Romen, how could you be so delicious?!

Hi there everyone and hi to Marco =D!!!!

Thank you for your email on Romen recipe request Marco XD!
I am not sure how far you want to go for it so.... for this time, I would use instant noodle that you probably can get over there in Italy...... Do you have them over there?!?!?!



I think in Japan, we have so many instant noodle available.
Here above are some of me and my family's favorite kind.

From the left, that is my fav. "Miso-ramen" from Sapporo Ichiban corp. This company has been dedicated themselves to make so many noodles in the past and successfully noted for that noodles. * Miso is a traditional Japanese seasoning, fermented soybean paste. Probably known as miso in some places overseas by now?

The middle one is "Umaka-cchan" from House foods corp, this one is tonkotsu (pig bone) based soup. This one is my Mom's favorite. I like it pretty much as well especially in winter time. The tonkotsu soup will warm your body up nicely :).

The right one is "Kin-chan ramen" from Nisshin foods corp. So as Sapporo Ichiban, this company is also really famous for the noodles. This is my brother's fav :). My Dad.... he eats anything XD. So he will be happy with any of these.


So now, how to make ne?
With these instant noodles aka ra-men, wonderful powder soup will come with it. The soup is pretty good so I think we do not have to make our own soup spending hours (and it might end up with bad soup). Well if you want to go for it Marco, I will explain on it with other blog ne ;). Do ask me :D.

OK, maybe there will be 3 points.
1) How to boil the noodle.
2) How to make the soup (this is so easy with the powder soup come with it).
3) Choose the toppings.

Since the noodle will be done in 2-3 minutes, let's decide what you want for the topping.
Oh found some interesting page on Internet, the ranking of my favorite ra-men toppings.

Those who would like to try reading in Japanese go jump the link page ;)!!
No.1: Cha-shu- (roast pork)
No.2: Menma (Chinese bamboo shoots that have been dried, soaked in water and then seasoned for use in cooking)
No.3: Aonegi (green onion, chopped to small pieces)
No.4: Nitamago (boiled sweeten egg) ----- I LOVE THIS!!!!! I do not make this at home though :p
No.5: Moyashi (bean sprouts)

Hummmm this is getting pretty long, isn't it? and probably I have not come close to what you really want to know Marco. Those toppings are something we choose at the ra-men shops, we have different line-up of toppings at home. Since some of them are pretty time consuming.....

Erm... let me come back on this a bit later!!!! Chotto mattete-------- m(. .)m

You you you you!

It has been long time since I wrote on this blog last time.

Today, I had a question on Japanese from my deary friend, Lucas. Hi Lucas =D!!

Question was on you in Japanese. I believe in English, there are not too many ways to say "you". Is that right??

What I think of is... just you.......

Anyways, Lucas's question was what how to use "omae" and "anata". His knowledge on those 2 words was like this "I have read that anata is used between close lovers, but I have also read it is used between businessmen."

OK. Let's explain what I think... what I know :p.

Now let's start with "you" expression we have in Japanese.

We have

1) Anata

2) Kimi

3) Omae

4) Anta (this one came from "Anata" I believe)

and there are several more like "Ondore" "Odore" "Ondorya" lol, those are something that you would not want to use for your friends or whatever, only when you try to get ready for fight or something XD. Just for your info :p.

In Japanese, we tend to omit subject like "I " and "you" in conversation unlike English. If you want to ask "What would you like to drink?" then we would say "nani ga nomitai?"

In this phrase, "nani" = what, "nomitai" = want to drink, "ga" = something that comes after subject in Japanese. So there are no "you" part in Japanese.

Anyways.... so go back to 1) Anata 2) Kimi 3) Omae 4) Anta.

Anata, would be used for

1) someone close lover, like wife to her husband

2) someone you do not know much, like someone you just met (it is a bit weird concidering 1) isn't it?)

3) between business man (this can count as (2) too I think)

Overall, Anata is an expression pretty polite.

Kimi, would be used for

1) someone at the same age or younger, we do not use this for elder people

Omae, would be used for

1) among men, this sounds a bit rough or macho. Some girls use this (I do too sometimes) but it does sound like she is not very feminine (^^;.

2) someone younger than you. But this also sounds like you are a bit bossy I think.

