Soba, ya....

Yesterday I went over to Jindaiji, which is apparently famous for its soba, to have some of said soba and then to make pottery nearby. There really isn't much else to say on the matter except that it was SOOOO MUCH FUN!!

Twenty-five of us--plus Chris, the organizer, and the two language helpers--descended on the poor soba-ya (soba shop), where about a third of the people sat in the western-style room and the rest of us got really excited about the tatami room and converged in there. Once there, Chris instructed us on the proper method of soba-eating (as well as eating in Japan in general, apparently), which is detailed in the video below.

Transcript:

This is the way we eat soba: take the noodles in your ohashi, and then you put it in the shoyu [soy sauce] and then you eat it, while slurping, to show your appreciation to the chef.

After we all finished our soba, Chris took us down the way to the pottery place, where we were each issued a slab of clay,

and let loose. I made a little cup/bowl thing with kanji etched into the side. I forgot to take a picture of it, but (assuming it makes it through the firing process in one piece) I'll put up pictures of the finished project when I get it back in a few weeks.

After we finished our pieces, we looked around the surrounding temple. I ran the pottery time down to the wire so I didn't get to look around as much as I would have liked, but I do have a typical flurry of pictures that I somehow manage to take while running around like a madwoman/chicken with her head cut off. They can be found here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2031867&id=1186934580&l=3435c50b9c

Later that night we had a (not so) little celebration for Kim's 20th birthday involving cakes, cookies, cinnamon roll hugs and frosting on my face. It was tons of fun; those pictures are also included in the album linked above.

[Speaking of pictures and videos, I've gone back and imbedded the Nihon Buyo dance video as well as the Lost in Mitaka videos in their appropriate posts, and added links to the photo albums for suika and hanabi, as well as the sadou. GO CHECK THEM OUT!!]

That was the bulk of yesterday. Today was my 'midterm' exam--as much as you can have a midterm for a six-week course--and afterwards I went down to a Mitaka City Governmental Building of some sort to pick up my actual alien registration card, then went out to lunch with Kim, Katie, James, Patrick, Nora and Akiko; pictures from that are in the Soba ya album linked above.

And that's all the exciting stuff from my front!! Tomorrow is the Zen temple visit, which means you guys'll be getting bombarded with more complaints about seiza then. Look forward to it!!

~ Anna

For those of you that speak Japanese, you may already have gotten the pun in the title of this entry, but for those of you that don't, I'm going to go ahead and enlighten you. As I said above, putting -ya at the end of something means that it's a shop, or a place to buy things. BUT, the connector 'ya' also means 'things like...'. Thus, the title means both 'The soba shop' and 'Soba and...' Clever, huh?