Scary Storms

I often check the Japan Meteorological Agency website which has some great information, especially about  tropical cyclones (i.e., typhoons basically) and earthquakes and the like.  They have a nice page that shows the projected trajectories of the cyclones.  What amazes me are some of the excellent satellite imagery of these powerful storms.  Here is one (named Malakas) that will narrowly miss Japan in the next day or two:

No wonder it was cloudy today!  I'm roughly in the middle between the top and bottom of what sticks out of those clouds.  Tokyo will get some rain from it but here it's supposed to be ok.  The cool thing is that you can animate the images over the last 24hrs.  Turn up the speed and watch the spirals turn!

First Cooked Meal

I finally got around to cooking my first full meal in Japan.  When you start cooking, you realize what you are missing and this also helped to identify the things I need to buy (like something to stir stuff while frying).  The day started off with a horrible thunderstorm going by:


This dish was very random.  Basically, I went to the mall to eat something for lunch after waking up a bit later today (and it being a holiday).  However, a baseball game was beginning in a few hours so the mall was packed with people trying to eat or get food for the game (a little bit annoying living next to such a large sports venue).  Each restaurant had tons of people lined up waiting outside each restaurant (there are small stools and such so that people can actually sit while they wait).  So I decided I'll go to the grocery store and buy some stuff to cook at home.  I actually ended up buying some unidentified baked stuff at the bakery which I ate for lunch, but I did buy ingredients for dinner cooking.

First of all, some seafood.  I wanted to buy beef, but after I saw the prices, I decided to stick with seafood - quite the opposite from Canada!  So I got some squid parts for around $1.50 and some nice autumn salmon for around $3.  That is super cheap!  They also had these large (~1.5foot) squids for sale that people were buying for basically $1 (per some weight I assume but still...).  Next time :P.

 I also got a bunch of mushrooms and green onions.  It is funny but you basically can't buy green onions here whole but there are tons of packaged already sliced ones!

I also felt like noodles and I saw these ramen noodles - basically your standard chinese thing egg noodle.

The mushrooms were Shiitake (on the left) and Enoki (on the right).  The Shiitake were awesome - so nice and soft, much nicer than the ones I used to get in Canada.

So I cut them all up plus some garlic and the green onions.

I cooked the noodles for a few minutes to warm them up - they were fresh noodles so quite tasty!

I washed the seafood:

Then I fried the garlic and each of the seafood and the mushrooms.  I added a bit of oyster sauce which I found at the store after a while of looking around (there weren't too many choices of that compared to the like 100s of soya sauces).

I couldn't operate the stove.  When I would put it to frying mode, it would shut off after a few seconds.  So I cooked everything using the boiling mode.  The stove is a ceramic plate and is very very fast at heating things!  The Shiitake needed a little bit of time to fry through but the Enoki were done in a few seconds.

Finally, the end result:

Taste conclusion:  it was actually pretty tasty.  The salmon was ok (well, tasted like salmon because I didn't do much to prepare it) but the squid was delicious!  My first time cooking squid and it was awesome!  The mushrooms were also very tasty and the noodles were great too!  I have enough left over for lunch tomorrow!  I celebrated with a coconut milk and some pearls dessert:

Japanese Coins

Today was a slow and quite rainy day plus it was a national holiday (the autumn equinox) so I spent most of the time at home.  Before I get to cooking my first full dinner in Japan (upcoming post!) I will present the coins of Japan.

Japanese currency is the yen 円.  Japan has 6 coins in normal circulation.  From what I heard they do not change and don't really have special versions that are widely circulated so each denomination has looked virtually the same since the 60s.  There are 500, 100, 50, 10, 5 (written in Japanese 五), and 1 yen coins:

The 500yen coin is basically the largest valued coin in normal circulation in the world (currently equivalent to roughly $6CAD). It has several anti-counterfeiting measures such as a solid bar or 500円 inside the 0s when viewed from different angles:

The 50yen and 5yen coins have a hole in the middle.  The designs all seem to have plants.  The 500yen coin has the Paulownia tree leaves, the 100yen has cherry blossoms (sakura!), the 50yen has Chrysanthemum flowers, the 5yen has rice, and the 1yen has a young tree.  The 10yen coin has an image of Kyoto's Byodoin Buddhist temple.

What is interesting to note is that the year shown on the coins is the year in the Japanese era (which in the last few hundred years have corresponded to the reign of the emperor).  So 2010 is the 22nd year in the Heisei period which started in 1989 when the old emperor died and the new one took over.  When filling out government documentation, you often have to provide current date and other dates such as birth dates in this numbering system.

You quite often see coins from the previous Showa era (which go up to year 64).  On the 100yen and 50yen coins, the year is in Arabic numerals, whereas on the other coins it is using Japanese numerals. For example, on these 6 10yen coins, the top 3 are from the Heisei (current) era and are years 5 (五), 8 (八), and 15(十五) (corresponding to 1993, 1996, and 2003).  The bottom 3 are from the Showa era, years 49 (四十九), 55 (五十五), and 63 (六十三) (corresponding to 1974, 1980, and 1988).

Ok, it's 5pm and time to cook!

