Part I

PART I:

This past weekend, Hylton drove Marc, Mike and I to the Costco in Chiba City (Chiba-shi, not to be confused with Chiba-ken, Chiba Prefecture). It was rainy, we didn't exactly know the way and Hylton's car is always a breath away from extinction, but somehow we made it both there and back.

Costco Chiba is two stories high. Moving ramps connect the two stories, so it feels oddly like you are approaching a Disneyland ride, except you and everyone else has a cart in front of them. While on the moving ramps the carts are magnetically anchored to the ramp so you don't have to hold them. Very high tech. I didn't really get to look around one of the stories because once we went down the moving ramp we realized we couldn't go back up with our stuff, and I was against just leaving our stuff downstairs unattended. But I got to walk around the food floor, which had a lot of American products. If I ever wanted a 60 gallon vat of peanut butter I now know where in Japan to get it. As it is Hylton and I ended up buying 1 kg of eggplant (350 yen), 1 kg of those really big purple grapes (yummy, though still expensive at 880 yen), 1 kg of cheddar cheese, a ten-pack of Pocky (around 1200 yen), and a dozen bagels.

I guess this would be a good segueway into just some of all the things I could say about food in Japan. The first thing that comes to mind is how expensive fruit and vegetables are. Yes yes, this is an island, and I did expect produce to be more expensive, I just didn't realize how much more it would be. Cantaloupe is routinely priced at ten dollars a melon, and I have heard whispers of how watermelon (not currently in season, so I can't affirm this myself) can go for $60 to $100 dollars. The cheapest fruit at the moment are mikans, which are a variety of mandarin orange, and Asian pears. I really like both, but even as one of the cheaper fruits, Asian pears (nashi) are still usually around 200 yen per pear (a bit less than $2 a fruit). These prices seem to stay steady no matter if I am buying from one of the shabby little open-faced fruit markets in town, or at Nagasakiya, our neighborhood grocery store.

Nagasakiya is on the 126 towards Togane, which means we still have to drive to get there, but it is only a few minutes. Before I left for Japan my mom told me a tale about "the white bird store," which I can now only assume is Nagasakiya. There are actually a number of grocery store-like places that feature a white bird as their symbol, but I am pretty sure this is what she was talking about. It is the only "real" grocery store in the area, but is still quite good. Not like an American supermarket, where you would find tons of variety of the same thing, but I am not sure that truly exists outside of the States anyhow. This isn't a judgment, merely an observation.

There are some food products that are a lot cheaper here. Tofu is the winner with a price averagely falling below 100 yen. Since I am talking about prices, I will let you in on my conversion secret: just move the decimal two places to the left. So 100 yen is $1.00. This isn't completely accurate, but it gives you a good idea. Udon and soba noodles usually come three packs for 300 yen, which also makes a cheap dinner. If eating out, ramen places are most definitely the most cost-efficient choice. Ramen is Chinese, but quite popular here in Japan. A (normally quite large) bowl of standard ramen (noodles, miso, liquid, seasoning and often a few slices of pork) can run anywhere from 600 down to 225 yen. If you can get full for a bit more than $2.00, I think that is doing pretty well. Mushrooms, which are currently being sold in all shapes and sizes, are also generally not too expensive. I just threw some slimy yellow ones in the dinner pan. Pretty good.

Without a doubt I have been pleased with Japanese snack food selection. Current favorites include "Ghana" brand chocolate, vegetable grid-chips that apparently also have chicken-flavoring (at least, I imagine that is what the chicken on the front of the bag means), and pink-flavored, jam-filled marshmallows. Marshmallows here are either billed as a foreign kind of snack or as collagen-enhancers. I admit that these observations might be a bit off because I can barely read anything on the packaging, but that is at least how it seems to me.

Yes, I can barely read anything here. This fact colors my existence. Hylton appears to get really frustrated about it, but maybe because he already is, or just because I might have been more places where I didn't know the language at all, it hasn't driven me crazy yet. In case you don't already know, Japanese has three writing systems: hiragana, katakana and kanji. Hiragana is for word endings and conjugations, or words that aren't already covered by kanji. Katakana is for foreign words, like computer (konpyuuta), part-time job (arubeito, from German! as far as I can tell), and boyfriend (booifurendo). Kanji is for pretty much everything else. Kanji is the thousands and thousands of complex characters taken from the Chinese alphabet. People I've met who were Japanese majors in college don't know even close to half of all the kanji used in Japanese. This is a daunting thing to have knowledge of.

