Good morning!

I woke up bright and early today with a cup can of coffee and some tarako pasta:


Tarako is the roe of a pollock (?) and it exists as a blob of tiny pink eggs with a tangy flavour. Evidently one day someone tossed some into pasta and found it to their liking, because it's a common sauce flavour over here. It's mostly put into spaghetti, but I found some cheap butterfly pasta (haha, I'll always call it that) and went for that. Note also the little strips of seaweed in there. One can find packs of premade sauce like this very easily.

I've been trying to eat good breakfasts lately, and then grabbing lunch at one of the uni dining halls when I can't find the time to make something. Please don't recoil in fear, the dining halls are a lovely invention. At Vic the food situation is... hmm. This Salient article from last year might give you some idea. At Rits, on the other hand, you can rock up to one of the halls with the knowledge you'll get reliably consistent, quite tasty, and somewhat nutritious stuff. There are a couple of halls that are open at different times during the day, so theoretically you could get all three meals out of them, if you could escape the onset of menu boredom. The fare is mainly hot meals; various kinds of stuff-on-rice and noodle bowls. If you want one of these, you join a packed line of other students, and wait for a staff member to eyeball you so you can yell your order to them. When you get to the business end of the line, your food should be there, made for you in a production line-looking way by some very very fast-moving ladies.

Apart from these, there is an underground convenience store with lots of edible and inedible items, and another above ground for food and drinks. These are run through a co-op system - we each paid some money as share capital at the start of the year, and the shops are run through that. We are able to get discounts on books and such as well.

Overall I'm satisfied with the food on campus. The hot meals are quite a bit cheaper than one could expect to pay off-campus, and not much more than what the raw ingredients cost to buy (although I'm learning how to make that cheaper too). Some time soon I'll show some photos of the dining hall environment, once I figure out how to import photos from my phone onto a computer. I'm thinking of buying a memory card and reader for the phone for this purpose. It's a lot less conspicuous and dodgy-looking taking photos of everyone on a phone :P

On another note, yesterday I went to my first meeting at the bijutsu-kenkyuukai (art research society). Research society?? Psssh. It's the art club, basically. We draw and paint pictures and exhibit them. The next exhibition is in a few weeks, and I'm going to put something in. More updates on that club to follow!

♥
Sophie