This post was updated on December 8, 2007 to add some more photos.

Thanksgiving. It was one of the best meals I’ve had since coming to this country. I refused to let this holiday pass without celebrating it with busting my gut full of food, so I invited some other JETs and some of their Japanese friends over for a very nice potluck-style Thanksgiving dinner. I must say I was actually somewhat surprised at how Thanksgiving-like a meal we were able to produce.

Overall we had some excellent homemade stuffing, a cheesy-broccoli caserole, a valiant attempt (yet overall failure) to make corn bread, wine with crackers and cheese, cookies, mashed potatoes and gravy, and Mark was even able to find some cranberry sauce. Luckily the import food store here sells gravy, so that makes my day.

Do you notice one thing missing? Yeah, it’s apparently a real bitch to find a turkey in this country. From asking around the best solution I could find was to special order one from Tokyo, and I wasn’t going to go that far just for a turkey. Even if I got a turkey, the closest thing to an oven we all have are our microwaves, which in this country also double as regular ovens, toasters, and grills.

We figured that the next best thing was to get a big bucket o’ chicken from KFC, so I rode my bike down to the nearest KFC, bought a big bucket of chicken, and we feasted.

And oh was it so good.

Earlier that day Beth and I took a trek out to a large gymnasium in Fukushima where we watched a marching band exhibition. I’m particularly fond of my students who are in band (versus sports), so I figured it would be nice to give them some support by showing up to their performance.

This particular band was cool because they all had pimp hats. Furthermore, I was quite impressed because half of the bands weren’t high school or even middle school–they were elementary school kids. I’ve never seen elementary school bands actually play real music, much less while marching in formations. I’m still impressed, actually.

Later on that weekend, Beth, Kate, and I jumped aboard a train down to Koriyama and then off west a bit to Inawashiro, a small town north of Lake Inawashiro, the third-largest lake in Japan. Our plan was to go to a specific river onsen that’s quite literally just a river that flows with naturally heated water. We figured it would be a cool place to go to in this fall weather.

Unfortunately the bus to go up near there didn’t run for a few hours after we arrived, and we didn’t want to go there in the dark (it gets dark by around 4:30pm).

We decided to go a little bit further west and hit up a different onsen that was right off of the train line. This had us arrive in the nice little inaka village of Okinashima at its nice little tiny station.

After a short amount of wandering around to find an onsen, we happened to come across a bus full for firewood that had absolutely no outcome on the trip, but I found interesting enough to take a picture of.

Shortly thereafter, we found a nice little hidden ryokan where we had a nice and relaxing bath. After heading back to Inawashiro and having dinner, went back to Fukushima. It was really one of those soothing ‘it’s the journey, not the destination’ trips.

And now, I must go back to studying for the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test), which I am taking tomorrow. I’m trying for 3-kyu, but I quite honestly would be overwhelmingly surprised if I passed.

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