Rice and Ramen

Technically this post is going to chronicle Hiroshima day .5 and 1, because Friday was all-in-all a travel day (so be prepared for a long post, sorry). After grabbing lunch at the station, Nick and I caught a Thunderbird (which sounds fast even though it's really not) from Kanazawa to Shin-Osaka (time: about 3 hours, which is longer than the time it takes to go from Kanazawa to Tokyo, to put that in perspective). In Shin-Osaka we switched to a bullet train (thank goodness) which took us the rest of the way to Hiroshima, and we arrived at around 6. Nick and I walked from the station towards the peace park, where our hotel was located delightfully close to. First impression of Hiroshima was this giant beer gate, though. For dinner we got okonomiyaki, which is famous in Hiroshima. This is a giant building filled with only okonomiyaki stores. Four or five floors of them. Okonomiyaki in process. Its a thin layer of batter, bean sprouts, cabbage, meat, egg noodles, tempu...

So cheesy manipulation of lyrics aside, today has been a great start to my six-day "chuukayasumi" or half-way break from my internship. I somehow persuaded myself to go for a run after breakfast today despite of the increasing heat. Then I put myself back together and made my way down to the Forus department store, which is having its huge summer sale. So I bought some things I needed and some things I probably didn't... Shopping aside, in the afternoon I went to the Kanazawa Rose Garden. (This is going to be a short, photo-heavy post and there won't be another until Sunday evening when I get to talk about my weekend trip to Hiroshima!) Despite the fact that it's been raining heavily all week there were still many beautiful blossoms. Lots of the flowers had really weird names: Blue Moon, Music, White Madonna, Uncle Walter...I don't know if those are legitimate strains of roses or not, but they made for a laugh. And now, let the photo barrage begin: ...

This past few days there's been no clear narrative of what's going on--just a bunch of separate yet interesting events (including one that's sending my family and I on a semi historical quest!). On Sunday (which was, all-in-all a very chill day) my host father had a choir concert. There were several groups that were singing (I think) a variety of nostalgic Japanese folk songs, mostly about the seasons or foods--one was about bananas, for instance. My host dad was part of the final, culminating song where 100 people were singing a song series called "furusatou four seasons" which was a huge medley of seasonal songs. There was piano and percussion accompaniment, mimicking the sounds of the wind, or snow, or falling leaves etc. The whole group! My host dad is in the front row, fifth from the right (to the left of the guy sitting down). Then on Monday I received a very interesting letter. A woman named Yoshiko Flershem, age 95, saw that I was from Chica...

So today, a slightly-chilly, drizzly Saturday, I did a bit of time traveling. Zoey and her host mom were kind enough to invite me on their excursion to Gokayama. Gokayama is a UNESCO world heritage site because all its buildings are built in the gassho-zukuri style (which basically means they're a-frame houses with thatched roofs). Part of the reason all the houses are a-frame is because they get so much snow--there were some photographs of the entire mountain covered in what looked like 5-6 feet of snow! There's not a huge amount of stuff to do there. You walk around, poke your head into some of the tourist stores. The houses are all residential, so except for one "open house" you're not allowed to walk in them. But the village is very picturesque, and I really liked getting to spend time with Zoey and her host mom (who I also get to call okaa-san, or "mom"). The one house we did get to poke our heads into was very nice: the floors are a...

So today both my job and my free time were centered around the consumption of food. I went to one event this morning, at the shinto shrine, Kanazawa Jinya, located inside of Kenrokuen. There was going to be a blessing at the shrine of this year's humuro-manju, which are a kind of Japanese sweet (think a sweet bun filled with red bean) and are eaten on July 1st in Kanazawa. The manju are a little hard to see in this photo, but on the black tray there are pink, green, and white blobs... And that was the only event I attended today. Around one I took the reporter who was sorta just assigned to keep me occupied in the afternoon, Mr Shimizu, to a cafe called Cafe Dumbo which was right behind the office building (but he'd never heard of it, surprisingly). I had a really solid pastrami sandwich and a heavenly chai tea latte. According to Shimizu, I suit this kind of cafe and he took this photo to illustrate how I look like a painting... The heavenly latte in questi...

Continuing with the theme of sports, today I went with Ms Kitamura to the rehearsal of Fantasy on Ice 2015, an ice skating exhibition/show-thing that's being held in four cities across Japan. The list of stars is actually...really good. Shoma Uno- winner of the 2015 Junior World Championships Javier Fernandez- winner of the 2015 World Championships Yuzuru Hanyu- gold medal winner in men's singles at Sochi Evgeni Plushenko- speaks for himself Johnny Weir- two-time Olympian who also speaks for himself... (And there were more, these were just the names I recognized!) Gave me an idea of how professional figure skaters support themselves though...and retired skaters... We were actually at this rink for a really long time. Each group of skaters had practices of 50 minutes each and there were...five groups. And of course the athlete that Ms Nishimura wanted to interview was in the last group, which didn't finish until 3pm. One of the younger Japanese skaters...Ma...

So yesterday, while productive, was actually rather dull--I went to two events, neither of which were terribly inspiring and hence no post (one was about these little weird fried fish that some school children ate for lunch if that gives you an idea of the strength of the news that day...) Today was more interesting and just to change up the format of my posts I'm going to give you a time-specific blow-by-blow. 10am: I arrive promptly at the office. It is mostly deserted as usual. I sit down at my desk and putz about 11am: Still putzing. I have since printed out a recipe for pound cake I might make for my host family and gotten online access to the Chicago Tribune from my mom. 11:40am: Decided to start looking at courses for next fall instead. Frontiers and Controversies in Modern Astrophysics, The Young Adult Dystopian Novel, and Bioethics and Law sound interesting. I make a note on my calendar and also realize that 8am breakfast feels like a long time ago. 12pm: I (fin...