I am less than super, however, because not only did it take me ages to post a picture of all the things Mariko sent me in our Gimme Your Stuff swap, the picture I did manage to take is out of focus. Also, I ate all the Starburst and Swedish Fish before I had a chance to take the picture. Oops.

Hopefully you can see how cute the fabrics are, how giant the bag of Peet's coffee beans is and how extensive the selection of lip balms is. What is less apparent from the picture, but what you will quickly realize if you read her blog, is how funny and awesome Mariko is. Truly, the ideal swap partner. Also, she introduced me to the magic of Sakura Pink/Nadeshiko Pink lip balm and I am now addicted. You can read more about it and see what I sent her here.

I got an ice cream maker for my birthday and am now gripped with the desire to make ice cream in crazy Japanese flavors like houji-cha (roasted green tea), azuki bean, kabocha, black sesame, yuzu.... No shrimp or chicken wing ice cream for me, though.

So far I've only made this kinako (toasted soy flour) ice cream, which is so good, it has only further fueled my new obsession. I posted the recipe over at Delicious Coma. Try it!

Dear Non-residents of Japan,

I'm so sorry. It must be terrible, living in a place where you can't walk to your local grocery store and purchase Coconut and Pine Cream Pocky, then return to your apartment and happily munch your way through one pack of each, alternating between the two flavors (a maneuver which surprisingly does not replicate the taste of a pina colada), while watching the latest antics of Hard Gay on TV.

I just feel so bad, especially about the Coconut Pocky because really, the combination of biscuit stick, chocolate and tiny, chewy chunks of coconut is as wonderful as the time Hard Gay went to the Yahoo Japan headquarters and tried to convince them he should be the new mascot. The Pine Cream Pocky is pretty good too, tangy and yellow with little flecks of pineapple, but it's a lesser treat, standing in the shadows of its coconut cousin. Like the time Hard Gay tried to help that failing ramen shop -- it's better than most things, but not as good as it gets.

That's why my heart goes out to you, living as you do in a country where you can't see a grown man in leather short-shorts giving another man a ball-gag for Father's Day on primetime TV, and even worse, a country without tropical-themed Pocky. It's just sad.

Maybe watching some Hard Gay will help.

Your friend and sympathizer,

Anjali

More Gimme Your Stuff love, this time from Tania in Portugal, who makes all manner of crafty and cute things.

She sent me some fabrics, trims, a Marie Claire and a Marie Claire Idées, delicious and interesting edibles and two green t-shirts. I'm most excited about the brown and turquoise fabric, the world of French crafting and all of the food items, which include a floral tea (makes a yummy sun tea), pumpkin and walnut jam (delectably orange), fennel candy (refreshing) and fancy dark chocolate. I've put the azuki-bean jam and cold barley tea away for a couple days and am enjoying my European food holiday while it lasts.

Next Monday is umi no hi, or Marine Day, in Japan. According to the rather poorly-written Wikipedia page I just linked to: "We wish to express our gratitude for the favor of the sea, and it wishes maritime country Japan to prosper" is assumed to be an outline in the law concerning the national holiday. Uh, really?

Coincidentally(?), maritime themes are big in the craft world here right now, so I found some cute anchor and... boat-steering-wheel fabric(??) a couple weeks ago. (Any pirates out there, feel free to correct my vocabulary.) I knew I wanted to turn it into some sort of patchwork project and it seemed the right time to finally try out the handy Super Eggplant totebag tutorial. And so, this:

Interior, with cell phone pocket. The red fabric reminds me of ocean currents.

Since it was my first totebag, my first patchwork project and the first time I had done cross stitch since the age of 9, there were inevitable problems, most notably the sewing of the handles inside the bag -- it's a good thing I live alone and can't take out my craft rage on anyone else -- but it's done and I love it. Best of all, it expresses my gratitude for the favor of the sea and wishes maritime country Japan to prosper. Really, it does.

A little over a year ago, I was sitting in front of a computer in the foothills of the Himalayas, overjoyed to have finally received an email from my predecessor in Japan. He told me a little about the town where I would be living and the school where I would be teaching. But he didn't tell me anything about the apartment I would be living in, which I considered essential information. In response to my questions, he wrote: "The apartment in two words, IS PURE CRAP!!!" and "My suggestion when you see your apartment, cover it up!!!" (I may have been as appalled at his punctuation as I was at this description.)

