Yakiimo & Chicken

Video courteous of Daniel. You know you are in Japan when, similar to the fashion in which the ice cream truck drives by with its own music, a truck with a man singing about yakiimo (baked sweet potatoes) drives by in your neighborhood. They drive at a crawl, and you can hear the song for quite a while as they go through your little section of town. Just like little kids go running for the ice cream truck in the United States, people here make frantic dashes for the yakiimo truck.

In other news, I've taken quite a leap of faith today in my dinner tonight.

It looks like chicken in ketchup? You can never be so sure when you're me whether it'll be safe to eat or not.

So I got myself a chocolate donut just in case I didn't like the chicken part and only ate the rice. It tasted surprisingly good. Which is good, since I managed to finish eating it. The donut was okay for a packaged donut.

I'm so glad that chopstick packages come with toothpicks though. So handy whenever food gets stuck in your teeth. Even in restaurants they have cups filled with toothpicks at every table. Too bad American restaurants don't do this too.

Taiyaki

Recently I've begun the steps for getting a part-time job that is something other than teaching English. The first step is getting what is called a 履歴書 (rirekisho), or a resume. Writing a resume here is completely different from in the states. Every job and company uses the same format and you don't need a cover letter. You can find resume forms at any convenience store or book store, and get a pack of four or so for less than a few dollars. Natsumi, a member from the same club as me, was kind enough to help me go buy one at the book store at my school last Friday (January 7). But first, we took a bit of a detour to a nearby place that is famous for their taiyaki.

The place is called Wakaba. It's a 5-10 minute walk from my school. However, because the road to Wakaba is lined with tall buildings blocking out the sun, we were very, very cold! Yet despite the temperature, there were a lot of people lining up waiting to buy warm and freshly handmade taiyaki. As such, it was a kind of a long wait, so I took a couple of photos of the surrounding area. The whole time the smell of waffles filled the air.

The display case in front of the store.

A cat sitting in front of a real estate agent's office.

Then it was finally our turn.

A plate of taiyaki. I had just eaten a couple of onigiri (rice balls) for lunch, so I wasn't that hungry and opted out of trying them. I'm also not that much of a fan of the flavor of the sweet bean paste they put it inside the waffle. If only it were filled with chocolate...! 

In the corner of the store, they had this on display. All shops display this for good fortune and wealth during the new year. This one's a lot more elaborate than I've seen at other restaurants, but I guess the lobster is common for stores that deal with food. People display a similar thing in front of their houses as well, but it's just pine and bamboo.

Once my club mates finished their taiyaki, we saw that there was writing on the plate. It says, "May the tails of your taiyaki always be filled with bean paste." I thought this was peculiar and asked my club mates if in the past they didn't put the bean paste in the tail, but I guess that wasn't the case. All the same, it's kind of cute.

Speaking of cats, I saw this one on my way home from school. Perched on top of the place where everyone throws their trash bags on the appointed days, it felt like it was piercing into my soul...

Happy New Year!

It's a bit late, but Happy New Year!

On New Year's Eve we went to Zojoji Temple.

Zojoji Temple is right next to the famous Tokyo Tower. It was so close we felt like we could touch it! My goodness it was so crowded, but even more surprising was the amount of foreigners there. There were food vendors all over the place together with really long lines. We went inside the temple as you can see in the picture above first.

Inside was a gorgeous gold Buddhist display along with a long offering box in front of it. Many people were throwing coins in and praying.

Outside and around the back of the temple, I managed to snap a picture of myself in front of Tokyo Tower.

Back behind the temple we found some pretty interesting things. The sign above includes a poem about cherry blossoms.

In a second temple they had another similar display along with souvenirs to be bought.

Why did we choose Zojoji Temple? To see them release 3,000 balloons at midnight! Unfortunately we didn't notice the line soon enough, so we couldn't get a chance to get one of the balloons to release. I suppose that's not such a bad thing though, considering by the time we were done exploring the temple grounds we decided we were both tired and had headaches and it would be better to went home early since we still had at least three hours before midnight. We stopped by Gusto for dinner since we were starving and dying to eat something warm. I got 'chicken Cesar salad' and different kinds of hot dogs and sausages.

At home we ended up watching this enka and singing competition on TV. The New Year programs weren't quite like the ones we're used to in America. No ball dropping, no fireworks, no seeing what other people were doing around the world. Then again, we were one of the first places to welcome the new year. It was a bit disappointing. We were hoping they would show the balloon display on TV, but they didn't have that either.

Now I'm already back at school, which started back up on Thursday (the 6th). Just a month left to go before the fall semester finishes! Can't wait for spring vacation to start.