Today was a fairly ordinary day at the office, but for the fact that I was the only ALT present. Everyone else had been assigned elementary school visits. I spent the morning using Google Maps to find the first few elementary schools I'll be visiting, and discovered that one of my most frequently visited schools is really far away. I'll have to get the bus schedule for that one because I won't be biking there, that's for sure.
Wednesdays are half days for us, so I had the afternoon free to do some shopping. When I arrived in Kochi, I discovered that the rice cooker I had been left was not in usable condition, but I couldn't convince myself to go buy a new one. Today I finally broke down and went to K's Denki, a large electronics store by the train station. It sells all kinds of things such as cameras, televisions, washing machines, air conditioning units, blow dryers, curling irons, microwaves, and of course, rice cookers.
There was a large selection of rice cookers with a price range of about 6,700 yen to 70,000 yen. I don't know what kind of functions the most expensive one had, but it must've been pretty impressive to warrant a price like that. I opted for a small unit in the lower to middle price range. It was really hard to choose one because I couldn't read any of the product specifications. Pretty much the only buttons I could read were the ones in katakana, which is used for foreign loan words. What made up my mind was one of the few words I could read: keeki. Cake! My rice cooker has a cake setting! Elizabeth had told me before that she had made rice cooker cake with a special education student, but I hadn't thought about it in a while. Since all of the models in my price range seemed to have roughly the same features (though I didn't know what most of them were), I opted for the one that I could make cake with. The instruction manual even comes with a few recipes, though I can't read them.
Tonight I tested out the rice cooker. I was a little hesitant because I don't know what most of the buttons do. The only ones I really understand are "menu", which lists the settings, and "start", which does what you would expect it to do. I'm not even sure it has an "off" button. So, I chose a setting that looked promising and pressed "start". The rice cooker played a little song. I guessed that meant that it was starting, but I wasn't entirely sure. I figured I would check back in about an hour, and if the rice hadn't cooked by then, I probably had done something wrong. About an hour later, I heard the rice cooker play another little song. I went to check on it, and sure enough, the rice was ready. I don't know the meaning of the setting I chose, but the rice turned out great, so I think I'll use that one again in the future. I ate some of the rice with vegetable furikake (seasoning flakes) and set the rest aside for tomorrow's lunch.
I'm excited to have a new appliance, and especially a rice cooker. Rice is a very convenient food. It's also satisfying to have picked it out myself and used it successfully without any help. I'm looking forward to making cake with it, as well. I'm going to have to fight the temptation to eat rice for every meal since it takes no effort for me to prepare. What I really need to do is learn some interesting ways to prepare vegetables. So far I've pretty much been limited to edamame. I don't really know how to cook meat, either, but that at least I get when I eat at restaurants and fast food places.
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