Well I must admit, I've been very lazy with this journal thing. A few interesting things have happened here and there but most of the time I have been working on the Obusession, Masuichi, and Obusedo websites (which are still not up -- not my fault) . The yane which I mentioned last ...uh.. May? Is complete! It looks very cool and imposing, pretty soon I think that construction will start around the yane to make it look more like hotel garden. Or maybe it won't, there is alot of construction going on around here, the hotel's two physically seperate buildings are going up and the restaurant San-Poo-Loh and the Salt warehouse got gutted and are now starting to be be rebuilt into one large italian style restaurant. Which was sad for me because my favorite (and only) bar in town got taken out with the restaurant so now I have no where to go on Friday nights.
Then in other happenings the Summer interns from Stanford, Ben, Eli, and Karen have come and gone. Their Japanese is so much better than mine it isn't even funny, oh well. It was cool because for a while the two guy interns would hang out at the brewery shop at night with me and we would have dinner and watch whatever junky movies were on tv. It's always nice to have people around you can actually talk to, it's just hard and tiring to speak another language that you don't really understand, going native tounge again is a good break.
Oh and then the Obuse-mini-marathon came and went, that was pretty cool, the whole town of Obuse turned out to cheer on the runners. Some people came out and gave the runners stuff like apples, cider, peaches and bananas as they ran by. Karen and I were in charge of taking pic of people running and since we had to carry cameras and keep up with the runners we got to do the marathon on bikes! haha It's really the only way to run.
Then I also had a week-long opportunity to work at a miso factory and make miso! Making miso requires a lot of beans, similar to making sake in that it's alive, but also not very similar at all. It was fun to see how other fermented products are made, and then draw parallels to sake, but I think I'll stick with making alcohol.
There was also two excursions out of the country, one to my friends Chris & Juilia's wedding; and a week long excursion to Thailand that I made with Carol. Chris & Juila's wedding took place in the most obscenely beautiful location you could ever imagine. It was rediculous. If you don't beleive me, go look at the pics in the photo gallery, knowing that mere pictures cannot do justice to how implausibly wonderful it was, and then weep knowing that you will never have a wedding as perfect as this one. It took place in Wisconson so I also got to eat alot of cheese and wieners yum! Then there was Thailand, it was fantastic (we went before all hell broke loose in the south). I ate so much spicy food that in the final days of our trip I would literally wake up with a raw, spiced-out sore throat. Oh man Thai food is good. Especially the stuff you can find on the street, I stuffed mysefl silly on the most wickedly tasty, spicy, sour, and sweet tidbits, soups and curries you can imagine. Oh-ho and you haven't seen a market 'till you go to the Bankok Weekend Market, it's shopping insanity defined @_@.
These days around Obuse I don't have much to do. The websites are done (and have been done for three months, just waiting for approval from the higher-ups). So I escaped to help with the construction of the new restaurant and general gardening/fixing tasks around the Masuichi grounds. I can take apart stuff real good and I think I get the basics of how to make a house, maybe I'll get some kinda run-down piece of crap place in the future and use it as my 'experiement' and see if I can't figure out how buildings are made. I'm also getting really antsy because, well, brewing will begin again soon!!! I can't wait but I have to. Feels like Christmas when I was 7 again and would start counting down the days more than a month in advance. Anyway I promise to keep this thing updated more regularly now, I realize that I actually missed out on a bunch of stuff now that I'm attempting to write it all down. And I haven't even mentioned my Mom and Grandma coming, making Plum liqueur, harvesting rice... Man time flies.
Sean.
