Another typical Japanese exchange blog: 2010

So the new semester has started and I have about 3.5 months left in Japan. I am both very glad to be going home soon and very sad. I really miss my family and friends back home. I also really miss engineering school. It has been a great adventure living here so far. I hope I can make these next months last.

I registered for my engineering classes in the fall today. After looking at what path I want to take with my courses, I've decided to change my major back to Computer Engineering. I switched my major to Electrical Engineering a year ago for various reasons, but I've found that the classes I want to take in the EE curriculum are also available in the CE curriculum. I can also take some Computer Science courses that I want to take with a CE degree that I can not take in EE for credit. I think that programming will be a major part of my future, so I think it is important to take classes on the subject. I've selected the classes I will take in the fall and couldn't be more psyched. I will also be doing some undergraduate research for the UIC Microphysics Laboratory (MPL). They do a lot of work in that lab that is very much related to some undergraduate research I did last summer for the UIC Nanotechnology Core Facility(NCF). The MPL focuses a lot more on physics and science so I am very excited to see how my research goes there.

This weekend was quite fun. I decided I would go to Pub Popeye with some friends on Friday because there was a seasonal beer there that I really wanted to try and I didn't know how long it would be there. The beer I am talking about is the "Divine Vamp III" brewed by Baird Brewing Company here in Japan. This brew was only made once and is only sold at Popeye's. It had really good reviews on beeradvocate, so I just HAD to try it!

I tried gathering some friends up, and the people that ended up going with me were Anna and Kyle(Canadian). (There are two Kyles on our floor here, one Canadian and one American, so a differentiation has to be made whenever you talk about either of them.) We had a great time at the pub. The beers we had were excellent, and we got a cheese platter to enjoy with the drinks. I had not had such cheeses in such a long time. It had blue cheese, smoked gouda, cheddar, etc. It was a great platter, but it didn't have that much on it. I was very proud because I was able to make suggestions to both Anna and Kyle about what beers they should get and they both were raving about how good they were. No pictures yet, Anna has the few we took on her camera.

On Saturday, I went to Harajuku with my uncle Tim and we went to a taproom by Baird Brewing. It was a really nice place. The overall atmosphere was great. The brewmaster for Baird was even drinking at the bar that night! It was really cool to be able to talk to him. It was mostly middle-aged white men at the bar. They were a generally friendly group. I had my very first taste of coffee stout and milk stout style beers that night. I really liked the coffee stout! There was a lot of coffee flavor in it well matched with the barley. The milk stout was really nothing special. It was very mild in both flavor and smell. It was a cask ale, and it seems that cask ales are maybe a bit milder than other beers in my experience so far. For my last round, Tim and I both got a glass of the brewery's Imperial IPA. It was much better than the bottle of the same beer I had a few weeks ago. There was a very nice fruity/citrus flavor to it along with a strong pine smell. Here is a picture of our last round and the taps:

Uncle Tim also came here bearing gifts for me! He brought a french press that my mom gave him to deliver to me that works beautifully. I brewed a mug of coffee with it today and it was glorious. He also grabbed me two bottles of beer from an Alaskan brewery since he does connecting flights there. They are both styles that I very much enjoy and they both have gotten some good reviews. I am very excited to try them out. I think I will have one next weekend and save the other for the week after that. Thanks uncle Tim!!!

So yeah, epic weekend.

Classes are starting up now. This week will be week two. I think I've got my classes figured out. I am taking: Intermediate Japanese 1, Japanese Conversation, Intermediate Kanji 1(maybe), Linear Algebra, German 1, Japanese Econ, Design Science, Imaging Science, and Develop of Urban Environment in Japan. Some of those are just filler classes so that I have enough to satisfy the requirements of this program, but most of the classes I am interested in and excited to take.

I should get to studying Japanese/German vocab and such now. Please leave some comments ;).

I thought I would do a little rant on eating in Japan today since I have time and was thinking about the subject today.

