Food.

It's been just a little more than a month since I arrived in Tokyo and I think I've established something of a routine. Sunday is church, Tuesday and Friday are Japanese class, Wednesday is study hall while the others are in Japanese class (I do one-on-one tutoring), and the rest of the time is... well, maybe I don't have a routine after all. In my free time I've cleaned my apartment, done my homework, cooked one-person meals or gone grocery shopping. I've also discovered cheap (and not so cheap) restaurants around my apartment... and I've eaten at the 24-hour McDonald's down the street more than I'd like to admit.

When I want to save money (and don't want to make the twenty-five-minute trek to the only cheap udon noodle place in the vicinity that I know), I usually subsist on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, Kōn Furēku Shugā Taipu ("Corn Flake Sugar Type," the cheap store-brand equivalent of Frosted Flakes), bananas, hard-boiled eggs, rice, and miso soup (with tofu, if I remember to pick some up!). For dinner, it's either spaghetti or yakisoba, the stir-fried noodles you may recall me raving about in my entry on Hongo Bible Camp.

Ridiculously proud of this.

Yakisoba was the first meal I ever cooked here. Though not nearly as good as what they serve in restaurants (the noodles come prepackaged with a separate seasoning packet--much like instant ramen), it's still easy to make and filling enough to make a decent dinner much cheaper than any restaurant in Tokyo (including the McDonald's!). Throw in a quarter-head of cabbage for 38 yen and you get a cheap serving of vegetables, too! (Well, stir-fried, but that still counts, right?)

To make miso soup you need 22.5 SPOON of miso.

When I finally decided to look for a real recipe (as opposed to the instructions on the back of the package), I discovered that my apartment actually lacks a set of measuring spoons. I needed them to make miso soup, so when I found them at our local (tiny) grocery store, I threw them into my basket without a second thought. Japanese recipes use ōsaji ("big spoon" or tablespoon) and kosaji ("little spoon" or teaspoon), so I figured they wouldn't be too different from what I used in the States.

But then I got home and untied them from the card they were on, I discovered that they were labeled in the most cryptic way possible. The biggest spoon was "15 SPOON," then "5 SPOON," "2.5 SPOON," and "1 SPOON." The back of the package was no help--just a wall of Japanese. It was only after some Googling and deduction that I realized the numbers were milliliter measurements. Did you know a tablespoon is 15 mL? Now I do.

It means "0 hours since the rice was done"
but I still like thinking it's startled.

I had another little victory when I figured out how to use my rice cooker... with a little help. Six years of Japanese language study may have allowed me to be able to articulate the homeless problem in Osaka or talk about the importance of eating together with family at mealtimes, but I still had to Google how to work the thing. (Turns out it's essentially "plug it in and push the giant red button.")

So there's a glimpse of my daily life here. In future entries I'll talk about my Japanese class, my church, lectures I've attended, English classes, and even more reflections on my life in Tokyo. For now, though, I'm gonna soak some rice and make me a PB&J.

A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?
Ecclesiastes 2:24-25 (NIV)