Hosting Japanese Students

I may or may not have mentioned this before, but the study abroad program I participated in last summer goes both ways. It's a little different for students coming to America, though. My understanding is that when the students of the English school are in middle school, interested students go to America for a week to experience America and tour schools (a high school and an English school) then later they can go to high school in America or graduate high school in Japan then go to English school and eventually community college in America. Or something like that. These are just some of the options I've seen. 

Anyway, sometime after returning from Japan the program coordinator messaged me asking if I could host some students that December. I said I would love to and come my last final I quickly pack up, say goodbye to my friends, and hop on a bus home. The next morning I go to the airport to meet their leader (an Australian girl who was in the study abroad program with me) and the nine girls at the airport. Recognized most of the girls from lessons at the English school and it was wonderful to see everyone again. Corgimama (the Australian girl, their bilingual America trip coordinator) was exhausted and the girls wanted to shop so being familiar with the airport I took the girls to the shops upstairs. Had seven of them with me and took them around to various shops, counting to seven a lot to make sure everyone was there. Let me tell you, it's a lot to keep track of seven girls wandering around shops. Often they would point at things and ask me what they were and I did my best to explain in my limited Japanese or simple English.

Corimama and me worked together to show the girls around the city for the day before taking them back to a hotel for the night. The next afternoon, the girls were going to various host families for the weekend, my family being one of the host families. There were a lot of girls, so I was asked to host three girls. Originally three high school girls were going to stay with me, but two middle school girls who were my students previously said they wanted to stay with me so things got changed a little :D. My mom and I picked up the three girls and I did my best to translate for my mom when asking questions or explaining where we were going. Actually tried my best to translate a lot that weekend despite not knowing much Japanese (the girls knew more English than I knew Japanese but I tried anyway). Because I knew the girls, I didn't mind messing up a lot while trying to speak Japanese Sometimes they would say "Juno, we don't know what you are saying" 😂. 

Over the weekend, we took them to a Christmas tree farm (and met Santa!), the mall, mini golf, and the zoo, which had a special event going on where everything was covered in Christmas lights. The girls also taught me how to make onigiri and origami. They instructed me in Japanese and despite not knowing what they were saying sometimes I managed to understand what they wanted me to do (learned a lot of new words too!). I'm not particularly good at either but they were patient with me and laughed with me at my mistakes. There was a lot of fun had and speaking in a mix of languages to communicate. We shared our cultures and I got to share my home with some of the people that welcomed me into their community that summer. 

When I took them to the mall, they would often come up to me and ask what things were. It was super cute (well, basically everything they did was super cute but I found this particularly cute). We also yelled a lot and otherwise had a good time while playing mini golf. Spoke very little English while playing so my parents were just watching on wondering what was happening XD. Something else really funny is due to both jet lag and the magical ability of Japanese people, the girls fell asleep if they were in a vehicle for more than 15 minutes. At one point I was sitting in the back seat of the car with one of the girls and hugged her because she was cold then she proceeded to fall asleep in my arms for the remainder of the 45 minute car ride. Something really funny that they liked was "uh huh" so while waiting in line at the zoo we said "uh huh" a lot and were otherwise ridiculous. They also had me recite all of hiragana then when I successfully did that one said "welcome, you are Japanese now." When it finally came time to drop them off at their hotel near the airport, they all said "see you again!" before we parted. The optimism and happiness was so adorable. So many precious memories that I could never fit into one blog post. These girls will forever be part of my life.

 Here's a picture of my mom and I with my three adorable Japanese little sisters (they are beyond adorable but I'm covering their faces for privacy reasons) at the zoo event. It was really cold and windy so everyone bundled up and at one point I had all three of them huddled around me because apparently I give off a lot of body heat 😂. Hopefully I'll see them again this summer when I'm in Japan for yet another study abroad.

Weird Kit Kat Flavors

HELLO ALL I AM BACK! IN THEORY. IT'S ONLY WEEK TWO OF THE TERM SO THINGS ARE ABOUT TO GET A LOT BUSIER REAL SOON. I'LL TRY MY BEST Y'ALL.

