Day 11: More Pictures!

At the building for our class, you have to remove your shoes before entering.

They give you slippers in the meanwhile. I should really find some bigger ones...

A roundabout and a tree! Just like WPI, only a little smaller.

A lovely bamboo forest on-campus.

Um, what is this even...

Watch out for Jello monsters?

The Suita campus also has a very lovely lake. Here's one for the sky...

...and one for the trees!

A pair of neat-looking buildings.

Students at play. In Japan, they don't have turf fields. Only plain dirt.

Visited a shrine today, didn't know the etiquette, so this is as far as I went.

The road leading up to it is pretty nice.

I could fill this blog with pictures of loverly houses.

The river near our house. Kinda low for now.

I'd love to see it in the rainy season.

Day 8: Round Two

Hey, I wonder who made this little steaming pile of deliciousness?

SPOILER ALERT: It was me.

I learned a few things from yesterday's food snafu. For one, I used more broth to give the onions and meat a little more to soak in. A little less heat meant the broth didn't boil away. And finally, I remembered to wear a watch. Those little details! They matter!

You've already seen the result, but let me tell you, this had to be the most savory thing I've eaten in quite some time, especially after a week of plain noodles and yesterday's frustration. The onions cooked so tender that you really couldn't tell them apart from the rice. The meat was a little chewy, but incredibly moist. The rice and broth mixture? Amazing. Finally, after so much work and worry, I'd cooked myself a decent meal.

And then I spilled milk all over my hand when I poured myself a drink. A little bonus lesson in humility.


Thanks for the prayers, everybody, and a special thanks to my mom for her tips on cooking and not setting things on fire.

Day 7: Cooking

Cooking is difficult here.

I can't read any of the labels in the store, I don't know what half my options are, and every single website I read tells me how to cook things with ingredients I can't get. I've been living off plain noodles alright for the past week, sometimes picking up some pre-cooked meat at the supermarket for some variety. But I know I'll soon get tired of that, and I don't want to get fried food whenever I'm feeling bored. It's expensive, it's unhealthy, and it's just a patch to a bigger problem; I need to learn how to cook.

I found this recipie for Gyudon, a sort of beef and rice dish, and it looked simple-ish. I studied up how to chop onions, I went to the store, twice, to pick up ingredients, I calculated reduced values for only making a single serving, but the one thing I couldn't find was how long I should cook the beef for. It seemed that searing beef in a pan was a mystical, long-lost art, at least as far as the internet is concerned. But I had a website that gave approximate times, so I could go with that.

 I started cooking, going painstakingly slow, taking great care not to mess up any step or forget anything. I left out the sake and mirin because, let's face it, that was too expensive for me to be experimenting with. Everything was going pretty well. I managed to mix up my base, and even chop the onion without too much trouble or any cut fingers. I could even feel when the onions were getting tender; confidence was pretty high. I got the beef out and fit it all in my little pan. I cooked it for a while, flipped it over, cooked it some more, flipped it over, and cooked it some more. I cooked and cooked until my base boiled away and the meat burned against the pan. But none of that mattered, because I'd left my watch upstairs, and there was no clock in the kitchen. I had no way of knowing if I'd been cooking the meat for five minutes or fifteen. I cut it open, but I read online that brown beef doesn't mean safe beef. I had a pan full of great-smelling food, my belly was empty, and I had no idea if I could eat it or not.

I had no choice; that panful of delicious meat is sitting at the bottom of a trash can now. In a huff, I ate up my rice. At least then I'd have something to eat while I figured out what else I could have for dinner. I was on the last forkfuls when it hit me: I had more than enough ingredients to try again. Only problem? I'd just eaten the last of my rice.

So, after waiting all day with visions of Gyudon dancing in my head, after getting over my initial fear of something new and actually trying, after more than an hour of cooking and cleaning, I'm sitting by my laptop eating fruit snacks while my dinner's in the garbage. It's petty, getting upset over something like this when I've got enough to eat, but I just wish I could figure this out. Man can live on plain noodles and bread alone, but it makes for a long fifteen weeks.

