I am back home after a trip to Belfast.  I am incredibly tired as the journey seemed to take forever.  I had hoped to sleep on the flight from London but it wasn’t comfortable and I gave up on that idea after about an hour.  It’s good to be home but after being cold for weeks Tokyo feels uncomfortably hot.  As well as tired I appear to be grumpy!  One of the many joys of travel that isn’t listed in the travel guides.

I did enjoy my time in Belfast and my short trip to Dingle.

Ireland, looking like the movies say it should

Family Wedding

I’ve finished my intensive Japanese course, passed all my exams, and I’m now getting ready to go on holiday.  I have quite a few things that I will be working on this week, but I’ll be away for two weeks around my wedding anniversary and I won’t really have a reliable internet connection then.

Today was a beautiful day for walking so we walked for hours braving the busy temples and shrines to see the cherry blossoms.  I’m hoping to get time to go and take some more pictures in the upcoming week with my camera and not just my iPhone.

Cherry Blossoms in a Park near the Sumida River

Breakfast on a holiday should be more exciting than my usual yoghurt and fruit and I wanted to come up with a something to tempt Marty out of bed.  In the past I would have gone out and bought fresh croissants, but I can no longer eat these or anything that they sell in our local bakery.  It’s not easy to make a traditional Northern Irish breakfast here but I decided that I could at least make potato farls.

When I was last back in Northern Ireland I was disappointed that I couldn’t buy gluten-free potato farls.  I thought it would be very easy to do as these are mostly made of potato, with salt, butter, and some flour to bind it together.  Well, at least that’s what they used to be.  Some commercial potato farls are now made with only about 20% potato.   I can’t see any reason why the flour needs to have gluten in it and this morning I made them using Dove Farm’s gluten-free mix of plain flour.  The texture is different than the commercial ones, as mine are mostly made of potato, but they were yummy.

Homemade Potato Farls

I’m back in London Heathrow waiting on my flight to Japan.  I did not manage to blog at all while I was in the UK, but then I rarely managed to get online.  The house we were staying in was supposed to have wifi but it broke completely for a few days and when it was “fixed” it was incredibly hard to get connected.  There were a couple of spots – like the second step of the stairs – where it was possible to connect for a minute or so, but it was incredibly frustrating trying to connect and I mostly gave up.  This means that I now have hundreds of unanswered emails.  Joy.

I’m starting back to my Japanese class on Monday morning and I feel horribly unprepared.  I tried to keep on top of the work over the past two weeks but it’s very hard to study when you are trying to do family things and catch up with friends.  I have a feeling that February is going to be a busy month.

I have been trying to sort out my travel plans for 2013.  Last year I spent 144 days away from home and I don’t want to travel quite that much this year.  Since 2007 I have attended three Perl conferences a year, but I don’t think that I will be able to attend  YAPC::EU this year.  It doesn’t coincide with any family events and it’s expensive to fly to the Ukraine from Tokyo.  Actually, it’s noticeably more expensive to fly to anywhere from Tokyo this year. I do plan to attend YAPC::NA in Austin in June and YAPC::Asia if it is held in Japan. I also want to attend some TPF Community events that should take place in Europe around the time I am there for my aunt’s wedding in May.

Although I travelled a lot last year I didn’t actually manage to have much of a holiday with Marty.  We have been been talking for a while now about seeing more of Asia while we live in this part of the world.  We haven’t been that great at doing that but we have booked a holiday around our wedding anniversary which will take us to China and South Korea.

I started the next level of my intensive Japanese class a couple of weeks ago. It’s utterly brain melting.  I was unsure about doing this as I’m flying to Europe on Monday for a family birthday.  I’m really looking forward to catching up with people but I’m not looking forward to missing two weeks of this term.  I am going to miss a lot of material and I will be expected to somehow cover this myself while travelling.  When I get back I’m also going to have to find time to complete the 10 hours of written homework, the two essays, the three kanji tests, and the two weekly tests that I will have missed.

The start of a year encourages me to think about new things.  I’ve just read Hails’ list of 101 things to do in 1001 days and it reminded me that it was time to create a new list.  It will take me a while to complete this, as I find it hard to come up with 101 things , but I do love the idea. I only managed to put 60 or so things on my last list, but the actual number doesn’t matter so much as the fact that having this sort of a list motivates me.

