Sumo and mountain climbing

This past week has been full of excitement! Last week, we went to Tokyo to watch sumo wrestling. It was great. We just happened to be there for the semi-finals of the competition, so it  was really exciting! We were pretty high up, so we didn't have the best view, but it was still really cool.

Here are some pictures and videos:

Here I am in front of the entrance to the Sumo building!

Let the Sumo begin! 

And now for some videos:

oooh, tricky!

Now for a fun one....Let's just fall on eachother!:

I will be putting more videos and pictures on facebook if you are interested to see more, look me up there!

Now, lets move on to our mountain climbing experience. This past Monday we went with our friends Kristin Creekmore and Kyle Lugger to climb mount Tsukuba, which is about an hour and a half away (driving). We were able to see Mt. Fuji at the earlier point of the day, so that was really awesome!

Here are some pictures from that day:

There are more pictures of this wonderful day on my facebook and maybe I will have a chance to put them on our Flickr account soon.

Random Facts about Japan

I have been meaning to post a random facts list for a while. Here it is:



1. Winter at school feels like wintercamp in Belgium. Its very cold except for in the main room, where its only warm if you are close enough to a heater. They use kerosene heaters, so the smell reminds me of the heaters and gaslamps at camp. Classrooms are cold. Hallways are cold. Toilets are cold.



2. In the summer, it gets hot and humid....so people wear a towel around their neck like a scarf to soak up the sweat.



3. Police car lights are always flashing. They use their loudspeakers when they want to pull someone over.



4. People don't pull over for ambulances....I guess unless they absolutely have to.



5. Japan has three alphabets and all three are used. Katakana, Hiragana and Kanji. The first two have more than 40 characters each and Kanji is basically a new vocabulary list, which must be drawn/written in the correct stroke order and with the exact number of strokes. THEY CAN TELL WHEN ITS WRONG!

6. Katakana is used for foreign words, but those words still need serious decoding. Some examples:
ka-n-to-ri = country
a-re-ru-gi = allergy
bu-ru = ????
hu-i-ru-taa = ????

Can you figure out the last two? In the next post we'll give you some more to figure out.

7. Rice with raw egg is a typical breakfast.

8. Fermented soybeans, some sticky, stinky, gooey brown stuff (= nato) is many children's favorite.

9. Road work seems to happen mostly in the winter and at night. At night? Yes, well, we dont know when they stop working but they tend to set up the road work stuff almost every day around 8 or 9 pm. Route 50 is the road we take straight into town....maybe about 10 km from our place. On our way in town its a perfectly clear road (except for the traffic). On our way back, after 9 pm, we can run into anywhere from 2 to 6 road work activities for which our lane takes turns with the oncoming traffic to pass the roadwork in the one usable lane.

10. Apparently green is blue.

11. I'm a big fan of inside shoes and bathroom shoes.

12. They really like mayonaise and corn here. In the store, you can buy a bun that just has mayonaise and corn on it. In almost any restaurant that sells pizza you can buy a mayo and corn pizza.

13. Crosswalks. Many crosswalk signal lights have a bird chirping sound to go along with the green light. Both directions have different sounds. Yes, I realize this is for blind people, which is awesome. I just think its funny they chose two different bird chirps. Also, you can cross an intersection diagonally (busy intersections)!! Yes, they actually stop road traffic from all 4 directions so that pedestrians have a green light from any corner to any corner.

14. It is cheaper to travel from Japan to South Korea or Thailand for vacation than to travel within Japan, considering all costs.

15. There is no real bacon and you can't buy a whole chicken anywhere.

16. One of the most popular desserts is anko. This is sweet bean paste. (sometimes its chunky!) Examples of anko dishes are 1) anko-filled mochi (remember the mochi rice stuff?), 2) anko-filled donuts and 3) anko-filled pancakes.

17. Pancake mixes are everywhere!

18. Bikers ride on the street against traffic (yes, on the side where pedestrians are supposed to walk if there is no sidewalk) on busy streets. (This is quite annoying and dangerous for us as scooter drivers because we typically kind of "hug" the curb to pass cars between the car and curb when traffic is moving slowly.)

19. Kewpies are actually not just known, but popular here. (They have a kewpie brand mayonaise!!) (If you do not know what a kewpie is, look it up....it is also Derrick's High School mascot)

20. Apparently gargling water or tea prevents illnesses, like the common cold or the flue.

Fun in Thailand!

