Baa Baa Black Sheep

Every family has one, or in my case, a few. Black sheep that is. I think I was one myself for quite a while.
So today my mother's brother wrote to me, he's got a bit of a patchy past let's say, and I thought I would share his enlightened thoughts.
The postcard shows a lush green paddock (I don't know how to translate that for you Americans - grassy field?) and above that a snow covered mountain (Mt Cook).
"Dear Rosie, Hope this picture of home, that is if you live at Mount Cook, cheers you up. It's not sunny here at the moment. It's just starting to get cold. Otherwise it's the same old same old. Everything just ticks over and you either fit in or get out.
Katharine (my mother) said you were getting a bit tetchy up there. Just stick it out. The rewards will come when you turn into a well travelled polished cosmopolitan. Don't ever underestimate it. When you come back if you ever do you'll see what kind of hicks Kiwis really are. All my love, Kerry."
You heard it here first folks. Now get off my land before I shoot you, you varmint.

Survivor: Hagi

My Mum is gonna be here to visit me in just over 3 weeks. I can't wait, not just because I love her and because she's an amazing Mum, but also because we are precariously low on supplies of Marmite/Vegemite. We used to have preferences but now we'll smear anything on our toast as long as it's origin is yeasty. Mum has a health food shop in my hometown, and I have horrible visions of her being detained for importing illegal quantities of Omega-3 fish oils for Dan.
I realised how desperate the situation was last night when Ellen called me from Kyoto. She had found a foreign food shop that sold Cream of Tartar, one of those elusive baking ingredients not available at Japanese supermarkets. So I got her to bring a packet back for me, setting me back a whopping Y420. I converted that back into NZ dollars and just about had a heart attack when I realised I had just paid nearly $7 for bloody Cream of Tartar.
Axl Rose was right all along - Welcome to the Jungle.

Get Your Hot and Spicy

Just ate a lot of delicious hot cross buns fresh from my wee oven here in Japan. Easter is truly the time for miracles. It's probably my favourite Christian holiday. It brings back memories of cold and drizzly days where we struggled to get the dough to rise, and the ectasy of eating the hot cross buns with the best butter in the world (NZ) while watching Jesus of Nazareth for the 17th time. Just spoke to my family on the phone who had an Easter roast, the kids were screaming in the background, I miss them through the craziness. But everyone thinks their family is crazy I suppose.
Family is everything to me, when it comes right down to it.

Kameoka - Destination One - Kansai Weekend Tour

Last Thursday I took off on the shink to Kyoto station, where I met up with a group of 30 other JETs from around Japan, and 10 Japanese people from the Kyoto/Osaka area. Four JETs from Kameoka (small town near Kyoto) had organised a non-profit tour of the area as a way for JETs to not only check out all there is to see and do, but also to promote friendships between local people and foreigners.
It was my first time travelling without Dan, it was fun to be out and about on my own and a fun challenge, no one to argue with about what train platform we were supposed to be on. I just had to figure it out.
The first afternoon was spent picking tomatoes in a greenhouse and making soba noodles (out of buckwheat flour). That night we stayed at a state-of-the-art ryokan (Japanese style hotel)http://www.ryokan.or.jp/index_en.html which would normally have cost 30,000 yen (roughly NZ$420, US$300). The dinner was a meal of about 20 tiny courses, all of us dressed in yukata (light robes) and drinking sake from the region. The mayor of Kameoka and other VIPs were there along with newspaper photographers. Everyone wanted a piece of the foreigner action! The highlight of course was the arrival of the geiko-san and maiko-san. Normally a geiko is known as a geisha, but we were told not to call her that as it has sex-worker connotations. A maiko-san is an apprentice geiko, between the ages of 15 to 20. Ours was 17 and was so cute, she kept smiling and breaking into giggles. I would try and describe this amazing event but my words cannot do the experience justice, I will post a photo here asap. Many Japanese have never seen a geiko performance so I was full of gratitude for this.
That night before dinner I went to not one but two onsens, the first was a very luxurious communal bathing area, and the second was a rotenburo, a small intimate outdoor mountain affair. http://www2.gol.com/users/jolsen/onsen/shikanoyu.html Needless to say that night (the sake giving a helping hand) I slept like a log. With the tour guides organising everything it felt like a real holiday, my brain was out to lunch. The cherry blossoms were out, my room was next to a beautiful mountain stream, it was my perfect Zen Japanese moment. I know I will probably never have another ryokan experience like it.

