in the hotel room. The second day we were there, Laila was so wound up from having a fun time playing with everyone all day that she couldn't fall asleep until past 11 p.m.! And this after her first words when we got to the hotel room were "Go home" and trying to put her shoes back on.

She was definitely still glad to be home, though. Traveling is nice, but it's also nice to be home.

The most interesting thing to write about--having a three-year-old drag you away so she can make you "egg tea" is a lot of fun in the moment but about all I can write about it is what's in that sentence--was during Laila's nap on Saturday, when sashagee and I went to the nearby Minnetrista Museum to see the Bob Ross Experience.

( Happy little trees )

I asked a few people if they wanted to watch 君の名は/Your Name with me and no one could come, but I had heard such good things about it (much like Black Panther) that I wasn't willing to wait, so I watched it myself.

What an amazing movie.

Spoilers: ( Read more... )

Spare me from management's idiotic initiatives.

The temperature has finally dropped. There's a chill in the air when I leave for work in the morning, and the leaves are starting to change. The week before last it was still up to 30°C, so I'm really glad fall has arrived. And I found a relevant fall icon that combines the colors of leaves with the spookiness that everyone associates with October. All I can think of when looking that are the warnings not to come on the fair folk in their revels. It's the perfect mix.

I found an autumn poem by Ueda Chōshū too in an article about haiku linked by a friend:

砕けても
砕けてもあり
水の月
-上田聴秋

And my translation:

Though broken
And broken again by water still
The moon is there

The moon is an autumn seasonal reference (季語, kigo) for haiku. Maybe the waxing and waning symbolizes the dying of the year?

Stardew Valley is out on Switch, and while I'm not getting it there because I don't care that much about portability--usually when I'm out somewhere, I'm reading Twitter on my phone or checking my various RSS feeds rather than using that time to play games--but it has gotten me back into it on PC. I have the forest farm layout, so most of it is given over to grass for animals and fruit trees. I turn fruit into wine and jam, milk cows and make cheese, pick up eggs and make mayonnaise, and sell all the products. It's the perfect small-batch artisanal craftsmanship simulator with none of the actual hard work of craftsmanship. And living in the countryside with none of the backbiting cliquery or viciousness.

There was a post in that Japanese woman's blog I found about the countryside, since her German in-laws live in a small town where they grow grapes in the backyard. It ends with:

田舎って退屈で不便と思う人もいるかもしれませんが、私は充実した時間がゆったり流れている気がして好きなんです

"There might be people who think the countryside is boring or inconvenient, but the time is fulfilling and I like how it seems to flows in a relaxed way."

When I was in high school I just wanted to move to the big city, which is part of why I wanted to go to Penn. And now I live in Chicago, and really like it. But living in Chiyoda taught me the good parts about small towns in the country, and sometimes I miss the songs of the frogs and long walks through the fields.

One benefit of staying in a ryokan is that you get both dinner and breakfast, so after sleeping in almost until the last minute, I was awakened by schoolpsychnerd with exactly enough time to make it to breakfast after a quick shower. And such a breakfast:



We had to eat a bit quickly in order to make the ferry, and originally I thought we were going to miss the shuttle from the ryokan to the port and would have to walk. What was I thinking? This is Glorious Nippon, after all. They held the bus for us, loaded our luggage into it while we paid for the room, and then drove us down in time to catch the 8:25 ferry and the street car that was just leaving after that.

We didn't try to make the 9:40 bus after arriving at 9:35, so we popped into a 7-11 to withdraw cash and get snacks--I got a melon pan, om nom nom--and then up to the bus center, where we bought tickets and asked for the proper platform to board the bus. I thought it was eight, but I was misremembering. It was nine, like it's always been.

Also, schoolpsychnerd accidentally bought us children's tickets instead of adult tickets and we were worried for a moment, but we were being silly. This is Japan, and the ticket counter exchanged them for free. They were actually the same price, so I'm not sure why the 北部 line even offers separate tickets.

On the bus, we learned that Pokemon Go had finally gone live in Japan, causing a frantic burst of activity as tropicanaomega captured every unclaimed gym in sight.

