Friday, January 31, 2014

Good Morning!

Finally! Yesterday, for the first time since we arrived, I made it through the entire day without napping. I woke up this morning and felt:


Must have been a good, full night of sleep!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.





Then I check the time...




4:25 am!!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.


(just kidding, dad!)


Thursday, January 30, 2014

Dealing with Basic Needs - First trip to the grocery store

"I'd like to start eating healthier - I don't want all that pasta. I would like to start eating like Japanese food." -Lost in Translation

On Basic Needs 




In the first three days, we have attempted to attend to many of the basic needs of life like grocery shopping, finding and using an ATM, and going to the post office. Our efforts so far 
properly belong on a sitcom. 



Our first stop was the grocery store where we intended to stock up on essentials. 

bread
butter
milk
pasta
rice
cheese
oil
etc.

While some things, like pasta, can be identified visually, other things are not so easy. Take for example this: 





My first thought was butter, this is definitely butter, but then I saw a fellow shopper empty the entire shelf of these items, of which there were approximately 12, into his shopping cart. 12 tubs of butter? Seemed unlikely, at the very least extremely strange. Could be cheese or a custard perhaps?

Ultimately, I had no clue. I took this picture with the aspiration of figuring out what it was. Hasn't happened yet, and one challenge of learning to read Japanese is that reading is a two step process, at least at my basic level.

  • Step one: you must be able to identify each character and the sound each character represents (for example,  is pronounced "toh"). Ok, I know that character. Check.
  • Step two: you must be able to string the sounds together and have that word in your vocabulary (for example, とりにく is pronounced "to ri ni ku" when strung together and  that means chicken) 

In case that wasn't challenging enough.... Did I mention that reading Japanese requires learning 3 sets of characters (like three sets of alphabets)? Yes, they are called hiragana, katakana and kanji. While hiragana and katakana are made up of a reasonably small and easy to learn system of symbols, kanji presents an epic challenge to literacy. There are 2,000 - 3,000 regularly used kanji and an estimated 50,000 - 80,000 kanji in existence.

3,000 characters! 

It's a monumental task, but I was feeling ambitious after we bought our groceries. I took the weekly grocery sale circular home and started to (try to) read it. Here are a few things I was able to dechiper:



(pronounced ko) indicates that a price applies to one item or "each one". This was used for apples and kiwis. 


(pronounced pakku) indicates that the specified price applies to one package. Used to price mushrooms.

indicates that the specified price applies to one sack, pouch or bag. 



I mean, if this sign weren't firmly planted 
in the middle of a  mountain of bananas, 
what would I really know? 




Monday, January 27, 2014

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Today is day 1 (初日 - shonichi, also means "opening day") in Tokyo. Or maybe yesterday was shonichi. It depends on how you mark the days. After a 16 hour flight, I have lost much of my sense of time. We took off at 10am from Newark, landed at 3pm local Tokyo time and now it is 5:35 am. I have been up since 3:00 am, after falling asleep at 9:00 pm.

I feel like a child with a sugar high hangover. My sugar high was my first trip in business class. As an exclusively economy traveler, I could hardly force myself to sleep. The food, the sundaes (yes, ice cream sundaes), the extensive movie selection and all of the computer games (I played Battleship for at least an hour). My hangover is desynchronosis. 

It doesn't help that my head is racing with fleeting thoughts, ideas, goals. Chief among them is the issue of food. I am a vegetarian and vividly recall from my first trip to Tokyo (three weeks in 2004) that being vegetarian was a challenge. I spent considerable time in the weeks leading up to my glorious business-class trip getting educated about the challenges and safe havens for vegetarians in Japan. Many people have written and blogged on the subject, so I will not presently attempt to add to that space. Instead, I will lean heavily on those who have explored before me as I get settled. 

Here are a few of those resources (though I loathe to group vegetarianism with veganism):

On being vegan in Japan
On "vegetarian survival" in Japan
 * Make sure to read the bio of the couple that runs this blog -- what a life!
On vegetarianism in Japan on "World Vegetarian Day" 
 * According to this 2005 post, "ham is considered a vegetable ". I hope the concept of vegetarian has evolved in the last 9 years!

For a skeptic's outlook on the subject, visit thisvegetarianlife.org. The internet voices largely concur: as far as traditional Japanese food goes, this won't be easy. The upside is that we are living in Azabu-juban (麻布十番), which is, according to other web voices, a relatively international neighborhood with a corresponding array of international cuisine. Here are a few places that I intend to try: 

Eat More Greens - an all vegetarian restaurant
King Falafel - an Israeli-owned, kosher-certified falafel stand
Frijoles - a Mexican restaurant whose owner lived for 9 years in California, sounds promising

CNN has even weighed in on the topic (here). The article is from 2010, so we will see whether these 7 restaurants are still open. I will also have to figure out where they are. I currently have no concept of Tokyo's layout, at all. 

Finally, it is nearing 7am. It is now appropriate for me to "wake up."