I'm doing it all out of order, aren't I? Oh well. I have an apartment now! It's completely empty, and only a little bit bigger than my Japan apartment (~516 sq. ft.), but I have one! It's part of a house (but separate), and the landlady is really nice. I feel really satisfied with this place.
Hasty pictures are here, on one of the old blogs.
Tonight is a very Whedonesque evening.
I was watching How I Met Your Mother, which stars Alyson Hannigan, and Tom Lenk (who looks kinda creepy these days as a brunette) shows up as a barista at a local coffee shop. (They were both on Buffy.) Some guy dates that woman from Firefly (Morena Baccarin), and then I see a commercial for Drive, which has Nathan Fillion (also from Firefly) in it. Then we change the channel and watch 24, which has D.B. Woodside as the president. (He was a principal on Buffy.) And while I can think of exactly one of you (hi L!) that would be impressed that I remembered these people, I'm still very proud of myself.
From the wikipedia article about ochazuke:
In Kyoto, ochazuke is known as bubuzuke. When a Kyoto native asks if a guest wants to eat bubuzuke, it really means that the person has overstayed and is being politely asked to leave.
It's somewhere between day 5 and day 6. Yesterday I bought a wireless card, so now I'm back on my own computer. Hooray internet!
I really like it here. There are a million more buses to take, but so far, manageable. Japan prepared me well for this. I had an awesome sandwich yesterday from a bakery. I went for a hike in Discovery Park with G's brother. I'll share more, but it's 3am, and I just wanted to take advantage of having internet bedside. Yay!
But I just realized something interesting, that of course must be shared.
I recently bought a pair of pointy heels for interviews, and I think I've finally broken them in. However, I can't decide if I stretched the leather, or if I realigned the bones in my feet. Gross, huh?
I have a cousin who's 17. We're myspace friends. She has "Crash Into Me" by the Dave Matthews Band playing on her page. She was 6 when that album came out, and 8 or 9 when I got into the band. I'm grateful she's got decent taste in music, but it sure is weird.
Read more...I'm going up to Seattle on Wednesday, so things will be quiet here. No job prospects, I'm just going. One-way, but mostly because you can get cheap one-way tickets with Southwest.
I am currently the following:
[Heads up, this entry is full of Japan stuff.]
To balance out the mediocre curry restaurant, today was also an Asian food store bonanza. We went to Nijiya, Mitsuwa, and Ranch 99 in search of dashi (soup stock) ingredients (the usual dried shiitake mushrooms, dried sardines, and kombu (dried kelp)) and udon flour (which doesn't seem to exist down here, I just got a high-gluten wheat flour instead). I also helped my dad pick out some nodoame (throat-soothing candy, not quite cough drops). He's pretty into it. We also found one of our favorite candies ever, the fizzy Mitsuya cider ones. My dad's a Big Fan. He bought three bags. Awesome. Also grabbed a box of the kurogo pocky, which is full of five kinds of black things, but I can only recognize two. Any exciting new pocky flavors in Japan I should keep an eye out for? I didn't check for the weird kitkats, but those weren't my favorite. Fruit parfait-flavored? Sakura-flavored? Green tea-flavored? Don't miss 'em.
I saw the conditioner I used in Japan. Twice as expensive. Dammmmit. All the other ones--Lux and a few others I recognized--were pretty close to Japan prices.
I also bought a Kateigaho magazine, which I still don't approve of, but it had an article on Konpira-san, so I had to get it. Stupid expensive though. The American subscription price isn't that bad, but I put down almost 20 bucks on a single issue. Ugh.
For people who haven't seen a Kateigaho magazine before, it's a beautiful, glossy magazine about Japanese arts and culture. While there have been some really fascinating articles about woodwork, textiles, and uhm, other stuff, they're fond of putting geisha on the cover. The guilt I feel while reading it is the same feeling I get when I read a women's fashion magazine.
Tonight the dashi stuff is soaking, tomorrow we're having udon! With real (frozen) Sanuki udon! It's packaged by Shirakiku (nationwide brand), so I doubt it was even made in Kagawa, but still, Hooray!
There's really nothing special about Curry House (a Japanese curry chain restaurant), so I'm not going to write a long review. The curry was soupy, not much curry spice. Croquettes were small and disturbingly orange. And no pickled onions. I'm pretty sure I've been to the LA branch before I went to Japan, but it didn't leave me with any standout memories.
There were plenty of Japanese people there, the staff spoke Japanese, and the menu was bilingual. But overall, I wasn't impressed. It even made me miss the You-me Town Kirin Curry.
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