And then, we arrived in Chiyoda.



Kaminaka-san, Hattori-san, and Sunada-san were all waiting to meet us at the bus center, and after a round of hugs (hugs! In Japan!) we started on our short tour. First we went to the Geihoku Cultural Center, new since we lived here, that had exhibits about local folk crafts like weaving and rice growing, about kagura performance, and about the festival of Mibu no Hanadaue. Then we went to Mibu itself, walking down the shōtengai where the festival takes place and ending at Mibu Jinja, where we went for hatsumōde our last year in Japan.



After that, we drove up to a viewpoint on top of a hill, and after a short walking path, we found our way to 壬生城跡 (Mibu shiroato, "the ruins of Mibu Castle"). I didn't see anything that looked remotely like a castle had ever been there, but there was a spectacular view:



After that, we went to look at our old house, still pretty nice looking and still sitting next to the abandoned twin house next to it, and and then off to Chiyoda High School! Unfortunately, due to the Japanese policy of transferring teachers after only a few years, very few of the people that schoolpsychnerd taught with were still there. There were a couple, though. Umeki-sensei, who teaches math, and Nishihara-sensei, who teaches science, and the school nurse were all there. We also ran into Koyama-san, mother of Kazu, who I wrote about in this post and who is now a high school student. We didn't talk for very long because Kaminaka-san had set us a schedule, but we looked around for a bit in the school and then continued on to the Yae-sogo Communtiy Center for lunch, where we were met by Nakamura-san, the other Hattori-san, and Bōno-san.

Lunch was amazing. They had remembered I liked sake a lot and brought two small bottles for me, one of local sake from Chiyoda and one from Saijō, where the sake festival is held every year in late August. We had conbini bentō and okonomiyaki, as well as dessert jello from somewhere. I got a grape and aloe jelly that tasted exactly like the drinks I used to get from vending machines. We chatted, and I did a lot of translating to and from Japanese, and there were only a couple times where I just brought the conversation to a halt because I couldn't think of how to express an idea. It was amazing. Why did we leave?

Oh yes. So schoolpsychnerd could go to school and fulfill her dreams. It's a good reason! And yet, when I'm here, walking around Chiyoda, speaking in Japanese in a way that I was very uncomfortable doing when I lived here the first time...

If I had moved here before knowing as much Japanese as I know now, I'd be conversationally fluent. But, well, there's nothing to do about that now. I just have to keep trying and keep studying.



And we will be back, someday. Sooner than five years.

After a three-hour meal, we had to catch the bus back to Hiroshima, so we took the taxi Kaminaka-San had chartered and packed away the hand-made pottery pieces he had made for each member of our group, including aaron.hosek, who wasn't there due to having not been in Hiroshima with us, and we got on the highway bus and started the trip back. After the trip, we walked to our hotel--not Hotel Active, sadly, because there was a weekend price spike that made it not worth staying in--but in Toyoko Inn on Heiwa-Ōdōri, which was further but not significantly so. We were scheduled to meet some old friends from our Japan days, who happened to all be here at the same time in a weird serendipity, and after we checked in that's what we set out to do, though tropicanaomega and tastee_wheat stayed behind because they were still incredibly full from lunch.

The tabe・nomihōdai was at Sōgo, not Mitsukoshi like we originally expected it would be, so it took a bit longer to get there than we thought it would. Not too long, though, and once we made our way through Sōgo to the special beer garden elevator and went up, we had a couple hours of drinks and food with friends. The food wasn't that great, but I got some nice use out of the bottle of sake that it didn't seem like anyone else was drinking from, and a lovely time talking to people I hadn't seen in years. And some Japanese practice with alwaysgenki_alwayshappy, though I think because of the beer, she forgot that I'm not that great and just launched into full native speed and I followed along as best as I could.

At ten they threw everyone out. Some people were going on to a bar called Koba and originally I was planning on joining them, but on the walk there I started getting more and more twitchy in a way that told me that it was time to go back to the hotel. So I said my goodbyes, walked back to the hotel with a friend, and read until schoolpsychnerd came back and then went to bed.

Steps taken: 14050.