I looked around. I was in India. People made houses out of boxes and dirty blankets. Giant spiders invaded my mom's house at regular intervals. I was sure it couldn't be so bad. Plus, it was cheap -- about $60/month for a two-bedroom apartment. I bought a big quilted wall hanging in India to "cover it up!!!" and hoped for the best.

When I arrived in August, the apartment didn't look so awful. Yes, the tatami was old and crackly in some rooms. The linoleum in the kitchen was a permanent gray. And some terrible soul had covered the ceiling of the bedroom with those glow-in-the-dark stars, but really, the ugliest aspect was the millions of tacks and scotch-tape marks dotting the walls where my predecessor had tried to "cover it up!!!" The place was just misunderstood, I thought. I was going to help it.

I immediately set to rearranging the furniture, ridding myself of the awful overhead fluorescent lights and fixing the other small problems that filled me with overwhelming depression whenever I looked at them. I didn't start the serious work until the spring, when I knew I was going to be staying for another year and the winter cold had retreated, releasing me from my living room captivity.

Because I'll only be living here for another year, there's only so much money and effort I've been willing to put in to fixing it up, but I'm so happy with what I've done so far, so much happier than I was when I first moved in. And because I love apartment makeover stories, I thought I might celebrate the one-year mark with a series of posts about what I've done to make my apartment the homey, comfortable place I always knew it could be.

"PURE CRAP"? I have two words for that: pure crap.

Next in the series: my living room, or How a $10 Wall-hanging From India Can Make Everything Better.

I think I might be becoming immune to cute.

Okay, not immune, but I definitely am not as easily impressed as I once was. After a year in the Land of Cute, I have become more discerning in my tastes. ("A hedgehog wearing a rain hat? That's fine, I suppose, though I prefer vegetables with grumpy faces myself.") It's not terrible though. I'm just a conscious consumer of cute.

So when something different comes along, something that sets off my cute-dar, I snap it up in an instant because I know it must be something special. So it was with Cubyrop.

First, there's the name. Cubyrop! It's even fun to type. The siren-like pull it exerted on me in the grocery store may have to do with a habit my high school best friend and I had of adding "-ie" to the end of anything, with the reasoning that it immediately made it more cute. Cube. Cubie. Furthermore, when "cuby" describes a tiny, colorful, fruit-flavored cube candy, the kawaii factor is off the charts, I'm sorry.

(It took a bit of thinking to explain "rop," but I'm fairly certain it is supposed to connote "drop," like a gumdrop. Cubyrop!)

The double-cube packaging is adorable, like each cubyrop needs a pal so it won't be lonely. It also results in some nice color combinations. And, as Japan has had 95%+ humidity this week, I appreciate that it keeps my little cubyrops from becoming a giant sticky cubymonster.

The flavors are fresh and yummy: mango, melon, lemon, pineapple, orange, peach, grape and strawberry. I think melon and mango, the newest additions to the Cubyrop family, are my favorites.

In conclusion, I have composed a haiku for Cubyrop:

Cubyrop is cute.
Cuter than a hedgehog in
a rain hat, I think.

(But not as cute as a grumpy-faced vegetable.)

The Before

I inherited a living room with a giant TV/DVD/stereo system, a hideous and giant laminate shelf thing, a small bookshelf, two uncomfortable chairs, the annual JET wall calendar and a pretty nice coffee table. The TV was placed in the far corner, which made the room into a sort of corridor, with everything crowded over on the TV side of the room. Also, the chairs were so low and the TV so high that you had to crane your neck back to watch anything. It was awful.

View from the kitchen: the chairs, the bookshelf and the calendar. The red chair's back doesn't stay up on its own; you have to prop it against a wall.

View from the bedroom: the TV, the hideous shelf, the fan, the coffee table.

View from outside: the corridor effect.

See the extended entry for the After pictures!

It's going on the fifth straight day of pouring rain and the only thing keeping me happy right now is this book:

I had never been exposed to a Moomin before moving to Japan, but I see them everywhere here, mainly because a local bank branch has the Moomin family as its mascots. (My own bank uses Paddington Bear. His picture even graces my ATM card which, along with the words "CASH CARD" written in a simple serif font, gives the thing all the authenticity of a child's plastic supermarket playset prop.)

Last week I found the whole series at my local library, started reading and promptly fell in love. The books were written by Tove Jansson, a reclusive Finnish woman who lived on a small island. Which is funny, because I've always wanted to be a reclusive Finnish woman who lives on an island and writes imaginative, smart and sometimes dark children's books. I'd live in a wood cabin, write on an old typewriter and tramp around in the woods a lot wearing handknit wool sweaters. Maybe someday....

