Fish and chips and bears (oh my)

Hokkaido has bears.

No, let me rephrase that.

Hokkaido has a bear problem. Seriously. This year has been particularly full of bear reports on the news. In the past week a bear was seen wandering into the Sapporo city area for some reason (and promptly gunned down, I've been told), which has caused all sorts of hubbub for the worried city folk. Then the other day a train hit a bear which understandably brought everything to a halt for a bit. It's pretty common here for trains to hit deer, since those are also so prevalent that they've become a problem too (I hear there's talk now about bringing in wolves to deal with the deer problem), but I guess a bear collision is a bit more out of the ordinary and therefore news-worthy. On numerous occasions this year I've even come in to the faculty room at the junior high only to be greeted by another map on my desk of the neighborhood with a big "X" on it all "A bear was spotted here - you might want to be careful." No kidding.

My eikaiwa (the group of adults I teach every Tuesday night) tells me about these bear incidents since they know I don't always catch the local news (or the news in general, since they use some pretty high-level Japanese in those reports), and it's always comforting when the conversation goes something like this:
"The last bear was seen just behind the elementary school."
"Oh, so you mean... right next to where my house is?"
"Oh, well... yes."
Beautiful.

So anyway, I'll talk a bit this time about a recent day trip a friend and I took out to Shiretoko, a big national park up here known for being THE place in the area if you want a good healthy dose of nature. I told my office I was going there and got panicked looks of "But... there're BEARS out there!" I told my friend about their panic and she rebutted with "Well yeah, that's kind of the point." She then told me of our plans to take a boat cruise around the edge of the park to see some waterfalls and, hopefully, some bears, so my mind was put at ease after learning about our plans and how they didn't involve hiking into bear-infested forests. My office probably thought that's what we would be doing, and probably don't think me smart enough to stay out of the way of scary forest creatures. And they're right, of course, I haven't been too savvy at hiding what an airhead I can be at times. They probably think I'd try to go give it a snack to make friends or something. (Nah, they don't really think that... I hope. I swear I'm smart. Really. What?)

But to get back to the point, it was a nice little road trip. I'd probably like to go back to try to see more of the park if I ever get the chance, since we really did just skim (or rather, boat around) the surface. The morning of our scheduled trip, I got up early and took a rather calm, 40 minute drive on twisty, hilly roads through forests and farms, followed by a panic as my car decided to be an absolute jerk to me again as I entered the town where my friend lives (I'll get back to this), I met up with her at her house and we began our trip out to Shiretoko (in her car that... you know... actually works). The trip there was kind of cool too, not only for the reason that we got to stop a few times to gawk at the clear weather, beautiful seashore, and random Ainu statues we found along the way, but because we were able to stop at 4 michi no eki throughout the course of the day.



A michi no eki ("Station on the Road" I guess you could translate it as... it's kind of like a pit stop) is a pretty big thing in Hokkaido. Hokkaido is nowhere near as densely populated as Honshu (or any of the other big islands in Japan), so everything is spread out and most people have their own cars with which to travel or even just get around in daily life. Because of this there are many michi no eki on these well-traveled roads, providing a place for people to stop, rest, use the john (one of my English teachers LOVES that I taught her this term for some reason), grab a bite to eat made from local foods, or buy region-specific souvenirs. They're really quite cool. And of course, one other reason why people stop at these places is to put that specific station's stamp in their stamp rally book.

I bought a book at our first michi no eki as we made our way out to Shiretoko, so I officially started one of the stamp rally books. Kind of a bummer since my less than reliable car kind of keeps me glued to my town out of nervousness, but at least when I'm out with others I can join in on the stamp rally fun and keep track of where I've been. So, after grabbing my first stamp and a sweet potato tart we once again hit the road.

Not too far outside of the official bounds of Shiretoko is a pretty big waterfall called Oshinkoshin falls. We stopped there to join the many other tourists in picture taking and gawking at its beauty. The weather was gorgeous and the waterfall was right next to the sea, so you could get a double dose of aquatic scenery. It really was gorgeous. Boy do I love the sound of water.





After that we headed into Utoro, which is the big town next to the park. We bought our boat tickets, which was interesting as all the places to buy them are on a far too narrow, far too crowded side street (and you need to pick a place to buy from before you can park in their parking lot, so the two doofy foreigners were stopped in the middle of this road talking to a flustered woman from our car window about which boat tour we wanted so we could move out of everyone's way. Good times.) We decided on a two hour cruise that included a chance to admire a hot spring waterfall and then a chance to do some bear spotting. And then with that out of the way, because it was past noon by this point we decided we NEEDED food.

