Now you see me

Wow, time really does fly when you're having fun. I've been away for a while, but I've been having a blast. Loads to talk about, but I haven't got a whole lot of time just now. I'll get through what I can, and for the rest, you'll just have to... wait longer.

Several friends have had their escaping from Japan parties in the last couple of weeks, so I've spent a few days in Saitama, the concrete bleah between Gunma and Tokyo. I forgot to bring my camera when I went to Molly and Andrew's combined sayonara party, which is just as well, because surprise surprise, I got drunk and sang my voice off at karaoke till 5 am. But I don't think I particularly made an ass of myself, which is a nice change. Everyone else was drunk anyway, so here's hoping they won't remember if I did.

On the job front, I hope I'm not jinxing anything here, but I applied for a promotion to the curriculum development team and they're going to bring me down to Nagoya to test run for a few days at Head Office. Apparently I'm one of two finalists. If it comes down to a swimsuit competition I haven't got a chance though; I have a feeling the other applicant is a girl. My sneaking suspicion is that they just wanna laugh at me and staple my tie to things, but I guess I'll find out. If that doesn't pan out, I have two other standing job offers with different companies and I might go to one of those.

My kickstand was stolen about two weeks ago. I have a fairly nice bike that saves me a ton of money when it comes to trains, and I parked it at the train station bike parking lot for about three hours while I went out carousing with some friends, when I came back the kickstand was gone. Friggin high school kids. I guess it serves me right, I had an accessory pouch under the seat and forgot my hex wrench set in there. (The whole pouch was stolen, but I don't particularly need or miss it or anything that was in it.) It was just attached with velcro, so I'm betting some kid stole the pouch, looked inside and found the hex wrenches, and thought, "what the hell, why not go for gold?" My idea at the moment, assuming I even bother to buy a new one, is to put a note inside the accessory pouch written in French, maybe make it look like a love note or something so that the kid might get curious about what it says and take it to a teacher for kicks, but it'll actually say "whoever gave you this stole it from my bike" or words to that effect. Any suggestions on what to put on the note are welcome, just leave a comment on this post. I try to keep it in perspective anyway, knowing the entire bike would likely have been stolen several times over by now if I used such a flimsy lock in North America.

Beside one of my schools there's a new ramen restaurant where the owner, a friend of one of my coworkers, never lets me pay for anything and keeps piling more food in front of me. He's like my Japanese mom. His English skills and those of his staff are shall we say non-existent, so I muddle through in Japanese as best I can and we all usually manage to get our ideas across. A few weeks ago he invited me to a seasonal restaurant he owns along with two of my coworkers and their boyfriend and husband respectively. (No, it was not a triple date.) The restaurant is on the banks of the Kiryu River and they offer very very fresh fish kept in a large pool by the entrance.

Eating this thing is a ritual in itself: first you gently mash it with your chopsticks, then use them to sever the tail and most of the head - but leave the spine intact. Then you grab the head and pull out the spine, ribcage, organs and the majority of the tiny bones intact. Voila! dig in... there's not a whole lotta meat left on one of these little guys after all that, but it's pretty good. Unfortunately I lack the finesse required to do the surgery just so, and I always ended up just pulling the head off. Then I had to rummage around with my fingers in hot deep-fried fish to find the spine and ever so gently pull it out. By far the most interesting dish of the evening, and I distinguish 'interesting' from 'good' here, was a paste made by pureeing the organs of one or two of the little guys. It's in the blue china dish in the background. It was a nasty pale brown and had to be one of the most bitter things I've ever tasted. Fotunately it was only about a teaspoon of the stuff, but even so only two of us even tried it at all. A tiny dab on one of my chopsticks was enough to tell me it wasn't for me, but Takako managed to finish hers somehow, grimacing the whole time. Ninomiya-san, the owner, had to take off early to go back to his other restaurant, but he warned us before he left that it was not a dish to everyone's liking, so we really didn't have to feel obliged to eat it. Phew. There were also several other varieties of fish, lots of beer, and a dessert that tastes kinda like a puff of dust in jello, and everyone left feeling quite content but knowing we'd be hungry again soon.

It was quite a nice evening, sitting in an open-sided building on the banks of the river that the fish came from so their cousins can watch you disembowel and eat their family, and as the five of us left we figured the bill would probably come to at least 6 or 7 thousand yen each (60-70 dollars, and well worth it), but the cashier had instructions not to let us pay for any of it, or give us any information about how much it would have been.

Thanks, Ninomiya-san!

I've got a backlog of funny pictures, but I think I'll wrap up for the day with just this one of a music shop here in Kiryu. See if you can spot the most interesting instrument they offer.



"Lessons in what? I know I have a skin flute around here somewhere... or perhaps you meant a rusty trombone?" Actually I had to check the real definition, which is disappointingly mundane, but it sure stands out doesn't it?