TIM's Hot Cooking Time

As some of you already know, I have not been eating exactly... healthy...ly since getting here. My dinner is usually bought at the convenience store, and lunch is generally eaten either in the Cafeteria, or at McDonald's.
Now, unfortunately, not only is this unhealthy, it is very expensive. I've known for a while that if I'm going to be here a while, I'd have to change my eating habits. So, today I finally sucked it up and went grocery shopping.

I keep hearing that a place called Fresco is good, so I decided to head there for the first time. On the way there, I almost killed a little old lady.

This is not funny. I feel absolutely horrible about it.

We were both on bikes, and she was going rather slowly. I moved in and tried to pass her, and at the same time she tried to turn. She had to swerve to avoid me, and she took a spill. Me, being a big dumb foreigner, could only stand there and repeat "I'm sorry!" and "Are you okay?" in Japanese. She wouldn't even let me help her up. She seemed very angry. She gave me a long talking to about what I had done wrong and what an idiot I was, but I couldn't understand hardly any of it. (I understood "idiot," though.)

Eventually, she picked up her bike and stalked off. I was incredibly shaken up, and I waited for her to go to make sure she was alright, then got back on my bike and just started riding in the direction I had been going.

I had no idea where I was, or what I was doing, I just knew I needed to get away from the scene of that incident. I must have ridden for about 15 minutes before I finally acknowledged that
I had no idea where I was going, and it was probably best to backtrack. So I went all the way back, and I finally found the Fresco. A few feet away from where the accident was.
I guess that's where she was going...

I did the only thing I could do. I went inside, and hoped that in the 30 minutes I had been riding around dazedly, she had done her shopping and left. I swear to you, though. Ever since that happened, every old lady I've seen has been THAT old lady, in my eyes. And there are a LOT of old ladies in Japan.

Ugh. On to less... distressing things.

My goal in going shopping was to imitate what I had seen a couple of my other unitmates doing: make a simple meal, that included rice, vegetables, and meat. Seems simple enough, yeah?

Unfortunately, I was pretty much out of everything, so that wasn't all that I needed to buy. Also unfortunately, there was only so much that was gonna fit in that little basket on my bike.

There was a lot of me picking stuff up, and then later putting it back, figuring I'll just buy it at the dollar grocery store later. There was enough stuff here that I needed that I couldn't get anywhere else, I figured I should concentrate on that.

So, I got me a big ol bag of rice. Got me some unidentified meat. Soy sauce. Vegetable oil. Bread. Etc, etc. But I looked all around the store, and I could not find mixed vegetables. The only other alternative was to buy some fresh ones, and chop and mix them myself. Now, not only is that way too much work, I figured it would be expensive, because they'd probably all go bad before I could use them all. So I just gave up on that part, and decided to look for them elsewhere.

I took my bulging shopping basket to the counter, paid about 4,000 Yen (Do I really need to keep converting it into dollars for you guys?), and hauled it out to my bike.

Well, first I had to bag it. Interestingly enough, in Japan, they don't do that for you. They take your shopping basket, right? And as they pull the items out, and ring them up, they put them in a DIFFERENT shopping basket. After you're done, they give you a couple bags and your new basket, and send you over to a bagging counter, where you do the dirty work yourself. That's... efficient, I guess.

Anyway. Even with all the stuff I put back, I STILL didn't have room for everything in the basket, so I had to hang a bag off the handlebars. I figure I won't usually have to buy this much stuff at once, as things like the big bag o rice, oil, and soy sauce aught to last me a while.

Anyway... I got back home without hitting anyone else. I was still really jittery, though. I swear, I felt the eyes of every Japanese person in the store and on the street that day, as if they were looking at me and saying "We know what you did! You stupid Gaijin! You knocked that old woman down!"

Gaah. I'm not exaggerating, either. The entire experience has been extremely nerve-wracking.

Anyway. I managed to get home, and about half of my unit-mates were there.

Unfortunately, none of them knew how to use the rice cooker. So, I just decided to work from the instructions provided and see where it got me (even though various measurements did not add up, such as the rice cooker measuring water in cups, and the measuring cup measuring rice in... I dunno. Hundreds of stuff.

But I did what I could. About 40 minutes later, I set to work on the meat part. Got a pan, poured oil in it, and started frying up the meat.

Decidedly AFTER the rice should have been done, the little "finished" light still had not come on yet. Someone came by who actually knew how to use the rice-cooker, and told me I had failed to start it in the first place.

Before smacking myself on the head and cursing my stupidity, I opened the rice cooker.

It was filled with puffy, cooked rice. Looks like I had done something right after all.

Anyway, put it all together, add a liberal dose of soy sauce, and viola!

My first meal ever cooked in Japan.


Don't look like much. The rice was a bit hard and chewy. But it's a start, by god.

Even if I had to go through hell and back just to get the ingredients together.

Well, I've got work to do.

This is TIM,

Signing off.