Yesterday we set out to spend the morning at Jigokudani Monkey Park.  We had arrived in Saku the night before and had arranged to meet our friends at 10am.  I was looking forward to our road trip as we are rarely in a car anymore. The day was damp and overcast, so we didn’t get a very good view of the mountains, but the journey was still enjoyable.

Once we parked the car we had a 30 minute hike through the forest.  I would love to see the monkeys when it’s snowing but I don’t know if I really want to go hiking in the middle of winter.  Even yesterday, without any ice or snow, it was a difficult walk.  The ground was muddy and in parts it was very steep and slippy.  But it was worth getting a bit dirty.

The monkeys are Japanese Macaques and they are beautiful.  I wasn’t expecting to see quite so many of them or for them to be so unconcerned about us being there.  A couple of them even pushed me out of the way when they didn’t like where I was standing.

One of the things the monkeys are famous for is bathing in a hot spring.  They do this to keep warm during the snowy months and I wasn’t sure if any would be bathing yesterday.  But when we got to the spring there were quite a few monkeys lazing around.  Others were grooming each other in the water.

One of the park keepers pointed out the alpha male of the troop. I believe that he said that the monkey was 26 years old. (He was speaking in Japanese so it’s possible that I am mistaken.)  He was calmly sitting watching all the humans and as long as we didn’t stare at him it was possible to get quite close.

Last night we stayed at the Plaza 21 hotel in Sakudaira.  It was the smallest Japanese hotel room I have ever stayed in.

I found it really hard to take a picture of the room because I couldn’t find anywhere sensible to stand.  The pictures don’t really show how small it was.  If I lay on the bed and stretched out I could touch the walls on either side of the room with the tips of my fingers and the points of my toes.  And I’m not exactly tall.

This weekend we are going to Saku to visit a friend and to go and see the snow monkeys.  I love travelling on the shinkansen and can’t wait to leave but Marty is still fast asleep.  Obviously the thought of a train with a maximum operating speed of 300 km/h isn’t as exciting to him as it is to me.

I have often heard people ask conference organisers if they’ve started to have nightmares about the event yet.  I organised a conference and I didn’t have nightmares.  But last night I had my first nightmare about being president of TPF.  The dream involved mutant rats, freaky flying creatures, and black goo.  Thankfully I woke up at the point where the rat people were trying to turn me into a man…

(I imagine when mst is encouraging people to blog about Perl that this isn’t the sort of post he is expecting.  But the dream has been on my mind all day.)

This spring has been surprisingly cold and damp.  But today the sun came out and a I finally got a chance to see the cherry blossoms.

“Bake a cake”, he said,  “It’ll be fun”.  It’s been years since I tried to bake a cake and I’d forgotten how much time it can take.  I used to make chocolate cakes, but I really don’t want all those extra calories in the house, so I decided to make something less fattening.

But before you can make a cake you need to shop for the ingredients.  It’s difficult to find the correct ingredients here.  I have been told that they don’t sell self raising flour in Japan.  This can be made from plain flour and baking soda but it adds an extra mixing and sieving phase when trying to get the baking soda evenly mixed through the flour.  I think I found the right type of sugar, but if nothing else it was the right colour.  Good fruit though is easy to buy, if a bit expensive.

After sieving and mixing the salt, flour, baking soda, and cinnamon I had to prepare the fruit.  I don’t appear to be very good at grating things.  The carrot was too hard and seemed to take forever, the apple was too mushy and I nearly put my hand through the grater.  The orange peel was the only thing that seemed to grate in the way I was expecting. The raisins were no problem at all as all I needed to do was weigh them.  The sugar needed mixed with oil and orange juice, which should have been easy, but I managed to squirt orange juice all over myself and the floor.

The cake didn’t look great before I put it in the oven, probably something to do with the carrots and raisins, but it did smell amazing.  Now that it’s out of the oven it looks fine.

Actually it tastes fine too.  Not sure I would describe the process as fun but I would make this again.

Yesterday I lifted up a copy of Now That’s What I Call Music Vol. 75 while walking through HMV in Shibuya.  I have only heard of about 40% of the artists and 4 of the 43 songs.  As I was curious I decided to look up the contents of Now That’s What I Call Music Vol. 65, which was released around the time I left the U.K.  I believe that I used to listen to popular music, but I might just be kidding myself and blaming my move to Japan for something that isn’t related at all.

On that CD I had heard of 70% of the artists and knew 20 of the 43 songs.  I was aware that I was hearing a lot more Asian music but I hadn’t realised just how out of touch I was getting regarding music from the U.K. and America.  Mind you, I’ve just looked at the contents of the album again and with artists like “Jedward featuring Vanilla Ice” I’m not sure I’m missing much.

Yesterday I decided to use the new oven to cook dinner for friends.  This did mean that things probably seemed totally chaotic when they arrived at our apartment.  When cooking for other people I’m a great fan of dishes that can mostly be prepared the day before.  I’ve gotten used to making soups, curries, and stews.  I’m completely out of practice when it comes to using an oven.

I made chicken soup the day before for our starter, which was one thing less to worry about.  I wanted to cook turkey breast, stuffing, potatoes, and carrots in the oven.  Since the oven is quiet small we tried putting things into it earlier in the day and realised that there was no way that was all going to fit.  Instead of roasting the carrots I made honey and orange coated carrots in the crock pot.  I have gotten used to the crock pot so when it plays it’s weird little Japanese tune I know that the thing instead it really is cooked.  Pity I can’t say the same about the oven.

The roast potatoes cooked really fast.  The turkey breasts cooked really slow.  At one point it looked liked all the vegetables would be ready with nowhere to keep them warm.  I had this large bowl of colcannon that I was beginning to think might have to go in the crock pot with the carrots, which wasn’t a brilliant solution but I really didn’t want to dry it out on the stove.

In the end it all worked out and I did learn a few things about the oven.  It’s really hard to cook two things in it at once that aren’t going to finish at the same time.  It has one oven tray and a wire stand that sits over this.  So, when you take out the tray, the stand comes out too.  If your meat is on the tray there is no way to baste it without lifting out the stand, and in my case, the potatoes.  The oven loses heat really fast when the door is open so it’s not a good idea to open it and then realise that you haven’t got a clue how to unwrap the tinfoil around the meat so you can baste it.

Oven gloves would also be very useful.  I used to have these but we have no idea where they might be.  I’m hoping that somewhere I have an unpacked box containing ovenware.

I’m really glad that I had ordered Easter eggs and little Easter cakes from the U.K. for this dinner.  If I hadn’t I would probably have decided to bake a cake and that would have made the day a complete stress-fest.  As it was we had a bit of flapping around followed by a really nice meal.

We celebrated our 14th Wedding Anniversary last week.