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Saw a taco truck in Makuhari just outside of Carrefour. First time I’ve ever seen it out there, but it seemed like it’s a regular thing. A lot better than that stupid fried bread truck I used to see on that same street closer to Room Deco. They need one of these in Chiba city (taco truck not fried bread).

It’s called the King of Tacos

It’s tough to write (what is essentially) a giant research paper when you’ve been out of college for almost 3 years and the most extensive writing you’ve done since is on a terrible blog.

Oh ya, totally unrelated but I saw this being advertised at some katsu (fried cutlet) stand in Tsudanuma a while back. It’s a 7-layer katsu with pork, seaweed, and mochi (pounded rice cake). I guess the ingredients aren’t that sweet, but it looks pretty massive. I had just eaten lunch otherwise I would have tried it.

It’s almost the end of January and I haven’t written a blog since 2008. So, uh…Happy New Year? Haha. The past 25 days have been pretty busy, but like a lot of days over the past few months, they’ve been busy with nothing. Just filler I guess. I won’t bother writing all the little details, mainly because I don’t remember most of them. I will write though, just because I feel like it.

I left the US early in the morning on January 1. My trip to the US was really awesome but way too short. The flight from StL to Dallas, then from there to Narita, was pretty uneventful. I seem to remember being annoyed at a group of guys, either Korean or Chinese, who were sitting around my area on the plane. They each had a giant suitcase as carry-on, and were wondering why all their stuff wouldn’t fit in the overhead bins. Gee, I wonder. Then also the old dude sitting next to me and blocking my access to the aisle must have been some kind of robot, because I’m pretty sure he didn’t use the bathroom the entire 13 hour long flight. Even after meals and drinks, when a lot of people would get up and at least walk around, he sat there continuing to watch the crappy airplane movies. That was a annoying because I always feel slightly bad about waking someone up to get out of my seat on a plane. But hey, I had to go.

Got back to Japan on the afternoon of the 2nd local time. Went to bed at a fairly normal time, but after that for the next half a week I had pretty bad jetlag, which was terrible since work started on Monday. I lived through it though. Was pretty tired at my department’s New Years dinner though, since we went to some Italian restaurant that was trying to give the worst service in the history of the planet. We were literally the only customers in the restaurant, but a normal meal took about 4 hours. Not that it was a super fancy, supposed-to-be-way-long dinner, they were just mega slow. The food was honestly pretty good, but not worth giving up an entire night. Let’s see… any other work-related stuff over this month? Well we got a new guy in the office, and I directed the recording of a CD to go along with a new textbook. That was kind of cool. I’ll be wrapping up at this job on Monday the 2nd, so time is ticking down.

I was in Kumamoto all last week doing part 2 of the course I did in November. Much of the same, although Brian went along this time to work as well. It was raining and stuff most of the week, so we didn’t do any sightseeing or anything, but we did go out with the students the first night which was pretty fun. Kumamoto ramen is really good. Went to a place last minute called こだいこ (Kodaiko) which may have been the best ramen I’ve ever had. Also had awesome Mexican food, which is unexpected but was a great find. Headed back on Friday night, since Derek was in Tokyo and we had a big Yakiniku Summit Battle on Saturday night at 風風亭 (Fuufuutei) in Shibuya. 2500 yen for 2 hours of unlimited Korean BBQ is pretty hard to pass up. We were all pretty much in a food coma afterwards and just walked around in the cold for a few hours. I did see about 5 flakes of snow, but I guess that’s about all Tokyo got last night.

Oh! I also finally broke down and got a sweet TV. Since the last one I had was like a 25″ old school one that was broken (broadcast antenna didn’t work anymore) from when I was working in Goi, I figured it was time to just splurge and get a real nice one. I got a big Sharp Aquos, the one I’d been looking at for a while, at Yodobashi on sale plus 20% in points (store credit). Really good deal, and I’m happy with it. For how much I watch TV, this was a good investment I think.

So yeah, like I mentioned up above, I’ll be wrapping up stuff at my current job in a week and a day. Then I’ll be kicking it high gear into the new gig, developing a new company and trying to make it a success. I think it’s a lot more of what I want to do for a living (not permament, just for now), and the freedom is something I need. I’ll be doing a lot of work from home, here in Japan, for now and we’ll see how it goes. I’m pretty excited about it. Oh, and by the way in case you handful of readers haven’t noticed over the past few months, I’m being a lot more vague about my work and stuff here on the blog. It’s not like I’m scared of who is reading this exactly, but I’ve come to learn that a lot more people read this blog than I always imagine. Sure I realized from the beginning that I’m posting this on the web, accessable to anyone, but I kind of always thought that only a few of my close friends will read this when they’re bored, when I post something funny, or when I make them look at it. But every now and then I’ll hear about someone outside of those parameters reading it, and everyone it’s still weird. I remember a while back a friend of a friend who I’d never met was like “Oh, we’ve never met? I think it’s just because I read your blog.” Straaange. Either way. I’ll still be keeping it real, just not as out in the open as I may have been before. I don’t think it’s that much of a change. If you know me in person then you probably know the details to fill everything out down to the last detail. It’s not that my life is that interesting anyway.

This post is pretty poorly organized because I just sat down for 15 or 20 minutes and let my brain puke onto the keyboard. Good night!

I had all but given up on a Thanksgiving-ish meal here in Japan, since pretty much the only place you can normally eat turkey around these parts is Subway, which is pretty expensive and also annoying because if you order a footlong sub they assume you’re splitting it with a family of 10. They also don’t sell chips.