Note: If you're interested in more about Chiyoda, I did a whole blog series about it here.

Mibu no Hanadaue Field
壬生の花田植 (Mibu no Hanadaue, "The rice-field-planting of Mibu," like it says in that link) is held every year in Chiyoda, and has been for over five hundred years. I wrote about it the first time we went, when a student in our English class at the community center invited us to go. There's an account of the festival and what I thought at the time in that other link, but I didn't write about a lesson that we got in Japanese indirectness, so I'll mention that now.

It was extremely hot--probably at least 35ºC--and very sunny, and Kaminaka-san asked us a couple times if we wanted to leave. Initially, we thought that he thought we were bored, so to show him that we were definitely interested (which we were), we said that we would like to move to a different place to get a better view. On the second time he asked, it was very hot and we were sweaty and tired, so we agreed that it was time to go.

Later, we realized what was really going on. He was tired of standing out in the sun, but having invited us to the festival and knowing that we hadn't seen it before, he didn't want to be the first one to say that he was done watching. Therefore, he asked us if we wanted to stay, since us saying no would give him an easy out.

We went in both 2010 and 2011, and while 2010 was hot again, 2011 was cloudy and cool, and we managed to stay for the entirety of the festival. Somewhat sadly, it turns out there was no special ending, and people just drifted away after the dancing and the planting was done. Still, I'm glad we had good weather for festival-attending, and I am glad we stayed, because we left early in both 2009 and 2010 and staying the whole time was a resolution for us in 2011.

Mibu no Hanadaue Oxen Path
As might be expected of a festival that's been going on for five centuries, the planting done during Mibu no Hanadaue is done in the traditional fashion. None of those straight rows and neatly-placed rice plants that you get from mechanically-planted fields. Instead, the field is turned by hand, using plows pulled by oxen who are done up in elaborate headdresses and wrappings. Before the actual planting starts, there's a parade down this street, where a lot of community and school groups accompany the women who sing and do the planting, the men who beat out the timing of the planting on their drums, and the oxen and their drivers.

One event that changed schoolpsychnerd's and my culinary landscape is that in 2011, we were wandering around the street looking for lunch and we found a couple selling Japanese curry out of their garage. I'm not sure if the husband was Japanese and the wife was Indonesian, it was the other way around, they were both Indonesian, or if they were both Japanese and had just had traveled to Indonesia before, but they had turmeric rice to go on the side with the curry, and it was the best カレーライス I had in my time in Japan. We haven't had it with curry rice anymore, but we make it a lot to go with chicken.

There was also a lovely tea house with a garden out back that we'd go to once a year, during Mibu no Hanadaue. We'd get the matcha, and the sweet along with it, and drink it while looking over the garden and listening to the parade outside.

Tondo Field
That's not actually the name of the field, but that's the main memory I have of it. On the right is the Yae-nishi Meeting Center, and on the left is the field where the Tondo Festival was held every year. Apparently it was a relatively new custom for the area (that link is to the festival held in Onomichi), but it got increasingly elaborate as we attended. The first year it was just zenzai and sake and pickles, and by the third year we had wild boar shot by one of the farmers for getting into his fields, and fish, and onigiri, and it was basically a feast. I wrote about that Tondo Festival here.

That wasn't the only event we attended there, though. The Meeting Center had spring and fall talent competitions, and we participated twice. The first time, I had a cold and couldn't actually perform, so schoolpsychnerd played a guitar and sang, though I don't remember what the piece she did was. The second time, we did "Scarborough Fair" together, and then I sang "Skibbereen" a cappella. We never got any comments on them, and I still wonder what our neighbors thought of me singing what's essentially a dirge at a talent competition.

During one summer, we went to a 皆で手作り遊び大会, which translate as "Let's Everyone Hand-Make Toys Together Gathering!" That was where I learned that I'm hopeless at origami--I tried to make a frog, and while I got halfway done I couldn't get the legs to come together--and where a little girl seemed incensed that I had long hair and kept demanding to know whether I was a man or not. I assured her that I was, and she gave me a very suspicious look. I wonder what became of her?

