I tend to keep personal aspects of my life… well… personal, but this is a very exciting time in my life so I wanted to share. We’re both really excited and still have a few things to take care of.

I can’t believe it’s in 26 days! In about 20 days some guests from America will arrive so that gives us a little less than three weeks to finish everything up. I know we can handle it and I’ll be memorizing itinerary to help everything go smoothly, but I still need to finalize my vows, I need to write a speech for the reception as well as a few other things I want to say, and memorize some lyrics of a Japanese song for one of our duets (luckily I have the easy part!). We’ve added some events to our wedding, removed some, added some new things.

Mai’s good friend in Tokyo is a designer and has been working on a unique wedding dress since September. I haven’t seen it of course but I hear it looks amazing so far.

How do other foreigners have their wedding in Japan? I’m not quite sure. So far I’ve seen the traditional Japanese wedding with full kimono and I’ve seen the ‘western style’ type of wedding at a chapel or restaurant with a reception dinner following. We’ll be having a western style with a touch of Steve and Mai and our closest friends and relatives will be attending. I’ll probably post some pictures next month.

Cherry blossom trees, or sakura (see more info at Wikipedia) look amazing and this year I got to experience them for the first time ever in my life!

I’ve seen some pictures of the trees, I heard they’re beautiful, I heard they’re romantic, I heard they’re magical, but I didn’t hear about the crazy drunken madness at night! We went to experience Hanami (flower viewing, enjoying tasty bento similar to this) at Ohori koen (means… Ohori park). I thought I was in for a romantic sakura viewing… but in fact… it was more of a fun time packed full of people, mostly drunk office workers, with some romantic moments in the quiet areas (near the temple).

The road to the park was lined up with vendors selling things from chocholate covered bananas to takoyoki (a grilled octopus dish). There were some families with kids running around having a good time and couples eating bento together, and then… there were tons of drunk people with sake, sho chu, and grills. Apparently the people under the trees brought tarps in advance and 1-2 people reserved their spot. Each cluster seemed to stay within their group of people which is good when family + drunk people are mixed.

We took some pictures but most of them ended up blurry and I took a lot of video which I haven’t taken off the camera. Here are a few of the decent pictures from that night.

If I had to sum up this experience in one sentance I’d say… it was like a tailgating party for the sakura football game. Ahh… good times, good times.

Tags: cherry blossoms, japanese cherry blossom trees, sakura

It’s time to learn Japanese.

I’ve been in Japan for a little over 6 months and I like the country a lot. It feels like I’m in another world, a much different feeling I get from traveling to other countries. My main barrier is that I don’t speak the language and that makes it difficult to do simple things like make dinner plans, learn about current events in the area, or even get the help I might need when shopping. I’d say I know about 50 words at one given time (sometimes I learn new ones but forget others) and that helps, but it’s not good enough. My sentances are basic too. People are probably tired of me asking if they’re good, the weather is nice, and I’ll have a draft a beer.

I picked up a book of some basic vocabulary the last time I was at Costco, and an Australian friend gave me a Hiragana book as a gift which I’ve tried out and then became lazy.

My goal is to learn Hiragana in about 3 months, so I’ve set a goal of August 1st. And I plan on studying vocabulary as much as I study Hiragana. I know I can do this if I hit the books every day.

Update (April 14): After the comments and encouragement you guys left I’ve learned about a new book, new methods, and some new websites so I’ve decided to update my goal. I’ve been very motivated and went to a 90 minute Japanese conversation lesson on Saturday. The teacher was speaking Japanese and using Hiragana and Katakana to explain things which tells me I need to speed things up! So I’ve set a new goal of learning Hiragana in 3 weeks  like claytonian mentioned, which is May 2nd. Then I’ll focus on Katakana.

One of the interesting things I’ve seen in Japan has to be how manual labor works. There are always two or more people to complete a task and most of the time it looks very efficient compared to the U.S. Let’s take construction for example… construction workers tend to get busy using everything from cranes to their bare hands and they’re rarely talking from what I can tell.

Something that I find interesting is even though construction can be happening downtown in multiple locations, I don’t seem to notice it. That’s because they usually block off the construction site wtih some type of wall or gate that surrounds the entire area. I’ve seen some cheap plastic walls, some expensive plastic walls with windows, and some wooden walls. I snapped some pics on a Sunday, so no workers were harmed in the photographing.

Here’s a picture of some type of portable wall

Ooo! This is the heavy duty wall with VIP windows!

I’m VIP, here’s proof, I’m looking through the window.

And here’s another construction location. It looks like they’re escavating dinosaurs.

Yeah… I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it or not but I’m 15 minutes away from 6 Starbucks Coffee shops here in Fukuoka. Now that’s going north, south, and east. I haven’t checked west yet…. there’s probably 3 more that way somewhere. One of the Starbucks is across the street from another Starbucks and about 3 blocks or so from another one down the side street.

So here we are… going into the Starbucks that’s inside Tsutaya.

For the record… Tsutaya is pretty sweet. It’s 6 stories and you can rent DVDs, CDs, buy them, get books and magazines, and enjoy some Starbucks. The DVD releases that have been out for a while usually run on a special that’s 4 DVDs for 1000 Yen. I’d say about $9-10 US.

Here’s kind of a cool photo

And here’s a picture I took from Starbucks of Starbucks across the street while enjoying some coffee with some friends.

