When you need to tell a New Yorker what places to visit in Japan. Always a work in progress.
Oh, yes, and “/s”
(click on the picture for the family size)
All posts by roehl.sybing@gmail.com
You, too, can make sushi
I made sushi tonight.
There was no great reason behind it. I was bicycling around doing errands when I thought, hey, if I’m in Japan, I should try to make sushi.
So I gathered up what I thought were the ingredients. Wasabi, fish, rice. Then I found a recipe for sushi rice and went back to the convenience store for vinegar and soy sauce. Just follow the directions, cut up the fish really thin, make mounds of rice and attach each slice of fish to each mound with a dab of wasabi. Done.
There’s really no great ritual to it. No school you have to attend to be considered capable of making sushi. No certificate necessary to legally make sushi. And certainly no nationality test.
Sitting alone, earphones on
I drink my coffee
Eat my donut
Have no one to talk to
Continue reading Sitting alone, earphones on
A Vampire Clocks Out
“What can you buy with money? Does it buy you human blood?”
“Do not be silly. I have Ethan for that.”
“Ah, your pet.”
“My lover. My human lover.”
“And that is why you exist here, among prey.”
Basic pasta sauce +1
In my mind, I have this idea for a cooking show/cookbook, where one half is about making a basic recipe (grilled cheese, rice pilaf, fresh pasta, etc.), while the other half is about adjusting the recipe to one’s tastes (hence the “+1”). And since the last post talked about the red wine I bought for the pasta sauce I made, well…
I couldn’t find any tomato puree or paste or a handful of other ingredients one finds in a pasta sauce recipe. But the basic ingredients are within easy reach of anyone near a decent supermarket in Japan.
Bring a sweater next time
Wikipedia does not have an English page for Shin-Shimashima Station.
Which is interesting, because the train fans have spent years making hundreds of new pages for each and every train station in Japan. There’s a page for both of the unused stations in the underwater tunnel between Aomori and Hokkaido. There’s a page for both stations at Narita Airport, because each requires a separate entry. There’s a page for every station on the Hokuriku Line, and the smallest of those stations probably service a population of 28 each. There is, of course, a page for that station that had only one passenger every day.
There is no page for Shin-Shimashima Station. Not remarkable enough or important enough to foreign tourists, I suppose. So on this trip around Nagano, I said let’s go there.
Politics on the social networks
It rained during my hike around Norikura Kogen today, and it was a good fifteen degrees Celsius cooler than I planned for, so I took very few pictures of the trip, which I’ll add to tomorrow’s post. But on my 5K walk nearly one mile above sea level, I was thinking about politics for some reason.
I won’t post too much about politics on this blog. This is about my writing, my life in Japan, some soccer, and whatever other fun stuff comes to mind. And if you know me, you already know who I’m supporting this November. No, this post is more about friendships.
This isn’t meant to justify anyone’s boorish behavior on the social networks, especially mine. Rather, I thought it would be a good guide going forward for anyone who engages in heated discussion with friends. I think if you ask yourself the questions listed below when your politics get hot, and you find the answers are acceptable, you should be well covered, and no one, let alone you, should think less of you.
Second best always tries harder
You already know what I think about the touristy places. Besides, I’ve already been to the major cities in Japan. Matsumoto is not a major city, but that’s why I decided to go there for Golden Week.
Rainy day writing
Nagoya’s not the most beautiful city in Japan. Probably not in the top five. Or the top ten. It’s a city dotted with industries that happen to be on the main shinkansen line, so they might as well spruce it up, select a famous food (their meibutsu is tebasaki; think Buffalo wings with a lot less meat and not nearly as spicy) and drop a couple of shopping complexes with international brands so people on the way east to Tokyo or west to Kyoto or Osaka can drop by and pass the time at an intermediary stop.
It’s not an ugly city, either. A number of rivers cross both edges of the city center, and there is plenty of nature along the streets so it doesn’t look like a dark and gray Dickens novel. The city is convenient with all the creature comforts first-worlders need and desire, so it’s not some middle-of-nowhere truck stop/bedroom community that just takes up space. They have those in Japan, too, but so does every other developed country that is large enough to have built up a few major cities. If Tokyo is New York, Nagoya is Delaware. Nice enough, but not a top destination.
It’s in the middle, is what I mean.
A Vampire Takes a Selfie
The waitress was cute, perky and most likely seeing someone on the weekends, not to mention busy as hell during her shift, sapping all of Ethan’s courage to strike up a real conversation. Probably wasn’t worth the trouble anyways, lest she use her charm to sell him more drinks and empty his wallet. She began to walk over to him a third time, so he had to give her the “five more minutes” sign again. Once he saw her discontent, no matter how much she tried to hide it, he impulsively pointed to the picture of the dark porter on the menu, which seemed to ease the concerns on her face about a large enough bill that would justify a large enough tip. Just keep everyone happy, Ethan thought to himself.
He checked his watch, and it had been twenty minutes since he was able to sit down at a table for six in a bar that was soon to become crowded with the Friday evening rush. So Ethan, ever the good co-worker, volunteered to get the table and hold it for everyone until they finished their last-minute work upstairs. He tried to look busy and not at all lonely sitting at a large table by tapping away on his phone. He even made sure to type with both hands and stare intently at the screen with serious, narrowed eyes to look like it was work, even if it was really just the daily sudoku puzzle.
He had nearly figured out where to put the last two sevens just when a figure cast a shadow on his table. Ethan looked up to greet his first beer of the night, but it wasn’t the waitress standing over his table. The figure hovering over him was that of a shorter woman in casual, non-waitress clothes, staring curiously at his phone as if she’d never seen one before. He didn’t look hard enough just yet, only catching the sense of fascination in her eyes.
She was cute. Creepy, though. He smiled nonetheless.
“How’re you doing?” he said. Continue reading A Vampire Takes a Selfie