It’s been just over a week in Aizu now, and things are starting to become a little more routine. The apartment is more or less furnished. We have curtains and two floor chairs. Someone at school had an extra table, so we should have that soon too. Mornings I’ll get up around 9, grab bread and juice at the convenience store on the way to school, and then hang around there for a few hours before going to lunch. Most afternoons we still have little things to take care of.

Monday afternoon we went to city hall to get our alien registration cards processed. We also got our name stamps (hanko 判子). In Japan hanko are often used in lieu of, or alongside a signature for legal documents. Since I don’t have a Japanese name, my hanko was printed in katakana, the alphabet used for foreign words. It looks pretty cool.

The two teachers helping us are Izumi-sensei and Kawaguchi-sensei. They’re both really awesome. Kawaguchi-sensei is also new to Aizu, he’s only been here a few months, but his English is great and he’s been really helpful in showing us around. Izumi-sensei has been in Aizu for 27 years. He originally came here from Mexico as part of a mission. Nick was really happy to meet him, since he’s been looking for someone to practice his Spanish with.

This weekend was pretty amazing too. On Friday we met up with Yamauchi-sensei, and he showed us around some of Aizu’s nightlife. We met his friend Satou-san, who works at Arai laser in Aizu. He was really friendly, and spoke a little bit of English. Yamauchi-sensei kept urging him to speak Japanese with us, which was really great. With Yamauchi’s help I know I managed to pick up at least a few new words over the course of the night. We had originally planned to visit Midnight Angel, a sister business to Superstar run by Hoshi-san’s wife. Unfortunately we arrived a little late so it was already full. Instead Satou-san took us to a different izakaya where we hung out for the rest of the night. It was really nice to have the Japanese immersion. Since the school is on break there haven’t been many people to talk to here.

On Saturday we went to a party that Noda was DJing at. This party usually has a lot of the international students from around Aizu, so it was a great opportunity to meet some of the other people here. It turns out that there were a lot more foreigners in Aizu that I’d thought. Despite having seen no one from America besides ourselves the entire week before, the party Saturday was full of them. Most of them were working as English teachers at various schools around Aizu. The music was really cool and it was a pretty fun group of people.

Sunday night was the real adventure of the weekend. We decided that we were going to cook curry at the apartment. The problem was that none of us here are really great at cooking to begin with, and none of us had ever cooked curry. On top of that our cooking set consists of half hand me down pots, and half bargain bin cookware. Finally, the curry box was entirely in Japanese with no pictures. So, while I started the vegetables and the rice McNees went to work translating the curry box. I’m almost done with the vegetables when we realize that 1) I didn’t add enough oil and the bottom of the pot is burning, and 2) the pots we were going to use are too small to hold the water for the curry or to hold the amount of rice we wanted. So, half way through I’m scrubbing the larger pot clean while the rice starts to boil over and Anderson desperately tries to stop the vegetables from overcooking. In the end it all turned out alright. The potatoes were a little burned, but everything was fine overall. We’re going to try and cook again tonight, hopefully it all turns out.

Till next time.