How's your week been going? Really, you guys should actually like... Tell me some time. I'm curious.
Hope that everything's great.
This week I haven't done so much as far as adventure, but it has been a lot of fun and I haven't had to spend too much money doing it, so it's pretty exciting to tell you about.
We'll also have a food section this week to compensate my lack of travel. xD;
Birthday parties and home made piñatas.
Glorious birthday parties and piñatas.
Glorious birthday parties and piñatas.
Here we have edamame [soybeans], an octopus [my baby!], and a whale.
That's pretty much what happened all throughout the rest of last week after I left you guys.
Thursday, after class I went to go visit a friend of mine and watch a movie that she had been really wanting me to see--We Bought a Zoo, the new one with... is it Matt Damon? in it. It was a good film, really. I was surprised--didn't expect so much out of it.
After the film, a friend of mine started haggling me, because his birthday had been on Tuesday and he wanted to throw a party that Saturday with everyone. He wanted me to help him make piñatas, because they don't have them in Japan.
So those piñatas you saw in the above photo were completely handmade by myself, him, and a friend of ours whose birthday had also been the Tuesday previous.
In all actuality, we should have started them much sooner than we did, perhaps Tuesday or Wednesday, since that would have given us more time to let it dry properly and actually work a little harder on the details and all. But we started Thursday night, and we still managed to get it finished, at least.
Although we were a little worried at first.
So that night we got the first layer of papier maché finished, and we called it a night.
Friday in-between classes, I went to Machida with a friend of mine and we went to eat and then went to get purikura done of us together, because I had been wanting to do that with her since Golden Week. It was a lot of fun, and she showed me a cheap pseudo-Italian restaurant.
A white sauce with shrimp and rice. It was really really good.
And only about 500 yen.
Also, for my mother, who wanted to see just how green melon soda can get, I took this photo:
Seriously green.
After hanging out with my friend for a while, I had to go on back to the university to meet up with my conversation partner, who is really awesome. She's done a lot of travelling, and actually speaks English really well, so we're planning on making it a mutual study for the both of us. I'm really excited to see how this will go. We almost spent too much time talking, though, and lost track of time, and were almost late for the next class. Made it on time, though, with about thirty seconds to spare.
Class was over soon enough, and then my birthday buddy and I got back together to do more work on the piñatas. We added a new layer to the papier maché, and he and the birthday girl went to Machida to get candy and some other supplies for the birthday party Saturday. Twister, anyone?
I went up to one of the lounges to eat dinner with some other people, and then came back after they had been back and working on it for a while. Jumping in, we got quite a lot done. The rest of the layers of newspaper [drying accelerated by a borrowed hair dryer], and then the first layers of colour on the edamame and whale, which weren't taken pictures of. The octopus was entirely mine to play with, though, and I was saving that for Saturday.
Whale was beginning to take his shape by the end of the night, too.
My room was a mess. by this point, and only due to get messier.
Saturday the birthday boy promised to go out to an exercise park with some friends, and so it was just me and birthday girl. He hadn't expected to be long, but he only got back about two hours before the party, and so that left me and birthday girl to finish the piñatas. I didn't mind, but she got a little frustrated by the fact.
But since I wanted to work on the piñatas by myself for a while [he was excited, and it was cute, but sometimes it just gets in the way when I know what I want to make], I was secretly quite pleased by the fact. There were a few hitches along the way that irritated me, as well, but the basic idea of having them to myself to finish was really awesome.
So, I worked on the octopus first. I was so excited: my first big art project in a long time.
Tissue paper cut into strips and layered over each other, then cut at an angle to accommodate the shape of the structure.
Looks like a lamp shade. It did, really, all the way until I added eyes.
With that much finished, birthday girl and I went to Machida so that she could buy birthday boy's birthday present [my present to him was the piñatas] and eat lunch together. Afterwards, we came back and proceeded to finish the piñatas.
I put the face on the edamame while the rest of the paper dried on my octopus.
I also put the face on the whale, a Ghibli-styled smile.
Once the paper had dried, I began to feather it, like the piñatas back home.
And from there, I attached the eyes and tentacles and called them done. I left the candy filling to birthday boy and girl, since I'd drawn on the faces and all. And the end product, as you saw previously, was pretty great.
I was pleased, at least. Not perfect, but not bad for just three days, you know?
I also drew bizarre marine animals on all of the remaining balloons, and we hung them up in the lounge, only to be popped later, much to my distress.
There was a birthday party from then on, and after a couple of rounds of Twister and a food fight, at around eleven, I decided that it had been enough fun for me and that I wanted to call it a night. It was a lot of fun, but I'm secretly a homebody and just didn't want to stick around for much longer after that. I'm really happy that my birthday kids had a lot of fun, though.
I spent Sunday at home, cleaning my room and working on homework. Birthday boy came by to help me scrub the flour out of the floor--it's mostly gone, but I still need to go back and get the rest of it out at some point soon. But, my room is clean again, and at this moment, that's all I really care about that much.
Did I tell you all that I bought myself a pepper plant for 100 yen at the flowershop? Well, at the 100 yen store, I found bigger pots and dirt so that my plant would have some space for his roots to grow.
I got a picture:
His name is so creative you wouldn't be able to stand it if I told you. So much creative.
I mean, who else, besides everyone else in the world, would have thought of calling a pepper plant Pepper? Really.
I just.
I amaze myself sometimes.