By having so many Starbucks so close to me I’d have to say

1. It’s kind of crazy in my opinion
2. They are is busy and the city is big
3. I love it!

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I forgot to include this picture so here you go! What’s interesting is right when we entered the Yahoo! Dome there was a cell phone company giving us king size snacks that taste like Cheetos. And there’s a snack bar, just like any other baseball stadium, but instead of beer, brats, and burgers they sell beer, yaki soba, takoyaki, and ramen. The prices were about the same. I just can’t imagine watching a game in the stands while slurping on some ramen using chopsticks while drinking beer. In that scenario there’s just too much going on. Of course I say this now, but just wait… in a year I’ll be doing it.

In America we usually do a mutual exchange of gifts, etc. I give her something, she gives me something, I take her on a date, ah… love is in the air. But Valentine’s Day In Japan is something that’s quite different for me. This is my first time celebrating Valentine’s here and there are two parts to this holiday. On Valentines Day a girl will give the guy some chocolate. It’s either purchased or hand made. The 2nd part is White Day where a guy gives the girl a gift, that’s approximately 3 times the value as he received (so I’ve heard from wikipedia). I wasn’t able to get pictures of the store displays, but they look exactly the same as the displays in America except there are tons of chicks and almost no guys wandering in that area.

Because it was too much chocolate to handle, my fiancee gave me a gift on the 13th, and then one on the 14th. On the 13th she hand made a chocolate parfait! It was amazing! It looked and tasted like it was expensive and hand crafted by a chef. It contained chocolate, ice cream, more chocolate, cake, chocolate covered crispy things, and strawberry Pocky. Oh, and hand whipped whip cream! Here are a few pictures (sorry for the blurriness, I’m not used to my friends camera yet). It was delicious.

On Valentine’s Day she gave me a wonderfully wrapped gift. It looked expensive and the presentation was great, so at first I thought she bought it at some expensive shop. She told me that she hand made the chocolate using ‘an idea’ but no recipe and a few ingredients she thought would work. And she wrapped it herself.

Here’s my blurry picture of the chocolates when I opened the cute basket they were in.

And finally here are the chocolates she made. They were powered with cocoa and had a very rich taste. It wasn’t a dark chocolate taste, and wasn’t a milk chocolate taste, it felt like a truffle when I ate it, but it was nothing I’ve tasted before.

When I opened the gift I felt overwhelmed and a little teary eyed when I ate the first piece because I know she spent all of that time and effort to prepare everything and that’s very special to me. Even when it’s not a holiday she often does special things like this to show me how she feels about me, and she is the first person in my life to ever do this. She’s so great. This was the best Valentine’s Day ever.

Every now and then I hear this guy singing a cool little tune at night. No music, just him singing a melody. I asked my fiancee what it is and she told me it’s a truck that sells ishiyaki imo (sweet potatoes). How awesome is that? I would never think “Hey, I could really go for a sweet potato” … until NOW! For a while I’ve been on a mission: run like an Olympic sprinter, catch this guy, enjoy the full ‘Japanese sweet potato out of a truck’ experience. The result? I’ve eaten one of these once, and I’ve seen the truck twice, and I have a picture!

What does Ishiyaki Imo mean? I asked this very same question and here’s the answer broken down. Ishi = stone, Yaki = grilled, Imo = sweet potato.

My Imagination: Now here’s what I was thinking about this truck before I saw it. I figured it was a pickup truck, some guy that cooks them on the back of his truck, and he sings his song out of a megaphone, he’s a happy guy that just loves giving out sweet potatoes late at night and apparently the job is fun and exciting. He drives fast because he wants to cover the entire city.

The Reality: Not quite what I was thinking. From my experience, an older guy drives either a truck or a van. He’s not singing, he’s playing a recording over a megaphone and this explaines why the song is perfect every time he drives by my place. He does drive slow, which means I’m just not running fast enough (time to hit the gym?). He has cooking gear on his truck but when I went all of the potatoes were ready to go. I spent 400 Yen ($3.75 at the time) for a big hot potato. And big as in huge, it looked like they gave me the biggest one in the sweet potato field. Good thing I was hungry!

The potato was hot and it I enjoyed it. Just eating a hot sweet potato is quite different from The Outback Steakhouse version back in the U.S. which is smothered in butter and cinnamon and maybe some sugar.

Here are a picture from the truck.

Here’s an Ishiyaki-Imo old school setup which I’ve never seen in person (photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s a YouTube video I found. The song doesn’t have as nice of a melody as the truck Fukuoka, the truck is slow and not busy, but it’s cool to check out.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMdEWJi1o48[/youtube]

Good stuff.

Today I’m going to share some pictures I’ve taken of things in Japan that I’ve never seen before in the U.S.

The picture above is a QR Code. I see them everywhere here, even at McDonalds. They’re on buildings, billboards, magazine ads, product packages, etc. You take a picture with your cell phone and it brings up information or a website.

From Wikipedia: A QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The “QR” is derived from “Quick Response”, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed. QR Codes are common in Japan where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional code.

The picture of the shochu bottles above were explained to me as a “bottle keep” and from my understanding these are unfinished bottles of alcohol. If a person comes in (probably with a group) and orders a bottle but they don’t finish it the restaurant will put the person’s name on it so that person can enjoy the tasty beverage which they’ve already paid for during their next visit. That’s awesome!

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Getting from point A to point Z using the subway is not that difficult. If you’re new to using a subway, or public transportation at all (like I was), my advice is to plan your route and stay calm no matter how busy the station gets. Carrying a small note pad and a pen is a good idea.

Along with some tips I’m going to share some pictures I took of the subway on a rainy, cold, Friday afternoon around 2pm. It wasn’t a busy time and the station I was at doesn’t seem to be as busy as bigger stations.

Tip #1 – If somebody falls onto the track, hit this button! (Press the red button below in case a person fall sinto the track area. Trains will stop automatically. FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY!)

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