fireman
An impressively bearded fireman watches the last of the flames.
Archive for November 2009
18 November 2009
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17 November 2009
watching the fire
It's almost four weeks to the end of my contract! My students are hilarious, all of them, and they are obsessed with learning slang, idioms, euphemisms of any sort: the lights are on but nobody's home, dealbreaker, gold-digger, sleazy. Today I taught them that rocks! - mostly to offset their growing tendency to imitate my bad habit of saying awesome! while giving a thumbs up, which they do in spades, exaggeratedly, all the time. It's like looking into a really horrifyingly perky mirror.
09 November 2009
fuchu shrine
The shrine near our apartment in Fuchu, whose name I don't know yet. It gets dark early and the weekends go by too fast here; while Iain was off playing guitar with some of the other teachers on Sunday, I went for a walk around the shrine, past festival-style booths selling okonomiyaki, garish chocolate-and-sprinkle covered bananas, and a strange savory pancake that, when opened, turned out to be filled with an unidentifiable mince of vegetables and meat.
05 November 2009
heron
At Engaku Shrine in Kamakura; herons always remind me of my mom and dad, so this photo is for you guys :-)
04 November 2009
engakuji
03 November 2009
daibutsu
In other news, today I figured out how to make instant almond gelatin! My mom used to make it when I was a teenager, and it's the quite possibly the best dessert in the world - who doesn't like the synthetic taste of fake almond? (Most people, apparently, Iain included, which means more for me!) Also, a perk of learning the Kanji for my name - 美加 - is that, thanks to the meaning of the second syllable (addition), I can now make some headway in figuring out cooking instructions! You could probably argue that the adding part of the recipe was obvious thanks to the drawing of a maniacally cheerful anthropomorphized jug of milk pouring itself into the boiling hot pan, but that would be far less cool.
