I’ve seen ducks swim towards people in the hope of getting food, but today was the first time I’ve seen carp do this.
Hungry Carp
Today I saw a great use for all those umbrellas that get left behind on the street car. Instead of storing them in a lost items’ room they are put in a box at the stop. If it’s raining when you get off you can take one with you.
Everyone's Umbrellas
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I spent hours yesterday afternoon chatting to friends. None of us smoke and someone made a comment on how ridiculous it was to spend money on cigarettes when you could practically afford to go on an extra holiday a year if you stopped smoking. I laughed and said that the same was true if you stopped buying coffee on the way to work. My friends looked sceptical, yet if you buy a grande latte from Starbucks in Tokyo every weekday of the year it costs more than 100,000 Yen (834 GBP, 1300 USD).
This lead to a more general conversation on the cost of living and how we don’t always know exactly how much money we spend on things. (One person at the table had detailed financial records on every penny he spends, but he only started to do that when he realised that he wasn’t sure what he was spending his money on.)
When I was in Europe in August and September I was surprised at the price of food. I believe that I spend a lot more money grocery shopping in Tokyo than I would if I lived in the UK, but I could be completely wrong. If I had to guess I would say that I spend 4,000 Yen (33 GBP, 52 USD) a day on groceries. 28,000 Yen (231 GBP, 364 USD) a week seems like a lot of money to spend on feeding two people. I imagine that we spend more money on food than the average Japanese couple, as I still buy some Western ingredients. I know it would be cheaper to eat Japanese food every day but I haven’t adapted enough to eat Japanese food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Of course my grocery shopping also contains non-food products, but then we also eat dinner out maybe once a week and Marty buys lunch every day.
I know that Tokyo is one of the world’s most expensive cities (Mercer’s 2011 Cost of Living Survey ranks it as number 2), which does mean that I expect to spend more money on food than if I lived in another city. The Yen has also strengthened substantially over the past couple of years making everything feel expensive when I covert it to another currency. But now I want to know exactly how much I do spend. This will mean keeping records but maybe I’ll find out what I’m buying that’s equivalent to the grande latte or packet of cigarettes.
. . .We have visitors arriving this week and for the first time this year we are planning on using two guest rooms. We have a guest bedroom which shouldn’t take much sorting out. The other room isn’t actually a guest room. It’s my study and it contains my electronic piano, bookcases, and my desk. The last time I decided to use the printer I had to attempt to find a path through the surprisingly large piles of stuff that’s managed to accumulate in there during the year. I hate that and love the thought of having an apartment where you could open any door without worrying about the lurking mess that’s waiting to embarrass you in front of your friends, but I don’t appear to have found a way to transfer my thoughts into actions.
I did peek in last week and the room has been breeding boxes. I don’t use the room that often and when I do it’s mostly to play the piano. Given how little space I actually need to do that the room ends up being used as a dumping ground for boxes and other items that need to be recycled. We really do mean to recycle the cardboard once a month but the door to the room stays closed and the boxes get to stay for another while. I love the convenience of being able to buy things like bottled water and rice online, but it really does use an alarming amount of packaging. Mind you, instead of writing about the packaging I should really go and start recycling.
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I haven’t had a Japanese lesson this year. I’ve been away from Japan more than I’ve been in it making it difficult to keep a teacher or to attend a language school. I may have tried harder to resolve that issue if I had been enjoying the language, but when I thought about Japanese I was filled with feelings of dislike. And although I have the ability to force myself to learn I was worried that I would never enjoy the language again.
This morning I was sorting through some of my things when I came across a box of kanji flashcards. Instead of putting these to the side I felt curiosity, I wanted to know how many kanji I could still remember. I started to sort them into order and went through the first 100 cards. I could read 99 of the 100 cards and I made a silly mistake with the one I got wrong. I’m now curious about the rest of the box. It’s a great feeling, long may it continue!
. . .I haven’t been feeling overly well so we decided to have a lazy Saturday at home. I read, watched Fringe, and ordered in food. We also decided to play Mario Kart. Every now and then Marty and I play a 32 round tournament against each other. Today I won!
Cartoon by xkcd
. . .I like trying out new recipes. This week I’ve been craving pastry and I thought I would attempt to make savoury pies. I have a limited supply of recipe books, most of which focus on desserts, so I spent quite a bit of time researching recipes on the Internet. In the end I went with a Delia Smith recipe for Chicken Feuilletes. I’m not sure what a feuillete is but it looks like a pastry parcel.
I had planned to make the pastry but I actually found frozen puff pastry in my local grocery store. I was delighted as it meant I could experiment with making pies without spending hours folding pastry. Making the filling was easy. I let Marty put the filling in the pastry as he enjoys playing and was keen to try making the little parcels. Watching him looking into the oven and saying things like “oh pants” did make me wonder if I’d made a mistake. But although the finished pies don’t look as good as the ones in the original recipe they certainly taste like the comfort food I was hoping for.
Chicken Parcels
Marty and I spent a couple of days at Ashford Castle during September. One of our planned activities was archery with “cupid in mind”. I don’t find the concept of being hit by an arrow a romantic one but thankfully the arrows flew mostly in the direction of the targets.
Archery Practice
We received information today from our medical insurance company listing medication that they supply once a year. This included a set of things for cold prevention.
I’ve gotten used to the Japanese wearing masks in the winter but I hadn’t heard about Isodine Gargle until one of my doctors asked me if I was using it. She was concerned that my thyroid function was being affected by me gargling too often with products that contained iodine. For me it was an incredibly strange question but it seems that lots of people in Japan gargle with a mouth wash when they arrive home.
I’m not sure what a medical company in the UK would suggest for cold prevention. Maybe a medicated hand-wash, as there was much talk about these after the swine flu scare, but I can’t think of anything else. All the other things for cold prevention that come to my mind aren’t backed up with much science. My mother would encourage me to take echinacea which used to make me laugh as she pronounced it like “itchy kneea”. There was a time when Vitamin C was considered to be the best thing to take to prevent a cold. And now I hear people talking about Zinc.
When I was younger I spent more time arguing about these things. But I was never persuasive enough to convince my grandmother that I wouldn’t “catch me death” by going out in the winter with wet hair.
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I used to think that our new DVD player only hated me. I would try to watch an episode of something like “Grey’s Anatomy” at lunchtime and it would refuse to play. Or it would play the first couple of minutes, making me think it was finally behaving, and then stop without explanation. Put in something like “Gossip Girl” and it would start to make alarming noises making me fear that the disk would be spat out scratched beyond use. Yet in the evenings, when Marty wanted to watch something, it would have no problem playing “Dexter” or some other violent show that Marty was into. Marty liked to say that the player had taste, unlike me.
But last night it was devious. Instead of refusing to play the film or stopping every five minutes it managed to skip whole chapters. We were watching “Thor” which had a predicable plot, so it took us a while to work out that this was happening.
It is a cheap player as we wanted something that was multi-region and our only choices were badly hacked together machines. When we first moved to Japan I wasn’t expecting this problem as both the UK and Japan are in region 2. But our Japanese region 2 player wouldn’t play UK DVDs. Something to do with having a player that wanted NTSC DVDs and not PAL DVDs.
Today it’s sitting sadly in the corner, no longer plugged in, as having to guess if the DVD is playing all of the movie was the last straw. In its place is our XBox 360 which appears to be capable of playing Japanese and UK Region 2 DVDs. Not quite sure yet what we are going to do with our Region 1 disks, but for now I’m happy that I can watch “Mad Men” over lunch and don’t have to venture near that scary thing the Japanese call T.V.
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