About that octopus

12:45 a.m. and everybody has gone home already! I wonder why the early night. I came back to the lab to write about the octopus. I fear it could be said that I drank and drove a bicycle. I thought I picked out a nice grape pop to go with my corndogs, but I'm feeling a leetle beet loopy.

I had a little chat with Dr. Kuromi today about my data that was making me angry. It turned into a typical boss-Janel conversation. Janel: "My data is terrible! How can I learn how this drug affects the recycling pool when it only affects some of the boutons? How am I supposed to know the truth? This is frustrating! What is wrong with my dissections?" Boss: No problem! Why is it frustrating? Boutons are different. Actin is different in the boutons, so maybe it will be variable. Try ...." Sigh. I don't know. I expected more clarity from drug experiments. My brain has to allow the story to change.

Ah yes, the octopus. When I woke up Sunday morning in Niigata I headed for the ocean. There were hundreds of people sitting in the streets of Bandai City (area of Niigata) with crafts and paintings to sell, and many more people handing out fans and toilet paper. I stopped at Mr. Donut for breakfast because I felt it was my duty as an American, and then meandered around until I found a big road that pointed to Bandai bridge. The nice man at my hotel gave me a map in English, so I knew that was the way to the ocean. I walked across Bandai bridge and listened to the interesting Japanese music playing on the bridge, then yelled "I'm fine, how are you?" to a bunch of kids on the other side of the street who yelled "Hello! How are you?" in very passable English. I thought I would take a peek at a museum that was between my hotel and the ocean, but I had to go through some small streets to get to it and the map is not useful for small streets. I never did find the museum, but I found a weird pink house and a bunch of leaning trees that indicated the direction of the ocean. I must have learned something at girl scout camp eh? I passed a cannon and a little light-house looking thing in the woods and at last headed down a couple of flights of stone stairs to find the beautiful, beautiful Sea of Japan. The coastline was divided into several different swimming areas, and there were quite a few people smimming and snorkeling around the rocks. I stood in the water for a while, wondering what kind of idiot travels to Niigata and forgets her swimming suit. I spotted some guys doing something interesting with knives by the rocks, and after walking one way down the ocean and then back again, I saw they were frying oysters on the beach. In my baby-talk Japanese I said "This? From ocean? Today?" Yup. I was amazed. They then asked me to eat one. Well what the heck. I ate it, and it was good! The nice guys who did not speak English then offered me a big beer and I sat down and decided to massacre the language for a while with my pocket dictionary. I told them the beer was too big, but thank you, and they produced a smaller one from their cooler and proceeded to enjoy asking me questions which I could not understand and then laugh while I tried to look them up. I believe one of them was a postman originally from Hawaii, but at first I thought he said he was from Indonesia and they all enjoyed calling him an Indonesian after that. I told them where I was from and that I wanted to see an octopus. Well they just happened to have one. He was a bee-yoo-tiful octopus! There was a couple of very large sea urchins in the bucket as well, but I cared only for the octopus. He was maybe 12-15 inches long from head to tail, pinkish-purple, and he blew water at me out of his mouth tubes while I tried to figure out how to unstick him from the bucket so I could play with him. He then decided to stick to my arm instead and I was thrilled. Holding an octopus at last! I got some nice pictures of my octopus, and have no fear, if you know me you will see them. The guys thought I was funny to play with food and kept saying "your pet!" while I played with him. Eventually I gave my octopus back to the guys and had a small hope that they would put him back in the ocean, but alas they rubbed him in the sand, rinsed him, cut his legs off and ate him. Atsuko has been working with me on the issue of raw food (i.e. it's just food! Don't think about it so much. Do you think about your hamburger as a cow?), so I managed to watch the murder of my friend the octopus with a forced shallowness of feeling, but I could not eat him. They like nama no tako (raw octopus), covered in wasabi and dipped in soy sauce. How there can be taste of octopus left after that I do not know. At last, I had another fried oyster, finish my beer, thanked them and told them they should visit Colorado sometime and hopped up to continue my explorations. The Indonesian/Hawaiian guy then did a nice muscle-man pose and asked if I thought he was cute. Ha. "Okashi" means "funny" and it seemed appropriate. No sense harming the ego, I've heard it is very fragile in the XYs. So there you go, another opportunity gone as I hold out for that sumo wrestler.

I had a few more Englinese semi-conversations on the beach with people of all sorts who wanted to know where I was from, and found some Phillipino people who could speak some Spanglish with me, and all in all had a happy time learning the names of some weird bugs and finding out where I could find my own octopus to play with. I saw some kids doing flips off of a rock out in the ocean and couldn't stand it anymore, stashed my bag in between some rocks and jumped in the ocean. Sooooo fun to float in the ocean! It beat the Florida ocean because it was hazy enough to swim for a while without turning into human toast... and the wildlife! Wowza! There were hundred of little crabs skittering around on the rocks, crazy looking seaweeds and lots of little fish. I seriously needed some goggles as opening my eyes under water in search of the octopus was not a successful endeavor. It stings, and my vision isn't so good without glasses. After the fifth heart attack from getting slapped in the face by a weed I had to give up on that plan.

Twas a wet walk back through town, but I don't thinking a dripping wet American gets much more attention than a dry one. I found Atsuko and we went to a sushi restaurant where I learned what sushi really is. It's good. I had the raw tuna, I had the scorched tuna, I had the shrimp, I had the squid with wasabi in the middle... all good. Niigata is Japan's rice capital, maybe that helped as well. People in Japan distinguish between Niigata rice and ordinary rice similar to how I would distinguish home-made bread from Walmart 88-cent sandwich bread. It sounds like Niigata gets a wicked winter, but all the water is great for rice.

Must go home. I didn't even get to the horses! I spent most of the day Saturday at the Niigata racecourse, reveling in the sight and smell of horses. I put 300 yen on a nice-looking grey horse and another bay to get one-two, and darned if I didn't get 13050 yen! I tried 900 yen on some other horses but decided to quit while ahead. I miss my horsie. I enjoyed watching them run, but I was on the wrong side of the fence. I need to ride them. Maybe in tonight's dreams. My octopus dream came true so I will have to move on to something else.