Finding Japanese classes in Kitakami is proving to be somewhat challenging. Given that it's not a city drawing huge numbers of gaikokujin, perhaps it's not so surprising. It's problematic, though, because I very much need to be studying formally. So, at least for now, I've decided to take matters into my own hands.

Accompanied by my copy of "Japanese for Busy People," a notebook, and a columned kana practice book, I set out for a study venue. I was a college student in the early '90s. I know how this goes. Studying occurs in coffeehouses, and my destination was clear: Cafe Goo-Goo.

Cafe Goo-Goo is a mod little cafe on the main street that runs by our house, a short ride past the motorcycle shop and the love hotel (it's pink!). At the top of some very clean white stairs, one encounters a door inlaid with blue glass ovals, which opens onto a white room containing a bar and four tables. I was greeted by a cheery Japanese hipster boy (CJHB) and invited to sit wherever I liked. I wanted the chance to streetwatch, so I took a glass-topped table overlooking the street, rather than a 60's soda fountain seat at one of the round tables in the back.

I ordered a choco-banana parfait and an iced coffee from CJHB and settled in to study. Being mostly obscured by large, Pucci-ish, pink-and-orange decals, the window was not so conducive to people watching. Fine -- I was there to study and eat a cute, tasty dessert, which CJHB produced in short order, complete with chocolate wafer cookie and adorable pink and white star candies. The unexpected genmai flakes at the bottom provided a delightful crunch at the end. Ahh -- good parfait, good study session (bonus points for communicating with CJHB about my peanut allergy!), good new place to grab snacks. Really, anyplace that drops "Let's Groove" into its already awesome J-Pop soundtrack is okay by me.

The way home takes me past two bridges over the Waga River, which I previously hadn't crossed. Maybe it was the view of the mountains ahead, maybe just a continued desire to explore, but something inspired me to cross the one nearest our house, Kunenbashi ("nine-year bridge").

Backstory: Mukashi-mukashi in America, we went to dinner with our friend Yoshino. A minor difference of opinion arose, which caused her and Matthew to debate in Japanese and resulted in this classic phrase: "It is not daijoubu." Translation: "It is not okay."

Well, having done it twice now, I can state with relative authority that riding your sketchy bike across Kunenbashi is not daijoubu. I'm sure the attached side path is completely secure and no one's ever accidentally plummeted from it to a watery demise, but the combination of moderate wind, rushing water below (visible through the not-quite seam between the path and the bridge frame), hollow-sounding clank-clanky metal, and my fear of heights made me glad to be back in rush hour traffic on the other side. Until I remembered that I'd have to cross it again in order to go home. Damn you, Kunenbashi!

My ride took me down to a beautiful, serene park alongside the Waga River. I heard the five o'clock music for the first time since I arrived, passed some older gentlemen practicing chipping at the golf course, and met an Iwate dog (like an Akita dog, but smaller). The day was cool, windy, and overcast, but the lack of sunshine was easily overlooked by the sheer pleasure of being alive and out in the mountains -- in Japan! Woo-hoo, I live in Japan!

Being a New Mexican, I love mountains of all kinds. I admit a special fondness, though, for Japanese mountains. They frequently erupt with clouds of steam from geothermal activity. They're also big enough that their tops mingle with clouds on a regular basis. I'm not sure which is going on in this photo, but I'm inclined to think it's a combination of both. Whatever -- it's cool.

8:00 am -- Wake up to sounds of small city life, including clanking and machinery from nearby cement plant.
8:30 am -- Breakfast. Sometimes we have toast, eggs, or cereal (Japanese cornflakes + Iwate milk = awesome). Other days, we eat rice topped with umeboshi (pickled plums that look like brains), seaweed, or natto (fermented soybeans that have the texture and viscosity of warm Rice Krispie treat matter).



Okay, sometimes Matthew has natto. I fear the natto.

We also use mornings to catch up on American news and our respective newsgroups and food boards, since much of what happens happens while we're merrily snoozing away.

11:30 am -- Put futons away (only sometimes, I confess), iron, go to dry cleaner, decide whether we'll have lunch together. Matthew suits up for work and cycles off, messenger bag slung over his shoulder. He's adorable. :) I do laundry in the Jetsons washing machine, or clean up the teeny-tiny kitchen, or deal with paperwork.

Somewhere around 1:00 pm -- Lunch! I bike over to Matthew's school, and we seek out a mealing venue. There's a good, cheap takoyaki (grilled octopus balls, by which I mean balls of octopus meat) joint near his school that serves lunch specials of takoyaki (obviously) or tasty, tasty yakisoba (grilled noodles), onigiri (seaweed-wrapped rice balls stuffed with something like spiced roe, salmon, or brains), and a dessert (most recently, melon custard -- mmm). The people running the place are very friendly and chatty.

2:00 pm -- Deetsing around on some combination of errands, exploration, grocery shopping, and the inevitable WTF? moment. Here's today's:



I finally acquired an apron today. It makes me look a bit like a miniskirt-wearing short-order cook.

