Nothin Much

So much has happened since my last entry, but at the same time not much of it seems particularly worth mentioning.

The majority of my time in Uchiko has been spent driving (or, rather, getting driven) from place to place trying to sort out insurance, utilities, bank accounts, and all that jazz. Things only started to settle down about a week ago, when I spent some time in Matsuyama taking an “intensive” Japanese course. The course was fun while it lasted, but my BOE (board of education) was the only one that I knew of to not count the course as part of job training, and so all expenses and time spent in Matsuyama were taken out of my own pocket and holiday leave. Commuting to and from the city every day cost me $25 a trip and so I could only afford to go to the first week of classes. Kind of a bummer, but luckily I was able to spend the weekend in Matsuyama seeing the sights with the Matsuyama JETs.

This past week we had our official Uchiko-cho welcome party that was very formal. Marco, Paul, and I had to give powerpoint presentations in Japanese…yeah, that was interesting. Marco, of course, was fine – having studied Japanese for 6 years and lived in Tokyo. Paul was the comic relief since his speech had been translated by his wife and spoken with a thick Aussie accent. I won’t tell you how I did. I hate public speaking and having to speak in a language I should have a basic grasp of by now but don’t was a tad uncomfortable to say the least. Everyone was incredibly nice, though, and they had arranged to have an Iaido demonstration during dinner. There was also a Shoudo or calligraphy master who painted our favorite Kanji for us to keep. I choose mizu or water, which I think everyone got a kick out of because it is such a simple character. I love it, though, in part because I think the Kanji just looks cool and also because there’s a Zen koan that I read years ago that I really like.

Oh! My attempt at making chocolate chip cookies succeeded!..sorta, hehe. It took me a while to hunt down all the ingredients. Basic things like flour, granulated white sugar, and salt I could find at my tiny Fuji in Uchiko. Brown sugar and bags of chocolate chips that contained more than 10 chips per package were harder get. I never did succeed with the brown sugar, settling for a sort of beige/tan sugar, but I bought chocolate chips (for about $12/bag) in Matsuyama. Hiroko-san then rented out the local community kitchen for me (and sort of bent the rules by assuring the caretaker that our cookies were a “BOE foreign exchange” group activity :P ) and we made about 6 batches of cookies. Although they tasted more like sugar cookies with chocolate, they were most definitely delicious and so I’m calling it a success….and considering saving up for a mini-oven so I can continue to bake.