hey love, I'm an inconstant satellite

Oh, hey, I kinda disappeared, sorry. I did not get eaten by the zoo animals at this time. I did see bikers on Big Wheels (motor-tricycles anyway), and I did go the wrong way:



I still don't know how it happened, but I went behind that tennis center and got nowhere and turned, and then there was a whole lot of nothing. There was a guy walking down the other side of the street at one point who looked like a fifty-year-old from a rock band, and he had a dog who was clearly some mutt, not a canonical Japanese dog (usually a little Shiba Inu, sometimes dachshunds, always tidy). I liked them both immediately.

I didn't think I would ever see this in Japan:



But there was wildlife!

( Grasshoppers and butterflies, anyhow. )

I walked over a very large hill on that unmaintained sidewalk and wound up in Kitaotsubo, which I had not heard of before. Oops. To do: get a map of the entire city, not just part of it. I turned left and walked some more, and got to Uedayama, which I had also not heard of. There was an option to go left again, back over the mountain, but I went forward some more in my dead-reckoning way, and triumphed -- eventually I hit a T-junction, but with the chance to walk through a forested bit, and after that I saw a parking sign for Higashiyama something and started hearing loudspeaker announcements.

Lots of people with kids were around, always a good sign of a zoo, and I even got valuable information from one of the kids. He went up to a shrub and picked some inconspicuous flowers, then smelled them as he carried them off. I sniffed carefully and found that they were the source of the mysterious, wonderful tropical-fruit smell that I keep detecting in random places around the city. Once I knew what the bush looked like, I found out they're usually white, but these were orange:



Now I just have to figure out what their name is.

When I arrived I was very puzzled that I didn't have to pay -- this happened several times during the day, and later I found out that everything was free due to the Nagoya City Festival. Score. I walked into this:



It is, unfortunately, an old-school zoo. None of the animals really had enough space to be happy, and some of them were clearly messed up and pacing freakily. The babies, the birds, and the herps were all just fine, though. There was a lot to enjoy.

( Cut for many smallish photos )

Today 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.



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.

I discovered that there are paper screens in our kitchen! We can close it off, however tenuously, from the rest of the suite. Maybe I'll do that next time I'm up really early. I feel bad for making breakfast noises when Shiyu's room is so close.

Lulu and I had gotten in at the same time, so I demonstrated the screens to her. Then we both cooked dinner and compared food notes. She gave me umeshu; I responded with umeboshi. Some might think this was not a fair trade, though I love both. We also swapped spaghetti (me) for enoki and bean sprouts and tiny whole fishes (her), and stories about pickles and the foods of our childhoods.

Someday I will manage to come out ahead on the "giving people food" scorecard with these kids. Just putting some noodles in a bowl and handing it to Lulu without giving her a chance to demur was pretty successful. Putting her spinach away after she put it on the counter for me also worked. I'm considering making an American-style Thanksgiving dinner for everybody, if I can remotely find turkey or even a whole chicken.

When Shiyu got in we discussed a cheap trip to Kyoto that the international student organization is giving on the 31st. There are two options, Kinkakuji (which I have seen and it's beautiful) with Kiyomizudera (another temple), or Todaiji (temple) and Nara Park. I am leaning toward the second, but we're all going to look into it and discuss tomorrow. Seriously, 2000 yen is about $25 -- that's incredibly cheap just to get to Kyoto, and the trip includes lunch. No English tour guide, but you can't have everything. I do not suppose we will dress in costume.

And earlier today, I started a time lapse on one of the genes I'm actually interested in in -- and within the first two hours saw what I wanted to see and have been waiting to verify for years. SO AWESOME. Then I made it into a beautiful figure.

Look at these fucking hawkmoths! My mind was blown. I wished for a much better photography setup; this was pretty much the only identifiable photo out of a bunch, and it's not nearly as clear as I'd like. So cool though!

