Or, why I'm glad I don't work at the factory next door.



Actually, having an exercise routine built in as part of your work day might not be a bad idea. The Japanese people are traditionally pretty healthy, and this kind of health program has surely contributed.

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!

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.