クジラ！！！

(Kujira)

So a week or so ago, Daniel said one of his students (his favorite) wanted to take him out to dinner and was told to ask me if I wanted to come along as well, so he (the student) could bring his girlfriend. I delightfully agreed to a dinner of KUJIRA. Which, you might better know as WHALE. I hope this post doesn't gross you out or nag at your morals, but I think this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so you'll have to forgive me.

This past Tuesday, we met up with Ikeda Yasuaki and his girlfriend, Rie, in Shibuya, and walked to this restaurant, appropriately named "Kujira-ya" (basically, "Whale House")


The interior is beautiful and so fancy, so we knew we were in for quite a treat. We got our own little private room that seats six people and got situated. Yasuaki showed us the menu and pointed to this set that he was thinking of getting. It included a bunch of courses of whale prepared different ways, so we all just decided to go for it. They also ordered a glass of beer for all of us to accompany the whale. Conversation was all in English because the two of them want to master English, as they said. But it was good; we talked about earthquakes, girls with suitcases and eye patches, Chinese, driving and traffic, past whale experience, sketchy business conducted in Shibuya, work, and the like. They are both C.P.As (!); she just started working at IBM (!!) mainly working with taxes, and he is in private business.

First came this:

Whale tail, boiled, and mixed with cod eggs.

The texture was rather like bible tripe or something; I didn't think it had much taste besides a bit spicy aftertaste, but it wasn't bad.

Whale tongue, but of course!

This tasted exactly how you might imagine whale would taste...I found it much too chewy for my liking, and it had an oily texture, and just felt blubbery or something. But I mean, again, it wasn't bad; the two were surprised that we weren't grossed out yet I think.

Ah, can you guess? Sashimi!

Definitely one of the best dishes, though apparently Japanese people don't often eat whale as sashimi, it's more often boiled or cooked some other way. The white part is the skin and the deep red is the meat. Really, a bit surprisingly I suppose, delicious. Just tasted like really really fresh sashimi.

Kara-age, which normally is fried chicken, but here it's fried whale of course.

Also quite tasty. I love me some fried foods, so I enjoyed this too. It was crispy which made the meat a bit tougher, but still it really doesn't taste like you're eating something out of the ordinary. I think Rie really enjoyed this one too.

Yaki-niku!

And veggies too!

We cooked it at our table.

This was amazing! The marinade, or however they prepared it, was so delicious. And the vegetables were good too. Again, didn't taste like anything out of the ordinary. It wasn't blubbery, oily, or tough, just meaty and yummy...

We wore adult bibs! To prevent the yakiniku cooking to get all over us.

The last main whale dish was rice that we poured a broth into, with whale flakes on top

Just tasted like ground beef or something mixed with rice. It was a nice and warm palate-cleansing dish. Then we had a nice citrus-y ice cream along with tea to end the meal.

So all-in-all, a really amazing experience. This particular dinner set is priced at 5000yen; each drink we had was over 600yen (total of 2)...And Yasuaki paid for it all.......very kindly and generously. They even took us to parts of Shibuya that we've never really ventured to (near the highway and where all the skyscrapers and nice-looking places are). They took us to a bar in the end to continue conversation...music, learning languages, traveling etc...and paid for everything there as well. Then we ended the night and all went home. So worth missing 3 hours of intense and sweaty dance practice for....

Update on School

MIDTERMS ARE COMING!
On Monday, we take our midterm for grammar class. I don't understand why we started a new chapter today. But anyway, it's the same length and format (90 minutes and a test of memorization, respectively) as all our chapter tests, but I guess will just be cumulative. That day, I also receive my take-home exam for Linguistics, which we have a week to complete.
Wednesday we have some sort of take-home Kanji test...I don't know what that's supposed to be. And our actual midterm is the week after.
I guess that's it...so not really a tough schedule.

This week's been pretty light too. My Wednesday dance practice was canceled because our senpai's couldn't hold it, and I skipped Tuesday for something special. See next post!

Oh! My Depressing Story...

