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jinianToday at lunchtime, we had a "Welcome and Farewell" party for me and four other new people, plus two people who are leaving. There was pizza (much less tomato sauce and cheese than American, but similar thick crust), fried chicken, soumen noodles that I helped cook, choux creme buns, chocolate cake, lots of drinks, mysterious pink rice-things, salads -- so much food. And someone, I still don't know who, made up a key for the giant onigiri, so we who don't read Japanese could know what they were.
![[They translated almost nothing except shiso, which is never really called perilla by anyone]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/5a7d58e85e0e/678086-532067/underhill.hhhh.org/~igg/2012-10-18-onigiri-key.jpg)
Where I was sitting wound up with two packages of ume wakame, so Yuki went around looking for shiso hijiki ones to trade. Turns out we both love shiso, and I got some good recipes from her.
The most amazing machine was broken out about halfway through the party. There is a thing (nagashi soumen) where soumen noodles race down a bamboo slide and you have to grab them with your chopsticks so you can eat them. Obviously we weren't set up for that, but we did have soumen. And water. And apparently we also had a plastic moat painted to look like remarkably viridescent bamboo, which when you got enough water in there was battery-powered to circulate the water in a particular direction. You put your soumen in there. I don't even. I mean, I guess I did even, I caught and ate the soumen. But why do we have a Barbie infinity pool for our noodles? The plastic kitty in a plastic bucket of milk that sits in the window of a vet clinic on my way to school remains less explicable due to having no apparent function, but this was almost as weird.
After capturing your soumen, you dip them in a cup of clear brown sauce that's a lot like mild soy sauce. PI T had a cup of that and a nearly identical cup of cola. He said the inevitable mistake was terrible.
Unrelatedly, Tommy Lee Jones as the Suntory Coffee Boss (the boss of them all since 1992) will never not be funny. However, I found something even funnier in Motoyama. It seems Mr. Jones is a stock photo now, because he has been placed into an advertisement with a fluffy white dog, which is looking nobly into the distance just like he is.
![[Also, conductor dog wears a powdered wig!]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/976df9ef719a/678086-532067/underhill.hhhh.org/~igg/2012-10-18-jones.jpg)
Where I was sitting wound up with two packages of ume wakame, so Yuki went around looking for shiso hijiki ones to trade. Turns out we both love shiso, and I got some good recipes from her.
The most amazing machine was broken out about halfway through the party. There is a thing (nagashi soumen) where soumen noodles race down a bamboo slide and you have to grab them with your chopsticks so you can eat them. Obviously we weren't set up for that, but we did have soumen. And water. And apparently we also had a plastic moat painted to look like remarkably viridescent bamboo, which when you got enough water in there was battery-powered to circulate the water in a particular direction. You put your soumen in there. I don't even. I mean, I guess I did even, I caught and ate the soumen. But why do we have a Barbie infinity pool for our noodles? The plastic kitty in a plastic bucket of milk that sits in the window of a vet clinic on my way to school remains less explicable due to having no apparent function, but this was almost as weird.
After capturing your soumen, you dip them in a cup of clear brown sauce that's a lot like mild soy sauce. PI T had a cup of that and a nearly identical cup of cola. He said the inevitable mistake was terrible.
Unrelatedly, Tommy Lee Jones as the Suntory Coffee Boss (the boss of them all since 1992) will never not be funny. However, I found something even funnier in Motoyama. It seems Mr. Jones is a stock photo now, because he has been placed into an advertisement with a fluffy white dog, which is looking nobly into the distance just like he is.
