Over the past couple of days I have been given some strange things to eat. Marty and I stayed in a traditional ryokhan in Hakone for a couple of nights. As part of the package they provided us with Japanese food. For breakfast I was presented with rice, cold fish, miso soup, pickles, cold sausage, and scrambled eggs. Now scrambled eggs might sound like breakfast food but these eggs were cold, presented on a bed of lettuce and had been scrambled with baby eels that have little black eyes. There is no way I could eat food with eyes for breakfast.

As part of the dinner set, which was served in our room, we had stew that was cooked at the table. I didn’t really like the stew but it came in really useful as I was able to cook the sashimi in it. I know this was probably a terrible thing to do with the very expensive raw fish but I prefer my food to be cooked. Not all the fish was raw. We were given a deep fried catfish to eat. But it had eyes and fins and I just don’t like my food to look at me. Thankfully Marty likes loads of food and was able to eat lots of mine for me. We were also served lots of food that I didn’t recognise but sometimes it’s better not to know what you are eating.

Today Marty got hungry walking through the train station. He went to a small cake shop to buy a snack. They specialised in apple dishes and the air was filled with the wonderful scent of cooking apples. But Marty decided to buy candied sweet potato. And I was really surprised to discover that these actually tasted really good.

Yesterday afternoon Marty and I decided to spend a couple of hours at Big Echo Karaoke. We hired a private booth, so no-one else was subjected to our singing, and had fun trying to work the Japanese system. By accident Marty switched on the scoring system which gave marks at the end of each song. We weren’t sure what all of it meant but could see that some of it was for pitch, rhythm and vibrato. After a while we decided to pick songs for each other. I picked “Dancing Queen” for Marty and he was horrified that, according to the scoring system, this was the song he sang best.

Marty and I are celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary today.

I’ve been really surprised at the cost of food in Japan. It’s much cheaper than I remember. Today we bought katsu curry for lunch and it only cost about £3.00 each. We went out tonight for sukiyaki, which I thought would be really expensive, and paid around £10.00 each. Although the food has been really cheap it is very expensive to have anything to drink. In some places it costs £2.50 for a glass of coke and a small glass at that. We have been mainly drinking water as we are given this on entering any restaurant.

Tonight I had been hoping to have something more interesting to drink. But we ran into a problem. No-one in the restaurant could understand English. And Marty didn’t know the Japanese for any of the cocktails I wanted. I knew the restaurant served them because they gave us an English menu. The problem was that the English menu didn’t have the same layout as the Japanese one and it didn’t have any pictures. So although it was available it was completely useless to the Japanese staff who couldn’t read it. And therefore useless to us. It was a bit annoying being able to see that the restaurant served lots of things I would like but then being unable to order them.

My little sister is 12 today. Hopefully she has a great day and doesn’t mind too much that I can’t give her a present until I get back from Japan.