This picture was taken on a lovely rickshaw (or "tuktuk") in Bangkok. Tuktuks might be my favorite part of Bangkok. We arrived on the evening of Saturday the 20th of December. We only stayed two nights and left on a night bus for our island adventure on Koh Tao.



Once on Koh Tao (we arrived Tuesday morning around 9:30 on the Island), we started our scubadiving classes. We had to watch some videos, listen to "lectures", "read" a book and fill out a study guide before taking a theoretical test. We also walked out from the beach with scuba gear on into the shallow water to do some underwater exercises in a safe environment....you know, where if something goes wrong all you have to do is stand up. The scariest exercise was probably taking off my mask (with the breathing regulator still in my mouth) and having to put it back on under water.



Here's a picture of our group of divers. Alain was our instructor. He is the cool guy laying at our feet. He was really an awesome instructor.....also....he's a Belgian! Hurray for Belgium.







We don't have pictures of scubadiving unfortunately. Our underwater camera cannot handle that without a casing....but we did go snorkeling as well. We went to this bay on the other side of the island with a Swedish couple who was in our Scubadiving group: Elizabeth and Andre. If you look closely at the bay you can see a big rock.....thats about where we were snorkeling (actually....that rock is just where you could actually start seeing anything because the water was not very clear).Another part of our adventure seen in this picture is our fun ride in a pick-up taxi along the hilly and completely unpaved roads throughout the island. This was really fun, especially with elizabeth and Andre in the back with us!

Here is some coral/weird and colourful sealife we saw. When you wave your hand close enough to these little colourful animals they would completely suck in. It was pretty cool.

Koh Tao was awesome! Probably the best part of the whole trip!

Next we moved on to a resort in Chumpohn city, which is in Chumpohn province. We basically just chose to stay there because it was on our way back to Bangkok. We stayed three nights to be relaxed. It was nice....ok....could have been better. It was really not that bad.....but there are many reasons why we would not stay there again. Here are some of the positive aspects though:

Our little bungalow was pretty cool. It had a nice view too, but the weather was never nice enough to get a good picture.

We went on an all day snorkeling trip. That was actually pretty cool. Unfortunately it was pretty windy and cloudy so the visibility was not so good and we never got great pictures. We did see some cool fish though. Here we are on the boat that took us, a Thai family and three Swedish women to three different islands.

Here are some of the coolest fish we saw. They were beautiful! Unfortunately this picture does not show nearly how brightly colored they were!

Here's Derrick! (sorry this picture is not clear at all.....it was the water's fault I tell you!)

And here's Miranda!

We were supposed to go on a squid fishing trip one evening.....but the weather was not good enough.....it was too windy. SO, the resort decided to take us on a random sight seeing trip instead. We tried to go to a museum.....but it was closed because it was January 1st.

So....we saw monkeys! Ha, it was actually quite fun because we got to feed them.

We loved reading the English translation of the description of the monkeys. This is only some of it....our favorite part is the first line of the second paragraph.

And we saw some caves and a nice little temple. In the cave we saw a 2,000 year old painting of Buddha. That was pretty cool...unfortunately it was not well preserved and was very difficult to make out.

The man here was our guide for the caves and the small museum there that had nothing to do with the cave, lol. He was hilarious. He spoke like 5 words of english. When he was done "explaining" one thing he moved on to the next spot and would say "you you you, come come come" until we were all standing around him ready to decode his next explanation. Usually he ended up speaking Thai to our guide from the resort (the young woman in the picture on the left) who was driving us around. She would then kind of translate in broken Egnlish with a very strong Thai accent. Fun times.

And after we spent two more nights in Bangkok, we flew back to Japan.

We arrived back on Tuesday January 6th.

We made a stop in the Nagoya airport where we were told to "watch our steps" on the travelator by the voice coming out of the machine. We enjoyed this sign.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!

First day in Thailand!

Hello everyone!

Well Friday we were still teaching classes in Mito, Japan and yesterday we took a bus to the Narita airport to start our Thailand adventures. I know many of you were probably watching the news a few weeks ago when all the pfotesters were blocking the airport and making it impossible to fly in or out of the airport. We just wanted to reassure you that our flight and arrival went very smoothly and safely and we are at our guesthouse enjoying a relaxing beginning to our holiday.

Sorry this is short but there isnt much to report yet. We went to a really big market this morning and are just using the rest of today to relax. Maybe we will be able to post pictures while were here but if not we will try to as soon as we get back to Japan.

God bless you!

Merry Christmas!

Making Mochi

Mochi is a Mystery.

Mysterious Mochi.