I have no problem eating Japanese food pretty much all the time, but a lot of my other foreigner friends really love tracking down the foreign foods in new places. (Indian food is absurdly popular with them, so that's usually what I expect to eat any time I go out with the other ALTs in Sapporo or any other city that provides such a selection.) This day we happened to stumble upon this little hole in the wall pub that served fish and chips, complete with malt vinegar. I had no objections.



They brought it out to us with chopsticks. Sure, why not.



After chilling out there for a bit, watching the more hardcore tourists with their fishing and diving gear and whatnot, we headed to the ticket place where they ushered us, single file like elementary kids, out to the boat dock. They do this mostly since we have to cross that narrow busy street to get to an area full of trucks and cargo crates and fishermen tending to their fishing boats. But we got to walk past cool things like this dried fish vendor, drying out their fish by clipping them to this whirligig thing and letting them spin spin spin until they become ready to sell. Note the tentacles. Whee!



We then set off for our 2 hour boat cruise on a fairly tiny boat that bounced about on the rather bumpy water. Definitely not for the weak of stomach, but fun if you like to be tossed around a bit. We sat inside on padded benches, so we were protected from the wind and spray and all that... but we were also looking at the scenery from water-splattered windows (and we sat on the wrong side of the boat at that). Luckily there was a doorway on the side of the boat that was left open (with a wooden baby gate sized thing to keep anyone from falling out, like the few of us that were out of our seats taking pictures from this lone opening in the side of the boat). From there we got to see some gorgeous cliffs, rock formations, forests, the aforementioned hot spring waterfall, and eventually we stopped off a rocky shoreline to do what we paid to do: look for bears.







The sun got in my eyes as my friend tried taking my picture...



The boat people say that something like 95% of the boat cruises see bears, but we were at the very tail end of the bear-sighting season so we were worried we wouldn't see any... especially since quite a few minutes passed with no bear activity. But at long last one little brown bear came stumbling along the rocks on the shore, and though we were kind of far away and couldn't get a very good look at the little guy we still got to see a real, live, wild Hokkaido bear. Followed by another. Followed by a family of three. Bears everywhere! They weren't kidding. Even at the end of the season we got to participate in all this bear watching stuff.

There are no pictures of this though, sorry. My camera's not all that hot to begin with, and so trying to get a shot of a little bear on a coast a fair ways away while swaying around on a little boat didn't exactly produce results.

After getting back to shore and making our way passed all the fishing equipment, we stopped at the Utoro michi no eki again to pick up omiyage (souvenirs) for our offices. Any time anyone goes anywhere they're pretty much expected to pick up a box of small, individually wrapped sweets or crackers or something local to the area they visited, and as such pretty much anywhere you go has tons of these boxes with their own regional specialty. They had lots of cookies and dumplings and whatnot, but my friend and I both decided on what was obviously the clear choice: bear cookies. And not just bear cookies, but bear cookies that came in a cookies bus (complete with Engrish and everything). My office got omiyage, which they never actually seem to expect me to get and are always kind of surprised I remember, and I got to keep the cookies bus tin. It's totally a worthless trinket, but it makes me chuckle.



On the way back to her house we stopped in a city along the way at their Pizza Hut to get some double cheese pepperoni pizza. As I said, the other ALTs like to hunt down the not in any way Japanese foods in the area... but boy was it good to have pizza (normal pizza at that, not squid or mayonnaise or potato or something... not that those are all bad, exactly, but this pizza we got tasted like home).

I spent the night at her house and then made my way home the next day. In... THAT car. That car that made it through a little over half my short journey home before deciding it wanted to be a jerk and just stop on me. Luckily I had made it to a not twisty-turny part of the road so other cars could see me, and I ended up calling my Japan-mom on a bright sunny Sunday morning begging for assistance. After hanging up with her I decided to give my car another try (or seven) and eventually it puttered along... for a little while... before giving out again on me (but again on a straight bit of road at least). After a half an hour or so of waiting, admiring the onion field to my left, my Japan-dad and his wife arrived to take me and my half-working car to the local garage. Again. Boy, do they know me well there. Me and that stupid car of mine. Seriously, Donut (I named him), I absolutely hate you.

But then I was glad I bought everyone bear cookies. Again I had to bother everyone on their time off with my car problems... but that could be saved for a different (and what would be a very looong post) about my various car trouble stores in Japan.

But anyway, this ties back in to my main point, because as I told my eikaiwa about this one Tuesday night (they know my car and can tell immediately when I come to class in a car I had to borrow from the garage) they looked at me all "Oh, that's where your car broke down? There're bears out there."