In the meantime, I'll just keep rereading this, the first paragraph from "The Hemulen who loved Silence," because it makes me so very happy, even during this very soggy week:

Once upon a time there was a hemulen who worked in a pleasure-ground, which doesn't necessarily mean having a lot of fun. The hemulen's job was to punch holes in tickets, so that people wouldn't have fun more than once, and such a job is quite enough to make anyone sad if you have to do it all your life.

(Read more about the Moomins on Wikipedia.)

When I moved into my apartment, I thought the bedroom looked like a girl's sophomore-year college dorm room. There was some sort of attempt at "style," but it involved handpainted flowers on the closet door and glow-in-the-dark star stickers plastered to the ceiling.

(Sophomore-year college girls of the world, hear my plea: do not stick approximately 500 glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling of a room you do not own, because at some point someone (probably not you) will have to peel them off, fingers sore, neck aching, balancing precariously on a kitchen chair and cursing your name.)

In addition, the overhead light -- while thankfully halogen -- shined right in my eyes when I tried to read before bed, the metro shelving unit always looked cluttered and the tatami was anciently old.

View from the living room.

Oh, that flower...

(See the After pictures in the extended entry.)

This time I traded with the charming Laurence, who is from France, but is now living in L.A. She went above and beyond for me, and in general was just a lovely person to email and swap with.

She sent me some beautiful vintage fabrics (including a vintage red polka-dot linen from Russia), lace, embroidery floss, red buttons, dishtowels, notecards and French sweets. And doesn't everything look so pretty together? I almost don't want to ruin it by actually using anything...but I will.

Last weekend while it was still rainy and not yet blazingly hot, I baked these cupcakes to use up the cream cheese frosting I made for some red velvet cupcakes I had baked the week before. (Cupcake-making can become a dangerously endless cycle, you know.) Now that it's blazingly hot, they are safely tucked in the fridge, but they are still delicious cold. There wasn't enough frosting to go around, but even the frostingless ones are good, especially as accompaniments to the lentils and rice I've been eating all week, another autumnal recipe I suddenly felt like making in the dead of summer.

I used this recipe, except I used about 1/3 less sugar and added some ground ginger for laughs. I also used fresh kabocha because there is no such thing as canned pumpkin in Japan. It was easier than I expected -- I just boiled and mashed up a 500-gram piece. For the frosting, I used this recipe with a few tablespoons of whipping cream beaten in for extra creaminess.

Funny thing about baking in Japan: the ovens are only big enough to bake 6 cupcakes at a time. This is actually less "funny" and more "annoying," especially when you are all sweaty and irritable, wondering if your bowl of cupcake batter is going to go bad sitting out for an hour in the hot kitchen. Tinier is cuter, it's true, but a cute oven is not necessarily better.

I've never been very interested in Fran. Maybe it's because it always just seemed like the poor girl's Pocky. But I've been seeing Cool Fran in stores since the start of summer, along with a couple other candies labeled "cool" and the whole "cool" candy phenomenon was too intriguing to ignore.

Cool Fran is a choco-biscuit stick covered in something identified as "whipped white," which is further covered with lemon chocolate and bits of kishiritouru.

...Wait. What's kishiritouru?

After some multilingual Wikipedia-ing, I came to the conclusion that it's xylitol, a sweetener commonly used in chewing gum, which apparently gives the sensation of coolness when chewed.

And it really works. After eating a Fran, my mouth had a subtle, mentholated sort of coolness, but without the minty taste you usually associate with the feeling. The Fran itself was just okay. It was kind of like a lemon-filled cookie turned inside out, but with too much cream filling. Whipped white, you are unnecessary.

The real question is: after eating my Cool Fran, did I feel any cooler? The answer: no, no I didn't. I was as hot as ever. And Fran, even Cool Fran, is still the poor girl's Pocky.

Kelly and I decided to have a swap of candy and cute buttons and trims. And just look at all the cuteness! I'm especially in love with that little ice cream guy and the hedgehog buttons. I'm tempted to bring the Pop Rocks to school and feed them to my students, but I'm afraid their faces might fall off. Strange, super-sweet American candy exploding in their mouths can only lead to lots of girly screaming, but...I'm still tempted.

(You can see what I sent Kelly here. Except for the candy. Which seems to be "missing"....)