Nerd Day

This weekend was pretty awesome, I gotta say. It had the right amount of active and nerd in it. :) I already talked about Sunday's whitewater rafting adventure, but Saturday was a lot calmer and hurt far less.

Saturday was my nerd day with a fellow JET in Okayama city. ♡ I came into the city on Friday night and stayed the night at her place. I actually came in that day so that we could study at Coco's, one of my favorite family restaurants here (it's seriously fukken delicious). Our reasoning was that because they have a drink bar, we could just stay there and utilize the drink bar as long as we wanted to and study Japanese. Their drink bar is pretty nice; it has a coffee machine as well as loose leaf teas. ♡ loose leaf! It was a very productive night.

We did come to the realization that yes, we were studying Japanese on a Friday night (and not only had looked forward to studying on a friday night, but were also having fun doing so). Kinda lame, I know, but ♡ nerds I mean, we also chatted, but a lot of what we did was study (after dinner, of course). The place was close enough to her house that we were able to take advantage of it not being disgustingly hot outside for once, and walked back to her place.

The next morning, we were back again at Coco's for their morning "baikingu" or viking or buffet style breakfast. Yeah we were there probably less than twelve hours ago, but I mean come ON breakfast foods! ...not particularly like, gourmet breakfast foods, but they did have tasty curry and tasty breakfast breads and jam. And the drink bar. And it was all only 700 yen. ♡

After that, we decided to walk over to the Oriental Museum, since they were having an Egypt and mummy exhibit going on (which was the ultimate reason I had come into Okayama). First though, we stopped at the prefectural library, one of my favorite places in the prefecture. ♡ You can check out books from the prefectural library via your local library (or in my case, my high school library) in the interlibrary exchange program. It's pretty awesome. But you kind of have to know what you're looking for sometimes. That's why I like to browse when I can, and since we were passing by and had a bunch of time to kill...

I swear we hit the jackpot. Or I hit the jackpot. They had back issues of Bon Appetite (though fat lot of help that does us here in Japan where we can't get half the ingredients), but more importantly, their English language selection is pretty vast and really varied. They have a really decent social sciences section too; lots of stuff on gender studies, but also an impressive collection of academic books about food and culture. Hell. They even had the Food and Culture reader by Counihan. It was massive. I practically wept with joy; as it was, I became a library fangirl almost instantly.

Either way though, I found enough literature to keep me busy until probably at least december; and that's if I'm constantly reading everything I check out in a timely manner.

The first two books I picked up were Afternoon Tea and Foodways and Folklore (Thursby 2008). Afternoon Tea is a cute (short) book with lots of pictures that briefly talks about the origins of tea and then primarily focuses on the origins of tea customs and practices in the West (ie, England mostly). It was a very interesting, if short read that I finished when we decided to kill more time after visiting the museum at a cafe, reading and drinking tasty tasty tea. ♡ The other book is pretty interesting as well. It's a bit longer, and is more academic. There are countless numbers of articles and books I can grab references from, and it's interesting to read. It focuses on the food and foodways of mostly America, which, at the moment, I find incredibly fascinating. My views of what American food is (and isn't) has changed a lot since I've left for Japan. I used to mock the way Americans, in Japanese manga and anime anyways, are portrayed as always loving hamburgers (and sometimes fries, shakes, and apple pie). I only agreed with maybe one of those things as American - apple pie. To me, before, American food was ridiculously complex and near impossible to define because there were so many variations, so many immigrants, and so many regional differences that there was no one or two things that could be defined as "American food" (turkey, apple pie... and maybe BBQ style foods were the only ones I could think of).

American food is complex in that sense; that there's a lot of people who make up "America" and defining one thing over the other is really hard to do. However, after spending more time here in Japan, American food - to me - has come to mean "stuff that you can eat only in America and can't really eat anywhere else and also is pretty popular plus foods that lots of people eat and that the rest of the world thinks we're weird sometimes for eating plus stuff that people in America have eaten for friggin ages"

American style breakfast is, I think, pretty unique. Proper breakfast anyways. Slow, weekend breakfast. A full breakfast I guess you can call it. The British have quick and not so quick breakfast too, but the contents are vastly different. Here in Japan... some students have told me they have miso soup and rice for breakfast. Others have natto, and still others will have just bread (pastry bread from conbinis) or rice balls for breakfast. Sometimes, I too have rice balls for breakfast from the convenience store. I don't actually know if people eat pancakes or waffles for breakfast here (though waffles, often with ice cream or fruit and whipped cream, are a popular dessert). The closest thing I've seen to an american breakfast is the "breakfast set" some cafes offer: toast, salad, and coffee or tea and maybe eggs. Maybe not eggs. Oh yeah, salad for breakfast is a thing here (and sometimes, french fries are too).

It's funny though, cause yesterday in the car ride home, to stay awake I talked with the driver and we pretty much made ourselves ridiculously hungry by talking about the foods that we loved to eat. We went through like, top three desserts, top three chocolate bars, top three cakes, top three ice creams, top three savory foods, top three burgers, foods for your last meal, top three people you'd eat your last meal with, where you'd eat your last meal at... yeah, we were pretty much starving by the time we got back. We even stopped at a rest area because my friend had such a huge craving for chocolates (he has a huge sweet tooth to make things worse). This is sometimes a downside of talking to me.

Anyways. The museum exhibit was pretty cool. There were even things in English that we could read (I think the exhibition came from London) and they had two mummies and a couple sarcophaguses (sarcophagi?) on display. It was freaking RAD. They also had these gorgeous Egyptian style dresses, but those were kind of expensive (about 14,000 yen, or ~$150 which... isn't actually that much compared to a formal style dress). They had this area too where you could smell frankincense and uhhhh... something else. Some kind of wood - not sandalwood but uhhh... something else that was really earthy smelling. I forgot. But I sweartogod I've smelled frankincense somewhere else - and not at a funeral home or crematory.

After, we killed time at a cafe and read for a while until it was time to go to a Book Exchange that someone in AJET was starting. Brilliant idea. If only I hadn't just gone to the library. So much reading to do~Good thing classes haven't started yet. I meant to go back home earlier, but a couple of new JETs came and I was like ahhh I want to say hello since they both live pretty close to where I am. I totally meant to go back and make swedish meatballs. I'm doing that today, actually. I ended up eating dinner hella late (omnom curry from Coco Curry House~) so I wasn't hungry at all by the time I got back home, and so ended up not making them. I get tired kind of early now. But yes. That 24 hour block was kind of amazing. Like I said, saturday (and friday night) was like, my nerd day. ♡

You need slow (but still productive) quiet days like that sometimes, I think. Recharge the soul and the mind!