Fantastic Spring Is Here

On Saturday morning I said to Dan "I don't want to be here". It was my lowest low in Japan, in the sense that I was ready to ring the travel agent. I just wanted a weekend with my family, that is the one sucky thing about being so far away. No break from reality with Mum's roast chicken and my niece telling me she loves me while I kiss her gorgeous baby face. No summer New Zealand weather! Argh.
So, the last couple of days have been really warm. I got out and walked around parts of Hagi I hadn't seen before, it was amazing to see the old areas where there are tiny canals next to the houses where people used to wash their clothes and dishes not so long ago. I am feeling a bit more appreciation for this beautiful little town I live in, the trees are looking gorgeous, full of cherry blossom. We went out tonight for a bike ride and it was really nice to finally not feel frozen. I am also really looking forward to Kyoto, I am heading off on the shinkansen (bullet train) on Thurs 17th March. I am going on a group tour, run by a non-profit group of JETs from the Kyoto region, with a mixture of JETs from around Japan and some local Japanese people. Just the fact that there is a bookshop with English books and a Starbucks at Kyoto station is enough for me. I've become very simple to please. Wait til I see my Mum in April!

Krazy Korea

Okay here it is folks. The low down on the closest I'll ever get to Kim Jong Il. How that man ever managed to procreate I'll never know.
Friday - woke at 4.30am (unfortunately too pissed at the early start to celebrate the fact that I had a day off) to drive to Yamaguchi city to pick up Alex and Lauren (UK), two fantastic girls who were genki and ready to make a move. We then motored thru to Fukuoka and made our way to the port. We were lucky, the sea was calm and we arrived in Busan (huge container port, 4 million people) 3 hours later. We got driven up to our hotel, which was fab-u-lous. It was designed in the style of a Korean buddhist temple. There was a bed, no futons in sight, and a TV with English cable. The trip was worth every cent for me right there. Unfortunately the others wanted to do stuff! We went out and checked out the city, bustling markets, dirty, but with clean air, and explored the subway which was good and cheap. Our first eating experience was terrible, the travel agent referred us to a bbq meat restaurant (yakiniku, what Korea is famous for) which sucked dogs bollocks - service, food and price. Luckily we were a resilient bunch and bunked down determined to succeed.
Saturday - out and about, shopping and exploring in Busan. Weird stuff - Korean people do openly rude things - like stare at you a lot. Didn't realise how used I had got to the extreme Japanese politeness. Eating pizza at a local joint saw me almost getting into a Guiness Book of Records staring competition over lunch. Korean women wear way too much bright lipstick. The shopkeepers try to hustle to the point where you leave the store because the "assistant" is so close they are touching you and shadowing your every muscle flinch, while of course, staring at you. We went out to the countryside to see a gorgeous ancient temple, similar in design to the Japanese temples but - painted underneath with the most beautiful, colourful designs. You realise how plain and subtle the Japanese ones are in comparison. The flashier Korean stuff was leaning more towards Indian or Chinese style than Japanese. It was very cool. We went up a huge cable car to get a good look over Busan which was very fun.
We went out to a huge spa complex, after my revolutionary onsen experiences http://www.theculturedtraveler.com/archives/Nov2001/Hot_Spring_JP.htm
