A couple of weeks ago Marty bought me a scanner.  For a while now I’ve wanted to do something with the large collection of prints I have taken over the years. I never got round to putting these in albums and the damp air here is causing them to stick together.

I would like to have bought a negative scanner but I rarely use my 35mm camera anymore so this would have had a limited use.  In the end I compromised and bought a flatbed scanner that can also scan some types of negatives.

One of the reasons I moved to digital was that it was becoming too hard to get film printed.  Black and White film had to be posted away and some never came back.  Others came back with prints composed of half one picture and half of another.  Even colour films were ruined.  All my Egyptian films came back too yellow with lots of scratches on the pictures.  When I first saw them I was really worried that something had gone badly wrong with my camera but then I realised that these had been left to dry on something dirty.  I found the Egyptian photographs today but the negatives wouldn’t scan.  So far I haven’t been able to scan many of my negatives.  The process is slow and seems to work less than 50% of the time.  The negatives have to be completely flat and a lot of mine curve slightly.  There are also problems depending on how the negatives have been cut by the processing company.

I did manage to scan a few pictures though and I’m glad that I now have some of these stored on my computer.

Sailing Boat on the River Nile

We finally got round to buying bikes last weekend. I wasn’t able to get over my love for the first blue bike I saw so I sent Marty out on his own to pick the bikes. He brought me back a bike that is also blue but that cost a fraction of the price of the one I really wanted.

Today we cycled along the Sumida river. I have been ill for weeks and I was shocked at how much it has affected my fitness level. It’s true that I’m still not completely healed but I wasn’t able to cycle for longer than 20 minutes.  It was fun though and I’m looking forward to exploring more in the coming weeks.

Tony sent me a link to an article about the blood type obsession in Japan.  I already knew that in Japan it’s much more likely that someone would ask my blood type than my star sign but I’ve always had to tell people that I didn’t know what my blood type was.  This answer was always received with shock as everyone here knows what their blood type is.

The last person to ask me was a doctor and he laughed at me when I told him I didn’t know my blood type.  Since the doctor needed to know I now know that my blood type is A+.

So, after reading the article, it’s great to know that people with my blood type are considered to be patient, uptight, sensitive, responsible and cautious.  Maybe I should just keep telling the people who ask that I don’t know what it is.

I realised today that this is the fourth December in a row that I have lived in a different place.  I also realised that this apartment is not cold unlike our last one.  The new apartment actually has air conditioners / heaters that work as they are supposed to.  We also have under floor heating in the living room and a blow heater of some sort in the bathroom.  No longer will the heated toilet seat make the loo the warmest place to be.

It’s still fairly mild in Tokyo and we haven’t needed to use the heating much.  At night I prefer to wrap myself up in a fluffy blanket rather than put on the heating.  I’m a bit envious of my friends who keep telling me about the snow they are having. But I do know that snow is one of those things I always think of fondly but that the reality is sometimes much less appealing.

Marty and I spent five days in November relaxing in Okinawa at the Renaissance Resort.  Marty really likes water sports and I love to look at the sea.  The sea at Okinawa can be emerald green and various shades of light blue when the sun shines deepening to a dark blue.

When I was a small child we used to go to the beach at places like Millisle and Tyrella in County Down, Northern Ireland.  I remember the sea as being gray.   It was also usually quite cold, unlike Okinawa, but I loved to go anyway.  It’s hard to remember those days but I think my sister and I would sometimes go to the beach with my Grandparents on a Sunday afternoon.  Tyrella always seemed more of an adventure as it used to have a rickety road to the beach and I can remember my Granda driving down it at one point with a flat tire causing the car to lurch from side to side.  (I think my Granda Bailie’s driving was always a bit of a family joke and any car he ever owned was always on its last legs.)  My sister and I used to hide in the sand dunes and then try to find creatures in the rock pools.  I’m not quite sure exactly what we were looking for and I have strange memories of my Granda wanting us to find something he called “winkles” and “willicks”.

I think I will always love the sea.

Okinawa, South China Sea

Over the next few weeks we are expecting to have friends over for dinner.  I have been trying to think of dishes to cook that are Irish but that don’t require an oven.  Food is one of the few things I can talk about in Japanese but I am never sure what to tell people when they ask about food from Ireland.  What are our traditional dishes?

I have seen recipes for corn beef and cabbage – but really I have never eaten that anywhere but America.  And I don’t believe that adding Guinness or Baileys to a recipe makes it authentically Irish either.  The other problem is that I’m from the North of Ireland so have never eaten Dublin Coddle or Boxty (actually I had to look both these up when I first came across them as I had no idea what they were).

Potatoes are a key ingredient in Irish cooking but I don’t like champ or colcannon.  I do like Irish stew and potato soup and potato bread but I need a bit more variety than this as I don’t think we can have potatoes for all the courses.

I do wonder though how much the diet of Northern Irish people has changed from the traditional meal of meat and potatoes.  I rarely cooked potatoes when I lived there.  I was much more likely to cook Chinese, Italian or Mexican food.  Every other restaurant is a Chinese restaurant and Indian food it also really popular.  It’s actually difficult to find anywhere in Belfast that serves food that could be called traditionally Irish or British.

I am seriously considering cooking chicken tikka masala as my main dish.  Jamie Oliver’s recipe for this is really good and it is one of the most popular foods in the U.K. It may even have been created in the U.K.  I just don’t think that my Japanese friends will  be expecting spicy food served with rice but they are much more likely to come across that in Belfast than they are Dublin Lawyer or Dublin Coddle.

I have spent hours writing Christmas cards. It was suggested to me that we send e-cards instead but I think they are a poor replacement for paper cards. The surprising benefit of writing cards is that I can now write our address in Japanese. It’s scary though to think that I’ve been here for two years and only now can I do this.