BIG AMERICA!!!!!

Japan is full of many themed-special-limited-time-only-never-to-be-done-again-promotional products. Right now's theme of McDonalds is... America's burgers. As the promotion is titled "BIG AMERICA!!" There are four burgers that will be offered throughout the year.

First, the Texas Burger (Top left of the photo)This is a hamburger with cheese, special sauce of mustard and relish, a middle-bun, fried onions, bbq sauce, and bacon. How's that sound? It could be good except I don't know about mustard and bbq being combined... eeew.

NEXT! Is the New York Burger (top right). This is more of a straight ahead burger. As you can see it has a different bun... other than that it's just a burger, monterey jack cheese, lettuce, tomato, bacon, and a kind of grainy dijon mustard. I'm not completely sure what aspect of these reflects New York. It's basically a cheese burger with bacon on it... the bacon isn't the "New York" part of it because all the burgers contain bacon. The mustard? That's the same mustard that is on the Texas Burger... sans relish. The cheese... but is New York KNOWN for it's cheese? I gotta say that goes to Wisconsin... So, the bun, I guess that's it. Nothing like that true "New York Bun."

The third installment of the series will be the California Burger (bottom left). This burger has a meat patty, lettuce, tomato, spicy cheese, bacon, and a special red wine sauce. Yup a red wine sauce. That's the "California" part of this burger. The whole wine country aspect of California has been played up here lately. They reshot the movie "Sideways" with an all Japanese cast. It takes place in California still, but it's just Japanese people in it instead of American. It actually looked quite good and it seemed like a tasteful choice of a remake as opposed to our Japanese horror remake franchises. "Ring" was a good remake... that's about it...

The final installment of the Big America promotion will be from the most famous US State (in Japan), the Hawaii Burger. Think Hawaii, what do you picture? Palm Trees? Pineapple? Other tropical fruits? Fish? Volcanos? Well none of those are incorporated anyway into this burger. This burger has a distinctive feature of an egg. It's American cheese, a burger, lettuce, tomato, bacon, "special gravy," and an egg. I'm no McDonalds expert but last time I was here they were promoting the "Tamago Mac" which was a hamburger with an egg on it... this seems like the same thing with a new name.

Oh the joys. So the way this works is, for 3 months of the year each burger is available. They only make a certain amount each day so if you want to try it you pretty much gotta get there at lunch or they'll all be gone.

I'm tempted to try each one to see... but I'm not really THAT tempted.

*UPDATE* I just played a world-themed quiz came called "Sugoroku" in class. Students had to answer questions about countries and places in the world in English. One question was "Please name a Mexican food."

Everyone said "Tacos" so I said "Name one Mexican food OTHER than tacos." There was complete silence until one boys hand shot up and he said "あっ！テキサスバーガー！" Which means "AH! The Texas Burger!"

Kansai Video

Got a new video for people to check out...

It's of my trip to the Kansai region of Japan which is a region that I (and most people) really love. It's got big busy cities and small quiet country sides, mountains and oceans. It's also got a really strange and fun dialect full of bizarre words. It doesn't beat my little snow country here in Urasa, though.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH IT ON YOUTUBE

-Mike

Figuring out an explanation...

Every now and then a teacher will have a problem with a sentence in a book or something and ask me to help them understand it. I love when this happens because 1) I'm usually really bored at work. 2) I enjoy the challenge of trying to explain something or translating it into a similar Japanese version... 3) I am able to realize how confusing English (or any language at that) can be.

Today my teacher came up to me with a passage from a story about a girl who is on a date with a guy that she really likes.

It said something along the lines of this...

"I began to smile while I hope and waited for him to kiss me. And he did. If it's possible, I smiled even wider."

No particularly epic... doesn't even seem that difficult to understand to me... The teacher, who is very very good at Eglish, didn't understand the part that says "If it's possible I smiled even wider."

"What does this mean?" He asked.

As I started to explain it I found it was really difficult to explain simply. It was much more complex than I had imagined...