Day 7: Lots o' Pics

Vending machines are everywhere here. This is the first one I bought something from.

Best as I can tell, somebody took orange juice and added bubbles. Not bad.

Waiting for a train.

Decided to go for a walk. I saw this adorable place...

...and a FamilyMart. These things are outnumbered only by the vending machines.

When there is a lawn, at least it's pretty. Sort of...

This is the most green I've seen since coming here. Don't be fooled, it's only two layers of trees.

You can't escape them...not even here....

Not to be outdone, KFC shows up across the street.

And yet, both are just a few hundred feet from this place. Clashing much?

When I go home, I want to ride the space train.

Absolutely no jumpin' stuff.

A Ferris Wheel on top of a mall. Because why not?

A closer look.

This is Yodobashi Camera. If you can run power through it, it's here.

And this is where Jeff realized he didn't know how to flip pictures on Blogger.

Some interesting buildings in downtown Osaka

More buildings!

This is smack dab in the middle of the city.

Photograph ALL the buildings!

ALLLLLL OF THEM.

Another angle of Yodobashi Camera

Umeda Station. If you come to Osaka by train, you'll likely end up here.

Don't be fooled by strategic camerawork, this place is packed.

Handpainted sign just posted up. I wish I could read this.

Day 5: On Bigness

I don't think I'm ever going to get over just how big Osaka is.

I mean, sure, it's big. It's a city, by definition, a city is usually bigger than most things around it. And true, the neighborhoods seem an endless maze of twisty roads and winding hills. But that's not what we think of when we think "big city", is it? We're American, we think Washington D.C., we think San Fransisco, we think New York City. We think of tall skyscrapers where we can dangle our legs and look at the helicopters down below. We think packed streets, full of people going places, always busy, always busy. I can look out my window, and for most of the day, never see a soul. Even the main roads are never clogged with traffic, either on foot, on bicycle, or car. I remember somebody told me Osaka could rival New York City in size. I nodded along, rolling my eyes on the inside. And for the first few days coming here, I kept rolling them.

Yesterday, we had to go into Toyonaka City to get our Alien Registration Cards. You know, those things that say you're legally allowed to be here, and here's my address, I swear I'm not a hobo. We took the train, much like our Metro system back home. There's a station a good fifteen minute walk from our house. We rode for a stop, switched trains, rode another three stops, and reached our destination. All in all, maybe another ten to fifteen minutes. A small walk later, and we found the city hall where we could register. All told, it was a journey of a little more than a half hour, both walking and riding the train. And for that entire time, we didn't see a single clearing or break in the city. Not only that, but take a look:

Repeat in all four directions, with no end in sight

You see how densely packed everything is? There is not a foot of wasted space. And not once in our trip did the city get any less dense. The city simply exists everywhere, over everything, and every inch of it teems with life.

But wait, it gets better:

You might recall me saying we had to go into Toyonaka City, not Osaka. Well Osaka is also the name of the prefecture around the main city of Osaka. The area we've been exploring, Toyonaka, is just one of nine other sub-cities. All we've been seeing so far is only a small fraction of what the entire Osaka area has to offer, and we haven't even been in the main city yet. If you took New York City, chopped up each building into three-story chunks, spread them out, and changed all the hot dog stands to ramen shops, you'd get Osaka.

Needless to say, I'm not rolling my eyes anymore.

Day 3: A mini-picture dump

A fancy stairwell we found in our house.

The front entrance. The best place to store luggage.

Walking around Osaka. That's Kai in the foreground.

Our grand and glorious kitchen...

...complete with glorious and grand dining room!

Kettles are good for noodles, right?

Nothing says "College Student" like plain noodles and hot dog buns.

Why yes, I did get a picture of the front of the train as it was crossing.

The 100-yen store! Yeah, I'll take more (and better) pictures of this place later.