The Mystery of Mochi lies not in how it is made or what ingredients can be found in it, or even how it is eaten.

The mystery is simply WHY.

Mochi is one of the weirdest foods, and it's not even the dried fins of a fish, or fish flakes to garnish a meal, or fish eggs, or even bird talons, which are all weird Japanese food items we have seen in stores and restaurants.

Mochi is rice. Its very simple.

There is a special type of rice, called Mochi rice. The grains are smaller than regular rice. That's the only difference I can see. There must be more to it, because this rice you do not eat the same way as we eat any other rice.

Yes, the beginning starts and looks the same. Rinse the rice (mochi rice) in water...probably a billion times....before boiling it over a stove or fire or whatever you use. But, soon after boiling, you realize there is more to it...

Step 1: Make sure you use Mochi Rice.


Step 2: Rinse the rice with water as often as you can and prepare for boiling.

Step 2a: Wrap in some sort of towel for boiling (I believe to make handling after the boiling easier).Step 3: Boil. (I am really not sure for how long....it probably depends on whether you have the luxury of having the next step or not.
Step 4: Use the towel to easily transfer boiling hot mochi rice into an electric mochi maker. (I am pretty sure they did not have these in the earlier days and just had to boil the mochi for a longer period of time and go straight from bowling to pounding.....pounding probably lasted longer without the machine....in fact, the pounding might not be necessary at all with these machines).

Step 5: Whether we needed pounding or not...we got to do it! My students just loved this part!

Step 5a: My Kyoto Sensei (vice principle) helped get the mochi out of the mochi machines and into the mochi pounding pit!

It's pretty sticky, but just use water to unstick.

Rice and water; that's all this is.

Step 5b: Then you can start pounding! So....pick up your wooden hammer and pound and pound.....

....and pound....

......and pound.....

.....and keep pounding until everyone gets a turn!

Watch some old Japanese men pounding the mochi like it was their childhood pastime:

Step 6: Dress the mochi to your liking with whatever food or sauce you want to eat it it with.

These lovely ladies made mochi balls and rolled them in soy sauce: Sjoyu Mochi.

And these marvelous women made Mochi balls and rolled them in sweet soybean powder to create Kinako Mochi.

All finished!!!
Step 7: Eat and Enjoy this mushy sticky rice.

Really it's not bad....it just has the weirdest texture and it doesn't have much of a flavor. Any flavor you try to mix with it, doesn't seem to mix, it just sticks to the outside. BUT it provides for easy dishes, because it sticks to itself so much it doesn't really stick to your bowl!

So, who's up for a bit of MOCHI???

Parachutes and Wolverines

Monkey bars parachuting through the summer’s sun setting sky
Starts fires full of cold flames blowing through willows hair, brings her to open her great lidless eyes
And sends her running through the forest, through flurries of leaves
Jumping over hills and valleys and trees and things
Then exhausted she falls through rainbow corals reefs of snow
Wraps herself in dragon clouds of cotton candy to help soften her blows
Then exhaustion bids her sleep through the frost, and ice ridden streams
Wakes to find the morning and the embrace of sun’s warm beams
Live oh willow, and sing songs of sorrows that will surely die
Sing of monkey bars, cotton candy, and warm summer skies.

Derrick

Derrick's "Complicated"

So… how’s Japan? It’s complicated, really complicated, and it’s complicated on more than one level, so you know it’s extra complicated. First of all they have many different numbering systems, for example lets say I want two hot dogs, two packets of catsup, two cans of pop, two straws, two paper plates, and two chopsticks; there are probably six different ways to say the word “two” in that sentence… someone prease help me. I guess we do the same thing in English… well sort of… ok not really.

Second of all, the alphabet… English has only one set of 26 characters, Dutch is the same, French is also the same, Greek has 24, and Spanish has 29. Japanese on the other hand has three different alphabets; two sets have 46 characters each, and the third has… well no one seems to know an exact number, somewhere around five thousand characters, so I guess you could say that it’s complicated.

Thirdly, there’s the paperwork, lots and lots of paperwork which is never in English and usually includes all three alphabets. Sometimes it even feels like I have to do paperwork just to use the restroom or to sit down at my desk.

Fourthly, everything here is complicated.

Through all of what I’ve said thus far I’m not saying that the last six months here in Japan have been a big mistake, far from it. The last six months have really been a blessing from God, one that I would not be willing to trade. The people here are so kind, hospitable, hard-working, funny, and complicated. I really do love it here. I guess I should say that we love it here even if it is really complicated.

~Written by Derrick Thomas Logwood~