Living in the city has been a bit of a struggle for me; I really really like plants and trees, and not having constant access to them has really worked at getting under my skin. So, to compensate, I seem to have taken up just a little bit of gardening. Another friend of mine has bought me a pot for my plants, so I think I might buy another plant here in the near future. I thought I couldn't grow anything, but I've kept little Pepper alive [and blooming!] for about two weeks now, so maybe I'm not as bad at it as I thought I was.
We'll see how it goes. I'll keep you updated.
Monday was really boring, though, going back to what I've been doing during the week. I did my classwork, came home, locked myself away in my room, and finished up a huge chunk of my homework. It's made the rest of this week really easy, so that's been nice, but it was tedious and awful. I wrote two papers, did my Japanese homework, Literature and Society readings, and just some other stuff that had accidentally built up.
I was miserable by the end of the day. But it's been really nice since then.
Tuesday is my long class day, but because of my work on Monday, it went amazingly smoothly.
After class, I ran into a couple of friends and asked if they would want to grab a bite to eat with me since I didn't feel like eating alone, and they agreed.
So we went and had a good time, and afterwards, a friend came over for a while to help me with some grammar that I didn't understand, and we also watched another episode of a comedy that I'd shown her earlier.
Today, of course I would forget my freaking camera. The weather was beautiful, the skies were clear, and up on the top floor of my school? You could see mountains for miles. Ugh. I was so angry when I realised I left my camera.
What's more, my teacher took us out [since there are only four of us] to a nature reserve in Machida, and oh my gosh, it was gorgeous.
I took a couple of pictures with my phone, though. Not as good as they would have been with my camera, but they're not terrible, at least.
The weather was nice, the people were nice, it was lovely. She wanted to show us some wild orchids that sometimes grow in large amounts around there, but they've stopped blooming by now. It was okay; the irises were blooming, and even if nothing had been, the scenery in general was so beautiful that I just didn't care. For one of the first times, I actually felt like I was in Japan--it was just like the pictures of the traditional houses with all the trees around them, with the really narrow roads and everything.
I would love to live in an area like that.
Another picture from the nature park. Down beneath us was the tiny beginning of a river--we got to see where the river started, too.
After we spent some time in the park [and saw the strangest and biggest bee ever in the history of bees], we went to the temple that's really close by. Actually, really, I think it's part of the park.
Here's an up-close view.
A view from one of the hills. Isn't it wonderful?
After we explored for a while, our teacher took us to a tofu shop and a bakery, and then we went back to class. I bought myself some fresh bread, a couple of sweets, a small thing of peanut butter to tide me over until Mom mails me some, and a small thing of coffee. It was a little bit expensive [about 10$ for everything], but so far has tasted well worth it.
I came straight home afterwards.
So that's been this week~
Now for the food special!
Which will also cover how I've been saving money. If you have trouble cooking and are working with a budget that looks a bit like mine, you may want to start having someone who can cook show you the basics.
I've been trying to learn how to make as many foods as I can in order to save money. Last Thursday, while I was waiting on my friend to get to my room to start the piñatas, I made myself some gyoza, otherwise known as fried dumplings:
They needed salt, but for it being my first time making them, I wasn't too disappointed.
The only things that are really all that expensive for Gyoza are cabbage and the meat. Of course, those are the primary ingredients for them, too. But do you see all of those? There were 36 gyoza, and I still have meat and cabbage left-over. The cost was approximately what one or two restaurant-made gyoza plates would have been, and I got two or three times the amount that I would have gotten at a restaurant. It's a little time-consuming, but if you have the time, it will save a lot of money.
I also, a long time ago, learned how to make Japanese-style curry. It's inexpensive to make at home, but at a restaurant can run you a pretty penny if you're not careful.
Ramen shops here aren't too expensive--but it'll add up quickly if you go too often. At about 8$ a bowl, it fills you up and keeps you full for a while, so it's worth it, but... I'm trying not to make a habit of going, because I can only afford to support their business so much.
But I have paid attention to what extras they put into the ramen. In Japan, they freeze-dry some of the fancier ramens, and while it's a little more expensive than the instant ramen, it's still not as bad as going to a ramen shop and tastes almost the same. So, noticing that I had accumulated all of the add-ins, I decided to make some myself.
With the added bonus of leftover cabbage.
It tasted pretty close to what I was looking for, so it's nice to know that I can fall back on that should I ever crave real ramen and not the 25 cent kind. Of course, I'm sure this kind of treatment for the 25 cent kind would taste really good, too.
The fancy ramen at the grocery store costs about 180 yen. All of the ingredients piled together, in as small of an amount as required, might have cost about 250 yen all together. The cheapest bowl at the ramen shop is 680 yen.
Lastly, in times when I'm low on cash, don't want to go to the ATM or to a restaurant, I kind of want to eat well, and I have a lot of vegetables?
I make a really big omelette.
That has peppers, broccoli, cabbage, bean sprouts, green onions, and cheese all inside of that.
And it was delicious.
I don't know how much money I saved [haven't seen anything quite like it around here], but my goodness.
I was proud of myself.
Moral of the story?
Being able to cook helps save a lot of cash.
It might not be as instant as going to a restaurant, and it might not be nearly as fun [I secretly hate cooking], but it's worth it if you need to watch how much you're spending.
So there you have it for this week! I'll let you all know how expensive it is to get to the park as soon as I find out, and if there's any way to cut the costs on it. It was beautiful, and I'd really just like to have a picnic there some day in the near future.
'Til then, take care.
Hope you enjoyed this week's update. I'm not falling asleep this time, so I think it's a lot better than my other ones. Haha.
Talk to you all soon!
-RD
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