Lake Yachiyo
In Japanese, 八千代湖. We drove by this place many times, but we went here once, the last year that we lived in Japan. During the spring, when the cherryblossoms were in full bloom, we packed a lunch and took it to Lake Yachiyo, and we ate lunch by the waters and then walked on the paths under the cherry trees, just schoolpsychnerd and me. I did like the other ohanami parties we went to--I especially liked the one in Shobara where we rented a rowboat--but that walk by Lake Yachiyo is one of my favorite ohanami memories.


And that's it! If people liked that, I can do another series for places in Hiroshima, or even other cities like Tokyo or Kyoto. I certainly have plenty to say if people want to hear it.

The Corner Store
We didn't realize what this was for probably the first year that we lived in Chiyoda. It looks like it's called きもの ("kimono"), so we thought it was a clothing store or something, but it's actually きもと ("kimoto") with a stylized と. It wasn't until much later that we went and realized it was a grocery store with mostly packaged stuff but a small produce and butcher's section. They also had umeshu by the carton. It wasn't as good as the umeshu that our neighbor brought by, which looked like some kind of filthy water with plums floating in the plastic jar it was sealed in but which tasted amazing, but it was pretty good.

That store is also where schoolpsychnerd ran into someone who claimed that he had been to Europe and he could guess any foreigner's nationality. schoolpsychnerd invited him to try, and his first guess was "Swiss!" His second guess was German, and his third guess was British, after which schoolpsychnerd told her she was American.

The response to all this from the shopkeeper was to the effect of, "How can you tell? They all look the same to me."

Poplar Conbini
There's two examples of what's usually called カタカナ英語 (katakana eigo, basically "Japanified English"). "Conbini" is an abbreviation of the Japanese pronunciation of Convenience (like Spanish, there's no V sound in Japanese) and it took me an inordinate amount of time to realize that the leaf symbol next to ポプラ (popura, "Poplar") meant it was the tree. The chain's website here here, though the usual warning about Japanese website design applies.[1]

We'd drive or walk down there when we needed a snack. Unlike America, Japanese convenience stores are actually worth going to. I mean, it's still not healthy, but it's not bottom-of-the-barrel packaged crap. They've got fresh-daily riceballs, bread from the Takaki Bakery just down the road (turn left and click down the Yae Bypass a ways if you want to see that), pre-assembled bentō with fresh rice from the conbini added, and so on. To this day, I still occasionally get the urge to head down to a convenience store for a snack before I remember that I've been to American convenience stores and very little there even looks appetizing, much less tasty.

2019 Edit: Oh no, it went out of business. I hope whoever lives there now has a good conbini they can go to.

The Ubiquitous Pachinko Parlor
That giant king there is one of the town pachinko parlors. Yes, one of them. If you turn the view left and look at the empty field next to the huge parking lot, there used to be another one there. The third one was there when we moved in, but closed and was demolished while we were living there. Apparently, the reason pachinko parlors are so common is that they're used for 天下り (amakudari, literally "descent from heaven"), the practice of public officials retiring and taking positions in organizations that they gave favorable considerations toward while they were government employees. Blatant corruption, basically. The associations that run pachinko parlors are owned mostly by former police officers, which makes the yakuza/pachinko connection even more unsettling.

To the right is a small ramen stand that we'd go too occasionally when we wanted a quick bowl of ramen. It was run by a roughly 150-year-old man who was quite possibly the friendliest person I've ever met. I think his advanced age meant we all looked the same to him as well, because he'd keep bringing out plastic toys and little trinkets for schoolpsychnerd when we ate there, as though she was getting a ramen happy meal.

We also ran into him at a festival one day running an unagi stand. He was a man of many culinary talents.

Funky Tonky
This is almost certainly the saddest picture I'll post in this series, because that blank wall and empty storefront used to be Funky Talky. I wrote about the second time I ever went here, and it was probably the restaurant we went to most often in Chiyoda, usually going twice or three times a month. I say Tonky instead of Talky, which is what the little English on the menu said, because the inside was done up like a honky-tonk bar, with round tables, a carved wooden railing, a bar with a bunch of alcohol, and so on.