On Thursday after work I grabbed some Burger King in Funabashi after my lesson, figuring that since I can’t eat turkey I might as well eat something American. KFC is all over the place here, but as we discovered in 2006 it’s also not nearly as good as fried chicken back in the States. At some point during that day I wrote a 1-line message on mixi, the Japanese equivalent of Facebook, saying “I want to eat turkey.” My friend Yoko replied on there saying that her restaurant had turkey that day, and I should have come.

W H A A A A A A A T ! ? ! ? !

Several e-mails later on Friday, I found out that Outback Steakhouse in Makuhari, where she works, still had some turkey left and she could save an order for me if I could make it. Damn right I could make it. I headed there straight after teaching in Soga, and enjoyed a Thanksgiving dinner with Bryan and Brian. The meal was roast turkey, a sliver of cranberry sauce, masked potatoes, broccoli, unlimited bread, and 7,000 “G’Day mates!” Overall it was really good and probably the closest to a real American Thanksgiving dinner I could expect around here. Also I think Bryan made the waiter pee his pants in fear. Thanks Yoko for saving the day.

I think my phone makes the food look bad; it looked way good in real life.

I’m on my last night in Kumamoto (熊本), where I’ve been on a business trip for the past 5 days. I left Tokyo on Monday evening after working as usual in Shinjuku. It was my first time to use Haneda Airport, so I guess that was kind of cool. I was a bit surprised at how smooth the whole process was. Since it was a domestic flight, I didn’t have to worry about showing ID ever, was only going for a short time so didn’t have much luggage, and slept the entire 2 hour flight. It felt more like riding on a local train than getting on an airplane. I guess since nowadays pretty much the only time I fly is to go between Japan and the US, I was mentally preparing for a huge ordeal of ridiculous security checks and other stupid warnings against the terrible threat of bottles of water.

Arrived in Kumamoto and hopped on the last bus from the out-in-the-middle of nowhere airport to my hotel at the Kumamoto Kotsu Center (熊本交通センター). The hotel was actually pretty nice, despite being so cheap. A big part of this was due to the fact that they didn’t have any single rooms available when I checked in, so I got a triple instead. Since it was 3 twin beds instead of 1 bigger one I guess that wasn’t so great, but my room was massive, so I think it was worth it. Got up bright and early Tuesday to start teaching. This week was a similar intensive seminar to a few I’ve done in the past, but my class this time was really young compared to the ones I did before for the same organization. That was pretty sweet.

Let’s see… what else did I do of note while here? I tried Kumamoto ramen, which is supposed to be famous. It was really good, but to be honest, ramen is ramen and I think local specialties are just another one of those things Japanese people like to harp on about. I did try basashi (馬刺し), which I understand being more special because it’s harder to find in other places. Basashi is raw horse meat, which sounds gross for two reasons (raw meat and horse), but it was actually pretty good. I tried 3 different kinds: straight up raw horse meat, raw fat from some part of the horse (near the mane, maybe?), and the liver. (see pic below) All of it was a lot better than expected, but also mega expensive. Tried some different Kumamoto shochus, fried horse cutlet skewers (串カツ), and another local dish called karashi renkon (辛子レンコン), which is lotus root stuffed with mustard. It was an expensive meal, but I talked to the mother and daughter working for like 2 hours while I ate, and then with some old alcoholic dude who showed up a little bit before I left.

On Thursday night I went out with my students to a nabe restaurant then karaoke, which was a lot of fun. With my students all being around my age, I think it was easier for me to hang out with them and not feel like I was just entertaining a bunch of old people. One student drank so much that the next morning during class he had to leave to go puke. I don’t think I’ve ever had a student do that, haha. I’m coming back here in January to teach the second half of this seminar, and I think I’ll have the same class. Either way they all want to go out again, so that’ll be cool.

I’m staying at the Kumamoto Royal Hotel now, which is nice and cheap but not as good as the Kotsu Center Hotel. The bathroom feels like an airplane lavatory and the location is a little further away from the main drag. It’s OK though, since it’s only for 2 nights. Today I went around to do a little sightseeing after sleeping a ridiculously long time. Waking up for 4 days straight at 6AM does that to you. I got to see the Kumamoto Castle (熊本城), which is “one of the great castles of Japan.” It was pretty sweet, but it started raining in the afternoon so I had to cut my sightseeing short at that. I did some shopping in the afternoon and have been spacing out for the past few hours in a Popeye net cafe. I’ll probably crash early tonight before waking up and flying back to Tokyo in the morning. Having a party with Matt and other old co-workers at night, then back to work as usual on Monday.

This was a good trip overall but I was pretty tired almost the entire time. I didn’t get any JLPT studying done, although I naively thought I would. Oh well. I’ll upload better/more pictures when I get home – these are just from my cell phone.

If memory serves me right, on Saturday I went with Brian and his replacement at Chiba school, Andy, to the Kappa Sushi close to my apartment. It’s a kaiten-sushi, where the sushi plates go around on a conveyor belt and you grab what you want. It’s awesome because everything is only 100 yen. We decided to have a contest to see who could eat the most, and the results were horrilble for all. I think Andy ended up with about 14 plates, Brian with 21, and me with 22. Even though we each had 2 or 3 plates worth of juiceboxes, it was a painful bout.

I may have won the contest, but we were all losers that day. Haha.