Big surprise, Hokkaido. Big surprise. I'm just glad I didn't know (or at least think about) that while I was stranded out there.

I'm kind of back, I guess

Good evening, everyone.

...

Yeah, I know. "Who the heck are you?" Fair enough, I might have neglected this thing for a wee bit too long. But hey, I'll try to be better about it. To be perfectly honest, several months ago I wrote a blog post of monstrous proportions about pretty much everything interesting that's happened to me since coming here, but after figuring out how many pictures I'd have to resize and upload to make it happen I pretty much just set it aside and, of course, forgot about it. Until, of course, I headed back to America for summer vacation to catch up with everyone and received an earful from everyone about my lack of blog posts.

So let's just start over. I'll get around to telling you guys about my adventures here, but I'll do it in smaller increments so as not to overwhelm myself to the point of just lazily dropping it entirely.

So I got into a discussion this morning with my mom about strange (or what I used to think were strange) Japanese foods that I now thoroughly enjoy. At the top of the list are umeboshi, the incredibly salty, incredibly tart pickled plums that Japanese people love to pair with rice. You can find an umeboshi on top of the rice portion of pretty much every bento box (box lunch, often easily obtained in the convenience stores you see all over the place) you find in this country, and they're also a popular filling for onigiri (rice balls). Here you can see it on the top left (this is a sampler bento I got from one of the department stores here. So pretty!)



First time I had on it was like getting punched in the mouth, but I actually really enjoy them now and always put a couple of them in my genmai (Japanese brown rice, much tastier than regular brown rice) any time I have to make a lunch box for myself for work. It helps keep the food fresh too, which is an added bonus. That may be why pickles are so darn popular here, since it is quite a traditional food from long, long ago. And they pickle pretty much everything. Takuan, these bright yellow daikon radish pickles, are also pretty tasty. I didn't like them when I first got here either, but now I appreciate a good, crunchy takuan with my meals. I even buy bags of them at the store now to eat with my giant bowl of evening miso soup.

Good heavens, miso soup is good. I especially love it when it has potatoes in it. Seriously. It's the easiest thing in the world to make and it's so good. Go make yourself some.

Chikuwa is also pretty tasty. They're these little hollow tube looking things made from pureed fish that has been wrapped around bamboo and then grilled... or steamed... or... I don't know. Cooked somehow. It's a pretty cheap, healthy way to add protein to a meal, so I usually cut it into little rings and chuck it into my giant bowls of soup in the evening (but you can eat chikuwa as-is if you so desire). They get all puffy when they've been in the soup for awhile, so I use them as a way to tell me when my food is done. I owe kyuushoku (school lunch) for this, as my first real introduction to this food came from it's appearance in my school lunches. Plural. As in it usually takes a few appearances of a new food in my meals for me to actually remember the name of these foreign foods that I'm repeatedly eating.

My mom then asked if I still hate squid. Well... kind of, yeah. I'm still not a fan of the raw stuff, but it's fine when cooked. It often appears at yakiniku, which is where everyone sits around a grill and cooks little pieces of different meats and vegetables and everyone just kind of helps themselves (this is pretty much the prefectural pastime of Hokkaido, by the way. They LOVE their yakiniku here). I then stated again that I still prefer octopus to squid, which made my mom present me with a face as if to say "you're insane." Well, maybe so, but octopus is good. So good, in fact, that I got the stick of octopus in my oden for dinner tonight.

Now, this purchase of oden is kind of a special thing for me, so let me talk about this. Oden is a type of nabe cooking, which basically means a type of cooking where you have a big pot of some kind of broth which you then fill with random crap and let it simmer and cook until everything has absorbed the tastiness and you're left with a big pot of awesome. This is understandably a big thing in winter (and parties even in the summer, as a big pot of food easily feeds many), so now that we're heading into winter the convenience stores are all advertising their oden lineups. And if you go to the convenience store you can choose from quite an array of ingredients to compose your single serving of soup, so it really is... well... convenient. Especially since oden is best when the food has been simmering for a rather long time to absorb all the flavors, which isn't always fun to replicate at home. Here are some examples from our friends at google image search:





The most popular ingredients are hard boiled eggs, daikon radish, konnyaku (a jelly-type block made from yams. It absorbs flavors really well and is pretty much calorie free, so the ladies love it), tofu (as-is or fried, sometimes mixed with chopped vegetables), and a variety of fish cakes (such as the aforementioned chikuwa). You can eat it along with a variety of condiments, but perhaps the most popular is spicy mustard. It really is good and perfect for cold weather (or nasty rainy nights, like tonight).

