Long Time No See

So, it's been a while since I've posted, I'll try to keep updated more frequently in the future... 

Anyway, lots has happened, and it's too much to write about really, but the main, major, exciting things are... I went to the Ghibli Museum for a friend's birthday, my computer is broken and making horrifying noises, I won NaNoWriMo, and last but not least... Christmas break is next week! Yay!

Ghibli was awesome! I will definitely be going again, as this time we entered at the 4pm entrance time and only got about 2 hours in the museum. Since Sophie wanted to eat at the cafe we completely skipped the 2nd floor. The first and 3rd floors were amazing and the rooftop garden was fun. Gotta love that Laputa robot!The interior of the building on the 1st floor made me think, "If Santa's workshop were steam punk." Unfortunately the entire interior is a no-photo zone, the outside is fair game though, so here's a quick pic! Notice the 2 story Christmas tree hiding amongst the ivy background.


Anyway, I've already pretty much given the rundown on the computer situation, and if you wanna know more about what went on during NaNo, and haven't been reading my other blog, here's the address Koori-chan's Writing. The story is not yet finished, and the blog form is unedited, so there may be issues with grammar or punctuation, don't let that bother you. Updates will be going a bit slower now that NaNo is finished, but please go look!


That bit of personal advertisement over, Christmas break is on the way. I have school on the 23rd, :( so feel sad for me. I have Christmas Eve through the 5th of January off, then dead week, then finals week. These are then followed by spring break, which in Japanese universities is about 2 1/2 months long. I'm planning on flying to Kyoto in Feb, and having a few day trips to Osaka and Nara while there. Actually, a friend who's family lives in Osaka told me today that she likes Kobe better than Osaka... That said, I know another girl from school back in the US (Japanese student) who grew up in Kobe, so I'll probably head there too. Time to find travel guides at the library!

Homestay!

So, if being a college student in Japan for a year isn't cool enough, I'm also gonna be doing a homestay next weekend. It's Toyo's bunkasai (school festival) so we have a long weekend, most of the exchange students from various countries signed up to join the homestay! We're going to be in Itakura in Gunma prefecture, and stay with families who volunteered to host us for 3 days! Sounds fun right?

My host family is a young couple with a 4 year old and a baby. Sadly, no pets. I miss my kitty from home... Also no smoking, but I requested that (the only thing I requested) when I filled out my paperwork. The ryugakusei (exchange students) are also going to go to Seijoin Temple and participate in a tea ceremony, and have a lecture on Buddhism. Which may sound boring, but considering that I'm doing the NaNoWriMo this year, it very well might make it into my story! 

Stress Less

In the last year or so of college I've started getting more and more interested in knitting, and as I've become interested I've found that the more stressed I feel the more I want to knit. It is relaxing as nothing else I enjoy is. My current project is for a friend who saw a hat I made the first week I was in Japan. She said she wanted one just like it and offered to buy it. (Paying customer Woohoo!) I told her 1,000 yen (about $10) plus the price of the yarn, so she bought the yarn and gave it to me on Monday.

I suppose without realizing it I've been de-stressing all week by working on this hat for her. My class has had an awful week of vocabulary tests and grammar lessons. We did lessons 5-7 this week, plus the vocab test for lesson 4 on Monday. Tomorrow is, thankfully the last day of the week, and this week there's no Saturday class (Yay!). Hopefully next week isn't so bad, but thanks to my knitting I'm not feeling as bad as I could be.

I'm currently about halfway done with Emily's hat, and since the yarn is a bit fluffier, same weight but different brand, so it is turning out a little different, but I'm happy with the results. I found a little shop with some superwash wool/cotton yarn that I think I'm gonna buy to work on a shawl for when autumn starts cooling down as well.

Nekobukuro

Nekobukuro, Cat City... The name really speaks for itself, I think. It's located on the 8th floor of a department store in Ikebukuro called Tokyu Hands. The store has some crafty things, and a whole floor dedicated to stationary and another to bags and travel supplies, but noting too interesting to report short of the pet shop on the top.

Sorry about the lack of photos of the actual building, but my camera was not cooperating with me and did not want to focus on anything out of arms reach. 

