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名古屋で人生を楽しむ

I know that everyone's brother and themselves are writing the same kind of noise on their blogs, but I would like to express my feelings about the election results.

I didn't realize before how much I had been obsessed. Not just about this election, but about GWB and how he has taken this country down from some of its greatest heights to some of its gloomiest depths in such a short time. It had saddened and hardened me and has really changed my life for the last 8 years. I mean, he's the whole reason I'm here in Japan. I would never have felt the urge to leave the country for a significant amount of time if it weren't for the disgrace, sadness, and shame (yes, I'm not afraid to say it "shame"!) that I have felt about my country for so long. But at the same time, I have been possessed with following its spiraling downfall for all these years.

I haven't talked about it much, but I've really been a news junkie. I don't know why, but over all this time, I've had to find out what's the next way that guy was going to drag our name, our tradition, our pride, through the dirt. Going to war for fatuous reasons, excusing torture of fellow human beings, and irresponsible tax cuts were just the headlines. I have been obsessed with finding out every little detail of this downfall. There's been some sense of duty in finding out every little mistake. I was unable to go to sleep without listening to NPR or the BBC to hear what it was.

Then when this election season began, I really started tightening up. Hillary was not the answer, and definitely not McCain. But there was a new hope on the horizon. Could this really happen? Was there really a light in the tunnel? There was hope, sure, but was it real? There were too many disappointments along the way to be optimistic. But it's happened!

I feel as if now there is hope again for America. Obama is not at all perfect, but now we're, finally, finally, finally, back on the right track. I don't have to follow this politics stuff anymore. We're in good hands now. I can devote my energy to thinking about my own life now. Instead of feeling a need to listen to the news in English all the time, I can finally start living in Japan, immerse myself in this great country.

So, no, I'm not coming back to the States anytime soon. (Although it was a very negative reason that it began, I'm still very happy with my life here now and the direction that it's taken - I will continue here). My current visa doesn't expire until 2011 and it will take at least until then to get my Japanese up to a point where I'd be comfortable in leaving.

This has been a completely rambling post, and I apologize for its incoherence. Such a great feeling of relief and ecstasy, it may take a few days to stop walking on air. Things are looking up, and that's the only direction to go.

Thank you, American people! Thanks, Barack Obama! You've got a long hard, almost hopeless task before you, but there's no other way I'd rather have it at this point. Godspeed!

That's all for now...

:)

Last month I took a really short trip to America, and here are the pictures. It really feels as if it was just a dream. And although I did seem to take a lot of pictures, there's a lot missing from this photo journal. Not enough people pictures.

Tahoe 2008

NYC 2008

SF 2008

Woo hoo! Summer's over!

Today was glorious. It rained all day long, and the high was only 17C(62F)! It finally seems that the days of the sauna are long gone. Soon, I'll need a light jacket to go outside! And it does seem that this day happened a lot sooner than last year. But I do have to keep my guard up, as I know October still has the potential for some sweaty days ahead. But I'll be enjoying this stuff while it lasts.

I realize it's been quite a while since I've posted here, and I guess I apologize for that. Truth is, real life has been much more interesting than anything online, so that's where I've been focusing my energies. But today, I did feel compelled for some reason to write about this egg restaurant.

For the past year, almost every single week, I've patronized this omuraisu place near my office. Omuraisu (オムライス) means "omelet rice". It's a type of youshoku, which means Western-style cooking. I believe it came to Japan during the Meiji restoration. Anyway, it's basically flavored rice (usually with ketchup and maybe some onions) with an omelet on top of it. It's really great (and unhealthy) comfort food. By the way, there's a lot of other great comfort food in Japan that Americans probably don't know much about, like karaage (fried chicken), ramen, and curry rice.

The point is, I've decided to call it off with the egg place.

Now, the omuraisu has been consistently fantastic. Just off the top of my head, here are some of the dishes: "Indokuriimu Omuraisu", which is a nicely spiced rice with a curry sauce and a little cream, "Napoli Omuraisu", a tomato-based sauce with maybe a little nasu, "Hokkaido Kuriimu Omuraisu", with potatoes, corn, and a demi-glace sauce, "Amerika Omuraisu" with steak and a brown sauce, "Japan All-Star Omuraisu" with oroshi(grated daikon) and some other Japanese-style toppings. With the A, B, C, or D lunch (which run from about 850 yen to 1030 yen), you also get soup, salad, and a juice of your choice. I personally rotated between the choices of lychee, guava, mango, and pineapple.

And the service was exemplary, even for Japan. At Japanese restaurants, you get accustomed to being waited on hand and foot, so it takes something really special to be noticed. But "Egg For You" go out of their way. For example, whenever a customer would leave, a staff member is sure to shout out "Okyakusama kaeri desu!" (A customer is leaving!), and the entire staff sincerely bellows "Arigatou gozaimasu!" (Thank you very much!).

But there have always been a few things that really annoyed me about the place. Number one, without question, is the music. For this entire year, they have played the exact same CD every single day. (I was hoping it maybe depended on what day of the week it was, but I've been there on different days and it's always the same.) Here are some of the songs on that CD: Beach Boys - "Kokomo", "Pocketful of Paradise", Orleans - "Still the One", and some other reggae-style songs (but no real reggae). Anyway, it's not that bad to listen to once, but every single week? too much. But the real thing is, I can't see how people can work there day after day after day. I would blow my brains out if I had to listen to the same 20 songs over and over for over a year. I think that's why the staff, as polite as they are, really seem like unthinking robots. (Hmm, I wonder if that's why the staff at Mujirushi also seem similarly soulless...) To tell the truth, in that year, there's only one staff that's stayed that whole time, so that might be a reason for the high turnover rate.

