January is here....stayed at The Peninsula! Interviewed on tv!

January started in a whirl of lessons and a couple of new students.

Through someone at church I got a very part-time job at Tsukuba School for the visually impaired. Very excited about it. Ironically I'd been to a volunteer group meeting and the thing that appealed to me most was doing English interview practice with 18-year-olds as part of their university application.  It's at the same place so I get to be more involved and paid!

January11th is a public holiday so another four day week!  Dominic had booked a weekend away on the Izu Peninsula, about 50 minutes on the train from Tokyo. Volcanic lava flow has created a rocky coastline, with lovely beaches further south.  What is strange is that ugly horrible buildings are right beside these beautiful beaches.  

 One beach had a similar rock formation to the Giants Causeway, perhaps Finn came here on his holidays? 

We joined the locals enjoying bowls of fish and noodles.

The area is famous for hot springs.  One ryokan (a type of traditional Japanese inn that originated in the Edo period (1603–1868). They typically feature tatami-matted rooms and communal baths) has a wooden 1,000 people bath.

Men and women normally bathe separately (you are starkers).  But in some places the women can go into the men's!! The assumption is that the men will be lucky if this happens. The reverse is not true and is not allowed!   It was very confusing but I went into the men's side. Women are allowed to wear a towel which is weird. One                                                 woman had a specifically designed outfit for the occasion.

The next day we got to take a chairlift up to the rim of the volcano. The bottom of the crater is used for archery!  We got a good view of Mount Fuji or Fuji-san as they call him.

The area is also famous for dried fish and there are various contraptions all around town for this.  However we went to a place recommended for okonomiyaki pancakes and ordered two jumbo ones. The female owner looked alarmed and said that one would be enough. She was right but it only cost about four quid so not sure we were her most profitable customers that evening.

We stayed at a hostel which was a 100-year-old wooden building, basically a hotel without any ensuite rooms!  I loved it and we had a massive room. It had a few communal rooms too which looked out over the river and there was a very small strip of decking.  In typical Japanese style this tiny area had been used to create a lovely garden.

We went to another mixed bathing place.  Accessed via a funicular railway!  We had the place to ourselves. It really felt as though we were on holiday.  A tenner to have exclusive use of it for an hour!

 The following weekend we went to a temple known for its number of cat statues. Shop owners buy a statue and leave it at the temple believing that it will bring their business money and good luck.  A TV crew were there interviewing foreigners to find out why they were visiting the temple and what they did there.  They asked us a few questions and then asked if they could follow us around the temple. That was weird!

Perhaps they thought he was Harrison Ford?

Festive season

Well Christmas Day was a normal working day in Japan. But not for us!

Before Christmas we went out to a tiny cafe - one big table seating about 12.  It does world breakfasts.  On offer was English and French.  The French one had a boiled egg served in an egg cup with long pieces of toasted baguette. Surely this is more English egg and soldiers?  Our neighbours chose the french breakfast and were given copious instructions by the waitress on how to take the top off the egg! They gingerly tapped around the egg with a knife.  It was a new experience for them.  It caused much excitement and laughter. This explains why I haven't seen an egg cup in Tokyo because they don't exist!

Having some extra time in a metro station I decided to go to the stand-up noodle bar.  Was one of those places where you put your money in the machine press a button to make a choice and it spits out a ticket that you then present to the staff dishing out the food. Luckily I spotted the English menu button so choosing what I wanted was easy even though I didn't know what it was!

There were seats! So I grabbed one. The way to eat noodles is to get hold of some with your chopsticks and then slurp them up. Putting my head over a massive bowl of incredibly hot noodles is bound to make my nose run.  We are wondering if when the locals are slurping food they are managing also to snort up their snot. They are not fans of people blowing their nose, we believe they think it is disgusting, but I had to several times over!  

Dominic decided that he wanted to have a traditional Christmas lunch. Sprouts very expensive. A friend paid £4 for a parsnip.  I've only recently decided that I need to stop comparing UK and Japan prices for fruit and veg or we will end up with scurvy! 

Jo arrived in and I had my second Christmas dinner of the day with her and Dominic launched into the Christmas pudding! 

We decided a breath of fresh air would be good and we went to see the Christmas lights. Luckily we got there just before they were switched off for the year at 10pm. 

On Boxing day we went to an area that sells all kinds of kitchen stuff and then on to the temple that has a busy street of market traders on its approach.

Next day off on the Shinkansen to Kyoto.  It was cold there and we ended up buying thermals! We templed ourselves out.

We also found a fantastic cafe doing ice creams.(yes I know we should have been looking for hot soup!)  At the entrance they have a display showing the products available in fake food format. They look fantastic so we decided to try the real thing!

We headed back to Tokyo to see what happens over New Year.  We met up with Matt a friend of a friend and and wondered round a part of town new to us.   We said we'd be having noodles at home with tempura like the locals and Matt offered to make sushi as well.

Very impressive it was too. I put a bit of the skin of a citrus fruit yuzu in with the noodles, you can also put the whole fruit in your bath to keep you healthy.

So full of food and alcohol we headed off to the local temple to hear the bell been rung 108 times. Apparently there are 108 things we can do wrong and ringing the bell gets rid of them.  We arrived and were told to get a number. We soon realised that between us we would be ringing number 63 and 64 gongs!  We watched to see how others rang the bell so that we did not embarrass ourselves.

We then walked up to the massive temple and joined the throng of people who were queuing up to spend 30 seconds in front of the temple.  We thought it might take an hour to get to the front of the queue so we decided to head home.

We went to a great exhibition at the MORI  Museum by Takeshi Murakami one of the few places that are open every year over New Year and went up the tower to get a view over town.  Then we went to Gonpachi the restaurant associated with Kill Bill.

We spent ages looking for one of the Japanese photo booth places only to be told it had shut down and to be shown the empty site amongst the buildings!

There is a whole area known as fabric town but as it's mainly wholesalers it too was shut. However week three I found a fabric store that I think is really good so Jo and I headed out there on Sunday. We had intended to go somewhere else as well but we did three floors of the shop and then had a break for coffee and cake. We then headed back in to do the final two floors and make our purchases!  It was great fun - Jo advised that a stripy fabric which had illustrations of otters, armadillos and badgers would not suit me, the same for the spotty fabric with pink pugs on it.  I settled for the flowers with a polar bear poking his head through them. We made it home just in time to go out for dinner with Kayo the person I met through a cultural exchange website.

We put Jo on the airport train just before 7am and we waited on the same platform to get a train to Kamakura to see the big Buddha and the sea. Glorious weather so much so Dominic zipped off the bottom of his trousers!  

Look at the flavours!

 

Drying fish on a bike!