Refreshing. Beautiful. Healthy. Tea. Happy. Maggie.

Japan has one of my favorite non-alcoholic drinks. It's called 爽健美茶 (sou-ken-bi-cha, with the literal meaning: refreshing healthy beauty tea), and in addition to the catchy little jingle back about 15 years ago (see below) when I was here that I still sing (sometimes out loud. to myself. publicly.) and  having a nice meaning (and a really sexy looking first kanji letter in the name), it's also a delicious blend of some different teas and stuff like herbs and barley (don't get me started on how much I love 麦茶 mugicha - barely tea, for many of the same reasons). Then they mix it and add pure magical goodness or crack. And that jingle. Yay, marketing!

Here's the jingle that stayed with me, even when I forgot all useful Japanese.

It's that very last bit when they say "sou-ken-bi-cha" all sing-songy.

While I'll drink a Coke with my Big Mac, when I am actually thirsty, I just don't really feel inclined to drink something carbonated or sugary and often opt for water. I love water. Seriously. Back home, it's what I drink most because we don't have Soukenbicha. To me, Soukenbicha is kind of like water - clean, clear, refreshing, no calories - but then with a nice mild and not even really "tea-like" flavor. It's good stuff.

I sound like a commercial. They don't know or care who I am, but I am madly in love all that is this amazing drink. I'm not alone. It's even on the menu at McDonald's. Of course, most everyone where I'm from knows that you can't drink water/water-like drinks when trying to wash down your burger and fries because you need that carbonation to make the grease not stick and the calories not count (it's a Maggie Math thing, never mind, carry on), so then it's Coke, all the way. Soukenbicha or water (or mugicha) are for me for all those other times I want to be refreshingly healthy and amazingly beautiful, though.

22/366 - Refreshing. Beautiful. Healthy. Tea. Happy. Maggie.
(taken on my iPhone, toyed with in BeFunkyFx app)

Extra Credit Photos - School, Town, Home

In the spirit of taking way more than just the one picture a day that I need for the 366 project but still wanting to share, here are a few more from roughly the past week. I didn't go anywhere special, but this is what I saw.

21(1)/366 - School. 3rd Floor. Everything looks best from here.
(taken on my iPhone)

21(2)/366 - School. 1st Floor.
(taken on my iPhone)

21(3)/366 - Now Building in a Town That Can Be So Very Back Then, Too
(This is outside the same building from last week's inside. I love this building!)
(taken on my Nikon D5100)

21(4)/366 - Children, Our Hope for the Future
Not sure what this statue is really called or what it is supposed to convey, but it always reminds me that
 the children are the future. I see it every week after our teachers' meeting. Fitting.
(taken on my iPhone)

21(5)/366 - Good Morning. New Day, New House.
When Japan decides to build something, it goes from a plot of land and a shinto priest doing a blessing
to a full on house with people living in it all in a matter of weeks.
(taken on my iPhone)

21(6)/366 - Deceptively Sunny but Windy and Cold Friday Afternoon
I spent much of the weekend keeping warm inside and looking out at this.
(taken on my Nikon D5100)

21(7)/366 - The Day it Snowed.
(Yes, this one is a little older. Same day as this post.)
(taken on my Nikon D5100)

Warm in a Jar

Although my part of Japan doesn't get as cold as, say, Chicago, without proper insulation or what I consider to be a reasonable amount of climate control, I'm interested when people suggest home remedies and other ideas to stay warm. This past week it came in the form of a suspicious looking jar on the the table in the teachers' room. It's homemade ginger honey "tea" with actual strips of ginger and even some hot pepper. A couple of teaspoons of this mixed in with hot water in your cup, and you should be good for about 4 hours of warmth, is what the note said. Usually I'm only kind of "meh" on the ginger teas I've tried in winter (with the same promise), but this was actually really, really good, and I did stay warm. I was wearing 4 layers on top and 3 on bottom, and they turned the heat on in the teachers' room that day, so I can't say whether or not it was the tea, but being warm and tasting something good makes for a good day, however it happens.