But today was the last straw. There were tiny, oh so inconsequential straws that broke the camel's back. One was, to be sure, not the restaurant's fault, but it was annoying enough - the guy in the table next to me was chain-smoking through the entire meal. Just a big turnoff, no doubt about it. But the final nail in the coffin was the water. I have a very set routine (surprised?) when I come into the place - after eating, I do my little Nintendo DS kanji practice for about half an hour. So I always require an extra glass of water (or two). Up until now, they've come completely unsolicited to refill my empty garasu. But today, even though they were not at all busy, no one even walked by the table to see if I needed anything.

Sorry, Egg For You. It's been good while it lasted. But it's over.

This week is the Obon holiday in Japan. And although it's not an official government holiday, pretty much all non-service businesses shut down during this time. So on one of the days I went to Odawara (小田原) in Kanagawa prefecture to take part in a ceremony for this holiday. Here are some pictures:

小田原 2008-08-15

On Saturday, the hottest day of the year so far all across Japan, I went to Gifu city, about a 25 minute train ride from Nagoya, to watch one of the most famous annual fireworks displays in the country - the Nagaragawa fireworks. We got there early enough and sweat a lot in the hot sun, but it was sure worth it for 1 hour and 45 minutes of one of the most memorable pyrotechnics exhibitions I've seen. Probably about five times during the display there were outbursts worthy of grand finales in most of the fireworks shows I'd seen before in my life. I know the quality of the photographs aren't the best, but the movies, if you can download them, hopefully begin to give you a little taste.

長良川の花火

Here are the links to the videos：

(And by the way, if these files are too big for you to download, I did put a few of them on youtube：1, 2, 3,
4.)

(8.9M)	(28M)
(16M)	(20M)
(25M)	(27M)
(13M)

Today I finally got the results back from the KanjiKentei I took last month. I was really pleased to have passed both level 7 and level 6! It's kind of funny, but these are tests on the level of 4th and 5th graders, but, dammit, I'm pretty proud of it. And so now it's off to, in October, level 5 and maybe 4, and in December the JLPT (Japanese Level Proficiency Test, or something like that). I'm going for level 2 in that one, but that will be much more of a challenge, I think. Anyway, they do a really great job of making you feel good with your accomplishments with the nice certificates and also very well detailed assessments of the tests.

The building next door just caught fire on the second floor. I live on the third floor, and the source of the fire was like 50m from my apartment. But in reality, apart from the loud noises and the fire engines, not too much to go on about. I'd post pictures, but I didn't have my phone with me when I evacuated (stupidly). Not that much to see. Black smoke billowing out of the window(strong burning tire smell), getting really strong, then changing to light white smoke and you think it's under control. But then some pretty big flames for about a minute before they were doused. It doesn't appear that anyone was hurt, but the Shop 99 downstairs got drenched.
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OK, after posting, I did get a few pictures. They're not very good though. Sorry about the bad quality. Maybe I'll add some more tomorrow morning if I wake up early enough.

火事

I haven't written in quite a while for many reasons. One is that I've been spending a lot of time studying for the Kanken, or Kanji Kentei, or Japanese Chinese character proficiency test. Maybe that doesn't make sense to some people, anyway, to put it simply, much of Japanese is written in Chinese characters, so it's good to have proficiency in them if you want to learn Japanese.

A few months ago, I signed up online to take this test today. I actually took two tests, level 7 and level 6. The highest and most difficult is level one, the easiest is level 10. The tests are exactly one hour long, and I'm sure that this is an experience that Japanese go through untold times in their lives. This experience was quite interesting. For the first test, there were 100 test takers. Three of us were adults, the rest were all very young children, probably around 8-11 years old. In the second test, there were 80 test takers, and two of us adults. As you might imagine, it's a little humbling to have an eight-year-old child finish a test 20 minutes ahead of you when you're struggling to finish in time.

One nice thing about these tests is that they allow you to take the question sheets home with you, so you can check and see how you did right away. I'm pretty confident about my level 7 test, and even my level 6 test, I think I got enough answers correct. However, it might depend on if I wrote neatly enough and my characters were well-formed enough to be marked right. We'll see. Anyways, next time, in October, I'll at least take level 5 for sure, and maybe level 4. I am looking forward to the time when I can take the higher levels when there might be more adults taking the test. Anyway, if anyone's interested, I scanned my test papers, and you can see them here:

Level 7 part 1
Level 7 part 2
Level 6 part 1
Level 6 part 2

Went back to Tokuzo in Imaike last night to see Bob Log 3. Hadn't seen him since, I don't know, 2002 or so in SF (at Bimbo's). He's exactly as I remembered, although with the smaller club it was a little better view. Plus there were three other bands, all pretty memorable, although the third one, ハッチハッチェル・バンド (Hachihacher Band? I'm not sure what it means) was pretty memorable. They had us all singing a song about monkeys and gorillas at the end of their set.

Dang but this camera takes crappy photos for the most part, doesn't it?