It begins…

So, despite promises of starting a meticulous daily blog once I arrived in Japan, it’s taken me over a week to get this thing going. Since this is my first blog, I apologize if it’s a bit amateurish. This first post is also pretty long, since I’ve got a lot to catch up on. I promise after this I’ll keep it a lot shorter.

A lot has happened since I arrived. Most importantly, Sawa and I got engaged on Monday! I had the Zumbyes call us up after they finished singing in the freshman show last Sunday and wake her up with a musical proposal (the time difference worked out perfectly). Then I made French toast-the only thing I’m really any good at making. That and chocolate chip cookies.
Were planning to try to have the wedding next April or May here in Japan, but to have separate celebration things in Amherst, Massachusetts and Wellington, New Zealand so we can celebrate with our friends and family in those places. It’d be great to have a party in Amherst in June when all of our recent graduate friends can come back for this first Amherst recent alumni reunion thing. More details to come.

Speaking of cooking, I’ve become strangely interested in cooking lately. It all started when I realized I’d be living on my own this year without being spoiled by having a dining hall I could go graze at or parents to cook my food. So I started reading a cookbook and teaching myself to cook and reading the Omnivore’s Dilemma, a great book about the modern food chains that we eat from. That lead to reading Guns, Germs and Steel, which is all about the environmental history of everyone in the world and how the development of agriculture happened and how the different development on different continents lead to the modern-day disparities between different races and nations. It’s really friggin’ interesting, I keep on talking to everyone I meet about it, probably way too much. Anyway, now I’ve become really fascinated with the things I eat and how they got to be there and learning how to make foods from the basic ingredients they’re actually made from instead of from packets that have been pre-made by the food industry and have weird ingredients in them. I’m sure that if I ever get a real job that requires me to work a full day, I’ll start hankering for the convenience of more processed food, but I’m starting to get used to the life of not having a real job after working 15 hours a week as a “composer-in-residence” for 5 weeks and now living in Kyoto as the Amherst-Doshisha Fellow, where I’ll start teaching one 1.5hr class a week in October. I think I’ll try to angle for these kinds of lifestyles for the rest of my life.

I do have big plans for the rest of my time, but I haven’t really gotten around to starting any of them. In addition to my “research” into Japanese music (listening to lots of music, going to concerts, learning the shamisen or shakuhachi and Japanese singing), I want to try to really become completely comfortable speaking, reading, writing and listening in Japanese. I also want to learn to cook Japanese food. And of course, I want to explore all over Japan and just try to understand the culture by living here and traveling around. It should be a pretty sweet year. We’ll see how much of my goals I actually manage to get done…

So far, I haven’t done too much exciting stuff here in Kyoto. I did a lot of sightseeing when I was here in June with the Zumbyes on our Japan tour and on my own the week after they left. I’ve mostly been taking care of paperwork stuff, cooking a little bit and getting settled into my new accomodation.

I don’t want to babble on too much, so I’ll just share a couple of pictures from the last couple of days.

The first one is this sweet shrine about a minutes walk down the road from my dorm.

It has this awesome fresh-water spring where people can go fill up drink bottles for free. I love it, I feel a little more connected to nature collecting water from somewhere it naturally wells up and carrying it back to my dorm with my own power, rather than having it getting processed through this municipal water supply thing and pumped to my dorm. The one drawback is that being a wet, shady place where lots of people stop to fill their drink bottles is a mosquitoes heaven.

The other three pictures are from last night, when Morita-sensei, the Amherst representative at Doshisha, took me, Sawa and Reiko out to a delicious banzai (local Kyoto specialty food) restaurant.

The food was ridiculously good, as was the beer and sake. It seems that in Japan people really like to take you out and treat you to delicious meals and drink lots with you; another professor had actually taken me out to another (Italian) restaurant for a delicious meal and beer. I could definitely get used to this kind of life. The pictures are of the four of us and some delicious katsuo (bonito) sashimi.

Today another professor took me and Sawa out to this sweet soba (buckwheat noodle) restaurant where they ground the buckwheat and made it into noodles on site. It was awesome. Everything was made from soba, from the soba itself (obviously) to the tea, to the ice cream for dessert.

To finish this train of food-related stuff and end this unnecessarily long first blog entry, I’ll include a picture of the yakisoba and miso soup that Sawa and I made for dinner tonight. She’s got her own apartment with a nice kitchen (much better than my dorm), so you can look forward to many more pictures of my ongoing attempts to learn Japanese cooking.

Thanks for reading this far if you managed it. I promise I’ll try to keep it shorter in the future.

Although Japan is great, I really miss all you friends and family back in New Zealand and America. Hope some of you get a chance to come by sometime while I’m here.