Anyway, onto the actual post.

So as you may or may not know, Japan really likes Kit Kats. This is because the name sounds like the phrase きっとかっつ (kitto kattsu), which translates to something like "you will surely win" so the candy are used as a good luck charm for exams. There is actually a space on the back of the packages for you to write a note. In America, we only seem to have three flavors of Kit Kats (milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and white chocolate I think) but in Japan there are over 300 flavors. Pretty wild, huh? (you can find a list and further information on the Kit Kats in Japan Wikipedia page)

Now, you may be thinking "Juno, you can't even eat Kit Kats so why are you talking about them?" Well, for one all the Kit Kat flavors in Japan are pretty awesome and secondly I have friends who also know this and can eat Kit Kats. Before I went to Japan, I was asking people if they wanted anything from Japan and a friend of mine wanted some Kit Kats. I was determined to get my friend some cool flavor, so I looked around a lot for something you couldn't get in America. One day, I was walking through the 7/11 near the main guesthouse in Ojiya and saw some small packages of a Kit Kat flavor I had never seen before. I couldn't read the label, but it looked fun so I bought it.

During my travels in Japan, I had started using HelloTalk and decided to post a picture of the Kit Kats I got for my friend to see what flavor I had. When I posted the picture, the first thing people started asking is "where did you get that?" Many of them had never seen the flavor before and were genuinely confused as to its existence. Apparently it had a picture of some famous announcer on it and was cough drop flavored 😂😂😂

 

Yeah I didn't end up giving it to my friend for somewhat obvious reasons. I'm going to Japan 
again this summer and I promise I'll get you something that will actually taste good 😂

Let's Cook: Miso Ramen!

First full new post of the Azuki Ice Cream reboot! 行こう！(let's go!)

So I'm a full on college student now. Like dorm room living, group work doing, midterm related crying, sleep deprived spacing out college student. I was in community college before so technically a college student but I feel a lot more of the student activity related soul death now. Anyway, this new living situation makes cooking a lot more difficult. My residence hall does have really nice kitchens, but there is the issue of that they are shared and that I don't have very much equipment (like literally all I have is one pot, a cutting board and knife, two bowls, one spoon, and three sets of chopsticks). Time to get resourceful because I enjoy cooking and don't want to eat dining hall food all the time. I developed quite a taste for miso soup while I was in Japan and have been making it back home. My mom found these rice ramen pack things at Costco so I can eat ramen like a proper college student. Combine my taste for miso soup and my college student desire for ramen and you get miso ramen! I make this ramen usually twice a week, sometimes more depending on how I feel. Okay, enough with the life update, let's watch me make this!

Step One: Chop Up Ingredients!

First things first get all your ingredients. I do as much as I can in my dorm room because I don't exactly trust the other people using my floor's kitchen. Ingredients are up to you, but I start by putting 1/3 to 1/2 a block of tofu into the bottom of my tupperware (it's pyrex so I can bake in it too. Pretty cool, isn't it?). Then I put 2-6 cut up green onions in there as well. Why so many, you ask? Because the campus grocery store sells them in bunches and for some reason I can't get them to store well so I just buy them then use them. Also onions are fabulous.

Step Two: Gather Other Ingredients!

Next grab your noodles (I use rice ramen, but you can basically use any noodles) and miso paste. Get your miso paste from a Japanese store if you can. It's a million times better than what you can get in a regular grocery store, even a nice one. You can use as much or as little of these as you want, but I use one ramen hunk (what would you even call that...?) and about a tablespoon of miso paste. Sticking the miso paste to the lid of your container makes it convenient to grab it to stir into your boiling water later.

Step Three: Pack Up Your Stuff and Head to the Kitchen!

Close up your container of ingredients, get your pot, and grab some sort of utensil. I try to keep everything as self contained as possible so I have less to carry to the kitchen. Also, it was snowing when I was making this! 😄

Step Four: Boil Some Water!