Being a student on a budget, eating in Japan is about eating cheap more than anything. There are many places to choose from when going out to eat if you want a cheap meal. There are ramen shops, Maruetsu/Tsukiya type restaurants, Mcdonalds, curry shops (CoCo's!), and various Japanese food chains: Saizeriya(Italian), First Kitchen(American style), etc. I'll elaborate on a few of these...

Ramen shops
Ramen shops are everywhere in Japan. There are a few chain ramen places, but it seems that independant mom and pop ramen shops exist in abundance. My favored shop in the area is one that the students here call "Stinky ramen". It gets the name because the shop has a strange smell that it emits. You can smell the store from across the street. It is pretty incredible. At first I found the smell repulsive, but it doesn't bother me any longer. There is a large variety of ramen to choose from, but if you want to eat cheaply, you have about 4-5 options including salt, soy sauce, miso, and spicy ramen. I prefer the spicy ramen out of these because I think it is the most delicious.

Matsuya/Tsutaya restaurants

These places are the closest you can get to a Japanese food McDonalds. It is really cheap, the service is fast, but I really can't stand the food at these places very well. There was a period when I thought Matsuya was OK, but I am totally turned off by these places these days. The common cheapo meal you can get at these places are bowls of rice with fatty pork and maybe some spices/onion with miso soup on the side. Now when I say fatty pork, I mean they give you strips of pork that are pretty much half fat. Japanese people seem to LOVE fatty meats. I see it everywhere. The amount of fat on some of the meat Japanese people eat is ungodly. Anyway, there are often other choices like sub-par Japanese curry dishes and rice bowls with chicken. I usually get the curry since that seems to be most palatable for me.

McDonald's
McDonald's in Japan really isn't very different from McDonald's in the states. There are some different burger options, but all the choices you have in the states are there pretty much. They don't do anything with quarter pounder patties though. Beef is expensive here. I was expecting that you could order a side of rice in Japanese McDonalds since I had seen this in Hawaii, but that is not the case.

There are some interesting burgers in the Japanese McDonalds menu. The teriyaki burger being one of the most significantly different burgers. There have been shrimp burgers in the past at McDonalds, but I am pretty sure that they aren't on the menu anymore.

There have been rotating special burgers at the Japanese McDonald's lately called the "Big America" series. There are a number of different burgers that are made to represent different areas in the US. The ones I have tried include the New York burger, the Texas burger, and the Hawaii burger. The Texas burger seems most popular. I think I like the New York burger the best. It had a decent patty and a nice mustard sauce. Here is a picture of the Texas burger:

CoCo's curry

This has been the most popular restaurant lately amongst my friends and I. The special thing about CoCo's is that you can customize your dish a good amount. There are 10 levels of spicyness to choose from at CoCo's. Level one has no spice at all. I have found that the curry stops being enjoyable at about level 5. I usually order level 4 or 3. Here is a picture of the English menu talking about the spice levels. We can read the Japanese menu, but they give us the English menu without asking sometimes.

Level 5 spice says "Not for the faint hearted. Consider the consequences." My friend Anna is trying to work her way up to level 10 curry. She has gotten up to 8 so far and lived.

You can also customize your curry with various add-ins like vegatables, meats, cheese, basically anything they have they can add in for you.

It is a great mystery to me as to why curry isn't a more popular dish in the US. Good curry is DELICIOUS and it is generally very cheap to make. I think that Indian curry is much better than Japanese curry, but they both have their charms.

Saizeriya
This restaurant is a perfect example of a country taking a foreign style of food and making it their own. Italian food in Japan is very different from the American variety. There is a lot more seafood involved and some things are made totally differently.

