It's Craft-astic!

Can you hear that? Is that...the sound of sleigh bells? 


Christmas: it seems to start earlier every year (and yup, Japan is no different - take down the Hallowe'en stuff, only to replace it with stuff for Noël). Now, I try to keep my wits about me until at least the end of November - even shooting down an excited H when he wanted to put up the tree the second October became November. But hark! Only a month and two days left - time to get decorating! 

This year, I decided to make my own Christmas cards. It's not that I can't get Christmas cards in Japan - quite the opposite, actually. The problem is you can't buy them in nice, $10 or $20 sets for multiple cards. Nope - each has to be bought individually for anywhere from 200-600+Yen, depending on how fancy a card you want. That's just too rich for me, especially when I plan on sending out 20+ cards. When you get right down to it, making my own cards probably won't save me much money, but I at least get the joy of crafting out of the expense, as well as a unique Christmas card. 

Here's what I got made today. They're not beautiful, but they're a start.

And just thought I'd post some paper crane decorations I made last year. They give the ol' tree a little bit of a Japanese edge. Eeeee! Christmas!!!

Location, Location, Location

It's all about location, baby, and we've got it narrowed down to two. 

Now, H is in favour of the main shrine, Hachimangu, in Kamakura, a city about an hour down the coast from Tokyo. You can find English info and pictures of the shrine here. I love Kamakura, but then, so does every single tourist (Japanese and foreign) to come within a three-hour radius of Tokyo. I don't really fancy being in that many photos, or having that many telephoto lenses aimed at me. But, it is a lovely shrine.

My first choice is a shrine at another major tourist destination, Hakone, although it is a little more out of the way. It has hugely tall cedar trees and is in the "mountains" (they don't seem quite high enough to be actual mountains...), on the edge of the nice, big Lake Ashi. Hakone Jinja (scroll down that page for more pictures) even has a torii gate in the lake, and, on a clear day, a view of the Fuj (um...that would be Mt. Fuji) - it's just fantastic.


After H and I visit Hakone again in person, I will post clearer pictures of my own.

A November Strawberry Shortcake

If there's one tried and true method of ingratiating/endearing yourself to others, it is to make them dessert. I mean, who doesn't like the cake-bearer? In that vein, I have spent the morning baking a strawberry shortcake. Actually, truth be told, I just like baking stuff and giving it away.

Over at the Food Network, Anna Olson has a fantastic, if not at all traditional, recipe for strawberry shortcake. I've made it about a million times in the last year (Japanese people really like shortcake), and it is divine. Even in my dinky little oven, it cooks up pretty nicely.

Of course, it wouldn't be a Me-cake if I didn't run into some form of obstacle. Today's was that the one cake (stupid 9" cake pan!) came out very, very thin. As I had been planning on doing two one-layer cakes, the thickness was more important than ever. What to do??

Well, it ended up being one double layer-cake. *sigh* H says we'll just all eat the one cake together rather than separately. Not a huge difference, but still. 


I had some chocolate ganache left over from a cake I baked the other day, so I put that down as a thin layer on top of the first cake. Then came whipped cream, the second layer with more whipped cream, and the strawberries. It looks delicious - here's hoping it is delicious.


Oh, as a side note. My hope is to have a lot of cake entries on this blog, and to get your opinion on which looks best. I think I'd like to bake my own wedding cake, you see, so I'm going to have to try out a bunch of different recipes over the next few months. Next up, a really cool-looking cake from the ladies at Mennonite Girls Can Cook. I'm thinking this one. Those flowers? Pineapple slices! I know, crazy! When I get a chance to make it, I'll add some pics.

              Tiny Oven         Just Right        Too Small            Not Bad


Ever see such a little oven? It can roast a small chicken, nothing bigger. And it is seriously a microwave/oven. Compact, yes, but if you want to heat up some butter for a recipe, or anything else for that matter, while you're using the oven, you're outta luck. It also has a tendency to burn the tops of cakes... Oh well, I still love it.

A Bit of Visual

To help with the question from the previous post, I have put my terrible cut and paste skills to work: Which is better, the full hat/hood, or the little hat?

                                                                                 

What do you think?

Getting Ready for the Next Step

When in Rome, do as the Romans. When in Japan, get married as the Japanese. Well, get married as they used to get married, at least. You know, before all the Magic Kingdom nonsense threw decency to the wind and every grown-up little girl needed to have her (bankruptcy inducing) day as a princess. What the Japanese have managed to do to the western-style wedding is truly something.

I, however, have different plans. For years now, I've had dreams of an odd wedding day (hello, pot-luck!), but getting hitched to a Japanese fellow means that I get to make my day (actually, TWO days), even more interesting. Well, the first day, at least. H (the fiancé) and I are going to be married in a traditional Shinto ceremony. That means shiromuku (a white wedding kimono) for me and a montsuki (a black, formal kimono), hakama and haori for H (among other odds and ends of formal Japanese clothing). But the best part is the hat/hood I get to wear. It's big, white and is designed to cover my horns of jealousy. It is the tsuno kakushi. Of course, I've read that it's also supposed to 'prove [my] obedience to [my] husband', but well, we'll see about that...

Anyway, after taking a look at the two different styles of tsuno kakushi, which do you think would best suit a strawberry blond?   

A Glimpse into the Mind of a Tokyo Newbie

I wrote this a month after coming to Tokyo. It pretty much sums up how I felt back then, riding trains to and from work in a city that just never seemed to end. While I am quite a bit more literate in Japanese than I was back then, I still find myself drowning in kanji on a regular basis.

Ode to Tokyo

Strange days in a

          Tokyo haze

Cars far too big for the narrow streets

speed by me

As I sit staring out the train window at the bright lights of a city so huge,

          So foreign, so hard to believe...

                                                       Is real...

I'm really here in this crazy

                                     trippy

                                            world

          of manga and Keropi ~

Hello Kitty greets me from every angle

Every surface covered in flourescent flashing

                                                               "Buy This!"

                                                               "Buy That!"

I can't read what it says,

But I get the gist...

                           It's all the same, no matter where you go,

                                                   but different.

Hiragana, katakana, kanji ~ all sprinkled together like one big bowl of Alphabet Soup,

                     but it's bizarro Alphabet Soup that I can't read...

Illiterate, everywhere I look is something else I can't read...

              But even if I could, would I understand?

This culture shock, shocks the system, culture walk into the Land of Oz...

         Odds and ends that don't match ~

                  East meets west, old and new, grey and seizure-causing colours make up this crazy city known as Tokyo

             Bright lights in a haze of starry night...

                                     This is Tokyo.

Ye Olde Site

For those who are curious, or others who have forgotten the link, here is my old site. It is filled to the brim with my first impressions of Tokyo and life in Japan.

A New Beginning

Welcome to my new blog, "Peregrination: Japan."

I thought I needed a bit of a fresh start, having become rather bored with my original blog and well, increasingly neglectful of it. That, in addition to the fact that my blog goals have changed - I'm no longer discovering Japan the way I was nearly four years ago, laughing in delight at every use of awkward English and gawking at every bizarre sight that Japan is home to and then feverishly putting it on record for those at home to delight in. No, no longer.

I have gone from temporary visitor to something more. I'm trying to build a life here that goes beyond teaching English to the masses. I'm paying more attention to the subtle happenings that surround me, rather than just the spectacles. I'm trying to figure out where I fit in and if I can create a comfortable niche that balances my foreigner culture with my Japanese environment. In short, I'm trying to grow up. Let's see how it goes...