Box Curry

Now in a variety of designer colors



So I mentioned box curry sometime before. It's curry that comes in a box, when you want to eat it, you take it out of the box (it's in a metal bag) and boil it in the bag, then place it on food.



Easy. Inside the bag is curry, potatoes, meat, and carrots. All of it is precooked, and the packet is nonperishable (apparently). For a fast food fix they beat the hell out of TV dinners.

What's the difference


"1" Curry. The mildest curry, it was like beef stew. Good but very lackings, it has excellent uses in bolstering otherwise boring sauces. Having pasta but want more than a jar of tomato sauce of it. Curry "1" will make it into a hearty bolonaise with potatoes.



"2" Curry. Slightly more spicy than 1, this curry begins to still taste like curry, but is in no way spicy. When I made this curry Jessi was pleasantly suprise at the taste and texture of it.


"3" Curry. Three curry actually begins to have the curry taste as well as a bit of the spicy taste asscoiated with curry. For many people I would probably suggest the "3" curry, it's great by itself on rice.


"4" Curry. "4" Curry was my favorite out of the five, it's got a good kick, but it's mild enough so that you can enjoy the flavor. Jessi had this one with me, and agreed that it wasn't so spicy that you couldn't eat it, but was still spicy.


"5" Curry. So at the outset I figured that none of the curry's would reach a level of spicyness that would deter me. After finding "4" so delicious, I figured "5" wouldn't be much hotter. I was suprised, "5" curry is very spicy. I can handle very spicy, but it begins to just taste like black pepper to me after a while. After a few bites, I defrosted some corn and added a bit of butter to it, and it came out just splendid.



When I leave Japan I will severely miss box curry. I think I will just have to make a whole lot of curry from scratch.

-Mack

Juggling in Japan

I've currently taught one international student how to juggle, and put three more on the path of juggling. Once taught these students have gone on to try and teach other students. If I were here for a year I'd start a club.

And now for something completely different

Currency in Japan

So a noticible difference between the American and the Japanese Currency Manufacturing Bodies is that the Japanese make no Cents.

The exchange rate rougly translates to 100 yen to 1 dollar. Honestly from a practical perspective this kind of makes sense. It's simpler. Why have two systems of currency dollars and cents when a dollar is really only 100 cents. It's semantics of course, but Jessi an I have been coping fairly well with the difference. The main difficulty comes up when we see bigger numbers when talking about something in class. 100,000 yen does not immeadiatly translate in my brain. 100 yen is a dollar, 10,000 yen is 100 dollars. Etc Etc. Fortunately I'm not doing a huge amount of business in Japan. Though at one point I nearly withdrew 3,000 dollars worth of yen instead of 300 dollar worth of yen (Thank goodness for "Are you sure" statements.

The biggest problem I've encountered with the Japanese currency system though it with coins. In Japan they use dollar coins, which I find pretty bad. This isn't so much unique to Japan, because the Europeans have dollar coins, and even 2 dollar coins. However what I find most horrifying is the 5 dollar coin,
and I'll explain why in a moment.

People who know me, may have noticed that I tend to lose things. I tend to lose important things, with absolutely no recollection of where or when I may have lost them. They're in my hand one moment and the next they've disappeared into the aether. Reverse Kleptomania I think is a good term for it, and I firmly believe it's possible for me to misplace something that was tied to me.

That being said distilling money into small metal circles doesn't quite work for me. In America if I manage to dump the contents of my pocket into a car seat without noticing, I may lose a buck fifty at the maximum in coins. If I keep my coins in a purse, and I keep the purse filled with quarters, I could lose 5 dollars on a very good day for myself.

In Japan, however, every time I pull my camera from my pocket theres a chance I could lose 3 dollars in coins and not even notice. When I get my change back from buying something, it's very likely for me to drop a dollar on the counter and forget it. My change purse (I don't use one in America, but they are necessary in Japan) is worth about 20 dollars on a good day, and I can fit about 40 dollars into it. Can you imagine having 40 dollars in a purse that's not much bigger than a match box.