Sometimes, my travels take me to the "WellYu" building, home of the Kitakami International Assembly Hall and a tiny, excellent art museum. KIAH is where Matthew first learned about The Moustache's reputation from a fellow Amerika-jin, an exchange student from Florida whose father had seen them around.

Somewhere around 5:00 pm -- return home and unpack goods. Feel relieved to have blood flow restored to hands if I overestimated how much I could reasonably carry on my sketchy bike, as I did today. Study Japanese, or surf the net, or catch up on email, or go for a bike ride.

7:00 pm-ish on days when it's not raining -- watch sunset.



:)

8:30 pm -- make dinner. I've been cooking a fair amount of Japanese food, including fish, and had quite a bit of success. Fish is tricky, but for some reason, seems very easy to do here. On Tuesday, I made salt-broiled whole aji (horse mackerel), including gutting and de-gilling. There's no stopping me now...

9:30 pm -- Cocktail time! Matthew gets home from work around 9:10 most nights, changes, and makes drinks while I finish dinner. We eat and speak some Japanese before doing our last internet stuff and going to bed.

11:00 pm -- get out futons, go to bed. Listen to frogs communing along the Waga River.

Several of you expressed consternation upon learning that we have Lucy and Ricky futons in our expatriate marital home. Also about the availability of storage space in the demi-closets, but that had more to do with the pending opinion in Handbags et al. v. Trains.

There is, however, a very good reason for the single futons. It would be virtually impossible to do this



with a queen-sized futon. Aren't the giant blue futon clips awesome?

Special birthday shout-out to my fellow June celebrants!

Lately (meaning within the last three days), whenever I've mounted my sketchy bike, one scene flashed through my head. It's the scene near the end of "Beetlejuice," when Winona Ryder leaves school on her bike, rolling cheerfully down the hill, waving to her friends. Now, I'm not Winona Ryder in a schoolgirl outfit, and while Kitakami is a mountain town, it's not quainte olde New England.

Is it because I'm rocking a messenger bag wherever I go? Is it because I'm married to a guy who builds models? Is it because I'm surrounded by young women who almost without exception wear white blouses, pleated skirts, and knee socks, regardless of whether they're schoolgirls? Did I spend altogether too much time watching this movie in my adolescence?

Incidentally, aspects of the 80s are alive and well here. Legwarmers, Paula Abdul's "Rush Rush" over the sound system at the Sakurano shopping center, and those red boxes of crinkle-cut fries from the early days of microwaves have all entered my sphere of experience. It is worth noting that the microwave fries share space with similar green boxes of microwaveable edamame.

Day-o!

You might be in Japan if... you get a lot of little gifts from the companies you do business with.

Sure, back home, you might find the occasional freebie. Fill your tank with gas, get a free toy car. Buy a bottle of Scotch, get a free tasting glass emblazoned with the distillery's name.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the way almost any business will give you a pocket-size pack of tissues for almost any transaction. Send a letter at the post office? Here's your receipt and a pack of tissues. Sign up for cell phone service? Here's your phone, user manual, and two packs of tissues!

It's not always little packs of tissues, either. When we bought a sitting cushion from the futon store, they gave us a full box of tissues instead of a little packet. A taxi driver gave me what I initially thought was a packet of tissues, but turned out to be a folded garbage bag. And when a moving company came out to give me an estimate, the estimator gave me a 2kg bag of locally grown rice.

If the transaction doesn't go completely smoothly, they pull out the big guns. After I signed up for my postal savings account (yes, you can bank at the post office, but that's another story), I had to go back the next day because they'd forgotten to copy one of my documents. After they made the copy, they gave me a "we're sorry we made you come back" towel, complete with the postal savings logo.

Greetings from Kitakami, and welcome to Let's Sharing! If the last week is any indication of how our lives will progress here, blog entries will center on the following topics:

1) Whatever I'm cooking or we're eating;
2) The cult of Matthew's moustache;
3) Travel on our sketchy bikes.

We launched the blog this evening fueled by delivery udon. The udon delivery joint functions a lot like room service in that the udon shop brings your food in actual stoneware dishes that they collect the next morning (don't forget to put them outside!). I am a big fan.

For those of you who have never met Matthew, or have not seen him in a long time, he is a six-foot-tall French-looking guy sporting a pointy handlebar moustache. The Moustache is developing a reputation around Kitakami. In fact, while we were out this morning, we encountered a denizen who referred to Matthew as "hige-san," or "Mr. Moustache."

Unlike many places in the US, Japan is very bike-friendly. This is fortunate for those of us who have not ridden a bicycle in sixteen years and now have to do so while a) carrying groceries, including pastries and large bottles of Sapporo beer; b) wearing a suit; or c) wearing Steve Madden heels and carrying a fetching handbag. However, neither of us has attempted doing a), b), and c) simultaneously.

We are both enjoying our nascent adventure quite a lot. Matthew's teaching gig is challenging, but keeping him happy. I'm settling in and trying to make the most of my negligible Japanese. Speaking of, I have a placement test for Japanese classes tomorrow, so -- oyasuminasai! Good night!