Shooting cars

Another quick entry: you know what a driving range is? You know, those places where you can rent a golf club and a bucket full of golfballs and hit away at your pleasure. I have never played golf - except for miniature golf ;-) - and tried that driving range thing only once, because i lived next to one in China and had a flatmate who knew how to golf. Anyways. Have you ever thought about where to build a driving range in a cramped city like Tokyo? Well, me neither, but last night i passed by one:

 So there you have it. Above a parking lot. Not the most obvious choice, i think. I wouldn't have thought of golfballs above cars as the first choice. But well, you know, space is scarce around here..

Another thing i passed by:

One of the ubiquitous vending machines that I've already mentioned. Just posting it here because of the name: don't know about you, but i don't want to drink something called 'sweat' :D

Fishmilk

Before i moved to Japan someone in Austria told met that their idea was to get oneself a treat everyday to make life in Japan even nicer. Well, i don't strictly adhere to this, but every now and then i get myself something. Mostly out of curiosity, to try new products that don't exist elsewhere but Japan.

So, the fish milk was one of this things. If you think combining fish and milk is a really, really bad idea, hold your horses: there's no actual fish involved, as far as i know. Maybe a picture will help:

Just before yummy in the sun.

 If you've been to Japan, you might recognise this fish as Taiyaki. A waffle-like cake in the form of fish. Most commonly filled with delicious anko. So this is nothing else than sweet milk with Taiyaki taste. It really tastes like those waffle-things filled with anko. Yummy, Japan.

If you're wondering where i enjoyed this: i drank it in front of Yasuda Auditorium at Hongo campus. Just after lunch. In the sun, with snowmen around me because of the snowfall during the night before - but they were already melting away in the sunshine.

Happy fishmilk ad in the local COOP shop.

Cheers.

書道 (calligraphy)

The Japanese language class of my first semester here at Todai ended this week. But we already had the final exam in the week before. The rest of the course our nice teachers did several activities with us. That included pronounciation training and reading comprehension, but also one class about the many cultural festivals that exists in Japan. And, to come to the point of this blog entry, one session of Japanese calligraphy or shodō (that is also how you read the two kanji in the blog's title. The dō is the same as e.g. in Judō).

It started with the teacher giving us a presentation about the different styles of calligraphy. She told us about three of them each one more difficult to do. Interestingly, the most advanced one is the most unreadable one and looks more like well, someone writing very fast and not caring so much about the readability of the text. Uhm, writing letters unreadable, looks like i can do that...

Anyways. We had already studied our first 110 kanji during our course, nevertheless the teacher had some examples of 'nice' kanji at the end of her presentation. So each one of us picked two that would make some kind of sense and started practising. To know what we're aiming for, our teacher wrote us a sample sheet of our kanji with red ink (actually, it was more orange than red) and we were copying that. Here's my 'master copy':

先生の書道

The two big kanji mean something like 'happiness' and 'travel'. Originally i wanted to write 'happy traveller' but that would've been too many kanji - more than two - and there was only space for two kanji on these sheet. So, 'happy travel' it was. Oh, and i usually don't write my name here in this blog, but if you can read it - the four small kanji on the left - well, good for you ;-)
Some more pics:

Practising. Next to me is a Nepalese friend of mine.

My final product compared to the teacher's one on the left.
Some Japanese friends told me that my name is 'no Japanese', well, i guess i managed to achieve the 'unreadable' Kanji style ;-)

 

 

Expert at work - a Chinese classmate, obviously knowing more about calligraphy

All of us incl.our teacher.

In the last pic you can see only about half of my language class. Most people didn't show up during the last two weeks because of exams etc. and the language class not being compulsory. Still, you can see six different nationalities in that pic. Hehe.

Well, that was fun :-)

Cheers.

Gib mir Deinen Saft

What's the Austrian sauce? Does this question make any sense to you? And what would you answer if "we don't have one sauce that we put on everything" doesn't count as an answer?

Another little anecdote from my two weeks of family home stay in Hokkaido:
On the third or fourth evening my host family asked me to cook something Austrian for dinner. I cooked Wiener Schnitzel and Kaiserschmarrn for them. So far, so good. A novelty for me was eating Schnitzel with chopsticks - i made small, bite-sized Schnitzel to make that feasible (also easier to fry ;-)). I explained them that we would not do that, but use knife and fork to eat the Schnitzel. They told me well, they just love to use their hashi because they are so practical. Uuuhm, i don't think that'd be so practical if the food wasn't pre-cut/came in bite-sized pieces. Anyways. They liked the Schnitzel and the Kaiserschmarrn. Yummy, yummy.
I helped them cook dinner every evening. Besides that one Austrian evening and one time Spanish paella - they had visited Spain and liked that - we always cooked something Japanese, and almost every day something different. Delicious, two yummy weeks for me :D
But back to the sauce. The day after Austrian evening we used soy sauce while cooking. On that occasion they asked me what the Austrian sauce was. At first i wasn't sure what they meant, but then they explained me well, they can use soy sauce to put on everything and also do that with most dishes. So they wanted to know the Austrian equivalent of that. I told them that we don't have the one sauce that we can/do put on everything. They did not except that as an answer... hmmm, i could not tell them anything else. After consulting each other they agreed that it must be lemon. Mainly because on the night before, i had also bought lemons and explained them that you squeeze lemon slices over your Schnitzel. They seemed content with the answer they found and i left them in their belief.
Cultural differences...

Mahlzeit, everyone!

Cheers
CGA

ps: nevermind if you don't understand the title of this blog entry. It's from an old German song - by 'old' i mean something like 20 years old.