Quasarsglow

It’s that time of year agaim

For the first time in 10 years.

I’m back at crew practice. This time as a coach. It’s both easier and harder than before.

The workouts don’t really apply to me, so that’s easier. But the decisions do and that’s much harder.

Here we go!

Summer. Summer is good. I like being warm without trying. Things should be easy like that. Winter is cruel in that you have to work so hard to stay warm, but summer, you gotta just open the window and there’s your warm.

Comfort should not be a difficult thing. It’s for this reason I hate the rainy season. I cannot be comfortable when I’m working hard to stay dry. I normally like rain, but normally I have a way to keep myself sheltered from it when I need to look presentable upon arrival. The other day I decided I would wear some white pants to work because they dry quickly and roll up so theres less chance that the bottoms will get all gross and muddy. What I didn’t think of was that there’s a reason wet t-shirt contestants wear white shirts. I arrive at the elementary school and realize that my pants which have been plastered to my legs by the rain are nearly transparent. Thank god it was only from mid-thigh down, but still..

There is no way to arrive and look presentable in rainy season. The hair frizzes, the pants legs are wet, you aren’t sweating per se, but the humidity in the air is condensing on your face. Ugh. It’s just Ive been TRYING to look put together. Epic failure in this weather.

In other news, the rain does not keep me locked indoors on weekend evenings. It’s farewell party season and I have been all over the place. Two weekends in a row at Sala Sol have had me dancing loads and waking up in the morning exhausted, stinking of smoke and wondering where I left my dignity. I think you check it at the door, but at least I know I am doing much better than the girl who was dancing on the wobbly table last night. Her dignity must have been checked at the city limits.

Places like Sala always make me want to just sit back and watch the patrons, if I’m not too busy acting like a total idiot dancing. It’s both scary and fascinating. You get to see the awkward situations where there are two guys both talking up the same girl who you hear has a boyfriend. You see the people who apparently only want to dance and are realizing that meat markets are not really meant for dancing. My favorites are always the ones who think they can dance, and that their dancing is what will attract the opposite sex to them. Who needs cable?

I think I might actually miss Sala when I leave Matsuyama. Endless nights of amusement.

Bright spots!

I had a good day and I feel compelled to tell you about it.

Okay, so basically yesterday I was rolling along feeling a bit blah and thinking about going home and realizing that I suppose in some ways I have it quite easy in leaving since I don’t really have all that many Japanese friends or at least not that many people I feel like actually would care that I’m here or not. This was both a bit of a relief and a bit of a downer. After three years, you’d think that I’d have more Japanese buddies than the few people in the Board of Education office who know my name and chat to me whenever we meet.

Anyway, I was starting to realize the downside to being relatively distant to my coworkers despite my attempts to chat them up until I realize that I’m really more in the way than anything. My mood was sinking and I was really getting into the ickier bits of blah by midafternoon. When suddenly, one of my JTEs stops by my desk and gives me a plastic bag with a wrapped box inside it. “It’s a present for you. Omiyage (souvenier) from Kansai area!”

I was shocked. The third year teachers had all gone on a school trip with the kids and I didn’t because.. well, the ALT never went in the past even tho we’ve always been part of the third year teachers group. Well, this teacher and the school nurse chipped in and bought me a really lovely cup for tea ceremony painted with camillia flowers (matsuyama’s city flower). I was quite touched that they had even thought of me at all. I wasn’t expecting it and I felt super humbled due to my train of thought that had been chugging along earlier.

Well, today I went into school armed with thank you notes I’d written in Japanese for them. I left them on the desks when the teachers weren’t around as I don’t like to really call much attention to myself and just after lunch, the school nurse turns to me and says, “Your Japanese is amazing!”
I said I didn’t really think it was THAT good, I mean I study and all, but..
“No, really, there was only one mistake and even I don’t know how to write the kanji for the wan in “chawan”.”
What? It’s easy, I can tell how to do it just from looking.
“Really? Well the only mistake I saw was that you drew 私 with lines that make the right side look like the right side of 松”
Ah, of course I can’t manage to mess up grammar or something hard.. its always something silly, right?
“Hey, it happens to everyone”

I just have to say, the warm fuzzies have lasted all day.

Odd things

Just popping in to say I keep having weird problem-solving type dreams. Like, I have a task to complete and when I’m done, I wake up.

Last nights task was that someone had filled the tank of the toilet with a lot of clothes. and somehow these clothes were actually flushed through the toilet and my job was to find a way to get the tangled mass out. And clean.

Tedium.

Also I went to Hiroshima this weekend. I triumphantly return with study materials, books, bagels, a jump rope and gnocchi!

Singapore and Malaysia

Okay well I made a trip to Singapore and Malaysia for one week during the school holidays at the end of March/beginning of September and it was a much needed break from the chill of early-spring Japan.

My photos will be up soon, I’ve just hit a stall. I did however get pictures up until when I left uploaded. So I’m nearly there! Please be patient.

