My
first real weekend turned out to be disappointing. On Saturday some
of the other teachers went to Matsumoto, but I worked all day and so
I was too tired to catch the train and try to find them. On Sunday I
had planned to go to a church that I had found months ago. When I got
to the train station, I checked google to see which train I should
take. Google then told me that there wasn’t a train for another
hour, which would mean that I would miss church. As I was panicking
and trying to find other options, the train that I thought I would be
taking arrived and, sure enough, it was going to the place I needed
to go. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to buy a ticket and race
through the station in time to get on the train.
Instead,
I wandered around downtown Shiojiri trying to find other churches. I
did find the Portuguese church, but it had already started by the
time I got there, and I didn’t expect to be able to understand much
anyway. After establishing that I couldn’t find a church service
that hadn’t started long ago, I went home and tried cooking.p
My
first attempt at cooking was an unmitigated disaster. I think the
problem originates from just one ingredient though—the noodles. I
was making the famous dish “yakisoba”, fried noodles (oddly, it
doesn’t use soba noodles despite the name). I bought fresh chumen
(Chinese noodles, similar to ramen), and added them to carrots,
cabbage, and onions. Because they weren’t dried, I assumed that
they were okay to add directly to the dish. Wrong! Apparently you’re
supposed to briefly boil them first. The yakisoba ended up as a
glutinous, sticky mess, and though I managed to eat enough to keep me
full, I couldn’t bear the thought of eating the leftovers, so I
poured out the remainder of the pot.
On
the bright side, I was very happy with the cooking dish that I have
ended up with. The burner I’m using is probably only 22 cm,
approximately the length of my hand from fingertip to wrist. That
doesn’t give me much room to work with. Since I tend to cook
one-dish meals, I first bought one of the largest frying pans, which
ended up being almost too big to even sit on the stove area! I
certainly couldn’t cook anything on the back burner at the same
time. After much deliberation, I decided on a pot that wasn’t to
far from a wok. It has served me well by allowing me to cook large
meals with many different ingredients but without taking up all my
stove’s real estate.
My
second cooking attempt met with much more success. I made a curry
(really, beef stew) except I substituted shrimp for beef and left out
the mushrooms. It was a little watery in the end, so I added tonkatsu
sauce (which
seems to be the Japanese equivalent of ketchup), and it became more than acceptable. I probably wouldn’t use
shrimp in curry again, but it was so cheap compared to beef that I
couldn’t resist. I also used barley instead of rice, which came out
really well. As leftovers, the meal was even better.
After
my failure to go to church on Sunday, I was determined to make sure
my plans were solid. I looked for free Japanese lessons and found a
bunch within a half-hour train ride of my city. Monday night I
attended one of these classes, and it was a lot of fun. The class had
many teachers, and I was taught with just one other student from
Thailand. We read essays in Japanese, answered reading comprehension
questions, and then discussed the topics presented. It was probably
the best Japanese class I’ve ever had, though I wouldn’t have
minded a bit more discussion.
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