11/29/11, Or, The Day I Ran out of Creative Titles

Happy almost December! It’s hard to believe I have been in Japan for over four months now, a thing which marks not only the longest I have been out of the States, but also the longest I have gone without driving. The days of being able to ride my bicycle are quickly drawing to a close as well, as the inevitability of massive amounts of snowfall draws nearer. Currently, we are experiencing a somewhat strange but still appreciated 50 degree streak. It’s rainy, but really quite warm, a nice change as my house begins to look more and more like a den where I will hibernate all winter and less like a pit stop on my way to doing more exciting things. I broke out the heated carpet last night. That was an excellent choice. I have this inclination that the more fabric I put around the warmer my house will be. I’m not sure this is actually true, but it’s the premise I am operating under at present, and it makes me feel warmer, if nothing else.

I am making a long weekend trip to Tokyo next-next weekend. That should be a hoot.

Yesterday at Kita Ko I literally had nothing to do all day. Exams are coming up next week, so every teacher is cramming to cover the material the students need to know for the exams, which basically means that I am not team-teaching with anyone. I have vocabulary review classes today and tomorrow at Araya, and then I don’t think any more classes till December 12. I am trying to think of things I could prepare that might be useful (life-size Scrabble pieces? Endless trivia questions, divided into categories by topic and level? Scategories worksheets?) instead of studying Japanese for an hour and then reading NPR for the next five hours like I did yesterday (in my defense, I was woefully behind on the news).

In all that spare time, I also researched all the different kinds of things you can make in a rice cooker, including but not limited to, rice, soup, casserole, and cake! I have no microwave, which means I have no oven, and I also don’t cook. So in an attempt to harness what little culinary pursuits are within my power, I looked up how to make biscuits on a stovetop (do-able) and cookies on a stovetop (definitely not so do-able), in the event that I decide my true calling is baking and I take it up. I doubt it’ll happen. But one can hope. I’ll probably just end up buying some candles that smell like baking cookies and call it good.

Side note on the oven business, when I was trying to explain Thanksgiving to my students, I told them about the turkey and the stuffing. They kept asking questions like, You cook a whole turkey?, and How big is the turkey?, and Does everyone do this?.

And then it dawned on me. A Japanese “oven” is a microwave, i.e., it is the size of a microwave, and there is no way in hell you could ever fit a turkey in there, much less a turkey stuffed with stuffing. No wonder they were confused! So I proceeded to confuse them further and explain that in fact, people in America had real ovens about the same size as their desks (“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”), and that, dear students, is how you could cook a whole turkey at once. They didn’t believe me that we all had ovens that large. They further didn’t believe me when I told them that my house actually had two ovens, and one of them was bigger than the desk. My JTE also looked at me like TWO ovens was inexcusable excess of kitchen appliance. But what can I say? Blowin’ minds, one class session at a time.