Anta, would be used for

hummmm a bit hard to explain... this sounds a bit casual or rough.

So, "anata" would be the most approprite in any occasion I think.

Hummmm would this be good enough?? Maybe not. If you ask me more, then I will try to answer further ne ;)!!

xoxo

Silver week?

Starting from Sep 19th yesterday to Sep 23rd we are having a holiday named "Silver week".

This holiday has just started this year (^^;. We have a holiday called Golden week in April to May. Starting sometime around 29th April (Green day, former emperor Showa's birthday. It became "Green day" to dedicate his work in planting etc) and end on 5th May (children day in Japan).

I think "Silver week" coupling with "Golden week" seems pretty easy naming though... what do you think?!?!?



This is what character "Silver week" is looked like in Japanese lol. Different from English eh XD?!

Berryz Kobo CDs and Sumo goods

Today is the post for my store items.
I have uploaded some of Berryz Kobo, Perfume, Gackt and limited edition CDs of V6 (Johnny's entertainment) today.

Please come and check out my eBay store!!

For Berryz and Hello! Project items go to the category Hello! Project.
For Johnny's, go to the category Johnnys. J-rock here and Tableware here!!
Thank you~~~~ =D!

Politics and a party!

Last Sunday August 30th was a general election day in Japan.
I went to the election hall around 4 pm to vote and come home to sleep :p (I was really sleepy on Sunday).

The vote started to count after 8 closing of the palling places. Minshu tou (Democratic Party), the opposition party overwhelmed the ruling party, Jimin tou aka Jiyu-minshu tou (Liberal Democratic Party) (@_@)!!!
Probably pretty different from some other countries, Jimin tou has been ruled Japanese politics for more than 50 years since November 1955 except during 1993 to 1994. That was the only time Jimin tou became opposition party. So it looks like a big change.
I mean I was pretty tired of seeing Jimin changing its leader for many times and seems to become the prime minister was the most important consideration for some of the politicians so I guess it is good :). I cannot say I know much about politics, and I do not feel like change of the leading party will do much different however, I think it is good to have leading party changed then who would be the leader in the leading party would be less consideration..... hopefully.

So the man at the top will be our new leader. His name is Yukio Hatoyama. Yoroshikune (hello :p)!

OK, now about a party! Not about the political one but usual fun party yay~~~~!!!!!
So the reason I was tired on Sunday was because I went to a river with 8 of my friends on Saturday to swim and do a BBQ =D!
We met up at Hiroshima station at 11:00 and started out a bit past 11:00 for Jagui river. My friends and I have been going to that river park called "Play park Jagui" past 3 years.
We are really fond of that palce. There are grill that we can do BBQ, the river with different depth. Some place really shallow that small kids can play (even though we do not bring any kids lol). We can catch fish at the sallow part. Also at the deep parts, we can swim, we can jump in from the rocks side of the river. It is really nice.

The ordinary driving course from Hiroshima station is to get on a high way to Otake inter change (I think... I mean I forgot :p) and get off there and stop by at a super market named "YumeTown" to get some rice, snacks and drinks =D.

The main event this year was JUMPING OFF FROM A BRIDGE!!!



The bridge, you can see it in the picture of the right. It was about 7 m high!
I usually afraid of height but not on the Saturday haha! On the left picture at the red arrow you can see the splash I made. I was just got into the river from the bridge and was in the water =D. One of my friends took it with her cell phone camera (thank you Eri-chan (^3^))!!
On the right was my second trial with my friend Miki, I am the one in the red and Miki is in the yellow =D. We were standing out of the bridge guardrail kind of thing, about to jump.
This year, there were a lot of people at the bridge trying to jump and jump actually. Last year, we were just watching some people doing that and called them fool...... but this year, we became one of them and it was lot of fun lol lol lol.

Even after 2 days, my butt hearts probably from jumping into the water from the bridge :p. Other girls were saying that their butt heart from the impact of getting into the water.... haha. But we were pretty happy also with the pain :D :D :D :D!!

We will go there next year!!

First band meeting

Since my former band "chao" was ended due to Say-kun's business, Yossy the bass and vocal girl and I thought we could do something new. Yossy invited her co-worker Aki-chan and I invited Naoki, my first band guiterist ("chao" was my second band). 4 of us got together for the first time.

