The Whole Erk Catalogue Tales of a Geek Abroad

Winter break is a slow time for blog entries, since they are essentially a one-person job and Jen and I were taking the chance to spend a lot of time together.

For New Year's, we went out to Kawasaki-machi to spend the evening with our friends Maria and Andy. The trip out there was quite the fiasco! The only way to Kawasaki is by bus, and to start with we mistook the bus time for 2:00 - turns out it only runs on that time on normal weekdays, and the 31st is a statutory holiday in Japan. In fact, the 31st of december and 1st of january seem to be the only days of the year when service in Japan grinds to a near-complete halt! To make matters worse for ignorant foreigners, service on the 31st starts out normally but rapidly drops off. Thus, we were stuck in Sendai waiting for a 6 pm bus, with not quite enough time to bother going home and too much time to kill.

Luckily, we had a shopping list. Maria wanted to make ravioli from scratch, including homemade ricotta cheese, and that meant she needed ingredients. Sour cream, half-and-half, milk, and epsom salts topped the list: the latter is needed in her ricotta recipe to clot the milk. We found the first three with no problem, but epsom salts became pretty interesting.

First, knowing the japanese word for epsom salts, we asked for them at a grocery store, only to be met with astonishment. The clerk asked, "What country are those from?", a question that we found a little tough to answer.

Undeterred, our next try was at a medium-sized drug store. The clerk had indeed heard of epsom salts, and hunted around on his chemical shelf for a moment before telling us they were out of stock and we'd have to go to a larger store. So, we did. The clerk there looked at us without blinking and told us they had none, without bothering to check. At the next store, the clerks hunted the shelves again, found none, and called their distributor to check if there was any available. Yes, they said, there was, but because the 31st was a statutory holiday, they couldn't ship it from their stock in Sendai out to the drug store. At the next place, the clerk told us that even if they could ship it we needed to sign for it, because epsom salts are "kibishii", a strictly controlled substance.

WHAT?! I don't know that we'll ever find out how many of these clerks had any frigging idea what we were asking for and how many were pulling answers from their butts to get rid of us: on the 31st, most of the experienced druggists and managers were all on vacation.

Thoroughly thwarted, we decided we'd feel better after a nice bowl of ramen. When we entered the ramen store, the host gave an extremely amused and embarassed laugh and said "I'm sorry, but we're OUT OF SOUP!" the very idea was as preposterous to him as to us. "You'll have to come back next year. The ramen store is out of soup." We couldn't help but laugh, as he was pretty civil and amusing about it, but seriously! The ramen store was out of soup!!

Next, we retreated to a thai food restaurant, but it was getting late now. At 3 pm on the 31st, nearly everything was shutting down around us. The thai restaurant was closed, as was the chinese food place across the street. Finally, tired, starving, and epsom-salt-less, we went to a soba restaurant nearby that was miraculously open and actually had quite nice food. It was as if a single bit of positive luck changed the course of our day!

Well fed, we left the soba place and found a foreign food store less than a block away. They had no epsom salts, but they did have ricotta cheese; we got that and vinegar (the vinegar a backup plan, as some ricotta recipes use vinegar instead of epsom). We headed back to the station, stopping for a coffee to kill the time. The rest of our trip went just peachy.

A brief diversion: a recently popular phrase in Japanese is "KY". KY does not refer to personal lubricant; it abbreviates the term "Kuuki yomenai", "unable to read the air". For a person to be KY it either means that they can't read between the lines in a given situation (eg. a geek nattering on about his favourite pokemon while everyone else tries to claw their ears off), or they are unreadable to the people around them.

When I bought a chewy macadamia nut and caramel cookie at the coffee shop, I looked at the kanji on it and then at the barrista and told her, "Hmm, kukki yomenai." I can't read this cookie. She looked at me very, very oddly, like someone had stuffed a banana up her nose. I told her it was foreigner humour and left sadly. Andy and Jen thought I was a fool for trying, but I can't let a great opportunity like that pass.

The epilogue is that the other day I tried the same joke on Jen's friend Madoka as I passed her a cookie. SHE thought it was HILARIOUS. I place the blame of misunderstanding fully on the barrista. Erk: trying to spread a little silliness in the world whenever possible.

Once at Maria's, we made a kind of deep fried rice ball stuffed with tomato sauce as an appetiser. Then, stuffed, we spent most of the night making pasta dough and ricotta cheese. At about 10, we walked to the store, and got to see the extent of the winter in Kawasaki, which is far higher up in the mountains than Natori. It was fantastically beautiful: the town was empty of traffic, because everyone was inside celebrating Japanese New Year's (it's as important here as Christmas is to us). The snow was deep enough to get most of the way up to my knee during our trudge, and it was still coming down. Nothing mind-boggling, I know, but with no snow at all during the winter here it was a lovely feeling to get all sparkly and white again.

To ring in 2008, we put on some groovy music and danced for a while. We took some hilarious pictures, which I'll try to upload. Once we were exhausted from that, we finished the ravioli and enjoyed our first meal of the year, made from scratch. Not a bad way to start, I think. Afterwards, we went for a walk in the snow to work it off, and took a lot of great pictures of a Kawasaki winter night.

That was our new year's! I'll post more about the rest of the week separately.