Basically the whole place is two rooms that have ramps, stairs, and walkways all over the walls and ceilings for the 15 or so cats that live there. You pay 600 yen and go in for an unlimited amount of time. I got there just at the end of nap time, I think because the cats all started to wake up a few minutes after we got there.

Keep in mind this is a busy shopping district in Tokyo, so if you want to come visit the cats, try to go during school hours. That seriously decreases the chance that the place will be filled with 5-10 year olds chasing the cats with strings tied to sticks; or all the benches being full of high schoolers trying to keep the hair off their uniforms. All in all it was a fun place to go, and the cats were great, though they do make me lonely for my cat back home.

Japanese Food

When I was getting ready to come to Japan, one of the tings I looked forward to most was the food. I'm not a fan of sashimi, and haven't been brave enough yet to try natto, but pretty much everything I've eaten here has been, if not delicious, then at least not bad. One thing I didn't think about enough was cooking for myself. Sure I knew I'd be doing it, but I just kinda assumed that it wouldn't be any different than back home. Well I come from a small town in the backwoods that has not very many options for ingredients, and to me that wasn't strange, then I got here and had so much more at my disposal, so I didn't even know where to start! Not to mention everything is written in Japanese on the food packages themselves. (When I'm lucky it's katakana which I can sort of read and sort of sounds like English when said out loud, with guesswork... Ugh)

So on to my food adventures, I'm a poor college student so I started with a bag of rice. 2 kilos 500 grams (I'm American I have no clue the equivalence for that in pounds it feels like about 4-5) for 1900 yen. Easy enough. Here's a fun fact almost nobody in Japan knows how to cook rice on a stove! So I've one-uped them in that way at least (when you don't think that I really can't use a Japanese rice cooker cause all the buttons are written with kanji).

Japanese (Short Grained) Rice - Recipe

It doesn't matter if the cup you're using is American or Japanese because the amounts in the two measures are different, just make sure you don't measure part of the recipe with one and part with the other.

1cup rice, rinsed so the water is mostly clear (Japanese people say this is important, I don't know why)
1 cup water
Saucepan with lid that fits (to keep steam in)

Bring water to boil, pour in rinsed and drained rice, give it a stir.
Turn heat down to low, set timer for 20 min, put on lid.
Do not remove lid until timer is up unless you want al-dente rice.

Want more rice? 2 cups rice = 2 cups water etc.
Using long grained rice? 1 cup rice = 2 cups water
And that's it. Simple enough.

Ok, So Knitting...

I've only been in Tokyo for a few days, but have already learned my way around the area a bit. Yesterday I was surprised to find a yarn shop sitting, as plain as can be, somewhere I think I've walked past 4 or 5 times and never noticed yet. Of course now that I have noticed it, I can no longer find it. 

Since that lovely little find, it was a tiny shop, I have been searching the internet for yarn shops in Tokyo. I've had some interesting finds that I will direct you to, though they are not too helpful to me. I really don't want to go to a lot of big name places, but find fun hole in the wall shops like the place selling green tea down the street from here that gives you a free sample when you go in...

This just looks fun, nothing to do with yarn: Nekobukoro (Cat House)
Yarn shopping: Pinku's Yarn Store List & Travelknitter's Guide to Tokyo 

Ah, Japan

So, I'm finally here, and have been for a few days actually. Classes start on the 21st. Yes I know that's a Saturday, but its really not that uncommon to have Saturday classes or practices in America either. Until then I have orientations and placement tests and free time. My roommate and I went to Asakusa the other day after some school scheduled event or other that I don't even really remember now... Funny how that works. first we went to Sensouji, which is a beautiful Buddhist temple in an older district, which is set apart form other temples (I think anyway) by the fact that they let you go into the main temple area where the Buddhas and the statue of Kannon, the river goddess the temple was built for, are enshrined.