I went to Tokyu Hands (a sort of all-purpose store that's a zillion floors) before my Linguistics class yesterday to buy some things. I was in a section looking at stuffed animals and dropped my phone and the battery cover came off and I was pretty sure I saw it slide under one of the display shelf things...I don't know what you call it. I spent some time looking under things for it but couldn't find it; I needed to get under that display thing. So I went over to an employee (after a while) and asked if he could help me. So I started to explain the situation, or tried to. I forgot the word for 'drop' so that was a failure. I ended up throwing in the English word because I'm not very resourceful at using what I DO know and thinking on the spot (I just end up getting very stuck on whatever mistake I do make), and with that he just started apologizing and was like 'My English...bad...I'm sorry...' over and over, so I was like ok and left and he left. I stood around that area debating what to do when he brought over another employee to help me, and she spoke English to me. I gave up and talked to her in English. She removed a shelf and we found it and I went on my way. But that experience sucked, to be not-so-eloquent. Because after all this time, you'd think I'd be comfortable and skilled enough to have excelled in that situation, but no. I feel comfortable with comprehending what people say, but only normally comfortable enough talking with people in Japanese in more 'social' situations I guess. Even in class, I'm so awful at speaking with teachers and saying stuff in class.

Hmm...I think I said I killed my phone.

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I'd like to start off by wishing 乾媽, 姨媽, and Melanie a happy birthday! 祝你們生日快樂!

Rundown of classes (each period is 90minutes):
Monday -
1st period (Reading and Grammar) with Kobayashi Sensei who I like a lot. He's nice and funny, so the class seems a bit more relaxed than others might be. Grammar periods we go over the lesson's reading and the new grammar structures that are introduced in the section after taking a vocabulary quiz. We have a grammar outline handout with each structure listed, with example sentences, and also some fill-in-the-blank exercises to help us understand what the grammar point does and how to use it.
2nd period (Oral and Writing) with Yagi Sensei who is nice, but the way she teaches isn't very challenging. In this period, we usually have a handout for some listening exercise we are going to work on for the week. It gives us new vocabulary and exercises to help us comprehend the listening piece (mainly some true/false and fill-in-the-blank type stuff). When we have Yagi Sensei, we usually end up listening to the piece at least 5 times or so. Homeworks will be a task reading with a writing piece to go along with it, or a flat-out essay (pretty short though) and we usually get a week to work on those.

Then I don't have class until 5th period, which is History of Japanese Linguistics. It's absolutely insane. The content is in itself difficult to comprehend, with no linguistics background (words like moraic nasal, bilabial fricative, glottal stops, obstruents, onbin...), and Motohashi kind of expects us to know what he's talking about. Which is also difficult to pay attention to because he has a pretty strong accent and as he talks a glob of really white saliva collects at the right side of his mouth. Anyway, basically everything in that class goes over my head (and most others') but you do get a sense of just how complex Japanese is, though I'm sure most languages are and everyone studying Japanese understands that it's a complex language...but whatever.

Tuesday-
1st period (R&G) with Komine Sensei. She's also very nice and I suppose good for the grammar class, but she moves at a really slow pace. As in, we usually spend so much time going over the reading that we don't get to spend that much time with the grammar outline and much of the exercises are left for homework.
2nd period (Kanji) with Hino Sensei. She's the main person in charge of our level of Japanese. She's little and quiet and the way she teaches the Kanji class doesn't necessarily require much attention. We always start off with a quiz in this class as well on the Kanji that we learned last class (which sometimes is nearly a whole week...) or a test on the whole chapter's Kanji. I usually utilize class by filling out the worksheet, and writing all the Kanji, with their respective readings and compounds with definitions, in my Kanji notebook. She thinks that I find Kanji OK/relatively easy because of my China powers. Sigh. Because she asked and I didn't feel like talking so I said yes. Sigh. But in reality, writing them I don't find difficult because I'm used to how Chinese characters look and stroke order and that kind of thing. But I mean, my Chinese reading skills aren't even that high, so my Chinese skills can only help me so much in guessing what Japanese kanjis mean, and of course the readings are usually quite different (Japanese Kanji have 'onyomi' which is derived from the Chinese pronunciation (used in Kanji compounds), but with Japanese sounds, they may be different than what the Chinese word itself sounds like. Then there's 'kunyomi' which is the pure Japanese pronunciation (used in Japanese words) and these obviously are also completely new to me.)

Then I kill an afternoon until I have dance practice (my genre is hip-hop) from 5-8 pm, and then go home. (More on what dance practice is like later hopefully.)

Wednesday -
Same format as Tuesday.

I also have 'extra practice' for G-Splash Wednesday night, from 5-8pm again, though usually it ends a bit earlier.

Thursday -
Same as Monday, but 1st period teacher is Okamoto and 2nd period is Kobayashi. Okamoto Sensei I find most like Kawai Sensei at UVA. By that, she's quite enthusiastic and likes/wants to have everyone paying attention very carefully, and you rather have to do so because she likes to call on people randomly, and also asks a lot of content-related questions. So I'm on edge the entire period, just as I was for each and every one of Kawai Sensei's classes. But she does a really thorough and good job of explaining things.