We just jamed for an hour. Since Aki-chan (she will be the vocalist) liked the song "I can do better" by Avril Lavigne. We tried to play that one. After an hour jamed, we went to an icecream shop "Häagen-Dazs" and ate icecream and chat what we would like to do.

Naoki picked out a song of "Maiagaru" by Onmyoza (this is one of his fav bands). Since everybody will be busy for a while, the next practice will be on 19th Sep :).

Finally it arrived

Goodness! I finally got my substitute PC (>_<)! Waited to long!!!
My PC was nearly dead I think 2 days ago. I only successfully started it up twice that day and even that time it shut down a bit after it started up.....

Got my PC yesterday yay!! Will sending my old one to the person who will fix her for me tomorrow.

Cutting Onion Without Crying

Since I live with my parents, I get to cook just once a week (Monday supper and Tuesday lunch) which is very lucky since I do not like cooking very much.

Anyways, since my Mom seems to have less energy today, I fixed lunch today. Made Yakimeshi (fried rice).
I used 1) onion 2) carrot 3) green pepper 4) scallop. My mother told me to use scallop before it got old :).
So I cut onion, carrot and green pepper into small pieces and saute it and put scallop then rice.

By the way, I believe cutting onion makes you cry doesn't it?? Well, it does to me. I think this is global.....? Anyways assume it is and today, I did not cry when I was cutting the onions!!!
I watched a TV show a couple of weeks ago. It was a quiz show. In the question, there was a quiz that
which one is not correct to prevent you from crying when you are cutting onion. There is one that does not work.
1) Have piece of onion in your mouth when you are cutting onions
2) Plug your nose when you are cutting onions
3) Cover your eyes when you cut onions

Do you know which one is the right answer?? 3) Covering your eyes does not work. Did you know that?? I have narrowed my eyes when I cut it before and I thought it worked... but the thing (I forgot how it is called) permeate through nose mucous membrane (wow big word... (@_@) than eyes!!!!

So today, I tried not to breath from nose when I was cutting the onion and I DID NOT CRY!!!!! It does work!!! You should try it too!!



[Today's Japanese]
Above pictures. The left one is onion in English right? And the right is green onion.
I was wondering why these two have similar name even though it does not look a like. But maybe those 2 are some kind of family ne, I think. In Japanese, those 2 does have similar names.
Onion is "Tama-negi" and green onion is "Negi". You see? the "negi" part is the same just like the onion part is the same in English. "Tama" means ball sort of in Japanese. So.... ball shaped negi is onion......

In English Onion seemed to be the base and in Japanese Negi (green onion) seemed to be the base.... would it be something to do with which one is used more or something? or.... which one is harvested more.....?!?!? muttering........

PC troubles....

Awwww.... it's been only a couple days since I started this blog and 2 days ago my PC started to act weirdly again..... (;_:). I had pretty similar symptoms about a month ago. I took my PC to a "Pasokon Kobo" which is a PC repair and selling (original PC with relatively low price) chain in Japan.

They could not find any false. They even said that they could not see the symptoms. I had 2 fans renewed and get the PC back. Then after a couple of days later I had the same symptom again!!! So I gave it a try to bring my PC to one of my friends, a German friend who lives very close to my house, who were to be really good with PCs. THEN, he found what was wrong and repaired it for me =D!!! And a month passed, it started again (==;. Restarting again and again sort of (not that bad yet). Since my computer genius buddy is back to Germany to see his family.... (TOO BAD Stephan!), I called a person who made the PC for me 7 year ago :p! I know~ I know~ it is pretty old ne..... I was almost buying a new notebook though... he said he could save my PC girl, so I am going to send the PC back to him for repair. Oh please fix it right *cross my fingers*.

So, this blog might be a bit slow for a while. Not sure it all depends on my PC girl condition. Will see......

[One little Japanese lesson for today :). ]

When you do something for the last try, like you do it without expecting too much from it. We say it "Dame moto de" in Japanese. It is kind of slang form I think... comes from "Dame de moto moto". Which means give it a try without expecting too much.
"Dame" literally means "not good". "Moto" would mean.... hum maybe "equal to the start"?? Hope this makes sense........