I wanted to try a Korean one. Unfortunately it was a bit like an indoor public swimming pool, it really didn't have the feel of the discreet, at-one-with-nature Japanese onsen. It was still good though, it was so interesting to see the amazing culture of body acceptance which is so foreign in the West. You realise how desperately we all need to re-read The Beauty Myth. What I love particularly is how families go together, you see the grandmother with her grown daughter and in turn, her babies. You see the caesarean scars, where someone had their appendix out, and you just gradually lose your hang-ups. We all have our issues but essentially we are all the same. The specialty at the Korean onsen we went to was the body scrub, they had tables set up, where you could pay a woman to scrub your back to exfoliate. It was a mixture of pain and relaxation, stung a bit when you got off the table. They really take a tough love approach to dead skin. Dinner that night was hugely better, good beer, good meat, no dog! At the hotel bar that night we had a few drinks and I accidentally signed the bill Daniel "Bae Yon Jung" Hrstich. http://www.tamenobu.com/2004_11_01_archive.php Oops.
Sunday - The big one - we caught the fast train (after some Starbucks hehe) to Seoul, 3 hours away. Crazily, if you reserve the 4 seats which face each other in the middle of the carriage, you get a massive discount. We saved over $50 each! They have these amazing "Foreigner Only" queues at the train station, with an English-speaking local to help you out. Hello, Japan!
Seoul was crazy, 8 million in the city with another 12 million in the outlying districts. It was fantastic getting a good look at the countryside along the way as we played cards in our cheap seats - 4 was the perfect number (Ironically, you never do anything in 4's in Japan - 4 is synonomous with death, kinda like avoiding the number 13). The scary thing was the buildings they are all exactly the same everywhere in Korea. And I mean exactly. They are all white with the same design. It had a very mass, anti-independant thought vibe. We checked out the Royal Palace, the National Museum, saw the ridiculous amount of armed police outside the American Embassy, ate great bakery food, shopped at the markets and went up the Seoul Tower at night. Thank God for Lauren's Lonely Planet guide. We got back really late that night, what a whirlwind.
Monday - Our final day back in Busan, we slept in late, had a lazy frozen yoghurt breakfast and did our final shopping. I got some amazing souvenirs. One of the cool differences was the metal chopsticks. Korea is the only place in Asia not to use wooden chopsticks. Apparently one of the Emperors used silver chopsticks, as if there was any poison in his food he would know immediately when the silver tarnished. The legend is that his habit trickled down to the common people, and voila, stainless steel is the norm nowadays. I picked up my English newspaper from reception and checked out, looking forward to going home to Japan. It was nice to have that perspective and appreciation.
Just want to thank Alex, Lauren and Dan for being so fun to travel with, you guys rock. Wasn't all plain sailing, especially when I lost my temper missing 2 exits driving home. Phew! Next stop India with Ellen in Spring Break 2006...

Fudge Strikes Back With A Vengeance

Thank God. All that fudge karma was backed up and it finally came thru for me. I had the final night of my eikaiwa (Adult Conversation Class) and I had planned a fun cooking class. My contribution to the Christmas pot-luck celebration had been, of course, carrot cake and fudge. So guess what they wanted to make.
I was telling myself, it might be fudge, it might be in Japan, but these people aren't handicapped. Right!
So we got the cakes in the oven, and then on to the next project. Flashback, we had 6 pots full of potentially-explosive chocolatey goo on the stove.
I don't know how the hell it happenened, but every single one of those pots made proper, sets-like-its-supposed-to fudge. They were ecstatic, I felt like Jesus giving a sermon on the Mount, and the universe was at peace. Case closed.

Newsflash: The Chicken Basket Revelation

This is for all you Japan-dwellers out there. Hopefully you will all know by now that Hokka Hokka Tei (for non-dwellers: Japanese equivalent of the local fish n chip shop, a chain of take-aways, on every corner, except they do Japanese food - think katsu don, meat on rice, fantastic hangover/Friday night food) is one of the best things about Japan.
Tonight I decided to live precariously and order something I hadn't tried before. I got the "Chicken Basket" for 590 yen. Please try it - it comes with little sachets of lemon juice and peppery seasoning and it whips KFC's ass. Oversized nuggets of the tenderest chicken known to man. I should be doing their commercials.