I am a big fan of Italian food (as any other sane person is). So I was excited to find an Italian restaurant in Japan. This place disappoints with most of their dishes however. The meat sauce tastes like chef Boyardee, the pizza is the typical Japanese interpretation which is not all that good, the garlic bread is hard and too salty, the beef dish I tried there was also way too salty... A lot of the options in this restaurant are less than sub par compared to back home. The last time I went there however, I ordered paella with some bread and wine which was a nice meal. So it's not all bad. I am by no means a wine expert, but their 100円 wine glass isn't all that bad. I also had a fairly decent seafood pasta dish that wasn't bad.

The decorations at this chain are pretty entertaining. They try very hard to make it look European. There is a lot of very famous replica art all over the walls and ceiling.

Some of the pasta options are interesting. It is fairly common to have some dried seaweed strips on the pasta. There is one dish that looks like it is just black noodles with some squid. They use squid ink as the sauce for this pasta! I've never tried it, but heard that it is not very good.

First Kitchen
I've never gone to this place despite there being one close to me. I just think it is hilarious that First Kitchen is shortened to "Fa-kin" in spoken Japanese which sounds like "Fucking". A common joke is A:"Hey, have you tried Fakin yet?" B:"Oh, no. Not yet. We should go together" A:"Yea! lets go Fakin!" :P

Grocery Stores
The cheapest way to eat is, of course, the grocery store. Japanese grocery stores have a few quirks about them. Japanese people will unfailingly say "Irasyaimase" to you at any restaurant or place of business in general, but they seem to do it a lot more in places like grocery stores. They say it over and over again in small bursts in certain areas. There is a cultural reason they say this, but I won't get into that. Sometimes, instead of having an employee say the "irasyaimase" there is a small stereo that does it for them... In the grocery store, if an employee enters a back room, they always bow to all of the customers before opening the door. There will sometimes be televisions near a product that loop commercials for that product.

Prices: It seems that produce and meat are expensive items in Japan. I regularly pay 100円 for a single apple. Peanut butter is hard to find and expensive when you can find it. Fish can be relatively cheap. I usually buy either salmon or saba when buying fish. They are the most delicious and inexpensive in my opinion. Salmon goes for about 100円 a fillet while saba is about 200円 for half of the fish. I am going to miss saba a lot when I get back to the states.

My usual dinner I have when I make my own is a bowl of rice with natto, miso soup, an apple, some kind of green vegetable, and some fish. It is a filling, delicious, healthy, quick to make meal. I'll mix it up occasionally and make soba or curry. But the first example given is by far my favorite meal to make.

Popoki

This is my favorite place to get lunch on days that I have class. It is a cheap, filling, delicious, generally healthy meal. The selection consists of several rice dishes with meat and some vegetables. There is a rotating special item on the menu that changes each day. Here is a picture of the プルプルライス(purupuru rice) meal:

I think he uses wasabi to spice the pork for the purupuru. I think it is delicious. I am drooling just thinking about it.

It is run by an older couple. The husband is a retired architect that designed nuclear power plants, or something along those lines. I don't know much about the wife. They took my friends and I out for sushi one time when we met them outside of the restaurant. We frequent the restaurant to the point that they know our faces ;). It was really nice.

Side comments
Tacos and Mexican foods in general are poorly represented in Japan. Tacos/burritos are almost non-existent here! There is a taco truck that operates seasonally in Inage that is run by an actual Mexican guy. He actually doesn't speak any Japanese. The tacos there are alright, but really lacking compared to tacos back in Waukegan/Chicago. The meat doesn't seem to have a whole lot of substance and he uses some sort of sweet sauce for it. I'll definitely get it again in the future, but it was quite a let down. I really miss good tacos/burritos!

I was a fan of instant ramen in the US. When I came to Japan, I thought that the instant ramen would be similar, but maybe better. To my surprise, they have a totally different range of flavors to choose from. There isn't any beef, oriental, shrimp, etc. flavored ramen! There is a bit of chicken flavor here and there, but for the most part you can choose from salt, soy sauce, miso, and spicy korean stlye ramen. I honesly prefer the American variety.

That is all for now. See you all next time!