13 January 2006

A Boring Post

Today's post is not very exciting, but I thought I should give an actual update from my life for the folks back home. So...

I had a very nice three-day-weekend.

On Tuesday I slept in almost embarrassingly late (2:30pm) then slouched around the house a bit and met a friend for dinner in Kobe. We had a nice dinner at an izakaya in Sannomiya and as part of my recent crusade to start eating more seafood I actually screwed up my courage and ate a fried oyster. (It was just as horrible as I thought it was going to be.... bleeeggghhh, never again.) The rest of the dinner was good and included tuna-sashimi, tofu with Chinese sauce, french fries, and foil grilled mushrooms... (I think foil grilled mushrooms with ponzu [soy sauce with citron] and momiji-oroshi [grated radish with hot pepper] is one of the best ideas ever to come out of Japan...). We had a nice time, but I forgot my new purple gloves at the restaurant and didn't notice until the next morning! (Oh well, they were only cheap ¥200 gloves from the conbini.)

On Wednesday I went to the Kindergarten to do my volunteering. I was in Manbou (sunfish) Group this time, and we did cooking as always (Wednesday is cooking day). This time we made mochi (rice cakes) with various different toppings and it was pretty gross some of the things the kids put together. (Soy sauce, ketchup, cheese and chocolate is not my idea of a yummy snack, but they seemed to like it.) Then we cleaned up for lunch and after lunch we played Zombies in the big hall upstairs. (A few words of explanation are perhaps in order; A few weeks ago we were playing cops and robbers and I pretended to die and come back as a zombie, and ever since then the kids can't get enough of zombies. Now whenever I go they always come running up to me saying "Let's play zombies, Let's play zombies!"

After the kindergarten I came back home and vegged out. I watched the sumo on TV and then I watched this other weird trivia show. They had lots of bizarre trivia, including a battle between various species of giant beetles to determine the world's strongest beetle. (I LOVE Japanese TV!)

On Thursday I woke up late again, did the laundry, went to the post office to mail Mom and Claire's b-day presents, and then went back to Sannomiya for my French lessons. I had four lessons and tried to wrap my brain around negating sentences with two pronouns, but failed miserably. Finally I hopped the train down to Osaka to have dinner with my friend Shigeki who's going to Australia soon. We had my favorite pumpkin gnocchi in tomato cream sauce and garlic and tomato spaghetti (Yum, yum yum...) Then I came back home hung out with Hana and Non-chan for a while and wrote a blog entry.

Goog niter!

P.S. I will get those Paris and London pictures developed (after payday) and I'll have a blog entry about the trip up then.

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10 January 2006

Ouch!


This year's first basho is off to a rather distressing start with brand new Ozeki, Koto'oushuu, the Bulgarian Bruiser being taken down on the very first day off the tournament by none other than Roho ( the ugly one). He managed to recoup on day two with a victory vs. Takekaze but then, lo and behold the Man from Mongolia was also shamefully taken out by Kokkai (who, incidentally is one of only 5 wrestlers who actually beat Asashoryuu last year).

It's shaping up to be a real contest this year rather than the clean-sweeps by Asa we've seen in recent months and I for one would not be surprised if Koto'oushuu wins his first tournament this January!

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