Put 2-3 cups of water in your pot and bring to a boil. If your kitchen has one of those hot water things like my kitchen has, get hot water from that so you don't have to wait as long for the water to boil. Also putting a lid on your pot makes the water boil faster. Once your water boils, grab the miso paste hunk from the lid of your container (see why I do that?) and stir into the boiling water until the miso paste dissolves.

Step Five: Add Other Ingredients!

Now that your water is boiling and miso paste is dissolved, add the other ingredients from your container, but don't add the noodles yet. These ingredients are not hot so they will decrease the overall heat of the solution so you must add more heat for your soup to boil again (haha can you tell I'm taking general chemistry? 😜).

Step Six: Add Noodles!

Once your soup is boiling again, add the noodles! Cook them for however long it says to cook them for, which for my noodles is four minutes. Make sure to stir things around every minute or so.

Step Seven: Put into Bowl and Clean Up a Bit!

Remove your pot from the heat and wait for your noodles and such to cool for a few minutes. Transfer your noodles and such to a bowl. Clean up a bit while waiting for your bowl to be cool enough to carry and so the custodial staff won't hate you. Once cool enough to carry, carry everything to where you intend to eat your food.

Step Eight: Add the Seaweed!

Given that the most readily available seaweed is sushi nori or seaweed snacks, I use that in my miso ramen. Take two sheets of sushi nori or however much you want and tear it into pieces. Stir into soup. You add this now because it maintains flavor better and doesn't explode. Learned this the hard way last term. One time a Japanese exchange student saw my failed noodles with exploded seaweed and made fun of them for a solid 10 minutes. We are friends now, actually 😂

Step Nine: Enjoy Your Miso Ramen!

Now that you have everything cooked and mixed in and stuff, it's time to enjoy your ramen! Do your dishes later because ramen is best fresh. I'm a nerd so I eat at my desk while watching youtube gaming stuff or kpop music videos or whatever suits my fancy that day.

Hope you enjoyed my little tutorial on how I make miso ramen! I make this all the time when I want something home cooked and that reminds me of my adventures in Japan.

Being In A Parade

Found this post I wrote while I was in Ojiya! Enjoy my experience of being in the annual Ojiya Matsuri parade! 😁



So this weekend was Ojiya Matsuri. Matsuri translates as festival but I'll just call it matsuri because it is a Japanese style summer festival. Part of the matsuri was parade floats and on Sunday there was a big parade and I got to be on one of the floats. There are essentially three types of parade floats: character floats, music floats, and sit there waving floats. Our group of floats had one of each and we had one person in each of the music and character floats and the rest of us were on the sit and wave float. Everyone was given matching coats, headbands, and fans to wear while waving at everyone. Usually each float had its own uniform of sorts so that was pretty cool. Hopefully I will get a picture of us on the float so I can post it here.

Not exactly the picture I was looking for but this is the float I was on featuring some fellow international students 

I've been in parades a few times, but I was always walking or doing something outside the float. American parades also have floats and such, just a little different. Parades themselves are always full of excitement and lots of fun. However, it isn't really the parade that is important: it's the people.

What I mean is the people both on the floats and along the streets. Ojiya is a small city so everyone watching saw people they knew on the floats and everyone on the floats saw people they knew on the streets. Waiting for the parade to start some of us foreign students wandered around and found our English students to see what floats they were on and what they were doing. They were so cute in their uniforms for their floats. Lots were playing traditional instruments so that was super cool.

When actually on the floats we just sat there and waved at everyone we could see. Many people lined the streets and some people watched from windows on upper floors too. At one point I saw a guy watching from a balcony about a block away so I waved at him and he waved back. You can stand far away but you can't escape the excited foreigner 😆. All of us crazy foreigners waved a lot and yelled a fair amount, especially when we saw someone we knew. Because of all the lessons we teach, school visits, and events we go to, there are many people that we know. It was really wonderful to take part in an important part of the local community and feel the connection to all the people there.

GUESS WHO'S APPLYING TO STUDY ABROAD AGAIN

I'm applying to study abroad again! This time it's at a university. The application process has been a bit of a mess but things are looking good now. Going to revamp the blog for this new adventure of mine.

