mokudekiru

I swear not *everything* I do lately is tea. For example, on Friday we went out to dinner and to the beach. On Saturday, we spent all day at the beach. But tonight, we experienced some really good bubble tea.

Taken by Wit’s suggestion, we ventured to Mountain View, which has many good food venues, some of which are classier than others. Dinner was consumed at a Mongolian BBQ place which was okay, like Flat Top but more low-key and fewer sauce choices (good for indecisive people like me).

After dinner we got bubble tea at Verde Tea Espresso Bar which held the magical bubble tea. At 10pm on a Sunday night it was crowded, but despite the hefty line, the bubble tea was served with amazing speed. Very impressed. Good ambience. They had all the flavors on the menu (as far as we could tell) and didn’t glare you down when you ordered something from there, unlike certain bubble tea places in Chambana…

Also, my sesame bubble tea was some of the best I’ve ever had. Bubbles were just right, and sesame, well, how can you go wrong?

We got the following flavors which apparently all turned out good:
• Strawberry – Tastes like strawberries (amazing!)
• Green Bean – no, not like the vegetable. Kind of like red bean (a sweet bean, with the skins still on) but green.
• Rose Green Tea – beautiful and tasted like you were eating a flower. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but Bhargav seemed to enjoy it.
• Sesame – pure heaven on ice + tapioca balls.

Chillin’ at the bar. Or counter. Whatever.

Another successful tea journey in the San Francisco Bay area!

So two years into college, we’ve gotten the whole barcrawl thing down. Some random Tuesday, we all wear matching shirts, 1 bar per hour until closing time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, old news.

But last night, I embarked on a new kind of nighttime journey: the teacrawl. Same principle of course, but replace the bars with cafes, the bartenders with baristas.

Bhargav and Mukund made their way down from San Jose, just to check the whole Santa Cruz thing out I ‘spose. Unfortunately, I realized yesterday that my roommate Sarah and I had a Yoga class to attend that night. Luckily, Bhargav rolled with it and partook in some free yoga, and Mukund requested that we drop him off at the Santa Cruz hangout, Cafe Pergolesi.

An hour and a half later, we were stretched out, in our zone, and ready for the teacrawl.

After reuniting with Mukund, we made our way to Pacific Thai, since we had intended to find bubble/boba tea (depending on what you call it). They make you choose a tea base (green or black) and choose iced or blended (whether they just put ice in, or they make it more smoothie-like with the ice blended in). The flavors were fine, but nothing special I’d say — we tried Jasmine, which was good, Avocado, which was subtle, and Thai iced tea, which was exactly what you would expect — thai iced tea with boba (go figure). Delightful boba though. Not too big, chewy, or icy.

Here is Mukund eagerly anticipating what his avocado boba tea will taste like, as Bhargav swoops in:

But Pacific Thai wasn’t much of a hangout. So we crawled. Downtown SC.

Clock tower:

Building at the end of Pacific, the main downtown street. No, Jamba Juice is NOT part of any teacrawl.

Then we walked by every cafe on Pacific, and checked how late they were open. This was at 9:30pm. Almost all of them closed at 10. This is simply not acceptable! I’m usually offended that Espresso closes at MIDNIGHT! Come on now, cafes.

So, after passing up several other options due to early closing times, including Bad Ass Coffee, which I went to with Joey on my very first day in SC, we decided to head back to Cafe Pergolesi, where Mukund had spent some time.

And thus the sugar explosion began.

A hot chai, a mint papaya tea, an iced chai, and cookies, flavored roughly as chocolate/coconut/some kinda nut, “Mexican Mocha”, and chocolate/peanut butter/some kind of nut… I don’t know. It was a pretty epic order, and made me feel like we had some assembly to program in the middle of the night or something.

This place is pretty cool. Too cool for school. Too cool for us, probably. Some foreign hip-hop was playing the entire time. And very, very Santa Cruz. The chalkboard back there says, “dude, I know this is Santa Cruz, but please, no dope smokin’ on the patio. Thanks”

Cafe Pergolesi is too cool to have standardized seating. Bhargav’s chair was about four feet below our table. Which is okay I guess, if you have chai to worship.

This chai was friggin’ AMAZING. It was the most spiced chai I’ve ever had — left your throat all tingly! And just the right amount of foam. Yummmm to the max.

Bhargav summons the power of the iced chai, which was kind of too milky and not as intense as my SPICY CHAI of wonder and amazement.

After another hour of chilling, our favorite barista said we had to leave so he could go kill zombies, and thus ended the epic June ’09 Santa Cruz Teacrawl.

This must be repeated.

This week I moved into my new room in Santa Cruz and unpacked my 67 pounds of luggage for the summer.

My bookcase came in handy, and I documented it with my iPhone:

These happen to be right in the entry to my room in my apartment — so if you could say a single room has a genkan (an entryway, and in Japanese houses this is where all the shoes are kept) this is my genkan.

