It's been a week since we moved into our new apartment, but I seem to be still not in the pre-relocation rhythm of cooking-eating-blogging. For one thing, we haven't had a steady Internet connection since our move: our new landlords have been very generous to let us use their wireless connection, but somehow it's been flaky, to say the least. We had our phone line finally hooked up yesterday, but the AT&T person Patrick spoke to today told him (out of the blue) that we wouldn't be getting Internet until the 19th, God knows why.

I have been cooking, though; I made pretty good fried rice with the sweet, aromatic Chinese sausages I picked up after my fingerprinting sojourn with the USCIS (there was a sizable Asian market in the same shopping mall where the USCIS service center was located) on Wednesday, and on Thursday, we had Korean-ish stir-fried squid with kimchi. But the most noteworthy was (if any of my cooking ever is) the "relocation soba" we had on Monday, the day after we surrendered our old apartment.

Relocation soba, or "hikkoshi soba" in Japanese, is a customary meal after one moves from one place to the next. Usually a simple bowl of soba in warm dashi soup, or the same soba served chilled with cool dashi accompanied by wasabi and scallions in summer), hikkoshi soba is supposed to be shared with one's new neighbors. The Japanese can be quite fond of puns and jokes when it comes to what to eat for special occasions, and the hikkoshi soba isn't an exception.

Eating long noodles together with one's new neighbors is a way to wish for a good, long-lasting relationship with them in the new community. Although not too many people, especially city dwellers, engage in this ritual any more today, I'm sure it used to serve as an ice breaker, too, where the new neighbors would offer their help and share knowledge of the neighborhood while the newcomer would try to hide his skeleton in the cupboard from the plying noses of the new neighbors.

The same logic--long soba noodles corresponding to long something else--holds true for another special occasion: the New Year's Eve. Traditionally, the Japanese eat soba as the last meal on the New Year's Eve, usually waiting for the 108 gongs of temple bells that cleanse away our 108 worldly obsessions (yep, we have that many!). The idea here is to wish for the family members' longevity for years to come. We didn't share our relocation soba with our landlords/neighbors (who, I suspect, might have been amused if we had, but were away on vacation), hopefully the not-so-stunning soba I boiled up will bring us many fun years at our new apartment. (And hopefully we're getting the Internet back sooner than on the 19th! I'm quite tired of not knowing anything that's going on out in the world...)