Friday -
1st period with Okamoto again, and 2nd period (O&W; we just have Kanji twice a week) with Yagi Sensei.

Then dance practice from 5-8pm, then my weekend starts!

Currently, we're doing presentations in the O&W class; we present on either a childhood game (many of our lessons were spent on how to explain games) or a person. So that is taking up our 2nd periods and we end early. We spent today playing musical chairs and Heads Up-7 Up...

The Rest...

Well, I don't want to jinx it, but the weather is getting better! After some typhoon weather (it took me a full two hours to get to school yesterday because my line was down due to the strong winds and rain), we have sun!

So I took a bunch of pictures of other things on exhibit, but the pictures are not that great and rather random, so I'll try to be a bit more selective.

We got to try lifting these heavy pails! It was uncomfortable because the thing was chained down and didn't allow for you to move that much. It was pretty heavy.

Here was another little model of somewhere, but on top of that, they had this TV screen that showed you close-ups of the model, and had a whole story line of stuff that might've happened. So thought-out.

A pretty and colorful display.

This thing was awesome, even though you can't tell. So what was cool about the museum is they had a lot of moving/interactive exhibits. This one is set up like a kabuki play stage and, as this old Japanese guy next to us started explaining to us (which was super awesome!), it showed special stage tricks. You could not only see it as it appeared from the audience, but if you look closely, the frames at the top of the picture are actually mirrored reflections of the backstage, so you could see what was actually going on.

The bridge and things from below.

A carriage. I think all the pictures of me doing the things that Daniel is doing in my pictures are on his camera. So you can pretend that's me if you wish.

So we went into this model of a Japanese-style house and I went to check out this room and they had turned it into a storage room for the time being. ...Who does that?

A pretty panorama photograph. I took this because of the colors, but also because, instead of putting it all on one wall (there was plenty of space), they broke it up to cross the corner.

We were on top of the first of a set of moving displays.

St. Nikolai's Cathedral! I've been there! Another moving display.


A really large 'moving' display. But it was pretty lame. From where we were crouched, we could hardly see anything, and it would just be one section lighting up and then some dialogue or something playing.

Pictures of the city from the museum. We were just amazed at how light it still was outside because inside the museum was spent in sheer darkness for the most part.

A giant giant colorful festive thing near the gift shop.

And that sums up our museum trip!

Tokyo Metropolitan Edo-Tokyo Museum

Blogger needs to streamline its photo uploading process...

But first, a nice group shot of some people I've met here, mainly through Daniel, sans Daniel.

We were in the cafeteria celebrating James's 21st birthday during lunch. Clockwise from very left: Erika from Malaysia, James from England, So-Ky from the U.S., Pablo from Mexico, Clara from Spain, Brian from U.S., Christoph from Germany, and Greg.

Now for some education:

Daniel and I went to the aforementioned museum in Ryogoku. Ryogoku is famous for sumo. Sumo guys live there and open restaurants, there's a sumo museum, and some sumo stables that you can check out. It was a rainy, cold day so we decided to choose somewhere indoors and ended up at this highly-recommended museum.

The museum from the station platform.

Up the stairs.

The start of the long long escalator ride up.

Daniel catching some waves going up!

There were pretty paintings and things on the walls of the escalator tunnel...but someone got in the way...

Oh, like these, on the left. It was a really nice escalator...

Inside.

On a 1:1 scale representation of the northern part of the Nihonbashi (bridge). It crossed over one of the floors so you could look over everything beneath you, and crossed from the entrance to the main part of the exhibit.

Really detailed scale models of living arrangements and cities way back when.

Daniel peering through binoculars to get a better look at the little models.

Look at those tiny people! Everything was so detailed.

Little people crossing a bridge and things.

Daniel in one of those princess-carrying things. We didn't think we were allowed to use flash here...

Another look at the bridge. Oh so dark.

For Ben...Not that it can be read or anything, but uh, Kanazawa!

We wondered how this "Body warmer" might've worked...

Naval ensign of the Tokugawa Shogunate warship. Meaning, really old.

Back in the old days, when there was a fire, this one firefighter would have to go to the center and start twirling this thing to alert people and also show the fire's origin.

Daniel giving it a whirl. It's really heavy! I can't imagine being that person who carried that.

Step by step frames of a...silkscreen print perhaps.

Sumo!

Another model of something.

A record of illegal activities of Shirokiya employees over a span of 20 years (1839-1859). Interesting. It's really thick.

I have a ton more pictures from the museum, so I'm going to take a break (I'll try not to make it a week-long break...). Goodnight!