At last! Tonight I was enjoying a hot soak in our deep tub, giving my feet a much-needed exfoliating scrub, and lo and behold the nail finally came off one of my Fuji toes (the other one is still firmly attached). Contrary to most people’s experiences, the climb down Fuji killed the nail on the second toe of both feet, rather than the big toes. For two months, I’ve been walking around with ugly blackish-purple nails sticking out of my sandals, yearning for the start of closed-toe shoe season to hide those freakish toes. Now that I have a naked, nail-less toe, I’m afraid to put on socks and shoes!
Sunday, October 18--Two left feet
This evening’s outing was the culmination of a misunderstanding that began nearly two years ago. When I first started meeting Yumiko for English lessons, she told me one of her hobbies was b------ dancing. At the time, I wasn’t sure if she was a ballet, belly, or berry dancer (although I was 99% sure the last option wasn’t really a style of dance). It took a few months, and some pictures of a recent performance, for me to conclude that she was taking Bali dance lessons. I told her I’d love to attend one of her performances, and finally got that chance tonight.
Yumiko and her fellow dancers were performing at an Indonesian restaurant within walking distance of the base, so I had her make dinner reservations for Patrick, Rudy, and me (Jim is off on another trip). While we enjoyed delicious Indonesian food (the first time for me), we were treated to three different Balinese dances. The women wore beautiful, brightly colored costumes for each dance, crowned with elaborate golden headpieces. The graceful, fluid motions of their arms and hips, accented by complex eye movements, finger arrangements, and foot positions, told a story. Though it is one of the more subdued forms of dance I have seen—there is no rush from pose to pose—it looked all the more difficult for its subtlety. To my horror, Patrick and I got to personally find out just how difficult, as the dancers pulled up members of the audience for a mini-lesson after the final number. Not only did I feel like I had two left feet, it seemed I had two left everything. Now I understand why Balinese girls start learning this form of dance when they are elementary school age—it would take years of practice to become proficient enough to perform in public, which they do regularly at temple festivals in their villages.
I’m so glad I finally got to see Yumiko perform, and grateful to have escaped with only a couple embarrassing photos of my attempts at Bali (not berry) style dancing.
Saturday, October 10--Where's the fish?
Well, that didn’t exactly go as planned.
Even though Jim is gone on a business trip, I decided to take part in the ITT tour to Tsukiji fish market today. I knew this was not the early morning tour, so I would not be able to see the 5:00 a.m. tuna auction, but I figured at a market where approximately 2000 metric tons of seafood are bought and sold each day, there would be enough other stuff going on to justify the $27 tour cost.
Once the tour departed from the base, the guide informed us that he had not been originally scheduled for this trip, and was a last-minute replacement. He rattled off the details of our itinerary, as well as some facts about each stop of the tour, like guides have done on previous trips we’d been on, so I was not really concerned about his commitment to this outing. It wasn’t until we actually arrived at Tsukiji that his level of enthusiasm for this trip became evident. We got off the bus and stood on a bustling street corner, where our guide handed us a very general map of the area. Our fearless leader then raised his arm, pointed vaguely to the southeast, told us the market was down there, and warned us the bus would be leaving for the next stop in exactly two hours. Uhh, okay, but I thought the point of this tour was to be TAKEN to the market. If I wanted the confusion of trying to find it on my own, I’d have come by train.
To make a long story short, I spent most of my allotted two hours wandering around in a maze of stalls that ring the outside of the actual fish market, wading through throngs of people, trying not to lose my bearings among the endless look-alike rows of vegetable vendors and ramen hawkers. By the time I accidentally stumbled upon the entrance to the fish market (cleverly disguised as an active loading dock), I had less than 30 minutes left to explore. I carefully wove my way through buyers and delivery men maniacally trying to load and dispatch the morning’s purchases and finally ended up on the outskirts of an endless sea of wooden tables and water-filled tanks meant to display the unlucky creatures available for purchase. As I stepped from the alley into the shade of the auction area, it quickly became clear that the day was already over. In a few stalls, men were still packing up fish in Styrofoam coolers, but for the most part, workers clad in heavy rubber aprons and knee-high rubber boots were hosing down tables and scrubbing scales from the concrete floors. A few who had already finished the day’s chores were sitting around on crates slurping ramen noodles. Dejected and irritated, I made my way back to the bus and oohed over the digital pictures an acquaintance had taken of huge tuna being hacked into manageable pieces by a gleaming machete. Now that’s what I expected to see when I set off on this adventure. Guess I’ll have to try again another time.
Thursday, October 8--Melor fizzles
Another typhoon today…Typhoon Melor. They’ve been talking this one up for days, going through the different TCCOR (Tropical Cyclone Condition of Readiness) levels on the base as the storm got closer and closer to Japan. Today the base was locked down—only essential personnel could get on or off, stores were closed, schools were closed, no one was allowed out of their quarters. Many train lines were shut down, whether to prevent trains from blowing off the tracks or in anticipation of power outages, I'm not sure.
But again, just like all the other typhoons since we’ve been here, the storm proved to be nothing but a few heavy rain showers and some gusty winds. We’ve actually had stronger winds on sunny, non-typhoon days. But better safe than sorry, I guess. It got me almost a full day off—all but one of my lessons was canceled today.
Saturday, October 3--Presents from the dairy fairy
A few days ago, when Jim was home sick and napping on the couch, the doorbell rang. By the time he dragged himself to the front door, no one was waiting there, but he saw the “dairy fairy” flitting from house to house, dropping off product samples. I’m not sure if that’s actually the name of the Meiji dairy company’s home-delivery service (I thought I heard a solicitor say “dairy fairy” when she rang my doorbell last year, but it could have been a trick of my ears straining for something familiar in the rapid-fire Japanese she hurled at me), but it sounds cute and comes to mind every time I see their truck in the neighborhood.
Anyway, today we finally got around to investigating the samples, one in a tiny plastic container, and the rest in miniature glass bottles. Since they were all labeled only in Japanese, we were forced to guess what they might contain. The small plastic cup was an easy guess—looked like a kid’s yogurt container—and sure enough, when we tasted it, that’s what it was. The bottles we lined up by color, from whitest to yellowest, thinking the first might be milk and the last could possibly be buttermilk. A taste test confirmed our theory that the whitest liquid was milk, but the yellowest was not buttermilk. It smelled kind of like yogurt, as did the other two mystery samples. They all also tasted like yogurt, from very mild to quite tangy.
I had to do some research to figure out what was in those three bottles. The one with the blue label was Bulgarian-style yogurt (some marketing genius decided it was not very macho for men to eat yogurt from little plastic cups, so they’ve bottled it as a power drink instead). The green-labeled sample was a probiotic yogurt drink purported to improve gastric health. The yellowish liquid in the red-labeled bottle was a drink fortified with glucosamine, probably aimed at runners and other active types who are worried about maintaining joint health.
As convenient as it would be to have milk delivered right to the house, I don’t think my erratic schedule is very conducive to such an arrangement. For now, I’ll continue buying the six-week shelf-life, ultra-pasteurized, “real California milk” from the commissary.
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