well, today's esperanto club was fun. it's right around the corner from the "Ahago bashi" subway station, aka either 400 yen by subway + 10 minutes walking from my house, or 20 minutes walking from downtown sendai. it's an old-fashioned tiny 1-room apartment; no stove, the bathroom is JUST a toilet (anyone living here would've had to take baths at the local bathhouse), you have to turn the water on for your room yourself by going outside into the apartment yard, then turn it off when you leave!! although it was barely advertised anywhere compared to all the other holidays i've seen so far, today was "setsubun", the first day of spring (it's x number of days after the new year, or after some other event; anyway it's calculated every year). guys wear demon masks and then kids throw beans at them; traditionally in most places it's roasted soybeans i think but nowadays most people are using peanuts in the shell, because they're easier to clean up. tohoku (where i'm living) and hokkaido used different beans than all the rest of japan apparently, but now they've assimilated. anyway apparently the reason for WHY you're throwing beans is, your "inner demons" get chased out of your house and they're not to come back "until these beans i'm throwing sprout". if you use cooked beans, they'll never sprout, meaning the demons will never come back. anyway, one lady had brought a bag of roasted soybeans so we bundled them in plastic wrap (so that we wouldn't have to clean anything up afterwards) and said "out with the demon, in with the luck" in esperanto and tossed them lightly at each other. then unwrapped them and ate them with tea and pear slices. then we talked about "sasae-san" i think it's called? some famous comic series; it's just like a family comic strip in the newspaper. we talked about our family relations, since they asked if i contact my family - nope, my wife and i are on very bad terms with our family members. now, when you say this to a swede, the swede basically can't even believe it at ALL. like, swedish psychologists have an insanely hard time believing that i don't speak to my dad. americans do this "oh poor you!" thing, or the "you think that's bad? MY family's so much worse!" thing, but these 80-year-old japanese people are just like "oh yeah, that happens in japan too, like my son's daughter refuses to speak to him and whenever i try to talk about him to her she just yells that she hates him, or so-and-so got some kind of brain sickness that changed their entire personality and now we can't contact them because of it". it's just a kind of very refreshing matter-of-fact "this is life" feeling. then we were introduced to a card game where one set of cards has drawings illustrating proverbs on it, another set of cards has the proverbs. you're supposed to find the image that matches the proverb (meaning), but not even japanese people know the meaning of all of them. i immediately thought we should do the same thing in esperanto, it'll definitely sell... then we talked about the big sendai earthquake from some years ago. one lady lived right by where the tsunami ended, to the point where the water reached the road in front of her house i think she said. the power, water and gas were out for like 3 weeks. relatively nearby was either a shop or a beer-canning factory, anyway tons of beer cans came floating down right in front of her house so her son picked them all up. when the quake hit she had been working in sendai, the busses and trains still ran but didn't go all the way down to where they should have. she happened to stop at some certain building that ended up being a community center and even though it was nighttime and pitch black, her daughter noticed her and called out to her so they found each other. her husband had been at home when it hit so we asked her wasn't he terribly afraid and she said "maybe he was, i don't know!". her friend's house who lived right next to the water was completely gone, even the "roots" of the house were just ripped away. he came home and absolutely nothing was left. so everyone donated what they could of bedding and clothes and things and he got a sort of tent to live in for a little while. another lady said when it hit she was by an open window so she hurried and closed the window, then stood with her hands bracing herself in the doorway hoping nothing would happen. her power and stuff was out for about a week, and some soldiers(?) came with huge jugs of drinking water for everyone, but you couldn't wash your clothes or fill the toilet with that water because then you'd have nothing to drink. so she went to a friend's house who lived like half an hour away and washed her clothes there, and for toilet water the local school said she could fill up jugs from the school pool! the third lady said it wasn't particularly bad at her place, as soon as it started shaking she hid underneath the dinner table, the power was out for about a week and that was that. the guy said it was totally fine at his house, nothing had even fallen over, but when the quake hit he was at work on like the 53rd storey of his office building and naturally you couldn't use the elevators, so he had to walk down 53 floors' worth of steps to get outside. it felt really nice to hear actual stories about the big earthquake and not just "it was baaaad" which is what i normally hear, and of course we were all speaking in esperanto!! well they tend to mix esperanto and japanese but it still felt like "wow, this is what esperanto is FOR, to get the real stories". and then i was given a bag of dried sweet potato fries from the one lady who's the worst at esperanto out of everyone (she gives us food every time we see her and i think she must have started studying esperanto pretty hard since we came since suddenly this time she could say a lot more than the previous times haha). anyway, after club we walked to town and i got a grilled sweet potato from this one shop that sells them cheap (300 yen for a big one); i've bought 3 times from there and the lady remembers me each time. last time she said "oh, your japanese is very good!" (because i remembered to say the proper "yaki imo ni hon", grilled potato 2 cyllinders, instead of the usual foreigners-can't-count "yaki imo futa tsu", yaki imo 2 thingamajigs). this time she asked me to choose the potato i wanted and i said "i can't see well so...", she said "okay, i'll choose a tasty-looking one for you then! stand back a little please!" with a big cheerful smile. then she asked very hestitantly (as if i might get mad) and in more polite japanese than how she was just speaking a moment ago, "so where... you're a person of which country?" "sweden" "oh, sweden! it's much warmer here isn't it?" "yes, in my town it gets to minus 25 in the winter, the temperature here now is like spring" "spring you say, hahah!! oh but sweden's very beautiful" "japan is beautiful too" "thank you!!". then i went to the grocery store, there really isn't anything special sold for setsubun except for "various nuts" and then "lucky sushi rolls", uncut sushi rolls filled with 7 special lucky(? or not) ingredients. the upper-end ones were actually the most expensive sushi rolls i've seen at this store yet so it was surprizing, anyway the cheapest one (350 yen) had eel in it which i'd never eaten before so i bought it. the roll wasn't worth the money, it was at least half rice and thanks to the sauce you couldn't tell what was eel and what wasn't - better to just find a place that sells grilled eel or something (eel isn't sold at this grocery store so i have no idea where to get it).