Singapore was a dream come true for this shoe-string vacation foodie. I think the first thing I did when we landed was drool over all the food availible. The first night we were going to try to meet up with a food tour hosted by our hostle Betel Box, but they had run off a long way and it would have been a pain to try to meet them, so we just dropped our things and went for a stroll down the historic Joo Chiat district.

Food stalls abounded and it was all incredibly cheap. Vicky and I started with a bowl of spicy veggies and noodles at a place that specialises in “seafood steamboat” and I ate around the unexpected dried fish that were ladled atop the bowl. It was delicious, tho I wouldnt have minded not having to look out for the fish. Ah well. Next stop was a little Vietnamese place were we got some fried chicken and some fresh spring rolls. Yum! We got back to the hostel, did some checking for the stuff we planned to do on day two, including a cookery course then crashed out.

The next day we got up bright and early, ate breakfast and strolled around the corner (literally) to our cookery course. Cookery Magic was really cool. It was run out of our teacher’s house and she showed us how to prepare three dishes. Sweet sticky rice with mango (one of my favorite desserts since learning about it in Thailand last year), black pepper prawns, and sour gravy noodles, which sound a bit gross, but are in fact delicious!

The cooking was pretty much done in total by our teacher, but she showed us and talked to us about how to choose our ingredients and the background of the dishes as well. They were basically malay influenced foods.

My memory is already fading, but after the cookery course I think Vicky and I went out for a nice wander in the big central business district. We did the obligatory visit to the Merlion statue and acted like stupid tourists while taking pictures of ourselves. We also visited the Asian Cultures museum which was incredibly interesting and full of interactive guide and information terminals. It was a shame that we had to leave only two hours after arriving. We really only got to see one floor!

That evening we back at the hostel we got to chatting with some lovlely ladies from the UK and Thailand via Australia. We decided that it would be a good night to go out to a bar and get a couple drinks. We ended up sharing a table with a couple and chatting to them a bit. I was thrilled to learn that the woman who we randomly sat next to was a personal trainer, so I chatted to her about weightlifting for a while. Probably to the intense irritation of everyone else. Oops!

The next day was a beach day. We packed our stuff into a bag and ran off to Sentosa Island, the resort complex island. The food and stuff was really pricey compared to stuff in the area we were staying at, and a tube of sunscreen cost me an arm and a leg (forgot mine on the kitchen table), but overall it was a clean, nice beach. I plopped on the sand and read my book, had a short dip, but no major swimming for me as I didnt like the look of all the really huge ships in the harbor, probably full of oil. The beach was safe and good for swimming, but I just wasnt feeling it.

That evening Vicky and I went for dinner in Little India. I ate my weight in curry and I ate it off of a bananna leaf! Vicky did some shopping and I whined inwardly about being too big for all the really cute looking stuff and also about how silly it would look for me to wear any of it anyway as well.. there are some styles of clothing that make me with my very anglo/western european features look like a monkey in a costume. If kimono and yukata make me look foolish, I highly doubt Indian-style clothes are going to make me look less stupid.

The next day was a day for running off to the wonderful land of Malaysia! We jumped on a bus and arrived in Melaka 5 hours later. It was evening when we arrived, so we changed money, booked it to the guesthouse and then got a recommendation for places to eat nearby. We ate at a place called Geographer, western style cafe serving largely Malaysian food. The atomosphere was cool and there was an old man at a keyboard croonign Sweet Caroline. Our bucket of Carlson beer made all the bus-seat butt fatigue go away and we wandered our neighborhood for a bit before returning to crash out for the evening.

The next day in Melaka, we went to the beach. Malaysia is a bit more conservative than Singapore, and we were advised not to swim at any of the nearby beaches because the water isnt clean enough. Oddly enough, most tourist brochures said it was fine for swimming, but the locals said no, but allowed their kids to swim. Confusion. So Vicky and I camped out in shorts and tank tops, reading books and catching rays and being lulled by the sound of the waves. Ahhh…

On the way back we met Sara, a local Malay woman who offered to split up a cab with us back to town. She told us about how she works two jobs and about her children, where she lives, who she works for and all sorts of local information. She was an awesome lady and funny too. All this was in English, obviously and Vicky and I marvelled at her ability to converse. The high level of English proved to be the norm, even for the folks in non-service industry.

The way of life in Melaka seemed pretty slow, so our evenings were of a similar pace. We just hung around, wandered the neighborhood, ate at the street cafes for cheap and tended to eat what was recommended.

Our second day in Melaka was a spa day! Massage, scrubs, facial.. ahh, very nice. My masseuse seemed to take the approach that if theres a knot in a muscle, you must simply flay the person alive. I was shocked a few times to see that no knives had been used on my body. There were times I really thought that surely the muscles had been removed from the bone. So the only negative thing I have to say was that my masseuse was a teeny bit overzealous. I didnt know you could have muscle knots in your forearms!