I should find myself some native English speakers to hang out with. I don't want them, I want my friends, but I think I should have some in-person relaxing contact of some kind. All the Japanese folks are nice, my roommates are great, but I want conversations without that baseline of cultural/linguistic worry. I have no idea how to find such people. (Especially since I want them queer and about my age, not these annoying American undergrads.)

Still no internet at home and no word on whan it might happen.

How is there ready-made tuna salad onigiri in this world? Tuna salad onigiri, mind you, that is labeled "shii chikin mayoneezu". CHICKEN OF THE SEA. I mean, it was good. But what?

Wonderful things:
Serious awesome Black Widow fic
Ridiculous cute Avengers and Darcy fic
Adorable affirming Avengers fic
The Problem with the Big Bang Theory -- really glad someone else sees this so articulately, I just knew I felt really sad that my parents like it so much
Human skin tones as Pantone colors -- needs more dark, but really fun to see all the variation so far

There are a few things I pass while walking to the lab that are pretty Japan-specific, like the gutter-covering tiles. I confess, every time I see them I think of rolling them up in my katamari.

When I got home yesterday, there were five Chinese girls eating in the kitchen. That's more than live with us! Two of them were new Master's students, and they pressed me nicely to eat with them all. We had some good conversation -- they were really curious about Halloween, they know about Seattle from watching the American drama Grey's Anatomy, Chinese women have a lot of trouble getting jobs without advanced degrees and we all think sexism sucks. And the food was great. They glossed one thing as kung pao chicken, but it wasn't spicy at all, just delicious: little chicken bits and carrots and a little broccoli, green onions and avoidable tomatoes, with some amazing spice I need to inquire about further. Lulu bought some spaghetti, so I am required to show her how to cook it!

Now I cannot withdraw money at all, and it's the weekend so no bank people are available. I'm not going to die or anything, but THIS IS ANNOYING AS FUCK.

Still no internet at home.

Suitemates
- Lulu (plant bio! boosting CO2 metabolism for higher productivity; chatty and fun; afraid to cook spaghetti)
- Nicole (economics, some industrial level whatsit; has never seen the ocean; lots of experience with Americans in some special institute so very American accent and fluency)
- [name plate in hanzi only] (seems nice, not much English; offered me a tomato for my salad)
- new person moved in Thursday, haven't seen her yet

Peanut cream is really, really not peanut butter. I suspected this, given that I've always heard it's impossible to get peanut butter outside North America, but I didn't know what it might be like. Well, strawberry jam from Lawson is completely reasonable jam, and white bread is super-thick and soft but also clearly itself. Peanut cream is... translucent. It is nothing like cream either. Imagine the syrup you might cook to make peanut butter fudge. Peanut cream has that clarity and some of that sweetness. Maybe 25% syrup and 25% peanut solids, by the flavor. However, what the 50% remaining may be I know not. It's not actually bad, just kind of eldritch.

I got to use a microscope Wednesday! Hurrah! Spinning disc confocal. And had lunch with women of the lab, and learned to dissect and image ovules. Work steadies me. Also, it is blessedly cool in the plant growth room and actually a bit chilly in the miscroscope room. Aaahhhh. The weather here is no worse than it was in Boston during my recent trip, but August in Boston made me tired and floppy too. Also, Boston in general agrees with me about what reasonable room temp is; the lab thermostat is set to 26-28C, which is still too damned hot for being this muggy. (The university vice president told us during orientation that this was ridiculous weather for the season compared to his childhood 40 years ago, and that it would get fall-like soon, honest. I expect it's the same thing as me telling new people in the lab that normally Seattle weather isn't like whatever it's like at the time.)

Okay, so the toilets. Everyone knows that Japanese toilets are ridiculous, right? Either they're regular Asian style squat types, or they're Western style but with about fifty more options than necessary. There is no middle ground. And, as it turns out, I am stuck with two main options for using toilets: at the dorm and at the lab. Both offend me. They're both the absurd over-elaborate Western style, which normally is fine -- and honestly the "powerful deodorizer" button is a good idea and we should all have them, it just seems to be a really strong vent fan in the bowl -- but they have different obnoxious features.

