They don't seem to have shovels here, much less plows. Basically you're on your own. Luckily, I have a supreme off-road ready driving machine at my disposal. I actually got to use my 13" snow tires when I went to buy curtains for my living room to keep the glare out and the heat in.Utsunomiya is famous for chinese dumplings called gyoza. I never heard of them until I came to Japan for the first time, now they're famous worldwide. Guess what I had for dinner.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080205/hl_nm/dumpling_poisoning_dc_1
I thought my Japanese was getting pretty decent until I was talking to these girls at the bar last weekend. For once, I spoke better Japanese than they did English, and I was doing OK, making idiotic small talk. But I didn't know how to say anything better than "what is you hobby?", so kind of got stopped there. I was a little too hammered to make a sensible move in Japanese.
Haven't gotten any calls from most of you, so I thought I would remind you of my Skype screen name: dcroasmu. 'Cause I'm creative. Download Skype and give me a call and hope to catch me or send an email and we'll find a time.
I'm working on my "golden week" plans. That's a group of holidays close together that get me a week off at the end of April. I got this idea that I should try to go to every home stadium in Nippon Professional Baseball (not in 1 week, while I'm here). I say home stadium, because teams tend to have at least one alternate place where they play home games, and sometimes they'll play games in other cities just to bring the game to the fans. In fact, the Yomiuri Giants are playing in Utsuomiya this year.
Anyway, there's only 12 teams, so I think it's doable. Especially since 5 of them are in Tokyo. There's also 3 teams in the Osaka/Kyoto/Kobe area, so that's 8. That leaves Hiroshima and Fukuoka, way to the South, and Hokkaido and Sendai way North. I made up a nice little map and everything.
I'm going to try to do the southern loop during golden week and get one of the Osaka teams on the way. Let me know if you want to come along.
