(Link) Fukuoka: The Magical Mystery Tour

It turns out that, by default, Blogger dates posts to when you first edit them, not when you hit "publish." This creates some problems when, out of a delicate blend of bafflement and sheer laziness, you sit on a long post for nearly a month.

Behold: The Magical Mystery Tour, the story of how we came to play rock-paper-scissors with the mayor.

Posted today, but dated to October 30, 2011.

Kyoto Itinerary

Nana and I thought it might be a good idea to start posting itineraries for our trips. (Meaning that we'll probably do this once, or maybe twice, then forget about it entirely.)

So here's how we spent our Autumn vacation. I can't guarantee we'll write a post on each of these, but when we do post, we'll add a link below.

Saturday


Morning: Shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto
Early Afternoon: Nishiki Food Market
Late Afternoon: Kyoto Museum - special exhibit on kimono

Sunday


Morning: Philosopher's Walk and Temples, Northern Higashiyama
Afternoon: Geisha Dress-Up, Gion
Evening: Dinner at Goya, an Okinawan fusion restaurant

Monday

Morning: Toji Temple Flea Market
Afternoon: Temples, Southern Higashiyama
Evening: Kaiseki (Japanese haute cuisine)

Tuesday

Morning: Temples, Arashiyama
Early Afternoon: Arashiyama Monkey Park
Late Afternoon: Shijo Castle
Evening: Shinkansen to Fukuoka

Good and bad news

The good news: We are home safe and sound from Kyoto.

The bad news: Justin left me for a geisha.

PAINTED HUSSY.

Off to Kyoto; And, Expensive Pieces of Paper

We're heading off to Kyoto tomorrow, for four days of supremely dorky sightseeing. I'm hoping to finish a nice, long post about our last wacky excursion by the time we go, but I can make no guarantees.

In the meantime, I've spent half this week carrying two very expensive pieces of paper in my wallet: shinkansen (bullet train) tickets costing about $250 each. Yes, ticketing on Japanese trains is entirely done entirely with paper. Of course, most people buy their train tickets right before boarding, as trains run so frequently that there's almost always a seat. But this weekend is a major travel holiday, so we wanted to get ours a few days in advance.

Now, I don't know why carrying $500 in train tickets bothers me so much when I regularly carry a lot more than that in cash. (When in Rome.) But, boy, it does!

Wednesday Weirdness: A Life-Size Inflatable Panda With Boxing Gloves and a Murderous Glint in His Eye

It turns out not a single part of that post title was a lie. Just when you think you understand Japan, it gives you something like this . . . !

Mochi!

We say this a lot, but it bears repeating: Japan is a great place to eat.

Case in point: mochi, a chewy little cake made from pounding glutinous rice. (You can see me making some here.) Mochi has a variety of uses, from sweet to savory, but is most famous as a dessert snack. 

Daifuku (大福, literally "great fortune") is the most common variety of sweet mochi: it's rice dough, flavored or not, filled with something sweet, like red bean or chestnut. Decent, cheap mochi can be found in almost any grocery store, but the good stuff is a whole lot better and not that much more expensive. 

Nana and I have recently become addicted to a little mochi shop by our apartment that, in addition to the standard fare, has some really unusual stuff on offer.

We'll start with some standards, though: white daifuku with a chestnut filling, a block of sweet chestnut rice jelly (similar recipe, just with much lower rice content), and "black" daifuku (黒大福, kurodaifuku) in which the dough has been flavored with molasses.

 

And that's just the beginning! Below you can see a sweet, pink, almost sandy-textured bit of mochi designed to evoke the autumn cosmos, plus a red bean daifuku infused with yuzu, a regional citrus fruit more commonly used in spice pastes.

The cosmos one was nothing special, but I love the yuzu one on the left!

Once or twice, Nana and I have even tried some more exotic varieties. For instance, I failed to take a picture of the elusive akajiso daifuku - a red bean rice cake wrapped in red perilla, which is a slightly bitter, leafy herb related to mint.

Memrise: Slick, Free, and Super-Addictive Language Learning Site

For me, the biggest challenge in learning a language is the vocabulary. I tend to pick up grammatical patterns fairly quickly, but gathering enough words to express myself is a bit of a struggle. 

Recently, I've been trying to overcome this through some flashcard apps on my iPhone, which have helped me make better use of those scattered moments of downtime you have in the course of a day. However, these flashcard apps have one major weakness: there is no mechanism for encouraging you to practice words you've already learned, so that by the time you get to lesson 5, lesson 1 has started to fade.

Enter Memrise, a simple, well-designed, and addictive website-slash-dictionary-slash-social-network-slash-mini-game for language learners. The basic premise of Memrise is very familiar: take a word list, learn the words, move through progressively harder quiz questions on the words. What Memrise adds, however, is an odd little gardening game in which each word starts as a seed, grows into a plant as you practice it, and starts to wither if you haven't practiced for a while (at which point the site sends you an e-mail message, and prioritizes that word in your randomly generated quizzes). 

Basically, it's a stripped-down Farmville for language learners, harnessing the mindless addiction of such games in order to keep you coming back to your flashcards. There are some problems with the Japanese section of the site, which is still in beta: some questions don't recognize kanji in addition to hiragana, and the timer is a bit too short for frequent switching between hiragana and katakana, which requires some quick mouse work in Windows 7. Overall, though, the site is pretty effective - I blew a good 90 minutes on the site last night!

So thanks to our MUN advisor colleagues in Seoul last week, who showed us the site - and thanks to Nana, who kept mercilessly bugging me until I gave Memrise a try.

Today's Lesson

私は　日本語を　勉強しています。

わたしは　にほんごうを　べんきょうしています。

watashi-wa nihon-go-o ben-kyou sh(i)tay-imasu.

I (subj.) japan-language study do am.

"I am studying Japanese."