I started simple:
"Well, she was already smiling and then they kissed. Then, she was so happy she smiled even wider."

He responded, "So it is a fact that she is smiling wider?"

"Well... no... the second half implies that she was already smiling as wide as she could smile."

"Well, I'm a bit confused about the tense of this first section. Shouldn't it say 'If it was possible.' instead of If it is possible?"

Now I started to get confused.
"Well no... I don't think so... hmmm..."

"Is 'if' being used conditionally?" He was growing more and more confused.

"Well it's kind of a hypothetical thing... I think."

...There was an awkward pause....

I thought for a moment and came up with this.

"It would be the same as if she said "I was smiling as wide as I could, then he kissed me. I was so happy that I felt as if I could smile even wider, even though that is not possible."

The he stared at me and said "I think I'll try to go back to my desk and write out some other examples that are similar to this to try and understand..."

I decided I wanted to write some examples too, so that he might understand better. Boy, it's a difficult thing!

Photos of the Snow

So the top photo is of the area I live in, Urasa. If you watch the last shot of the first video I made, tripping and skipping to Japan. You'll see, in the very last shot, the lush mountains and rice fields from the exact same spot. Now it's bare, white, and empty.

Next is a photo of me standing next to some snow piles next to my apartment. Damn I look good.

The last is my car after only 3 hours of snow. It's been snowing for 36 hours since the photo was
taken and it's still snowing hard...

Since I was young I wondered if there could be thunder and lightening during a snowstorm... I now know that, yes, there can be. During a snowstorm there was very loud thunder and very bright blue flashes of lightening. It was something else. This has got to be one of the strangest places I've ever been to. I love every minute of it.

Wanna see MORE photos? Good, I took a lot more...

go here...

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

雪国 (Snow Country)

One of my professors sent me a wonderful care package of books including the famous "Snow Country" by Yasunari Kawabata. It's about the region of Japan I live in (in fact my apartment complex is named after his term 'Snow Country'). I got the book around New Years but waited to read it until I started school again so I could read it during my free periods. I started it yesterday and I'm almost finished.

The book has a very interesting story of a man, a geisha, their inner-demons and their relationship in this area of Niigata. Being in this area, reading the book, and having a decent understanding of Japanese culture I'm really amazed by Kawabata's writing. It switches between really human sounding dialogue and really beautiful long poetic passages about the setting. I think I'm in the perfect place to read this book.

This book couldn't have come at a more appropriate time. It is currently snowing unbelievably hard. It switches between heavy but small fluffy flakes of snow falling to windy violent massive chunks of snow falling. The snow in most places has collected and is above my head, many piles of snow from the snowplows and shoveling are around 7 or 8 feet tall. At the parking lot at the local "Walmart"-esque shop here the plowed snow piles are as tall as a house. How it was piled that high I may never know.

Either way, it is definitely 雪国。

It's So Cold In My Apartment...

1) I can see my breath anytime a heater is not on.

2) After reaching the desired temperature of 22 degrees Celsius (About 72 degrees Fahrenheit) if I turn my kerosene heater off, the temperature will fall 10 degrees to about 12 degrees Celsuis (about 54 degrees) in about 10-15 minutes.

3) Steam rises from the toilet when you pee.

4) So much steam is created in my shower that I literally couldn't see the ground or where any soap or shampoo bottles were. I was lost in a cloud of white.

5) I no longer have to put all my groceries away/can purchase more food than my little fridge has room for because it's colder outside of my fridge than it is inside of it.

I will continue this list going for a little while.

This Is What I Wear To Sleep Now...

1. Long underwear
2. Sweatpants
3. Long sleeve shirt
4. Sweatshirt with hood pulled up
5. Heavy winter hiking socks
6. One heavy futon blanket
7. A comforter
8. Another heavy futon blanket
9. A sleeping bag

and the most recent addition to the game...

10. A blue Snuggie. Thanks to my girlfriend's Mom.

I still wake up and my face hurts from being freezing. With the Snuggie addition, I did get surprisingly warmer.