20/366 - Sketchy Jar of Honey Ginger Remedy for Warmth
(taken on my iPhone)

Haiku Friday - Setsubun 2012 Edition

鬼は外! (oni wa soto)
Demons out! Good fortune in!
 福は内! (fuku wa uchi)

19(1)/366 - Beans (or peanuts, recently) to throw and chase out demons.

It's 節分 (setsubun)*
bean-throwing ceremony
spring renewal starts
*n is it's own syllable in Japanese, but if you don't count it, consider the line to read "it is setsubun"

恵方巻 (ehoumaki)**
lucky direction*** sushi
look there, hush**** and eat

**this is a type of fat rolled sushi, but while that is usually cut, for Setsubun, it is not cut because that would also cut your luck, so it's eaten as one long piece
***this year, the lucky direction is 北北西 (hoku-hokusei, north-northwest)
****tradition says that you have to eat it silently

19(2)/366 - Tons of 恵方巻 (ehoumaki) lucky direction sushi at my local grocery store. 

19(3)/366 - I might have gone shopping while hungry and over-bought. Oops.

My Main Mode of Transport

I don't have a car in Japan. Most of the time I don't really miss it. I have my granny bike, and it gets me around my mostly wonderfully centralized tiny town. I'd love it if we had a proper drug store in the center of town, too, instead of just way out on the outskirts (when it's windy and cold or stupidly hot and humid, I simply don't go there, so it's a very seasonal roughly 3-times-a-year event for me). If I need things that are further than I care to bike, I just bike the handful of minutes to the train station and head to one of the cities. If I need something in "the city," I'd probably like a latte or a Big Mac while I'm there anyway, too, so it works out OK much of the time.

I don't miss worrying about every little sound a car makes or weird thing it does and wondering if it is something that will need to be fixed or how much it will cost or having to pay for car insurance or caring about the cost of gas. Cars and their related costs are spendy. Even if the worst of Very Bad Things happened to my granny bike, the maximum cost would be roughly US $100 to replace it.

I do miss driving itself and love it when I am back home and get to crank up the radio and sing along while driving on back roads (bonus points for country roads and country music and, I'll admit it on this one, being in Oklahoma), but Japan's not really made for that. Many roads are ridiculously narrow, and I'm sometimes amazed that even a single car can fit, let alone two passing each other (sometimes they can't, and one has to wait). Once in awhile on these same super narrow roads there will be someone on a bike (like me) riding on the side but not all the way on the side because they are trying to avoid riding into the drainage ditch that exists next to most roads (remind me to show you these!). I'm sure there is a name for these in Japanese, but lots of us foreigners just call them gaijin traps (gaijin = 外人 = literally, outside person = foreigner, so, basically, "foreigner traps," a term that just cracks some of my my Japanese friends up the first time they hear it, but to me it's just what we call them). Those are bad enough walking or on a bike, but I can't imagine having to drive and worry about putting one (or more) of your tires into one and the damage/cost that would involve.

Then there is this whole separate driving skill set that's required to drive here. As a pedestrian/bike person living in Japan for more than a couple of days, I'm used to traffic driving on the left instead of on the right as back home in the States. That's fine. What I mean is the skill like how most people who drive in Japan back their cars into parking spaces instead of going into them front first, even the tightest of spaces, between two cars. When they hit nothing and also make it look as effortless as most people seem to do, I want to applaud and hold up a 10.0 score card. I can't imagine ever being able to do that without damaging a minimum of two cars in the process. I can back out of a parking space easily and parallel park about 87% of the time, but other than that, I drive frontwards. It's just what my people do.

So, yah, she is a basic one gear model full of no features fancier than a basket and a bell, but it's good that I have my granny bike. I accidentally took this picture the other day while I was walking to get a picture of the takoyaki/taiyaki stand. Oops.

18/366 - View From My Granny Bike
(Taken on my iPhone, toyed with using the BeFunky app. Oh, and Photobucket.)