Hmm seaweed...
But, I'm testing blogging from my phone :)

Quiet Weekend

This weekend I decided to relax.  However, on Saturday I bought a few things worth mentioning!

First of all:

Yes, I finally decided that if I can't decide what to get, I will never get a bike.  So I decided I wanted this one and got it.  It was around $350 - about $100 more expensive than the basic city bikes but I didn't like the shape of those and I wasn't clear on the gears (they said 3 but I couldn't see any).  It has a nice lock in the back that locks the back wheel.  Some people said I should get a chain lock and lock it to a post or something.  Getting the bike was fun since the person serving me spoke as much english as I speak Japanese.  But we somehow managed to communicate - the good thing is that I knew exactly what information he needed so I just provided it to him.  I had to register the bike with police (a $5 fee) in case it gets stolen there is a sticker on the bike identifying it.  There is also some insurance for 1 year that covers half of the bike fee if it isn't recovered.  After getting the bike (and while waiting for them to get it ready) I treated myself to some green tea (matcha) based drink with green tea icecream.

It is so nice to go shopping with the bike.  Get on the bike and just ride for like 5mins and I'm at a large supermarket.  I park the bike, go in, shop, and take the bike back home with grocery bag in the basket.  Works really well for normal day to day shopping.  However, the main purpose is to use the bike for commuting to university and I tried this today (Sunday) and it took around 30mins.  There was one tough moment where I had to go on 1st gear for a bit and I got quite tired but made it to the top of the hill.  Otherwise, it is quite nice.  The ride home is easier since the hill the other way is much smaller.  I have to get used to a few things though.  For instance, the steering wheel is very sensitive so I have to watch out not to drive into things.  Also, many sidewalks here have very little room to fit between some road barricade and a lamp post for instance so have to be careful not to hit thing.  Then there is people.  During my current working hours it's not a problem since there aren't that many pple on the sidewalks at that time.  However, during busy times, it's nuts.

Also on Saturday when I got back from the bike shop, I received an email that my phone is ready.  So I decided to head to the Softbank store in like downtown Nagoya.  I took the train.  There were so many people walking around on the sidewalks there on the weekend that biking is out of the question.  I had to wait a bit at the store for the english speaking person to appear but...

It's very shiny!  For free, I also got a small wireless router:

The phone is amazing (well... I haven't made a phone call on it yet...hehe, but the unlimited internet access is nice).  But more on that later.  I took a few pictures with it at the train station:

It's not bad - definitely good enough for the blog :P

After getting the phone, I went to the nearby rental store (TSUTAYA - the most popular rental store chain here) and got a membership made.  It was nice since they had somebody on staff that spoke english so she helped me fill out the form.  I rented 3 music CDs.  The rate was around $1.50 for a single and around $4 for album.  They came in a nice bag.  I had to return them the next day though.

On sunday, for lunch I had some miso katsu in the underground mall called Central Park.  I had some pictures from the park in earlier posts.  [picture from iphone!]

I found a comic type store walking around.  I didn't go in, so I don't know what they have inside:

Around 5pm, I biked to school to check out the route.  I went to the lab to see if anybody is around and there were a few people working on their presentations for the upcoming lab symposium.  Luckily I was able to go for dinner with one of the members and we went to this japanese home style restaurant near the university.  We sat on tatami (the mats) and short table.  This time it was more comfortable - the other place lacked the tatami and just had a hard floor.  The place was almost packed with people.  I asked my lab member to order something so we both got pig's intestine dish which was excellent but a bit chewy!  All that for about $8.  I really like the place - hopefully we will be able to come back there more often!

Bread

The bread here is actually amazingly good.  There is a bakery (or several) at the mall near me and they have some delicious baked goods.  Today before going to school, I bought a cheese bun which turned out to be corn, not cheese (that's what you get when you can't read).   Toast bread is packaged like this:

These are actually 4 slices (thick!) but you can get 6 or 8.  It was around $2.  The packages though look all similar.  It is quite amazing though - very delicious!  I got this specific one since I can get a miffy shopping bag (from my very poor understanding by buying like 15 of them until november...) which was advertised with this very cute commercial on tv :P.  I already have a miffy mug...so..

 or

I also bought some shampoo.  It took me a while to figure out what shampoos are until I realized that most of the stuff sold is refills in thin plastic bags.  I found some Pantene Pro-V which I suppose is the same as the one in Canada :P.  It also says shampoo in katakana on it.  Expensive though!  This container was around $9.

I also got some fruit that weren't ridiculously priced!  6 nice figs for around $3 and a small papaya for around $3.50.

Apartment Pictures

So I finally managed to take some pictures of the apartment.  I'm not posting them here in the public so if I know you and you want to see them, please email me (you know where!).

So a while back I mentioned that I bought a new miffy coffee mug for the office - well, here it is :).  I also took a picture of a Canada Dry sparkling orange juice in a can :P.

Some food pics.  First up, some cold udon with meat:

Then, some white fish - was very tasty!

Each of those dishes are less than $5 at the school's cafeterias.
Finally, a picture of this dude some girls were painting (it's a pole on campus) when I was walking by.  Took the picture the following day - great job!