It was run by a woman and her son--we never got their names--and she did a lot to make us feel at home. Her mother brought her a ton of vegetables to use in her restaurant and sometimes she couldn't use them all before they would go bad, so she'd give them to us. I mostly got the yakiniku pilaf, which you can somewhat approximate by going to Sunshine Cafe in Andersonville and getting the Nanbanyaki, but it doesn't have the fried rice with bits of meat that yakiniku pilaf had. They also had a bunch of versions of American food, like the american hamburger that I mentioned above.

The sad part is that March of the last year we were there, right after the 東日本大震災, we went to go to dinner at Funky Tonky to find it closed. There was a note on the door, thanking people for coming, with another message below that I couldn't read at the time. I didn't think to take a picture and translate it later, because I thought it might be temporary closed. But it never reopened, and we never saw the owner or her son again. To this day, I have no idea why it closed.

I wonder how she's doing, and if her son ever put that French sommelier training he got to use elsewhere?

Iwata Izakaya
This is one I don't have a ton of memories of, but I'm including it for a couple reasons. The first is another example of how in small towns, shops often hide in the most innocuous of places. That's a restaurant, with houses on its side of the street and a lumber shop across the street. We passed this place dozens of times without realizing it was anything special until schoolpsychnerd's jūdō club had an enkai there, and she called and invited me towards the end.

Izakaya are basically tapas bars, where the focus is on both eating and drinking. We mostly went to them for the food, though I'd occasionally get some umeshu (I really, really love umeshu), and Iwata had some great dishes. The main one I remember is 豚キムチ (buta kimuchi, "Pork and kimchi"), which was served all mixed together with these scooped rice cracker chips to pick it up and eat it. It was amazing. They also had 串焼き (kushiyaki, "Fried foods on a stick"), rice dishes, お茶漬け...all kinds of great stuff. I wish there were an izakaya to go to in Chicago, but as near as I can tell we just have upscale ramen restaurants.


[1]: Japanese web design is strongly influenced by the early availability of internet on mobile phones in Japan, so aesthetics are mostly based on optimizing for low-bandwidth phone connections even though smart phones are now common there. Packing tons of text in, no white space, bright-colored images with high contrast to be visible on 256-color screens, and so on.

I've wanted to make a post like this for a while, but I've always been stymied before because I didn't think of using my phone to take pictures everywhere until about halfway through my time living in Japan, and even then I didn't typically take pictures of daily life. Everything you do all the time seems ordinary even if other people wouldn't think so, after all. I could have used Google maps, but the only places the picture vans had gone were the major thoroughfares, and even then a lot of the major side roads hadn't been explored at all.

Today, I looked on Google maps and found that Chiyoda had been thoroughly mapped by Google Streeview, even to the point of a lot of the single-car roads leading to nooks and crannies all over! So here, I present a lot of the places I remember and my memories of them, with Streetview links so you can see them yourself.

You'll have to forgive the constant shifting between overcast and sunny in the pictures, but on the other hand, it does a good job representing Japanese weather.

Home Sweet Home
We lived in that house for three years. The discolored one on the left is abandoned and had been abandoned for years before we got there, but ours was in great condition. It looks like a cement block on the outside, but the inside is all tatami and wood floors, sliding panels, shōji screens, separate bathroom and toilet, and all the other elements of a traditional Japanese home.

It was subsidized by the Kitahiroshima Board of Education, so we got a huge bargain on the price--monthly rent was 170,000円, which was around $200 at the time and is more like $160 now. That's a big part of the reason we were able to save so much money and also why we never moved, even in the winter when it got incredibly cold--most Japanese houses are uninsulated, and ours had concrete walls filled with sand so it was even worse than usual--or the summer when it was muggy and hot.

We had holes in our shōji screens for a while before we learned where to buy the supplies to repair them, so our house enjoyed brief fame among schoolpsychnerd's students as the creepy house.

A Picturesque Path
If you've ever seen those various postcards or pictures or anime sequences where children are walking along raised paths through the rice fields, while cicadas buzz or crows caw, then you recognize that picture. That was the route that schoolpsychnerd took every day to get to school. Or at least, to Chiyoda's schools--she was at three other schools on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but since they aren't in Chiyoda and I never went there they won't feature here.

