Horse, it's what's for dinner

Yeah, you read that right. It's amazing what you can get away with when PETA isn't breathing down your neck. This post will partially be dedicated to the weird food I've eaten, and was inspired by the fact that I ate HORSE last night. On top of that, it was raw. Yup, horse sashimi. And I'm sure there are some making a weird face, or in stunned disbelief (I'm looking at you, Tamara), but hey, don't knock it 'till you try it. To be fair, eating horse is rare in Japan, it's not as if you can find it in every grocery store or on the menu at the local restaurant. My host dad, as per usual, has the connections, and while he was in Kagoshima(which is apparently semi-famous for the stuff) on business, he had some sent back to the house. It's just like pigs, cows, etc. where they raise the horses specifically for the purpose of being eaten, so it's not as if I'm gnawing on the tough muscle of some Triple Crown thoroughbred. Besides the chunks of raw horse meat, there were also chunks of fat, which after dipping in a little soy sauce, are eaten straight up. I could only handle one of those after I felt my arteries hardening from eating pure fat. That's a curious thing about Japanese people, their motto is the more fat, the better. ...It's amazing how they manage to stay so thin. In America, you hear a decent bit amount lean meat and whatnot, but that is considered less preferrable here. Beyond the horse meat, which was pretty tasty with a little soy sauce, I've had more beef in the past 3 weeks that I've probably consumed my entire life. And to a certain extent, I'm developing a taste for it. Case in point, I went to a yakiniku (grilled meat) restaurant with my host family about 10 days ago. The idea of these places is that the server brings you a plate o' raw meat, and you cook it yourself on little grill embedded in the table. It just so happens that my host dad is friends with the owner (again, his connections are insane) so we got what he called (saabisu) aka 'service' or 'the special treatment.' For appetizers we had beef sashimi. Yup, raw chunks o' beef. This was followed by raw cow liver, yet another thing I never thought I'd be eating. Now I'm not going to come back to America and start downing raw beef. A) Japan is draconian about preventing mad cow disease. B) The owner was giving us all the choice parts of the cow. After that, plate after plate of meat was brought in, along with rice, soup, veggies...the table was completely crammed with dishes. Quite the satisfying meal. I may or may not have already mentioned that awhile ago I had eel innards, etc. Anyway, enough about crazy food.
I saw Kabuki about two weeks ago, which was a great experience. Since the performance was going to be some 5 hours long, with the longest break being 30 min, a bunch of us exchange students decided to grab something to eat (and drink, of course) beforehand. So after eating some maguro donburi (tuna and rice, basically) and downing my fair share of sake, I headed to the theatre with the gang. The kabuki was loooong. Certainly interesting and I'm quite glad I went and had the cultural experience and all that, but I was definitely nodding off during the final play, which was 2hrs. 15min. long. We were up in the nosebleed section, but so were a couple of old guys who probably about the only two in the theatre to shout the actors' house names at climatic points in the play (or really whenever it seemed.) This is an established practice, so they weren't being rude, rather they were adding to the Kabuki atmosphere. Those two guys just sounded cool, and made it more interesting, so they get a big thumbs up. After the play, all the exchange students were taken on a tour below the stage, which normally isn't done (ahh, the perks of being a foreigner), and that was really cool. The guy explained some of the special names given to stage parts. The platform that lifts the actors to stage level from underneath is called a 'snapping turtle' because when it stops the actors' heads bob up and down a bit, apparently like a snapping turlte. Another one of the areas was nicknamed 'hell' etc. I have some pictures of that, but I forgot my USB cable, and these computers don't have SD card slots, so it'll have to wait.
Happy Halloween!

