winter greens

Tonight my Japanese teacher canceled our lesson together right when I was about to call her to say that that I didn't want to bike to her house in the freezing rain. This left me open to make a nice dinner for myself and spend some time juicing some veggies that I had in my kitchen. Since I go to the grocery store every day there's never a short supply of food in my apartment and tonight, following Matt Monarch's advice, I decided to juice and head of spinach and a bag of carrots. Back when I lived with Jon in Pittsburgh, I would often wake up to find our kitchen in disarray as he had made a similar mixture before heading off to work. The only sense that I could make of it was that Jon was a messy roommate and had little consideration for the shared rooms in our apartment. However, as I observed his strange messes more, I became interested in trying these weird concoctions little by little to see why someone would go though so much trouble just to make a glass of vegetable juice. Little did I know at the time (and without any prodding by Jon), I was going headfirst into the world of raw food meals, garbage bags full of pulp, and frequent but expensive trips to the health food store.

As I learned more about and experimented with eating mostly non-processed, uncooked foods, I saw that creating meals for myself could be a really interesting and practical form of creativity that I had never given much consideration to before. But I didn't go into it with that mindset, really, I was primarily amazed by how much cleaner my whole body felt after drinking some carrot juice or eating a giant salad. It snowballed from there and, after some months of preparation for it, I was eating a strictly raw food diet (see this post from June '07). Jon and that summer's third musketeer, Mr. Anthony Ritchey, joined in as the three of us set out to eat raw together. Living with someone who is also on a raw diet makes it a LOT easier because not only do you have another person to share meals and preparation with, but you've also got an ear to vent the frustrations (and exhilarations) of all the work that's required to creatively eat only vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds. Though keeping strictly raw is pretty tough (I did it for about a month), you learn to consume things by substitution- a method that requires some forethought and experimentation. As a simple example, natural sweeteners like raw honey in place of any other sugars, nutritional yeast instead of cheese, and avacadoes or raw cashews as natural sources of fats are all things that have stuck with me to this day as I prepare meals for myself. I think that it's no coincidence that many raw foodists seem so crazy/spacey...at least for me, I felt a lot different mentally and physically when I was eating like this (which is far from the case now).




And now, remembering back to that summer right before I moved to Japan and Jon moved to Korea primarily makes me thing of dancing on Thurday nights, knowing how much I would miss my friends and Pittsburgh, and constantly thinking about what my next meal would be.

naruto technical high school 10k

Fastest student- 37:20.
Fastest teacher- 40:00 (Yamaguchi sensei, 2nd pic from the bottom).
My time- 45:00 (The plan to stick with the baseball team worked until the last kilometer when I cramped up. I am convinced it's because of the curry that I ate last night for dinner. My reverse psychology of eating whatever I wanted the night before as to not over prepare myself and become nervous came back to haunt me).

mid-february updates

Thinking back to mid-February of last year brings back memories of freezing bike rides in the morning, teaching while wearing a winter coat, and sleeping under every blanket that I could find in my apartment. These days I have been going running after school in shorts and a t-shirt while fending off the brightness of the sun. I've got to say that I kind of miss the cold weather at the moment because I really like coming home and drinking tea and all night to stay warm...although I'm pretty sure winter still isn't quite over here.

Settling in after this most recent trip to southeast Asia has been significant because I can now feel that my life in Japan has an endpoint that's within sight. A few weeks ago I handed in my official papers letting the Board of Education know that I would not be staying for another year. I feel a little differently now that I (and most of my coworkers) know that come August I won't be living in Japan anymore. However, this can be a positive thing because if I am feeling down for one reason or another I can always say "Well, it's the last winter in Japan" etc, etc. So, as pretty much everyone does, I'm making a mental list of things to do here before heading off to somewhere else.

Changing the subject a bit, I've finally got around to putting many of my pictures online from the last year and a half. Check them out here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/direnzi/

You can browse through albums or just look at them by paging from beginning to end (the most recent ones are shown first). I will soon be uploading some older shots as well so I'll try to label where and when they are from. I plan on putting things up periodically (I've got about 1,600 posted at the moment) and I've also put the same link as above on the right of this page.

Other news...let's see...I have been running for a few weeks in preparation for Naruto Tech's 10k race that will take place tomorrow. I feel like I am in pretty good shape for it and I've been lucky because the warm weather has made it easy to train. A lot of the other teachers will be racing as well and it will be entertaining (as it was last year) to run along with them. I bought proper running shoes for the first time in years and I think that's making it a lot easier to run long distances (10 kilometers is 6.2 miles). The race takes places all throughout the farms by the school- basically the same terrain where I usually go running anyway.

I have been doing lessons on President Obama's inauguration speech with my upper level classes recently and the response has been great. One of my students even went out and bought the transcription of the speech and came to me after class, wanting to know the meaning of specific phrases that she'd highlighted and looked up in her dictionary. You know, it's a really nice thing to be proud of the person who leads the country that you're from.

Also, believe it or not, I'm back to traveling again in about a month. Last year Caitlin and I went around New Zealand (see this post) for spring break and there were a lot of places that I was considering (India, Australia, Vietnam, etc.) before figuring out what kind of trip that I wanted to do. For my last spring here I've decided to spend my vacation time seeing more of Japan while spending as little as possible. I'm looking forward to figuring out some creative ways to make it to some places that are nowhere near where I have spent most of time while living in Japan. If and when more details about my trip unfold, they will be posted.

Finally, because I might as well make this post full of random things, here are some pictures from a recent trip to Gifu. I almost forgot how snowboarding is one of the most fun activities ever...