That route is also the path we always took whenever we went walking toward the town center or whenever we had to drive anywhere. It's about as wide as our car was, so it's a good thing we never ran into a car going the opposite way. There's a kind of car in Japan called a kei car that were narrower than normal and better designed for urban roads, but we had a Mazda Familia (which we affectionately called "Uncle Enzo"), so we sometimes had to be careful on the smaller rural roads.

Minimalist Intersection
This is what I mean about small roads. This is where we turned left after going down the path between the rice fields. It seems ridiculously narrow, and it was ridiculously narrow, but it's built for left-hand turns so we got used to it pretty quickly. If we were going to the high school, then we kept on straight ahead.

On the right at the side of the road, you can see an open rain gutter. These ran along the roads all over town, filling the air with the constant sound of flowing water even on hot summer days. Sometimes they had stone plates put over them with small holes to let the water in, but in Chiyoda at least, they were usually uncovered. We called them "gaijin traps."

Local Okonomiyaki
When we first moved to Chiyoda, this building was a bakery, but even though there was a sign out on the main thoroughfare and some of schoolpsychnerd's students bought bread from there, we never managed to get there when it was open because it usually opened early and closed early. The one time we arrived during posted hours, it wasn't open.

About halfway through our time in Chiyoda, though, the family who lived there (shop/house combos are very common in Japanese towns) converted their bakery into an okonomiyaki restaurant where they made okonomiyaki to order. We'd select from the menu--no noodles, plus dried squid and kimchi for me, mochi and cheese for schoolpsychnerd--and then they'd make it on the grill in view and bring it over to us. It was amazing, and writing this reminded me how much it annoys me that I can't get good okonomiyaki anywhere in Chicago.

Local Brewery and Shop
I don't have many memories associated with this place, but I'm including it because we walked past it a lot and because we'd get gifts of sake from the various people we worked with--schoolpsychnerd's co-workers, our students, and so on--and a lot of them came from here. The shop is actually quite small and you can see most of it through the door there. The building is primarily the brewery.

And yes, that is a booze vending machine on the right.

Chiyoda High School
I don't have nearly as many memories of this place as schoolpsychnerd does, but it was still kind of the center of our lives in the town, along with the two English conversation classes we taught. I'd walk by it a lot, we'd see schoolpsychnerd's students and their parents, around town, and I'd go to the festivals they'd hold there, like Sports Day or the Culture Festival.

If you've seen any school anime, you might recognize the building. This is because all Japanese schools look basically the same, and we were able to instantly recognize them no matter where we went. The main building is on the left, and the building on the right was a theatre and gym.

Next time, more pastoral memories!

The first weekend in December was the JLPT/日本語能力試験, which was filled with just as much bullshit as I expected it to be. schoolpsycherd and I took level 4, which we figured that living in Japan for three years would be able to prepare us for. And it...kind of was, in a sense. Our lack of formal schooling (well, mine, schoolpsycherd did take some classes at university) was a bit obvious. She thinks she passed, I think I failed, mainly because of the listening section. As part of the bullshit I mentioned, the listening section repeated absolutely nothing at all, requiring you to maintain laser-like focus for 35 minutes and preventing you from taking more than a few seconds to think about the answers. There was ample writing space provided, but I quickly learned that it was useless because if you took the time to use it you were already missing the next question (unfortunately, I learned this through experience). The rest of the test was also bullshit, but it's the bullshit inherent to language, like a bunch of words that have slight differences in meaning or all look the same, such as the difference between 料理, 科埋, 料埋, and 科理 (though that would be a better example if those were all real words, which they aren't. At least, not in Japanese. The first one is Japanese, the other three are Chinese).

We plan to take Level 3 next year whether we pass or fail this one. Even if I did fail, I was of an appropriate level where there wouldn't be much point in retaking it. That'll give me a year to study for the new level, too, which should hopefully be enough.