Then we wandered around for about an hour trying to get to Tokyo Sky Tree. This thing is incredible. You can see it from where I'm living now actually, but really it's the second highest building in the world, and when we finally... and I do mean finally, it was hot outside and we'd been walking for almost three hours by the time we made it there, it was awe inspiring to just look up at it from the base. Don't expect to go up inside it for free. There are two observation decks, and the lower one costs 2,000 yen to go to, the upper one 3,000. One nice thing is that there is no need for reservations. You can just show up and get a ticket as long as they are open. Also there is an aquarium and a mall on the bottom five floors, and the basement includes a train station, so if, like us, you are tired at the end of a long day sightseeing, you can get on the train to go back to your hotel, or apartment or dorm or wherever it is that you're staying.

Leaving Soon!

So today is the first of September and I leave for Tokyo (by way of Dallas) in the early morning of the ninth. I have just over a week to go and then school will officially start for the year on Wednesday. Of course that means a week of placement tests, hastily buying books when I figure out which classes I'm taking and trying to settle in in a country whose language I really don't speak. 

I'm sooooo excited right now! 

And look, I even have Japanese enabled on my computer so I can type in it! Yay! 日本語(Japanese Language)　氷の火(my blogger name it means Icy fire) みんなさん、ブラグで読んだ　ありがとう！Everyone Thanks for reading my blog!

Christmas present finished

So my first Christmas present is done now: fingerless gloves for my mail delivering mom. She needs the fingerless part so she can handle all the paper she works with. They didn't take long at all once I started them. Unfortunately I haven't quite figured out how to taper the wrists so that the gloves have a pretty fitted look. They kinda resemble tube socks in shape. I do like how they've turned out, that tube shape so the only thing I'm disappointed with.

The hat I was making my brother on the other hand, well that was a flop. I was using plastic needles I had bought at Hobby Lobby. Now, I love the store, but knitters, don't ever buy plastic needles! Get aluminum or wood ones, something tough. So my plastic needles for the hat broke, and then I only had size six needles. With my loose knitting, the gauge was already gonna be off and I was gonna have a big hat, but with sixes... this thing was big enough to cover a basketball. I took the whole thing out, and am gonna have to go buy some good knitting needles now.

Yes, I know that it's only the very beginning of August, but for knitters and other crafters it is time to start thinking about Christmas presents, or they will not be finished by the time the holiday comes around. 

Ugh, don't we all get enough of Christmas starting the week of Thanksgiving? I mean it's in the stores before the Thanksgiving stuff is out, some places even start putting up decorations for sale as soon as the Halloween stuff is out. I like Christmas as much as the next person, but one of the reasons to be excited about it is that, much like birthdays, it only comes around once per year, and is only one day.

I started knitting this hat for my younger brother in hopes that he'll actually wear it. He's one of those tough guys (or likes to think he is, but we all know the truth) who only wears those baseball caps, and doesn't wear stocking hats in winter no matter how cold it gets. Well I found this pattern on Ravelry, a site I absolutely love, by the way, and can spend hours at a time on. The hat itself has a nice brim that looks a lot like a baseball cap, but also has this stretchy bottom part that can be pulled down over the ears when it gets cold.

I am also working on a pair of gloves for my mom, who needs the finger-less kind because of her job. Sadly those are very difficult to find and actually get warm gloves without getting those ugly convertible mittens with the flap that always gets in the way of everything. Sadly I have no camera at this time and the photo you see above was taken with my mom's phone. No, not even the camera on my phone works. So the gloves cannot be photographed by her for obvious reasons. Anyway, more photos to come, hopefully.

Well, We'll See How This Goes

I've attempted blogs before and honestly they didn't work out. Either I would be too lazy to say anything, or I didn't have anything I thought interesting enough to say, or I just plain forgot and suddenly 3 months had passed since I'd posted anything. So let's say third time's the charm, and try this again. Expect there to be few pictures as the camera on my phone is broken, so all I have is my webcam, and for now at least posts to be somewhat far between.

The reason for the title Japan and Knitting would be because I knit regularly, and I am preparing to go to Japan for study abroad in September of this year. At this point that is almost exactly 8 weeks from now. I can't even describe how excited I am about that, I mean a girl from boondocks USA getting to live in Tokyo for a year! How cool is that?

Anyway, on that happy note, there's more to come~