I stopped writing on this blog because it was getting too difficult to write in English, which is something that apparently happens when you learn a second language, but with all the writing I do for college my writing skills have come back! It's blog time! There are some draft posts from when I was in Japan that I need to finish and get posted and then it's time for my experiences since then and my journey to studying abroad again.

Okay. Time to go back to dying from all the college stuff. See you soon! 😘

Working In a Japanese Resturant

My study abroad program usually has a couple school visits a week, but it is summer break so now we suddenly have a lot more free days than we used to. I'm not the most social human so I was spending a lot of time laying on the floor in the downstairs sitting room either sleeping or watching YouTube. I think someone got worried about me or something and told the director of the program because suddenly I had a part time job. Kind of.

So last weekend was a major holiday weekend in Japan so this restaurant needed help because of either increased customers or decreased staff. Anyway, they needed help and have had exchange students work in the shop before. The owner speaks some English and I was assured that students with less knowledge of Japanese had worked there before. Some shenanigans happened the first day that made getting there a little challenging, but I did still get there on time and was ready to work.

This was not my first time working a restaurant type job. I worked at Chipotle to pay for my flights to Japan. Spent five months in that job, the first of which during the holiday season so it was incredibly busy, so I think I have at least some idea how restaurants work. I was just a cashier most of the time, but I also had to clean all the tables and change garbage cans and other lovely stuff. Got yelled at when I didn't do things right even if nobody had explained them to me in the first place. Oh fun times working in a minimum wage job.

Anyway, I arrive and am given a uniform thing to wear. It's just an apron with the name of the restaurant on it and a towel thing to wear on my head (it looked like a watermelon 😁). First thing I do is put stickers on some mini ice cream or pudding things (I can read the katakana but I still don't know what it is). After that, I was set on dish duty. This restaurant has many small dishes on trays so there are many tiny dishes you have to wash. Doing dishes is kind of relaxing in a way and gave me an opportunity to just listen to the other staff in the kitchen. The restaurant was busy that day, but it wasn't the insane atmosphere I remember from busy days at Chipotle. While I can't understand a lot of Japanese, I could still tell that the owner spoke very politely to her staff.

The dishes themselves were very delicate and each dish was meant for a different, well, dish. All very organized. Normally I think of dish washing as being a gross job because of all the leftover food bits, but in Japan people pretty much always finish all their food. I had a garbage can to throw the wet towels they have for people to wash their hands with away and other various garbage worthy things, but the garbage can never really got full. I remember having to change disgusting garbage cans at my old job because Americans tend to not finish their food. There was one dish that was something eggy baked in the dish so that was a little difficult to scrub out, but otherwise dishes was an easy and not gross job.

The staff there didn't really speak English, but they would still try to explain things to me by acting stuff out. I feel like Japanese people are actually pretty goofy so their acting things out was always quite entertaining even if I didn't get what they were trying to explain. Sometimes they would also talk to me like asking where I'm from, how old I am, or asking me to help them with something or laughing when I stood in front of the fan. Something I would also do even if I couldn't understand what people were saying is help carry out trays of food. People seemed to enjoy the clueless foreigner helping carry trays, so that was pretty cool.

Overall, it was a very nice experience. Got to eat ice cream at the end of my short shifts too 😁.

でも、所有者さんはもっと日本語を話してくださいと言っていました　😅

Culture Shock! Crazy Boys

Despite my lack of language skills, I have interacted with female and male Japanese humans of all ages. Everything from four year olds staring at my braces to my older neighbors asking if I live in the village. There are some differences in behavior from American humans of course, one difference being in the behavior of young boys.

In America, young boys can be crazy but by the time they are in middle or high school they tend to be more quiet. There is usually that one crazy guy in each class, but that's only one guy. In Japan, at least 50% of them are that crazy guy. The majority of my male friends are quiet and like computers so pretty much any craziness is surprising. However, I don't think I have ever seen American boys be this crazy. I asked my Japanese instructor about it and she said it is because in Japan boys are seen as entertainers.