It can be conveniant, sure, and for most people it's probably a pretty cool idea. But for those of you who know me well enough, you wouldn't be suprised if I managed to lose 50 dollars worth of coins in my time here in Japan. There've been no problems yet, so I'll keep my fingers crossed and knock on wood that I can keep my marbles altother for the duration of this trip.

The Fashion Show

The End Results

The fashion show was probably the biggest thing that we did for the festival. And by we I mean Jessi. The basics is that Jessi got involved with the fashion show and created three designs for three models. Her concept was awesome, "Rock" Subcultures. A Metal/Latin/Swing Rock Fusion Fashion design, since the festival's theme was AIU Roooooooooocks. The process of making those costumes was all consuming craziness. Jessi took the brunt of it, but I was up at 4:00 AM a couple nights hammering gromits into fabric. Jessi stayed up far later and worked a lot harder doing things that I could not even properly understand.

Here are the results of that labor.

Festival Foods

Festival Booths

Rows of Awesome

So for the festival, booths were set up for vender's to sell things. For the most part this was students selling ethnic food of their homeland. I was actually suprised though that there were a couple local venders from town selling food, and we had a group of ladies from a farm bring a huge amount of produce for sale. Have a look.








Those are cinderblocks with firewood in them, cheap and effective. They're making chicken on a stick, sausage on a stick, and rice fried onto a stick. The rice stick was delicious.



You can see the chocolate banannas to the right, they were so good. They didn't have chocolate that hardened, it was just bananna covered in chocolate fondue. Absolutely delicious.
There was a korean booth, produce, japanese omlette, fried noodles, chicken nuggets, french fry booth, chocolate bannanas, apple and sweet potato dumplings, corn soup, hot dog booth, and much more. But my personal favorite of the day was the mexican food booth. Armando, an international studen from baja mexico ran a booth that sold tacos. With hand-made tortillas, guacamole, and heaped with cheese. For a California native, it was heaven. Here's Elle, she's our friend from England and she made me my taco.




These are just the booths, wait till I get started on all the food I ate.

-Mack

The Wind Up Circus

Preparation

So Jessi and I have described the premise of our act, me a juggling robot and her a dancing robot, coming together and exploring our differences and simularities. A very broad concept, but one we could quickly expand into an act. Emphasis on quickly, as stuff for the festival began to come up, we found ourselves running low on time. We'd choreographed half of the act, they filmed us for a video a couple weeks ago, so we got a section of it done, but we figured it best to put it off for a while. With everything that came up, the friday before the festival we decided to be the day we'd really polish the act. We had most of the idea's, they just needed working through.

The thursday before the festival, the event manager showed up at my door at one 'o clock in the morning and told us there was going to be a dress rehearsal the next day. Needless to say this added the extra pressure we needed to get things done.

In the chaos that came out of Jessi's fashion designer mayhem, we were able to throw some really cool idea's into our costumes. I was sewing a blue lightning bolt onto my chest up until showtime. But it all came together nicely before the festival even started. What got us really excited though was when we found out what the video they had taken of us earlier was for.







They had taken all the video's of the performers and put them on a loop on the TV's in the cafeteria. We had wandered into the cafeteria during the festival, to find a bunch of Akita locals watching a video of Jessi and I performing our act. In HD no less.

Flawless Victory

This is our act in two parts, the first is our first successful rehearsal (minus the flip). The second is the actual act, that due to certain difficulties, starts immediately after we do the flip. See if you can guess where the song is from. Enjoy.








The crowd seemed to love it. I'm suprised to say that onstage we had absolutely no problems. For our dress rehearsal I lost a ball, and had to improvise, but for the actual show it went exactly as planned. Apperently there were only 2 acts out of like 30 that were created by international students. We had a lot of people who came up to us afterwards saying we had done an excellent job. It was great fun and I think we put on a pretty cool show.



-Mack