Most (but not all) roadsigns are in kanji, with romaji (Japanese in Latin letters, the Japanese you see me writing in italics in this blog) underneath. That I can read hiragana and katakana are often mute points when the bulk of everything is almost always in kanji. So basically I can recognize the endings of words, of tiny words in the middle of a sentence, or foreign words on billboards. And when I say "recognize" I mean I can tell what the characters are, but I don't usually have a clue what the word means. So, when I get handed the weekly schedule here at school (that lets me know if any of my classes are canceled, moved around or otherwise changed in a way I should be aware of), I look at it and read: blahblahblahblah no blahblahblah ka blahblahblah kyo blahblahblah mi (etc). This makes it hard to stay motivated to keep learning my few nouns and grammar points a day. It also makes it hard to know what is going on at my workplace! Fun!

While we are on the subject of language, I should say that is has been an interesting experience (all reading and writing aside) beginning to learn a language while living in the country. When I went to study in Germany for one year (now two years ago), I had studied German in college for two years. I was at college-level fluency, which means nothing when you are living where the language is never spoken and you have no opportunity outside of class to use it. That said, I did know my verbs and (some of) my rules and so forth, so when I arrived in Goettingen and was sort of shocked to find that no one used those same words I had learned in my textbook, I could at least switch over after a couple months. I won't say I still did fabulously, but I took my classes in German, had some German friends, traveled, went to the store and bought bread, got my bike fixed, etc. I struggled with more complex conversations and ideas, but that kind of struggle is very different from the day to day trials here in Japan. In some ways it was more difficult in Germany, because I was at a level where I was wanting to deal with more complicated structures and ideas and wasn't really able to. In contrast, I came to Japan pretty much a blank slate. Hylton coerced me into a bit of Japanese textbook study before we left, but apart from learning the two phonetic alphabets (hiragana and katakana), I didn't have much under my belt. I won't even go into how that has affected settling down in my job, because there is enough there to fill a different long-winded entry. For now I will say it is interesting (and probably good) to listen to conversations around the teacher's office and try to pick out words here and there.

As a translation team, Hylton and I actually don't do too poorly. I mean this relatively, but if Hylton does the talking and I try to interpret the situation, we usually come out alright. Hylton has had more of a drive to learn and has thus studied much more than me, and is currently delving into kanji-memorization while I am still at basic grammatical principles. That said, I think I have recently gotten some of my steam back (mostly after rushing around enough at work that I found a little extra time in which to crack out a book), so hopefully I will be getting into those store-counter conversations soon too. I have been surprised at how mostly accurate I have been at figuring out what people mean even if Hylton can't communicate with them in Japanese effectively. I think a large part of it is that I am not worrying over the language as he is, but rather watching for other clues. I remember that when Jacky and I would be talking to someone in Germany, whichever one of us wasn't talking was often the one to point out misunderstandings and so forth, most likely because they were able to pick up on other things because they weren't busy talking. Anyhow, I do remember thinking I had gotten decently good at this in Germany, but even if I am fooling myself, it has helped out communication here.

I have a lot more to say about Japanese and trying to pick it up here that I don't have time to keep writing about now. I will say that Japanese people are pretty funny, and make lots of noises that I didn't know people could use to communicate. There is also a ton of Japanese onomatopoeia that is interesting and endearing, which I probably haven't even scraped the surface of. And of my God, I don't think I've said too much about it yet, but BOWING. Wow. I think it is coming mostly naturally now, which means I'll probably be bowing my way to new acquaintances and out of shops all over America when I am there next. I think it is pretty effective, though. Gets the point across without having to swap germs or touch anyone's sweaty hand or anything. While in Italy I think I asked someone once what they did if they were meeting someone really gross whose cheek they wouldn't want to kiss (in greeting). I think the response was something to the effect of, well, I wouldn't actually touch their cheek with my mouth.

Part II will follow...