About a day after emailing this photo to Noam, a wonderful thing happened. This picture came into my inbox:

FYI now that I’m in Santa Cruz, I might have more pictures/updates about that. I know, crazy to think that I might interrupt a sentence coming out of my mouth and say something that’s *not* about Japan, but hey, it could happen.

In short, there will be a lot more of this:

and this:

There are about 12 million dramas about marriage. But the one with a combination of the most funny moments and intense stares, would have to be Dekichatta Kekkon (Shotgun Marriage) from 2001.

Starring:

Chiyo-chan (Hirosue Ryoko), sleeps with Ryuunosuke (Takenouchi Yutaka) one night, and they don’t talk again… until she realizes she’s pregnant. Ryuunosuke resigns himself to marry her, and hilarity ensues when the two of them attempt to become a couple, face Chiyo’s overprotective and potentially violent father, and deal with the antics of Reina, Ryuunosuke’s stalker, who befriends his completely ridiculous mother.

Meanwhile, Chiyo’s older sister is at wit’s end putting up with a 10 year relationship with Abe Hiroshi’s character, who will NOT propose. But he can give a damn good massage. On the side, there is the slutty friend of Chiyo’s, who keeps throwing herself at Tsumabuki Satoshi’s character, who is extremely tempted, but keeps quoting his grandfather’s conservative advice about love and sex, all in his grandfather’s Kyuushuu-ben accent (or wherever he was supposed to be from). And Chiyo’s doctor, who is hopelessly naive and enthusiastic about everything (especially Chiyo’s pregnancy) to cheerleader proportions, falls hard for Chiyo’s sister.

d-addicts had a relationship chart already, but it was in Japanese and very wordy, so here’s the translation:

And now a couple of screenshots.

Chiyo, realizing she is pregnant and her father will never allow her to marry Ryuunosuke. Crap!

Ryuunosuke. Asking the dudes for advice, and then not listening to it:

Abe Hiroshi. “Marriage, for a guy, is the END OF THE WORLD.” Says the guy in the 10 year relationship. And man, wtf is up with your hair.

The doctor, with his unbridled enthusiasm, out of proportion to the situation.

Yeah Chiyo, you’d best be listening to their advice. Look, Tsumabuki Satoshi is even wrinkling his eyebrow at you.

More groups of 3 people sitting in a line. As usual, Abe Hiroshi is complacent, Tsumabuki Satoshi is sincere, and Ryuunosuke has some decision regarding Chiyo to deal with, in which he will have good intentions but everything will spin out of control. Just the way it is.

Overall the show is pretty funny. Eventually, the baby becomes more important to the story, and it takes on a little bit of a touching/serious tone, but still, the two leads are great together, and the other characters keep things lively and ridiculous. This is the first time I’ve seen Hirosue Ryoko and liked her, and Takenouchi Yutaka was certainly way less sketchy of a dude in this show than in Long Vacation.

Other fun fact: Hirosue Ryoko herself, a couple of years after starring in this show, had her own dekichatta kekkon, when she became pregnant and proceeded to marry Takahiro Okazawa in 2004. The two divorced last year, according to Tokyograph.

This drama might be a good older drama to check out, especially in moments when you need to get your Abe Hiroshi fix (or, your < insert favorite wildly popular star among this cast here, since they're all really famous > fix)

And finally, one last gratuitous screencap of Abe Hiroshi:

This is perhaps one of the best-kept secrets of Mac OSX (10.5 or later) that any Japanese student should know about: the Dictionary app, inside your Applications folder, has a built-in Japanese Dictionary.

Koichi over at Tofugu just wrote an article about Why you should use a Mac to study Japanese, but I think the built-in dictionary is definitely one of the best resources on the Mac for Japanese. I had my MacBook for approximately two years before I even realized there was such a dictionary (would have been really helpful to know about during the year I lived in Japan and had my MacBook!) and it seems a lot of people I’ve talked to also don’t know about the Japanese dictionary.

The reason it’s a “secret” is that the Japanese dictionary doesn’t automatically show up as part of the Dictionary app. You’ll need to open the preferences, and then voila, you’ve discovered a gold mine:

So just select to enable the Japanese-English and Japanese dictionaries, and you’re ready to go! (There’s also a Japanese synonym dictionary which I haven’t used too much, honestly)

If you’re familiar with inputting Japanese text on OSX, the dictionary is very easy and nice to use. Here’s an example looking up the Japanese word びっくり (bikkuri). Type the word (Dictionary will auto-complete the word for you as you’re doing this):

Click for a definition, some synonyms, and example sentences:

The dictionary gives you a very standard-Japanese definition (not a lot of slang or new words) but it’s very solid and extremely helpful.