Birthday fun part one

Ahoy hoy,
So I definitely have two mid-terms and a speech this week, so how am I spending my time? By updating of course. This won't be quite so long however. I decided to get some folks together for a birthday shindig, and what I initially thought was going to be a smaller gathering quickly ballooned when word spread through my Japanese class. We ended up with a healthy majority of the 18 total students in the class, which made it all the more fun. We pretty much went with the standard course of action for 'going out' in Nagoya, which entails heading to Sakae, the party/entertainment/business hub of Nagoya, going to a pub of sorts (izakaya) and then heading to karaoke. We ended up hitting a place called Murasaki (which means purple...so remember that word Courtney!) and fittingly all the employee of the place are in purple garb. We had a good dozen or so people, and the thing about izakaya is that you order a bunch of little dishes and appetizers and pass them around the table. Everyone splits the evenly, no matter how much you ate/didn't eat, drank/didn't drink. I don't mind the sharing the bill thing, but I always leave these pubs still hungry. That whole passing the food idea is good in theory since you get to try a lot of different stuff, but it fails to satisfy my hunger...I really need a Snickers right now. The mixed drinks are super sweet, which is to my liking, but seriously doubt there is anything above a homeopathic level of alcohol in those things. I wouldn't have felt a thing if hadn't been for Aki who got down to business and ordered some sake. I have made this revelation...sake MUST be warm when you drink it. It seriously changes the flavor and how it feels going down. So Jason, Voss, you really ought to try that out if you haven't yet. I really can't stand the stuff cold, but it's decent when warm. Again, the whole bill sharing thing...I felt kind of bad because one of my classmates Sara(h) is vegetarian (hardcore, too, no cheese, etc.) so she hardly ate anything and still ended up paying close to equal that of everyone else...but that 's how it is done in Japan, plus my sympathy for vegetarians is somewhat lacking.
After that we headed to KaraokeJoyJoy, namely becuase that place is cheap, even when you do nomihoudai, which is a fun little practice where you get unlimited drinks during your time there. The only catch is the glass is kind of small and you have to go downstairs to the lobby desk to get alcholic drinks. But again, these didn't seem to pack much of a punch; they only served to satiate my sweet tooth. It is somewhat surprising to see what songs get into the books and which don't. For instance, they have the Power Rangers Theme Song, some stuff from West Side Story, even a song by Mest, but they lack Yellowcard and other bands that were relatively popular compared to some of the more obscure songs in there. I can't think of more examples now, but trust me.
After the karaoke we stopped at a local arcade to take purikura. It's basically a photo booth where you can add a bunch of crazy clip art and text to the photos afterward. I have no way of loading these up, although they turned out pretty crazy. I'll just have to show them to you when I get back...if I don't lose them, that is. They are tiny!!
Then on Sunday, my actual birthday, there was a small local festival. We gathered as a neighborhood and sported the ever fashionable happi festival jacket and made our way to a river bank where a group of guys were to fire off replica teppou, or old-style firearms. This group toured the entire town the whole day, firing off the teppou at various locations. So we watched that and then paraded around the neighborhood. Yugo got enlisted to help shake a rope with bells on it. The coupe de grace, though, was the float the kids had made. Normally the floats are little portable shinto shrines or whatnot, but the kids had made a float using an inflatable Stich, from Lilo and Stitch, all decked out in a Happi jacket. Of all the things to deify...only in Japan. After that, we crashed at the house until evening when a few family and friends came over for my birthday party. We had shabu shabu, a sweet cake that Shiho-san brought over. They sang happy birthday, with the requisite butchering of the 'th' sound. I got a slew of presents, ranging from crazy socks, to a photo guide of Japan, to a bunch of random candy...all in all a good, and extremely unexpected, haul of schtuff. I didn't expect such an elaborate party or the presents from Shiho-san, Tokiyo-san, etc, who I barely know. If there has been one thing I've been impressed/taken aback by, it is the level of kindness everyone has shown. Waaaay above and beyond the call of duty...err society.
Dave, the word for awesome that you are looking for is 'sugoi' It conjugates just like other adjectives that end in i (omoshiroi, kawaii, etc.)
Later

