I Don't Care, It's Still Winter

I have a few rules in life. One of them is this: "If it's snowing, it's not Spring yet." Seems simple enough to me, but Kyoto didn't get the memo. We are into March now, and it still continues to periodically snow. I am not used to this. Snow once every two years is good enough for anyone. It is very pretty, though. I tried to convey the this whimsical wintry beauty in the photo above, but I think it just looks like a sloppy and cold snowstorm.

Because of the conditions outlined above, I minimize my time spent outdoors during the work week. Walk to work, walk back, that's it. I even interrupt my return trip with an interlude in my grocery store. Nothing puts a smile on my face like listening to the sounds the store offers. When you first enter there is a tape player blasting out a man's voice simulating what you might hear if you were in an actual market: "Oranges! Oranges! Oranges! They're delicious and cheap! Bring some home tonight!" Are you trying to trick me into thinking I am at a farmer's market and you aren't some disembodied cassette recorded in 1982? Once you proceed through the entrance you start to hear the music pumped through the speakers. I wish I could remember all of the tunes the PA system pumps out. Sometimes its difficult to tell which 80s song you are listening to because rather than playing the actual song, the store chooses to broadcast a cheap midi imitation that sounds like it you should be in an elevator. Here are the songs I can be sure I have heard:

Hey Jude - Beatles
Norwegian Wood - Beatles
All I want for Christmas is You - Mariah Carey
Take My Breath Away - Berlin (from Top Gun)

And yesterday I definitely heard the soothing sounds of the ocean playing as I tried to decide if I should buy chocolate covered potato chips (I did).

I wasn't going to include this section into my blog because I didn't think "sounds I hear in my grocery store" would prove very interesting, but today in the meat section I heard something unbelievable. I honestly stopped looking at the pork and stared at the tape player with a huge grin on my face. It was what sounded like a little boy doing a rap in Japanese about ham. "Yeah, yeah, ham, ham, ham sausage. Ham and eggs, if you don't have ham just eat the eggs. Grandma! Put ham into the lunchbox, dad will like it. Of course I will like it to! I like it!" Now, this sort of thing has to be weird no matter what country you are in. I refuse to believe that this is normal. But all the other shoppers just went about their business without a second look.

Come to think of it, the same thing happened when I was eating at a ramen restaurant last week with some coworkers. We were just eating our ramen and chatting while unremarkable pop music played in the shop. Suddenly, though, the music shifted into hard core metal replete with the deep throated screams you usually hear in horror movies. Nobody batted an eyelash. I was left feeling incorrigibly out of place.


I may have mentioned in a previous post that I am doing a lecture series on sports in Seattle. Somehow I couldn't properly convey my sense of sadness at the prospect of the Sonics leaving for Oklahoma (I was just in Oklahoma! I like Oklahoma! Why do they have to steal half of what made the 90s memorable for me.) In an effort to convey my emotions, I showed them a excerpt from a recent Bill Simmons article:

"On the flip side, Presti has to be slammed a little for how the Ray Allen trade turned out: Basically, the Sonics dealt Ray Allen and "Big Baby" Davis for Jeff Green and Donyell Marshall's corpse and saved $10 million for the 2008-09 season ... money that they won't be spending on players because their soulless owner is busy destroying a 41-year history of professional basketball in Seattle. Does that sound like a good deal to you? Didn't think so. I'd have more to say here, but the poor Sonics fans are like abused dogs in an animal shelter right now. Let's just move on."

I realized I wasn't getting through when I had to explain the word "soulless."

Luckily, to help cheer me up, I spent all of Saturday wandering around Kyoto with my friend looking at the newly blossoming plum petals (you ain't nobody in this town if you don't head out to see the plum blossoms when they bloom.) I don't know what the fascination among Japanese people is with going to beautiful locations laid out perfectly with rows of flowers, and taking nothing but close-up detailed pictures of single blossoms. I mean, I appreciate the fleeting beauty of a single plum blossom as much as the next guy, but should I be neglecting the 1000 year-old temple around me? Well, if you can't beat 'em...


Oh, I forgot to write about the Great G8 Staircase Race. I explained in a previous post that I was participating in this event to promote the G8 Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Kyoto. First of all, the place was CRAWLING with people. I have never seen the staircase so busy. People wearing costumes, cheerleaders, and a ton of old Japanese men in running shorts. I hesitate to even bring up the warm up exercises they had everyone do only because I don't think I can do it justice. You know that movement you see sometimes where a person will put their arms out to the side with palms out and shake their chest from left to right? Yeah. That was part of the warm up. The stairs were miserable. I, in my feeble attempt at climbing them was dominated by the three other people I was running with. It didn't help I was running anchor of this particular relay. Thirty-nine seconds and 172 stairs later, I was at the top with a microphone in my face.
Reporter: Dou deshitaka? - How was it?
Me (panting and unable to operate my hamstrings): Kurushikatta.

Now, kurushikatta can mean a couple of different things. Here are some translations offered by www.alc.co.jp:

1. agonizing
2. bleeding
3. croosh
4. crucial
5. labored
6. laboring
7. painful
8. rough
9. stern
10. strait
11. thorny
12. trying

I don't think that was the scoop she was looking for, but it was all my poor lungs could offer. Thanks to the fact that nobody on our team was particularly slow, America took third place! Not quite the Miracle on Ice, but I was pleased. Turns out, the best runners did the worst in this competition. The German team was made up of a Japanese running club (not a German to be found in this city, apparently), and they did the worst. The winning team was the Russians, who, true to every Cold War stereotype I can muster, were stocky and burly (not to mention a little bit standoffish.) My hypothesis is that strong leg muscles are more important than long graceful strides in a staircase race. The burly Russians had some meaty legs and were thus able to outlast the competition.

Top Four Fastest Countries
1. Russia
2. Italy
3. America
4. Great Britain (Great Britain's team consisted of a Briton, an Irishman, a Lithuanian, and a Japanese.)

What you are looking at here, gentle reader, is a picture of the author's worst nightmares.