Happy Thanksgiving!

This year I broke a cardinal rule... I put up the Christmas tree before Thanksgiving. I'm a little bit ashamed... I always hated when people skipped over Thanksgiving.

But I have an excuse this year - I'll be in CHINA over Thanksgiving! Woohoo! I'll miss having turkey, but I hear Peking Duck is pretty tasty. I'll post plenty of pictures when I return:)

Chrysanthemum Festival

Hirosaki is the town where Chris and I went for the Cherry Blossom Festival earlier this spring. In the fall they have a Chrysanthemum festival. Last weekend Denia, Alison, Laura, Sarah and I went to the park for the day to see the fall colors and eat festival food.

Denia (on the left) is from Texas and isn't used to crisp fall mornings... Alison gave her a hat, I gave her gloves and a jacket... she barely survived. Winter might be rough on my good friend Denia:).

I LOVE this red bridge. It's beautiful in the spring with the cherry blossoms, but in the fall it's nice to be able to see the park without the cherry blossom crowds.

I like to think of these as bonsai apple trees... they were all over the park. We really wanted to pick the apples... I don't think that would go over well here in Japan.

I love taiko drummers... but this was the first time I had seen little tyke taiko drummers.... So cute! They played a couple traditional Japanese songs, and then they did "Thriller" by Michael Jackson... not joking.

Chrysanthemums, as I found out on Wikipedia, are the same as mums... Okay... I know that sounds really obvious. But I wasn't the only one that wasn't sure about that one.

This is the 400th year for the Chrysanthemum Festival... or maybe there are 400 apples on this sign... or maybe Hirosaki was established 400 years ago... or maybe there are 400 residents of Hirosaki... anyway... it's a neat sign.

Oh. My. Goodness. These are gigantic, mutant Chrysanthemums.

Wow... They're almost a little scary. Spider-like. Or like a bad toupee.

Traditional Japanese woman, meet traditional American woman. Do you think this mannequin is supposed to be life-sized?

I remember this... this is the scene in The Last Samurai when Tom Cruise meets the samurais.

I'm told that none of those Japanese signs said "please do not sit and pretend to drink tea with the mannequins on display". So I think this was perfectly fine.

Wow... there must have been so much work going in to dressing each of these guys every day! And then the flowers wilt and you have to do it again the next day! How frustrating!

Inside the Hirosaki castle tower.

View from the top castle tower window.

This woman was making these delicious peanut crackers... they tasted like peanut brittle in a cracker disguise. All the goodness of peanut brittle and nothing stuck in your teeth! Yum!

Lovely weekend, with lovely friends, in a lovely place. Plus we got to watch Casper the Friendly Ghost on the bus on the way back from Hirosaki, so it made for a pretty spectacular day:)

Ramen!

I LOVE Japanese Ramen. Now that it's getting colder, I'm as excited about Ramen as I am about chili.

Ramen MUST be served in gigantic bowls. I think it would be a crime if you were to serve Ramen in regular cereal bowls. There's just too much goodness to fit in cereal bowls. I've lived here 7 months now, and ever since our first evening here, and our first experience with a real Ramen restaurant, I've wanted to find some great Ramen bowls.

There was a huge Asian Bazaar a couple weekends ago, and one of the vendors had the exact bowls that I wanted. Time to try out a recipe! I bought the bowls, and after finishing my shift at the bazaar, I opened the box to find that they had sent me home with plates! NOooooo! I was pretty angry. So angry, in fact, that the very next weekend I drove myself right out to that vendor's business location and bought a set of bowls.... to compliment the set of plates that I decided to keep.... Ok. So I ended up getting over the plates pretty quickly.

That evening a couple of friends joined me to make some Japanese ramen. It turned out pretty well... but I'm glad I have the whole winter ahead of me to try out more recipes.

This ramen has Chinese noodles, green onions, pork loin, normal sprouts, and bamboo sprouts.