At the dorm, we have the Hot Seat. Normally the butt warmer is a CHOICE; here it is constant. We are admonished to put the seat down when we're done, too, so power isn't wasted while it's non-optionally keeping the damned thing hot for our asses. Have I mentioned it is 30 degrees out? (86F)

And at the lab, we have the Skirt Lifter. Most toilets allow me to start the necessary interaction; not so my new friend at the lab. As soon as one enters the stall, the seat automatically raises up. In combination with the shorter height of Japanese folks, which means that there's less leg room in the stall, this behavior means that my dress goes up rather before I intended it to, and in unhelpful ways. It also plays loud water-rushing noises automatically, which considering how dehydrated I keep getting sometimes leaves me wondering whether I have peed at all.

[ETA] Oh, I almost forgot. At orientation yesterday, the most useful presentation was about identifying and dealing with culture shock, and they said you can start in a "honeymoon phase." Okay so far! But she compared the honeymoon phase to being introduced to your first Japanese toilet, with the strong implication that obviously we find them heavenly. Audience: "..." I am pretty sure that the entire room of international students was thinking WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT YOUR TOILETS ARE ABSURD, just like I was. I did wonder whether lota users were satisfied with the washing options or would still prefer to self-serve, but it's not the kind of thing I can find out readily.

Fun thing from Thursday: The guy with the desk next to mine said "see you later" to me as he was leaving. Okay, not exactly the usual leaving-work thing in English, but I said "see you tomorrow" all cheerfully. He said it again on the way out the door, in place of what one normally says, leading to widespread laughter and I swear like fifteen minutes of other people repeating it in wondering tones and seeming to discuss whether this was reasonable or what it meant or what else one might say, and how it was clearly because of Kylee-san. Being me, I figured it would be funny if I said the Japanese thing on my own way out, so I looked it up. It's a little long and my Japanese sucks, so I wrote it down, but I did read it out to everyone and got a laugh. Hopefully this indicates that I am fun and a good sport rather than just a pathetic failure at speaking like humans. :)

Thursday morning I had bad touch-hunger. I don't think it's just ovulation. I don't feel like I've been all that cuddly recently, but there's a huge difference between someone to hold in your bed every night (if you are not too hot) and no one on the continent to snuggle up to at all.

Today has been spent almost entirely in bank shenanigans, but my tuition has now been paid. I would like a medal now, please. In general daily life is a huge amount of work right now; just buying lunch, I felt like SUCCESS! Which is kind of great, yay succeeding, but honestly the fact that buying lunch requires any all-caps reaction of any kind is tiring. And it's like that for almost everything.

The paper was submitted in a big hurry while I was out, since our competitor's paper came back from peer review with extreme speed. We are definitely stretching the boundaries of cosubmission here. Some trouble with the supplemental movies, which I solved Tuesday morning my time; they can be resubmitted. Luckily I have many other things to feel freaked out about!

This is all very well organized and deeply weird to me. I got picked up this morning by someone I knew from the lab, and sent off with someone I'd just met to check into the dorm and get things. All of which we did. I filled out many forms and went to the dollar store, where there were no strawberry glasses, and the department store. We visited the lab briefly (I got a hug from the PI's wife, who is very sweetly motherly with everyone) and got lunch at a cafeteria, then I went back to my room and was torpid, reading Emma off and on, unpacking gradually, and eventually napping properly for almost three hours. I felt gross on waking but eventually stirred myself to go to the convenience store for food and mostly juice. Then more sleep.

Still a little headachey this morning, and feeling the distance and newness quite a bit. It's lovely weather, though, and I am overcoming my anxiety even if I'm shaky. I'm getting picked up again this morning and taken to the lab with another new student, a Russian woman, who's also staying in this dorm though I haven't met her yet. I already saw that I have a desk in the lab's office, so hopefully getting settled in there will help me feel better. Walking around outdoors definitely does. I'm farther from the shinkansen station than I usually got on my last trip, and the decline in people speaking English to me is noticeable, but having a sense of the place helps me feel at home. And my katakana's coming back quickly.