Tokidoki

February 28, 2006

Birthday Party

Jesus. Looks like someone just turned another year older. Grahaeme turned 29 last Thursday and we all went out to enjoy a lovely ShabuShabu dinner. Shabushabu is the onomatopoeia for the sound beef makes when you dip it into a hot broth to cook it. One-two-three swipes and these razor thin slices of beef are cooked. As you can see there is a hot plate around the base of the broth bowl where you can sizzle the shit out of your beef if you want to. The meal was 2 hours all you can eat for around 26 bucks Canadajin. The meal also came with vegetables but seeing as this was our first red meat meal in a very long time, not many vegetables were consumed. I'd say Grahaeme ate none.

It was a really nice get-together with all the ALTs from work and their pardners. Saya, Eric, Nick, Josh, Jess, Jeremy and the rest. Tamaru-Sensei from city hall and Nori Fujita from Ichiritsu came out as well. To top the occasion off Natasha had a surprise for Grahaeme. She made a special (and especially delicious) chocolate cake with the number 30 on it. Very, very funny. It was a great dinner and we were both so happy to have everyone out to enjoy Grahaeme's 30 minus one birthday.

Check out the photogallery for more pics.

Posted by tokidoki at 04:36 PM | Comments (1)

February 11, 2006

Grahaeme's Trip To Mihara

I sit behind a Social Studies teacher, Mr Kato, who is into walking pilgrimages all the time. He puts on his big old sun hat and goes walking from temple to temple. To keep track of how well he's doing, he wears a step counter to work. He's pretty serious about his walking. But the thing is that as he visits temples along the way, he takes a zillion photos and collects stamps in a little book he keeps. So this last weekend he invited me out to a temple with him in Mihara. It was up in the mountains and there's been a cold snap recently, so it was a little chilly; but it was really nice. So Kato-sensei's book, like one of my sketchbooks but with a nicer cover and you collect stamps in it. When you visit a temple you can pay 300yen and the local priest/monk will write the temple's god name in lovely calligraphy. So he got a book for me that I have now used and when we visited the temple we got this done. (see picture to the right) Then we hit the Onsen, which was a salt water Onsen from the ocean and an all you can eat buffet. The view from the onsen is really nice looking out over the inland sea. You can watch the ships roll in and out of port, or just watch a little fisherman roll on the waves. We went to one other temple in Onomichi, which is a small city just 20 minutes away from Fukuyama. The temple we visited there was up on top of a hill, so we drove up and walked down. On the way home we stopped for a coffee in a little coffee shop on top pf the hill. It's sort of a mountain, but not really.

Posted by tokidoki at 08:36 PM | Comments (2)

February 05, 2006

This blogs full of shit like this

So, Miyamjima is apretty interesting place. It's got a famous temple some lovely mountains and deer that come right up and bite you on the ass. Well not all of them come up to you and bite you on the ass, but these ones were certainly biting this guy. I can understand why so many Japanese tourists come to Banff and Jasper and try to feed the animals. Well, Japanese people from Hiroshima anyway. We headed out here on a Saturday after we had been in Hiroshima for a conference. We visited the Peace Museum on the Friday and then out here to Miyajima on Saturday.

One of the beautiful things about Japan is how much they love food. Everything the Japanese prepare always LOOKS great. Every 'ken' has different specialities and those specialities change from season to season. The seasonal food this time of year is oysters, so every place we went to was serving freshly caught oyster. Now i know that trying new food is one of those great things about travelling, but man I cannot eat those oysters! I try and try but it just does not happen.

Anyway, Miyajima is a really nice little island and theres lots to do. We managed to fit in a visit to the local aquarium, where they have all sorts of crazy looking fish and aquatic life. There was one huge tank right as you walk in that was full af around 25 different kinds of fish and 2 sting rays, plus a couple sea turtles to boot. But the catch was there were only one, maybe two of each kind of fish. They must just catch what they need for the aquarium, then when it dies catch another one.

It was a very beautiful place and once we figure out how to get the photo gallery up and runing there will be a lot more pictures of it to look at.

Posted by tokidoki at 07:28 PM | Comments (0)

February 04, 2006

We've got a lot of catching up to do...

Well, there you go. This is the format through which we will be communicating with home. To some extent for friends i guess, but mostly this is for the moms. So they stop calling. Just Kidding.

I guess the only place to start is to describe where we live and how. At this point it should be clear, since neither of us have shown up for work or come out for beers, that we live in Japan. So this is a break down of where and how.

This is the view form our front door. The street is relatively quiet and the neighbourhood is full of kids, so we get more shouting and squeeky bikes than the roar of cars. Every so often a potato salesman will roll by in his truck and blast a dreary song about potatoes. It's like an ice cream van, but think hot potato treats instead of ice cream.

This is the interior of our apartment, this is Natasha in various areas of the house (but most of that was covered in the DVD so we wont repeat.)

Posted by tokidoki at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)