My lists always end up being dominated by travel.  Last year I managed to see Rome, Seoul and Melbourne, but I haven’t made any holiday plans yet for 2013. I dream of seeing the statues on Easter Island, the Northern Lights, and the Galápagos Islands, but I think it will need quite a bit of planning to actually manage to do that.  On my list I also have the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef, and Uluru – all places I have started to make plans to see.

There are non-travel things on my list.  I want to improve my Japanese and my ability to write English.  I want to find better ways to deal with my email and my to-do lists as at times I feel like I’m drowning in unanswered email.  I want to learn how to make gluten-free bread as I crave beans and toast. But most of all I want to make good use of the time I have in 2013.

We are not going to cook Christmas dinner this year.  Marty wasn’t able to get the day off work so we decided it would be easier to go out for a meal.  I cooked dinner the last couple of years and it was a challenge finding the ingredients I wanted.  This year we have a new one – I’m on a gluten-free diet.  There is a theory that eating gluten makes my thyroid disease worse.   I have a thyroid hormone that has not been improving with medication and it’s possible that changing my diet will help.  I’ve been gluten-free for a couple of months now and I’m certainly doing a lot better than I did this time last year.

Being gluten-free in Japan is not easy.  I never thought of wheat as an ingredient in Japanese cooking but it’s everywhere.  The main problem is that there is gluten in soy sauce.  There is even gluten in most tamari, though I have often heard it described as wheat-free soy sauce.   Eating out has become a challenge.  I can’t eat noodles, tempura, ton katsu, or yakitori. I have been avoiding my favourite French restaurant as the smell of the bread drives me mad.  I can still eat Indian food, but I really do miss pasta and pizza.

Bread is becoming very popular in Japan.  The coffee shop I study in on weekdays does not contain a single thing that I can eat.   I can bake my own things but I need to be careful about the flour I use.  Rice flour is naturally gluten-free but lots of the rice flour here has gluten added to it to make it easier to bake with. There are no gluten-free bread or pasta products in the local shops  I was told that that it is possible to buy bread made with rice flour but all the ones I have seen also contain wheat.  I have been able to find a few things online but they are expensive and since I do cook a lot of my own food I have just made other things.

I did order a couple of things from the UK and I am looking forward to trying my gluten free Christmas cake.   I also ordered a packet of gluten-free rolls, the type that you bake in the over, but they were horrible.  I was going to throw them out but I ground them up and made stuffing with them which wasn’t bad at all.  I should really try to make gluten-free shortbread for Christmas but I haven’t had the energy to do that.  It’s time consuming and I worry that I will spend ages fiddling with it only to find it tastes bad.  Maybe this year we’ll have gluten-free cupcakes instead as I know they taste good.

I’m not quite sure how the year manages to go by so quickly.  I’m sitting on the floor surrounded by Christmas cards and it seems like no time at all since I did this last year.  November was incredibly busy and flew by with Japanese lessons, TPF work, and  NaNoWriMo.   I was determined to complete NaNoWriMo this year and I somehow managed to write the required 50,000 words before midnight last night.

December is my favourite month as I love Christmas.  I have put up my little Christmas tree and finished about 50% of my Christmas shopping.  Christmas in Japan is always a little strange but it certainly isn’t boring.  Marty is working on Christmas Day, so we won’t be cooking at home, but we have made reservations to go out for roast turkey that night.

Christmas Decorations at Disney Sea

Tomorrow I begin a 3 month intensive Japanese course.  I’m not exactly looking forward to this.  I have thought about doing it before but my travel schedule has made it almost impossible.  This year, however, I have no plans to travel between now and New Year.  It’s been nearly two years since I attended a Japanese class and I have forgotten so much.  I had to attend a test on Saturday morning to determine which class I should enter.  It was not a pleasant experience. The first half was a written test which highlighted just how much I had forgotten.  I could read it, but I could not answer most of the questions.  The speaking part was an exercise in frustration.  Apart from one question I understood everything I was asked but I could barely form a coherent sentence in response.

The next few months are going to be challenging.

I was born in a country that’s well known for being green.  It’s not something that I hear said about Japan, but once you get outside the big cities you quickly become surrounded by green.

Green Mossy Carpet

Ryuzu Waterfall, Nikko

Shrine Grounds