Sushi Train

Bean Ogre Demons

Today was a special holiday in Japan.  There seems to be a holiday about every week.  This one though might be one of my favorites given its bizarreness.   There is a red-faced demon/ogre/monster? type thing with a beard and sharp teeth and horns.  His name is Oni.  He runs around outside and you throw beans at him.  Evidently he embodies bad luck and you cast him out of your house with beans and invite the good luck god to stay inside.  They sell paper masks on Oni at convenience stores and grocery stores and every time i see them I imagine some poor dad wearing it, running around his front yard while his kids throw beans at him.

Secretly, while I was setting up for my first class, my boss made a bean monster mask for my little girl Ayu.  When it was time for class, she came in wearing it.    Her brother, Yuu, tried to cast her out of the classroom, but lord knows, nothing can come in the way of learning English.  Here are some pictures of my students trying to be scary bean monsters.

gastronomic adventures

We met Fusayo, our favorite Japanese English teacher at our school, on Sunday.  We took the train to Takasaki,  She swept us up from out of the cold and drove us across Takasaki.  It feels so nice/unusual/luxurious to ride in a car nowadays.   I usually can't go anywhere that my bike or my feet can't carry me.  Fusayo took us to Aeon mega-mall... I am not entirely sure why, but probably so we could look at abominable English store name signs, see some weird stuff, and for Ty to buy some gifts for family members.   A special treat was in store for us, though non of us knew it yet.  Since soon it will be "St. Valentine's Day"  there were stands around selling giant chocolate bars and other confections for japanese girls to give to the boys in their lives (the boys return gifts on a separate holiday).  We were admiring one of the stands when Fusayo spotted a delicacy that we just had to try.  Candied squid!!!  There were little pouches of dried squid covered in either chocolate, caramel, white chocolate, or cheese (!?! I know...).  We decided on the chocolate one since it seemed like the most palatable variety.  Somehow I expected it to taste somehow unsquid-like.  As if adding chocolate would trigger some sort of chemical reaction that would make the chocolate and squid ingredients meld into some magical little nugget of weird asian gastronomic goodness.  But a testament to culinary alchemy it was not.  It looked like limp mulch or chewing tobacco.  It tasted exactly as it sounds- like seafoody squid covered in chocolate.  I made it through my little pouch, but its an experience I never care to repeat.

After the shopping, we went to a Thai restaurant that Fusayo likes.  It was the good kind too... the hole in the wall variety owned an

d staffed by real Thai people in a place whose decor seems unchanged since 1982.  We ate tasty food with the back room all to ourselves.  Trey, in a self-professed self-destructive stunt for attention, decided to impress us all by eating a red thai chili pepper.  He nearly died and quite possibly burnt a whole in his stomach.  He had to lie down for the last half of the dinner and cried tears of pain.

dinner with friends we never see- the Indonesians!  Language difficulties abounded but a good time was had by all along with blurry commemorative photos.