To show you what I mean, I will tell some stories about my interactions with crazy boys.

Part of my program is visiting local schools and the first school we visited was a local middle school. My friend and I picked a second year class (so 13 and 14 year old kids) and played a game of some sort with them in their English class. Everyone seemed fairly calm aside from the one kid trying to get answers from his friends in the back of class and the kid who found a rubber band and was putting it on his head. However, come break time, the kids were running around the room. Realizing my friend speaks Japanese, a group of boys came up to us and were talking to him. They all had their arms over each other's shoulders and the one with the best English said "we're bros." One of them suddenly pointed at us and said "couple?" (my friend is a guy, you see). After realizing what he said, we both denied it. Another boy proceeded to ask the same question. A third boy proceeded to point at us individually and ask. Were they convinced? Nope. They walk past the main house on the way home from school and whenever they see me they start saying "couple" or the name of my friend. They don't even know my name. The just call me Lion boy's girlfriend. They know it annoys me so they just give me this mischievous smile and keep walking.

We have visited many schools and also visited a kindergarten one day. The kids were very excited to see us and talked nonstop. At one point a group of girls were crowded around me and saying something about my sunflower hair clip and then were staring at my braces. I had been squatting down to be more their height but I decided to stand up so my braids hung down in front of me. The girls just stared at them and found it interesting but a couple boys came along and started punching them. Not sure what the logic to that is. This has actually happened a couple more times since then. If my braids hang in front of me (like I'm leaning over or something) little boys will come punch my braids.

One weekend one of the staff from the program took some of us to the beach. I was in a car with her, my housemate, and one of her friends. Her friend didn't really speak much English so he just spoke Japanese at me. He was saying something that sounded funny so I was laughing but the lady told me not to laugh because he was saying something along the lines of "she has a hot body." When we got closer to the beach he started chanting "うみ！うみ！うみ！” which is "ocean" in Japanese. When we were at the beach him and my friend ran around with the kids there and otherwise were crazy. Him and my friend also decided to dig a hole and bury my friend in sand. He drew funny stuff over where my friend was buried in sand.

After the speech contest, somehow the director ended up having a janken (rock paper scissors) match with one of the young boys over who paid for dinner after the event. The boy lost and dramatically flung himself on the floor yelling and so did his friends. They repeated the process and he again lost so the dramatic act continued. Mid way through the dinner, we had everyone switch seats and the director of the program switched seats with me so I was sitting across from the boy who was in the janken match earlier. He called himself "crazy boy" so that's what I will be calling him here. So Crazy Boy introduced himself like you normally do, then continued to say all sorts of crazy stuff in his less than perfect English. He was saying stuff like "I like girls," "I work in car metal factory," "funny funny funny personality," and pointed at a picture of a kpop idol on his phone and said she was his girlfriend. He told the French girl he could speak French so she asked him to prove it and he said "un deux trois." He said some kinda questionable stuff and his friends laughed a lot and corrected him. After the dinner, some of us decided to go to karaoke. He called one of his friends the King of Karaoke and that kid decided to go with us but Crazy Boy was going to drive the rest of his friends home. King of Karaoke hadn't spoken much up to this point, but as his friends were leaving he yelled "fuck you bitch!" Crazy boy responded with "oh, so I'm a bitch?" Hearing kids with broken English swear at each other is hilarious, in my opinion. Later at karaoke, King of Karaoke sang passionately or headbanged to various songs. One of the staff guys was with us and he danced to a silly Japanese song so that was also pretty funny.

We went to a small festival a couple weeks ago and a drunk middle aged man walked up to us and started talking to us. He pointed at one of the boys and the girl standing next to him and asked if they were a couple. They said no and as the conversation progressed various girls interacted with the boy in question and the guy would ask if that girl and the boy were a couple. He went through all of us girls and then went back to the original girl. Him and his wife also wanted us to drink with them, but we politely declined. I'm pretty sure he knew most of us were underage, too.

So those are some of my experiences with crazy Japanese boys! It's definitely interesting how the culture is different and how that changes people's behavior. Hope you found my stories entertaining 😁.