Hi all, long time no blog. Things are going well. We had a nice, quiet Christmas. Some students came over on Christmas Eve and we watched the traditional Christmas classic, Office Space.
A couple of days before, we went to a pottery town called Mashiko about three hours north of Tokyo by train and bus. There was a lot of pottery of all different styles and prices. We spent several hours looking at the pottery and certainly saw only a small part of what was there. We bought several pieces that we liked and then went to a Japanese vegetarian restaurant. In Tokyo, vegetarian restaurants are rare and it is difficult to get any vegetarian food in most Japanese restaurants—mostly because of the use of dashi as a soup base and fish used in many sauces. So we were rather pleasantly surprised to find this restaurant in Mashiko. The food was excellent, interesting, and tasty. It was so good, in fact, that we lost track of the time and almost missed our bus back. There are some pictures in the gallery.
Yesterday we decided to get on a bus close to our apartment that we hadn’t taken before. It went to Ueno park. The park was not crowded (perhaps because the ginko tree fruits rotting on the ground are particularly bad smelling this time of year) and we walked a lot. We wanted to go into the Tokyo National Museum gift shop without paying for the museum. This is possible and Karen asked how. We were told to go north a short distance. Well, we went a short distance and there was no way to get in. We continued to walk all the way around this rather large park and there was no way in. When we got back to the regular entrance more than half an hour later we saw the place we were to go a mere few steps away.
We then walked to Akihabara and bought a USB hub for all the geeky equipment we got for Christmas. Oh yeah, for Christmas Karen got a set of speakers to play music on. The laptop computer speakers just aren’t good enough anymore. We’ve been listening almost non-stop ever since. We connect them to our computers, my Creative Zen Nano MP3 player, and Karen’s Olympus digital voice recorder to listen to music. We also connect them when watching DVD movies. It makes them sound as if we are in a theater compared to the computer speakers. Other geeky gifts– a new USB hard drive—250 GB and a computer video camera so Sophia can see us while we see her. We’ve been using Google-talk, Skype, and Skype-out to talk to everyone. Now we’ve started using Festoon to see Lisa, Ben, and Sophia. If anyone else has a camera and wants to see us, we’d be glad to. If you would like to or need to use a different program rather than Festoon, let me know what it is. My email is dgourd@gmail.com.
We went to Mashiko with friends who live in our building, Katie and Steve Kohl. Professor Kohl is the RD for the Oregon Program. Unfortunately for us, they are going to be leaving soon. Katie leaves next month and Steve leaves the middle of February. They have been to Japan many times and had been to Mishiko before, so they made all the plans, including finding the vegetarian restaurant.