In the above sentenses, I gave it a try to bring my PC to one of my friends (I am not so sure if this English sounds natural. Forgive me English is not my first language so :p) if I say that in Japanese, I would say "Dame moto de tomodachi no tokoro ni PC wo motte itta (I went to bring my PC to my friend's without much expectaion)".
Well that is it for today!!! Mata (see ya)!!

Robert and Fabien from Germany

Finally be able to upload some pix of Robert and Fabian!!

Robert is one of my customers from Germany. He bought a CD from my shop JapaNeedz in March I believe (I checked it and yes it was March 12th that he purchased a MiniMoni CD from my store :)). I usually send my customers ship out notice on ship out with some questionnaire and he kindly replied to that email and I found out that he had a plan to come to Japan in April!

So he came to Japan =D.



This one above is the picture of his friend Fabian me and Robert (from the left) in front of Hiroshima castle. Pretty different from western castle, isn't it =D??



Fabian tried out a old Japanese battle clothes in the castle. He seemed pretty liked that one!



Robert showing me the pictures he took at Shukkei-en garden (and this one was taken by Fabian :p). The Shukkei-en is one of the famous place in Hiroshima as well for beautiful Japanese style landscape. I do not go there so often but when I go, I get really relaxed and feel good in the nature garden.



After Shukkei-en, we went to a burger shop (not sure if that was McDonald or Lotteria) and ate and went to a Book Off, a second handed books and CDs chain in Japan. Robert bought so many CDs and DVDs of Hello! Project. Attending to the Hello! Project concerts is one of the main reason for Robert and he actually attended many concerts and bought concert fans, posters and etc at the concert (the above picture is a part of his collection)! Glad Robert and Fabian had good time in Japan.... even though, they missed the plain back home once...... (they eventually made home of course ;D).

Robert is now into studying Japanese and purchase 2 Japanese learning books the other day.
"Minna no Nihongo Shokyu 1" and "Minna no Nihongo Shokyu1 Honyaku & Bunpou Kaisetsu" the first one is with basic explanation and quiz and stuffs and the second one is grammar stuff in German.

This book seems pretty famous for Japanese learner, some say those are the best and some say it is a bit boring so I am not sure. I guess it depends on people's taste. Well, good luck to Robert on his study!!

The second feed! Happy Birthday to Carla!!!

Today is my best friend Carla's birthday =D.
I sent her an email this morning, at that time I did not even know that I was going to open a blog on this Blogger today. Well, I did not even know that I open a blog account on anywhere actually.

After I finished my first feed, I received an email from her.
She mentioned about her blog having new pictures taken from a couple days ago. I was writing to her that I also just have opened a blog account today. And then I went to check her blog pictures and looked at her blog address, it seems SO FAMILIAR _______.blogspot.com/

I checked my blog address and looked back her blog, and noticed that we have an account on the same blog service!!!

Here comes some old pictures for you Carla. Maybe Ryan would enjoy them too!!

A picture from Christmas 1989 <--- LOL!!!!









I think this one was just before we finished the last semester in 1990.

This one was taken when I went back in 1992 with my mom ne ;)!!

Well, Happy Birthday Carla!!!!!
Sending lots of love from Japan!
xoxoxoxoxoxo

Nozomi

The 1st feed

The first day and first feed on Blogger =D!!!
The reason I opened this blog is basically for my shop :p.

I have a shop on eBay named JapaNeedz, selling many kind of Japanese stuffs :).
But before that, I had blog named "Peep at Japanese life?" about 3 years before on British platform called 20six. It was such a fine blog and I made a lot of friends there. I think it was in 2006 or 2007 that they made some major change on their system. It made us, 20six users inconvenient to use the software..... :(. Ever since, I stopped....

The reason I started my eBay store actually related to that blog.
One day early in 2006 I believe, one British friend of mine on 20 six asked me to buy and send him CDs of his favorite Japanese band.
He told me he searched everywhere in London for the band CDs but could not find them anywhere. Then he thought of me, a friend from Japan on Internet (cool, eh?).

I got the CDs for him from Amazon.co.jp and forwarded them to his house. It made him very happy. He even wrote about the CDs on the blog and uploaded the picture of the parcel =D.
Back then I was not working since I was ill for a while, then thought about selling things on auction site abroad since the CDs made my friend so happy. So I started my store.......... :).