That afternoon we cruised the museums at sadthuys and had our last supper in Melaka. The next day was our bus trip back to Singapore and then we had one more day of food.

I also went to the gym in Singapore on our last day. We finally got to take part in the food walk, which was amazing. Our leader, Tony, told us everything about the Joo Chiat district, we were taught about the architecutre, the cultures that mixed in the area, where the area has been and where its going and we got to eat some of the most amazing food as we learned about everything. Unfortunately we had to cut out early to get our plane. Overall tho, it was a great trip.

Found via Gubernatrix: Metabolism boosting

Nutrition expert John Berardi on Canadian TV selling a book, but also making great points about strength training and metabolism.

Precision Nutrition part 1

Precision Nutrition part 2

I’m actually pretty intrigued by the cookbook looking at the samples of some of the foods they displayed on the show.

My training has been going well lately, I’ve dropped nearly 5 full kilograms since September, thats 11 pounds to you folks in other places. I feel loads healthier and I am strong like bull! More on all this later. Just thought it was interesting.

Gonna go pick up heavy things and put them down again as much as I can!

Things I want to eat right now

Okay, Ive been going to the gym a lot lately. Thats not me trying to sound tough, its true! I’ve dropped almost 10 pounds and I’m getting those hot dented-in lines across my abs that are not pressure marks from my jeans. Speaking of jeans, they’re all getting a bit loose. I’m getting stronger, and I mean I have nice definition coming up on my arms and shoulders again. Ah, I love the way looking better makes me feel.

The greatest thing about kicking my own butt 4-5 times a week at the gym is that I can eat pretty much anything I want because, I’m creating the calorie deficit to do so. Now just because I can sit down and eat a whole stick of butter topped with sugar doesnt mean thats what I want. Ive been cooking some pretty good (and healthy) food lately, but I’m getting the Cravings.

So here, for you dear friends and family and anyone who randomly comes across this, is a list of what I want to eat right this moment. All at once. Ill explode my stomach and die a happy woman. And don’t worry, I can find some of this stuff here, but oh how I miss the convenience.
Give me cottage cheese or give me death! Then give me roast turkey. Mashed potatoes with corn in. Hot apple cider. Reeses cups. Gumbo. Enchiladas, cheese, bean and rice. Cheese soup. A baked potato. Thin mint cookies. Mint chocolate ice cream. Any kind of ice cream (okay, not any.. but lots). Pumpkin cookies. Pad thai and tom yum gun. New potatoes. Thai sweet sticky rice with mango (shiver). Jalepeno poppers. Aunt Susans meatballs. Mom’s Swedish meatballs. Saurkraut and sausages. Greek salad (double shiver). Buffalo wings and bleu cheese. Avacado, tomato, beansprout pita with spicy mustard. Grilled portabella mushroom. A wicked willy’s fajita burrito (oh i miss the Calamity Cafe). A long-island iced tea. Regular iced tea. Chai. Boca burgers.
I could go on all day, but I’ve got to go get something to eat.

Pumpkin pie

Pumpkin pie

Originally uploaded by quasarsglow.

I made a pie. A wonderfully delicious pumpkin pie that did so much to lift my spirits and the corners of my mouth into a grin that I declare it a soul-saving pie.

I made it from scratch, you know. Its all me. Nothing canned (except that I had to buy the spices and the maple syrup) and I even ground my own cinnamon sticks.

I got the recipe at All Recipes.com and had to substitute Kabocha instead of regular pumpkin, but oooh it was sooo good anyway!

Hooray for everything! There’s a pumpkin pie on my table!

Matsuyama Fall Festival

Well, its been a while again, but there is more to say! Yay!

The Matsuyama Fall Festival is upon me and I drug my butt out of bed at 4:30 this morning to go to Dogo and watch lots of people slam portable shrines into each other. It was highly exciting and incredibly insanely packed full of people. The festival starts on Friday evening and comes to a head in the Mikoshi (portable shrine) fighting early Sunday morning, but thats not when it’s over, thats only the high point. There are still portable shrines being marched around the neighborhoods and the chanting of drunken revelers fills the air. That and the sound of ambulance sirens as someone has to tend to all those drunk people who are carrying around mikoshis for three days straight.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I shot some video of the mikoshi fights and have lots of photos up over on flickr, but for now, heres the video and a few pictures. The video didn’t seem to want to imbed, so head over to my youtube page to check out this groovy bit of Matsuyama culture.

Riding the mikoshi into the festival area.

An idea of the madness and the work it takes to keep the crowd from being sucked into the sea of mikoshi carriers.

The shrines about to collide!

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Quasarsglow

It’s that time of year agaim

Wild rain and nights

Bright spots!

Odd things

Singapore and Malaysia

Found via Gubernatrix: Metabolism boosting

Things I want to eat right now

Pumpkin pie

Matsuyama Fall Festival

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