English-Japanese isn’t bad either:

And once your Japanese is coming along, you’ll want to start using the Japanese-Japanese dictionary as well. This dictionary is more extensive than the Japanese-English dictionary, so especially with proper nouns, old words that aren’t used much anymore, or more technical/specific/historical vocabulary, it may only be in the Japanese dictionary. Here’s what a Japanese dictionary entry looks like:

This dictionary isn’t perfect, but since it’s a desktop app that doesn’t rely on an internet connection, it’s been extremely useful. I generally use it as my primary dictionary, and then seek other resources if I need them (like jisho.org for kanji-lookup, for example). I also used the Dictionary app during exams for my Japanese translation class this semester — we were allowed to have dictionaries, but no internet connection (I suppose so we wouldn’t chatting with other people taking the exam, or something like that).

As a Mac user/Japanese learner I’m excited about the cool new things Koichi mentioned, like the new Chinese input method that will come out with Snow Leopard, but I just wanted to make sure you don’t miss the built-in dictionary like I did!

When you have a piece of strawberry shortcake, do you eat the strawberry on top first, or last?

SOS (Strawberry on the Shortcake) is the story of a total creepster, Irie-kun. In the first couple of episodes he does delightful things such as:

He meets Yui, a strange girl who seems to be following him, to learn that she will be his new sister when their single parents wed. Yui, played by Fukuda Kyoko, is equally selfish, greedy, creepy and annoying — in short, she and Irie are a perfect match.

SOS is from 2001, so Tackey (Mr. Creepster Irie) is a little bit young. Up until this point, I’d entirely managed to avoid Tackey (Takizawa Hideaki) dramas, and so I knew him merely as his 2006 self, where I saw him appear as part of his music duo (courtesy of Johnny & Associates, Inc.), Tackey and Tsubasa. They frequented TV programs and terrorized the nation with their song “Venus”:

Anyway, let’s get back to the point. Preventing Irie and Yui from their psuedo-incestuous relationship are two supporting characters, who thankfully save the show. Sawamura, Irie’s childhood friend, who has had a longtime crush on him, gets into a dating situation with Irie because he is too passive to ever say no. Eventually, when she takes him to a love hotel and he uh… fails to perform, she figures out that he’s really after Yui (before he does) and decides to turn her efforts to helping out with that, rather than being bitchy about the loss.

Meanwhile, Yui has a crush on their classmate, Saeki-sempai, who is actually 20 years old (and still in high school) because he is hopelessly in love with his teacher (the same teacher Irie-kun stole the underwear from). So now Yui’s jealous of her teacher (and even attacks her at one point) and Irie is jealous of Saeki on several levels, and suddenly this show has teacher/student relationship and the pseuodo-incest relationship. Things just keep getting better.

The show keeps going, Irie invents a fake character, Hirase Ai, and sends fake letters back and forth to her to mislead Yui, Yui plays sick, they both continue to be greedy, deceptive, obsessive, and rather disturbed, while their teacher remains completely confused as to whether she likes Saeki or not, while managing to be the blandest character of them all.

The whole thing gets more and more complicated/stupid, so I drew a graph to help out. Notice the unrequited love progression (the thick red arrows), starting at Sawamura and continuing all the way to the teacher. Those red arrows, are really the main problem this show deals with.

But what is this whole strawberry business? The whole show, other than resting emotionally on the line, which runs through Irie’s head several times per episode, “That’s why I won’t forget you,” is built on a solid philosophical base: the question, “If you have a piece of strawberry shortcake, and you like the strawberry on top the best, do you eat the strawberry first, or last?”

Throughout the show we learn the answer each character would give. Turns out, Sawamura and Irie-kun would eat the strawberry last, because they like it, and Saeki and Yui would eat the strawberry first, because they like it. Really deep, I know. Gives Socrates a run for his money.

So SOS kind of sucked. The two supporting characters kept it from being a total disaster, but I’ve never seen another show where the two leads were both so disgusting. However, after a few episodes, it was like watching a train wreck and I needed to see this disaster through to the end. And hey, the show made good use of ABBA.

Today something amazing came in the mail from California. What as it? Why, it was Tanaka Koki (from KAT-TUN, one of the most important (?) modern day Japanese boy bands).

For those of you who don’t necessarily recognize him, he looks something like this:

He was accompanied by a matching pillow, which was none other than the practice-your-kanji seal!

If you don’t recognize the seal, well, he sometimes creeps up on kanji-practice notebooks:

The legend goes as follows: Tanaka Koki, being one of the less-pretty KAT-TUN members, sometimes gets angry. Angry enough to slay seals. But listen up, Japanese students, only *you* can prevent seal extinction, by practicing your kanji! Learn it!

Thanks to Hannah for this and many more inappropriate/hilarious pictures of Japanese celebrities. It was all sealed with a Matsujun (if you don’t know who he is, read the previous post.)