I've got sadou (tea ceremony) on the brain

Hey all,
Okay, I apologize for the ugly picture layout, and again, I'm really bad in keeping this thing up to date, but I'll try to make up some time with this post. I had made plans to hang out with Aki (she is a student at Nanzan University who studied abroad at UW-Madison last year and lived in the same dorm as me) on Tuesday a couple weeks ago, but I had yet to make a bank account, which I needed to do in short order to receive one of the scholarships, and we didn't have any specific plans, so I asked if she wanted to accompany me while I opened a bank account. The epitome of fun, I know. Well, I tried to hit the bank beforehand, only to find out I had the wrong document from the ward office, and couldn't open an account. Awesome. So I met up with Aki, and fill her in, so we go back to my host family's place and then head to the ward office and get the proper form. More fun, I know. Anyway, my host family was having some friends and extended family over that night, and they invited Aki to stay for dinner. That ended up being a rollicking good time. And Aki, despite having a job interview the next day, was putting away her beer rather quickly, which prompted my host family to make many a joke.
But it was all good, because Aki got the job! So she held a party that next week on Wednesday, and we went to an izakaya, which is bar/restaurant where you order a bunch of small dishes and pass them around between everyone, while drinking of course. Then we hit karaoke, where I managed to find the old Power Rangers theme song. Apparently that song has verses, which I never recall hearing before, but when the chorus hit, I , along with Ken and Chris, rocked out hard.
But the weekend in between those two events was even more memorable. My host mom's friend is a tea ceremony sensei, and she was nice enough to bring me as a guest to a tea gathering at Atsuta Jingu (a famous shinto shrine that holds one of Japan's three national treasures) The weather was picture perfect, and the entire setting, from the old teahouses to almost everyone at the ceremony wearing kimono, screamed 'Japan.'
We participated in three separate tea ceremonies, and this gathering was apparently part of a larger project to conduct 400 tea ceremonies in 100 days. This tour o' tea started at four different points in Japan and the four paths are converging on Kyoto where they'll hold the final gathering of the 'relay.'
The entire experience was rather surreal, and save for the cameras and cell phone, it could have been couple centuries ago. I have developed quite a liking for matcha, which is the type of green tea served at ceremonies. But before the tea, they serve little Japanese candies, which are almost always as pretty as they are delicious. Everything, every motion is predetermined, from how you enter, to how you receive the candy and tea. You rotate the bowl twice before drinking, and there is a specific way to fold the paper after you eat the candy (so as to not spill crumbs). Oh, and you are supposed to sit in seiza style (see picture), which after awhile cuts off the circulation to your legs. After the third ceremony, I couldn't feel my legs, and had to wait a bit before I could stand. Also, that night I noticed my leg was a little swollen. There is much more but it would take a while to explain.
Probably the most interesting thing I found out was that the entrance to the teahouse was purposely made extremely small so that samurai would have to disarm in order to fit. Without their sword, and thus their rank, they were equals with everyone else when taking tea.
Immediately after that I went to a musical my host Aunt (she's a dancer) invited me to. It was a kid's musical, and one of her friends was in it, so we had free tickets. The muscial was to commemorate the world expo that was held in Nagoya last year, and featured the two furry mascots of the expo helping a group of four kids who were lost in a forest.
The weekend after that, I got to attend another muscial, in lieu of another foreign exchange student who fell ill. Roughly translated, it was titled 'A Dream Borne from a Dream' It was sensory overload. Outside the theatre there was a 'pre-show,' which consisted of a bunch of costumed people freaking out kids and making photo opps. The actual musical was pretty interesting, and easier to understand than I had expected. Probably due to the fact that since it was a musical, they pronounced the hell out of every word.
After the musical we headed to dinner, and stumbled upon Hard Rock Cafe-Nagoya. The food was pretty similar to the U.S. (although apparently the mashed potatoes were instant) but the memorabilia was understandably not as impressive as in the U.S. The prices seemd expensive at first, but taking into account the fact that tax is included in the price, and that you don't have to tip in Japan, it ended up being cheaper than the U.S. Go figure!
In general, life is going well, although I was out this past weekend with a sore throat/fever/cold sort of thing that is still pestering me. I had my mid-term for Japanese class today, which I think went decently despite the illness. Anyway, to repsond to a few of the comments people made. Stevo, yes, I have had sake, there will be pictures on the next post when I detail my birthday weekend. Busha and Sami, as far as nightlife goes, it is pretty much the same formula as Aki's party, go somewhere to eat and drink, then go to karaoke and drink some more. Again, more details will be in the birthday post. Aaron, PLEASE let me know of any places I should check out. Where exactly were you stationed? And it would be awesome if you were able to make the trip (just let me know in advance). Voss, I realize you get the Wii in America before Japan, and I hate you for it. Finally, thanks to everyone for their support and the kind birthday wishes left on my facebook wall, they are much appreciated!!!!