And, of course, since it's awesome and I apparently hate myself, I hardly ever treat myself to a bowl of this heavenly food. It kind of shows up in our school lunches from time to time, but there it's more like a bunch of oden ingredients on a plate topped with a sweet miso-ish sauce and less like a big hot bowl of delicious slow-cooked soup (don't get me wrong, it's still good, but the real stuff is better than the school stuff). Obviously we're just now coming out of summer so oden hasn't really been on anyone's mind for months, but I think I've bought convenience store oden maybe... once since I've been here? It was last year some time. It's a shame, really, so I finally got off my lazy butt and went to my local 7-11 to get a styrofoam bowl of tasty tasty oden this evening. (Which I paired with a big salad topped with umeboshi dressing. Those plums really have grown on me.)

So I went and picked 6 different things for my oden dinner tonight: egg (of course), daikon radish, konnyaku, roll cabbage (its got ground meat wrapped up inside of it, kind of like a Japanese gawumpki for those of you that know what I'm talking about), fuki (some kind of rhubarb-like vegetable), and, to bring me back to my original point, an octopus tentacle on a bamboo stick.



The octopus was by far the most expensive one of the bunch (over twice as much as the others, which are usually around a buck a piece), but I wanted to splurge and get something really Japanese. So, after my talk with my mom this morning I decided I needed a little octopus in my day. I mean, it's good stuff! Why doesn't anyone give it a chance?

And then a lone suction cup fell into my mustard as I was dining, and I remembered that, "Oh yeah, this looks pretty darn disgusting." Well, if you ignore that part of it, octopus is pretty darn good, and I'll tell you right now that I didn't let even that lone mustard-covered suction cup go to waste.

It was quite the treat, but I'll probably try making it at home next time, just to see if I can do it and to save some cash. You can buy oden kits in all the supermarkets here... or, if you've become a health nut like I apparently have, you can skip all the fried vegetables and tofu balls and just make it at home with the eggs, daikon, carrots, and konyakku you've got in the fridge (which is more practical if you're cooking for one and don't need a family-size bag of stuff). Can't be that hard... can it? At least I know where to go if I want some pseudo-gawumpki and suction cups if my at-home version goes bad.

All right, I'm off to finish off my meal with some of that applesauce I made last night. Since it's fall, apples are cheap, and I bought half a dozen of them last night and decided to make a boatload of applesauce with them at 11 pm. Since this country apparently doesn't know what applesauce is. In fact cinnamon really isn't a big thing here in the fall. Pumpkin cakes and puddings and cookies are all over the place, but they have no spices. It's really quite depressing... so I've been making a lot of my own fall pumpkin and apple foods to satisfy my craving for cinnamon-packed American-style fall goodies.

I think I've had a bout of homesickness lately, and I've been battling it by reminding myself how awesome this country is by enjoying its delicious cuisine. The oden just happened to be on my mind tonight, but there will probably be more food blogs in the future... just as a heads up. And I'll apologize right now. Sort of. This place has awesome food you all need to know about.

Speaking of battling homesickness with food, I've got a big Japanese proficiency exam coming up in a couple months, so I get to pretend I'm still a college student by finding cafe-like places to hide out on weekend evenings so I can study and drink lots and lots (and lots) of coffee (mmm). There aren't many places in Japan that let you do this, but good ol' Mister Donut, the donut chain here in Japan, is open late, has tasty and interesting donuts, is currently running a campaign with Snoopy related items that warms my beagle-loving heart, and, to top it all off, gives you FREE refills on coffee if you dine in.

Awwww yeah. This is what my weekends will look like for the next few months... textbooks and donuts:



They even have some interesting donuts. Not too long ago they introduced a line of baked donuts with such flavors at chocolate burdock and sweet potato spinach (you could totally taste the spinach... it was kinf of odd). Here we have a rice flour mitarashi donut (mitarashi meaning that thick, sweet soy sauce they put on the top of it). The dough is really chewy and dense like the mochi dumplings you get here, and it's really interesting and GOOD. Seriously, I do limit my Mister Donut visits to the weekend, and only one donut at a time... because I could easily eat a dozen of these. In about a minute.



It's still passably warm enough for me to go bike riding or jogging in the mornings on the weekend, so bring on more crazy donuts, Mister Donut!

OK, enough food, I promise I'll write about something else next time. And I swear there will be a next time. Not sure when, but I'll try to keep this up, even if it's just unimportant little tidbits about my life like this one was.

(And speaking of food, for those of you following me on facebook you might see more photo albums pop up on my facebook account with more Japan pictures, since posting pictures there is easier I think. I'll try to keep that up to, so stay tuned.)