An Ode to Okonomiyaki / Stargazing

The sign in the window says "okonomiyaki."
Ginko trees, a few weeks ago on campus.
I really like this advert for high-speed rail. They did a good job of fitting the bullet train into what could otherwise be a classical Japanese woodblock print. The text at the bottom reads "head back to your hometown by train for the new year."
Another hair-raising parking job by a Tokyo cabbie.
See the blue LED fixture near the top of the frame?
The thought is that the color blue will help calm people down and stop them from hurling themselves in front of the trains. I've been late to class three times this year because of people committing suicide that way. They've installed these at every station on the Yamanote line.
My bike. I'm not sure the quality is good enough to really show the flaking, dying brake cables or the evil, serrated edges of the rusty baskets.
I like what they've done with the creek here; criss-crossing it with walkways and building tables and benches. The creek eventually flows into the Yagami river.
A sign near some railroad tracks, put up by the police department. It reads "Let Us Beware / of Sweet Words and Dark Paths."
I rode to school in the front car of the train the other day ^ ^ Notice the old-fashioned pocketwatch near the conductor's hand, set into the console?


Wow. I just realized that these 300 gram bags of peanuts that I've been snacking continually off of for the past two weeks pack almost 2000 kcals each. I caught myself thinking: "Man, I've been doing a ton of snacking on these peanuts. But they're just so irrepressibly delicious." I finally decided to check the nutrition label : ( It's back to bananas and dark chocolate for me...

Anyway, Christmas is approaching and I shall soon head back to America for the holidays! Yay! I apologize for not writing recently, but the school work has cropped up rather thick in this last week before Winter Break. I think I have passed through the thick of it.

So I would like to take this opportunity to sing the praises of okonomiyaki- a dish consisting of nothing more than egg, cabbage, and flour, mixed with whatever you like and topped with katsuo-bushi, mayo and sweet sauce. The translation of "okonomiyaki," in fact, is "whatever you like, grilled." Due to a dangerous surplus of cabbage, my recent meals have been dominated by this unassuming and delicious pancake. I have taken my artisanal preparations of it to new levels: tuna and corn okonomiyaki, salmon and spinach okonomiyaki, even cheeseburger and egg okonomiyaki. Never before have I spent so little time and money to prepare such filling and delicious meals. I am getting sick of it, but I only have enough giant cabbage left for one more meal. So, thank you okonomiyaki.

In fact, it was thanks to the power of okonomiyaki that I achieved last night (and this morning) one of the greatest feats of my reckless young life: Staying out all night with friends- dancing, drinking, and attempting to flirt with beautiful girls in a fashionable club in Shibuya- after pulling an all-nighter to complete a translating project and catch up on my homework. I think that after I finish this post, I'm going to sleep so well that I'll end up dying.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I have two things to share with my loyal readers.

First:

"My eyes have expressed it,
My tongue has pronounced it,
My quill has declared it;
For you my heart capsizes,
My mind raves,
And my hand writes."

-- George Farquhar

Next, amusing Australians make fun of the British.

I guess that's about all I wanted to write about. Except! Last Monday night I took a trip by train to Mt. Takao, about an hour west of where I live, with Maya and three of her friends from school (Benedict Lloyd Terrell, Jared Bird, and Evon Too). Our goal: to catch a glimpse of the Geminid meteor shower, away from the city lights.

The first hour after we arrived at the station nearest the mountain could be described as "misadventure." After misreading the large, friendly map in front of the station, we wandered off into the dark along a highway, passing construction for a controversial new elevated roadway and numerous flashy love hotels and restaurants. Finally, we started wandering up a random wintry mountain, following the misleading advice of Ben's iPhone. Toward the close of that first hour, we encountered a totally unexpected sight: a large, torch-lit parking lot for a sprawling, classy, castle-like restaurant that was set into the mountainside. A valet saw us standing dumbfounded at the entrance to the parking lot (which was fairly full of high-end cars), and came over to us with an uncertain look in his eyes. When he realized just how lost we were, he arranged for us to take the restaurant's private shuttle bus back to the station. Yes, private shuttle bus.

So there we were, right back where we started, with final trains and curfews mere hours away.
The driver of the shuttle bus was kind enough to point us in the right direction, and so we quickly found the correct path and started climbing. It felt good to do some real hiking (although some stretches of the path were concrete, unfortunately). Bird gets credit for remembering to bring flashlights! The air was crisp and clear, perfect for stargazing. We also enjoyed some spectacular, glittering panoramas of Tokyo from viewing areas on the mountain. We didn't make it all the way up, on account of the aforementioned time restrictions, but we did find a really good spot to lie down and just stare up at the sky. I could feel my body heat seeping into the ground through my all-too-thin cardigan, as we alternated between contented silence and jokes about Carl Sagan. Every few minutes, we would catch a meteor as it streaked through the atmosphere and vanished.

That's all for now. On Tuesday I'm going to see Tokyo Disney Land for the first time, but I might not have time to write about it until I'm back in the States. See you all soon!