For Thanksgiving, schoolpsycherd and I took the train down to Kentucky to visit her family. We spent Thanksgiving Day with her father and his girlfriend, and the day after Thanksgiving with her mother and her fiance. Despite our initial misgivings, it actually went really well, and it gave me plenty of time to write (I think I banged out the last 7000 words of my NaNo while we were there). Both dinners were delicious. Dinner at her father's house was a more traditional Thanksgiving dinner, and her mother's fiance cooked a smaller one but made me a very rare filet mignon, which was incredibly tasty. Also, there were no awkward moments, shouting matches, or anything that we were worried about, though a big portion of that can probably trace back to her mother's refusal to enter her father's house, instead waiting for us out in the car. Still, it was what it was, and it worked out okay.

Last weekend, we went to visit melishus_b in Seattle! I had been to Seattle before, since my aunt and uncle live there, but schoolpsycherd had never been (except to the airport, which hardly counts), so we spent two days in Seattle, one day at melishus_b's house planning (and later throwing) a party, and then one day in the rainforest on the Olympian Peninsula. That last bit was probably my favorite, since I've never been to anything like it before. schoolpsycherd and I went to a tropical rainforest when we were in Singapore, but that's obvious not the same as a temperate one. Anyway, before we went to the rainforest we went to a little town called Poulsbo, which is the kind of place that the word "quaint" was invented to describe. Lots of little shops with tasty treats, including some of the best chocolate I've ever eaten, and some places where we stocked up on food before heading off to the rainforest. There's a ton of rainforest photos up on my Facebook.

In Seattle, we went to a little local bar the first night and did the tourist thing the second night, mostly around Pike's Market. We also went to the Museum of Glass on Saturday afternoon before the party. All in all, it was neat, and I'm looking forward to when melishus_b gets time off so we can show her around Chicago. (^_^)

And finally, something random, for those who've played Morrowind. The whole thing resolves around the Heart of Lorkhan--the disappearance of the Dwemer, Dagoth Ur's plans with Akulakhan, the Tribunal's power, the final battle takes place in the heart chamber, you spend a huge part of the game looking for the tools the Dwemer used to affect the heart, etc.

Now, listen to the Nerevar Rising, Morrowind's main theme. The theme that accompanies you throughout the entire game. Listen to the drums that kick in in the beginning and continue underneath the melody for the whole song.

What do they sound like?

(I <3 Elder Scrolls so much).

So, we were planning on going to kaitenzushi for my birthday, but it never actually happened because it was closed. Why, I have no idea. The hours on the door said that it was open from 1100 to 2100. There was a paper taped to the inside of the door, with something on it about May 25 and a bunch of other kanji I couldn't read that might have explained why it was closed, but... We thought it might have been closed on weekends, and schoolpsychnerd confirmed that with Yamasaki-san, so we tried going back today...except it's still closed. Now I'm wondering if it was closed for renovations or something? No idea...

I'm also annoyed because we were going to go to Funky Talky instead, but that was closed too, so we ended up getting sushi from the sushi counter at the supermarket and eating that. It was about as expensive as eating out would be and we still have leftovers for tomorrow. The yakiniku restaurant we went to instead of kaitenzushi was open (we saw people going in), but since that was the last place we went, we decided not to go there.

I really wish that restaurants would post their hours on door--or, for the ones that do, I wish they'd actually be open during those hours :-p

A warning--this entry is ridiculously long, since it has all the entries I would have made over the past three weeks. As such, I'm LJ-cutting it. I'd like to think it's neat and interesting, but...well, it's lengthly. Individual entries have been separated to prevent the "Wall of Text crits you for 9999, you die" problem.

( Long entry is looooooooooooooooooooooooooooong )
( Footnotes )

Kitahiroshima (creative name, ain't it?). Sadly, I know almost nothing about it. It looks like it's only been a city since the big city consolidation a few years ago. It's a bit country-esque (1000 sq. km, but only 29K people), but it's only 20 or 30 miles from Hiroshima proper, so that's not so bad. The actual distance depends on where in Kitahiroshima we get put (1000 sq. km is a pretty large possible area).

Sadly, I can't find much transportation information in English.