I suppose in September I was settling in and getting accustomed to life in Japan, and in October I was mostly sick to varying degrees. Only this month have I begun to explore a bit more.
First I went hiking with some friends on the Nakasendo trail, which is a road that connected Tokyo to Kyoto during the Edo Period (1603-1868). Some parts of the road are still intact, and it passes through many quaint villages as well as beautiful countryside. The stretch we hiked wasn't the most scenic as nearly half of it was next to an actual highway, but there were some nice parts nonetheless, especially with the color of the autumn leaves. We walked at least 15 km, and I was really sore for the next few days.
Another friend and I went to a conveyor belt sushi restaurant after our Thursday morning Japanese class. Here you can pick out plates of sushi (usually containing two pieces of sushi) for a hundred yen apiece (about $1) from a conveyor belt that runs on one side of your table. At the particular restaurant that we went to, the plates were protected by a hard plastic bubble-like casing which stayed on the conveyor belt, and it wasn't very easy to take the plates out of this casing. The first time we tried, we failed to completely remove the sushi plate, and we had to watch the desired sushi be taken out of our reach. It was funny though, and it was an interesting way to eat, though I found that I tended to be distracted by new possibilities that the conveyor belt might bring.
The next day we went with some of the people in the Japanese class on a kind of walking tour through Matsumoto that ended at a miso factory. Miso is a paste fermented soybeans mixed with salt, a fungus, and sometimes a grain like rice or barley. Miso soup is a staple of Japanese cuisine, especially for breakfast, as I understand. The factory that we visited made two kinds of miso--red and white. The white miso sits for a year and has a milder taste, whereas the red miso sits for three years and is stronger. Miso tastes salty, but (to me) it also has a pleasantly earthy taste and aroma. The factory showed us the warehouse where they kept very large barrels (five tons is what I remember) of miso. Every six months or something like that, the miso is rotated by shoveling it out of one barrel and into another.
After the tour we sampled some miso soup made from the factory's miso. The factory had a nice gift shop, which also sold miso soft-serve ice cream. This was so bizarre that I had to try it. The taste was not bad, kind of a slightly salty and creamy mixture that reminded me more of Bailey's than anything else. I ate it all, but it wasn't tasty enough that I would eat it again.
The following weekend I decided that I wanted to go out on Saturday night, and went to an izakaya, a darts bar, and a club. It was a rough night, and upon getting home very late I discovered that I had lost my key. I slept on a coworker's floor in my clothes, and the next morning I had to call my boss and ask him to bring the spare key so that I could get into my apartment. I promised myself that many parts of that night would not be repeated, but it was a funny experience to see the inside of a Japanese club, where very few people were dancing--most were just bobbing to the music. Why even go to a club if that's what you want to do?
On Sunday the 18th I finally went to a different church that I had been wanting to visit for a while. This church was also very small, with only 12 people in the service that day, but they were very friendly, and invited me to stay for lunch after the service. Also, I was able to understand generally what the sermon was about, and I was able to follow the order of the service. I promised to return the next week.
There was a bit more to November that I will finish soon, hopefully.
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