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Butterfly!
Pretty pretty butterfly. It's actually iridescent blue / purple and a still shot doesn't do it justice. This is a picture I took while talking to you, Di! Food
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Food has been the concern of the week. Now in the third week of being in Japan, us guys have essentially used up whatever American nutrition we've stored in our bodies and are relying on Japan to maintain our vitality. Unfortunately, we're having various problems with that. For me personally, the first issue was that I realized I wasn't getting enough fruit (or vegetables). Or things that don't come from the sea, in general.
I like to keep an eye on my nutrition, so that I can at least know who to blame for my heart failure, but over here I have *no* idea about the content of my foods. For example, I'd like to imagine that I've grown proficient at identifying basic nutrition through taste - the fatty taste of oil, the sickly saccharine taste in sugary soda - but all the foods here mask those flavors in different ways than I'm used to. I think they way it works is that I know the way an archetypal food should taste - say, scrambled eggs. If I have scrambled eggs and I can *really* taste the butter, I know that it probably isn't too healthy to me
Parkness
More of the park where I was. I don't know what's in the inner sanctum, the outer part was massively large and I had fun wandering around its fields. because I know a) scrambled eggs aren't great for you to begin with, and b) this one is extra buttery. However, all that requires that you know your flavors, how they are masked, and what the archetypal food tastes like - which I don't.
The upshot of all this is that I pulled out the bottle of multivitamins my mother gave me at the beginning of freshman year (and lay, untouched, through four different dorm rooms, defaulting from one location to another) and have started taking them.
But now I have found a better solution. Enter: People kibble.
I've long searched for the people equivalent of dog kibble. The cool thing about dog kibble is that it's mass produced, cheap, and nutritionally solid. For many dogs, it can literally be the only thing they eat for their entire lives. So why don't they have cheap food that may not taste good but a) can be bought in quantity, b) is easy to prepare, and c) contains everything you need for the day? Turns out they do - and, of course, the Japanese came up with it. I had heard of Calorie Mate before I left, but was not aware of the full extent of its awesomeness. For US$12, you can get 2000 calories of Calorie Mate blocks at any convenience store, easily making it the cheapest nutritionally balanced three meals in Japan.
This works especially well for me because I get *hongry* in the evening. My family never eats before 8:30 and sometimes as late as 10:30, so it's a long time for me between meals. The Japanese portions are fine with me, but there's no way a meal eaten at noon can last for the rest of the day - practically until I go to bed at night - so having a block around to tide me over is a godsend.
I don't get as ravenous now and am no longer prey to random cravings ("CARROTS! I NEED CARROTS!") like I used to, so it's probably all good.
Circle Shack / Kyodai
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On Thursday, after my last class, we headed out to lunch. The usual place we go, which sells these lunch box things called "obento" in Japan, was full of SCTI students already by the time we arrived, so Mike, Sang, and I kept on walking. And walking. Place after place was either full, or too expensive for us, so we eventually walked to the nearby Kyoto University (In Japanese "Kyoto Daigaku" or "Kyodai" for short), where amusingly we found the same obento chain. We grabbed our lunches, and set out in search of a park to eat them in (we were near campus and saw lots of trees), so we turned into one area and discovered what again might be the coolest place ever.
The circle shack (circles are clubs, essentially, but less formal) is this amazing warehouse that is the epitome of student-ness. It's incredibly cheaply constructed, by the looks of it from the outside, but inside is this amazing place. It's quite long - there are several airplane wings being built inside of it for a bicycle-powered airplane. Which, incidentally, is damn cool - and they're doing a real pro job. All the technical drawings are on the wall and the workshop where they machine is next to the warehouse, so you can even see how they're building it and cutting the wood, machining the parts, etc. Anyway, it's really long, and sort of subdivided by project areas, but mostly a communal place. The walls are covered in brightly colored murals obviously drawn by students having fun, there's a band practice area with a drum kit and lighting, there's even sports equipment in one corner - a place where Good Times are to be had, all in all.
Anyway, we brought in our food because we were drawn by music - the band practice area was currently occupied by a great group playing a cover of an Oasis song. We sat down in the background, which, incidentally also was great - around eight or ten sets of car seats, ripped out of cars, and plunked down on the concrete floor. I chose the snazzy leather one which formerly held the derriere of someone rather rich, judging by its quality, while my buddies snagged the plush and the busted swivel chair. They played through the Oasis song a couple of times until they had it down, but, just as we were about to leave, switched to Bob Marley's "No woman, no cry." This might be my favorite moment in Japan so far. Just relaxing in the back, swaying to the music, and singing along to a really good rendition of "No wooman, no kurai." The singer was solid, the drummer was into it, and the bass player knew her chops. If we ever get the SCTI band off the ground, we'll definitely need to do a battle of the bands or something.
~Danny
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