I am writing at an iMac in the NWA lounge at Narita airport. The mouse tracking was painfully slow, but I’ve fixed it.
I woke up with a small headache. When I should have been packing, yesterday, I was playing Slitherlink instead, so I had to wake myself an hour early. Fortunately, everything fitted in my […]
It was my last day in the office — I fly tomorrow — and after a wrap-up meeting, where I was surprised to find that every stated goal of my visit had been met, I was given the choice of where to go for lunch. I chose donburi. It was tasty.
I received a phone call […]
Today’s lunch was an interesting change: my colleagues took me to an Italian restaurant. One section of the menu was devoted to Japanese twists on Italian food, and I ended up with a spagghetti dish with soy sauce and sesame.
In the evening, they had planned a simultaneous welcome and farewell meal for me at a […]
I am scraping the bottom of the barrel for topics today.
The coffee vending machine in the office makes lovely coffee; you can have it hot or iced, or you can have green tea, black tea, Coke, or various branded drinks I’m not familiar with.
Never mind those though: the coffee is the main attraction, and on […]
Blasted Slitherlink. I was just about awake at 8:30am, but by the time I managed to drag myself away from the game and have a shower, it was past 3pm. This would never have happened if Debbie had been here.
I had a decadently Western club sandwich with potato wedges in the hotel restaurant, on my […]
To compensate for Bauhaus’s inability to get me drunk, I bought some beer at the 7-11 (Yebisu “The Hop”), and that is probably the reason why it was past twelve when I finally roused myself and got dressed.
I had reached a point in my visit where I craved the familiar, so I took the metro […]
Lunch today was Okonomiyaki, but whereas in Osaka we had Osaka style Okonomiyaki, today my colleagues took me for Hiroshima style Okanomiyaki. This is an elaborate preparation: let’s see whether I can remember all the steps in its preparation.
We sat at a counter in front of a large flat hotplate, where we could watch the […]
The Japanese tell me that my English is very clear and easy to understand. However, I’m a little worried about evidence of a Midlands burr in my accent, which I wasn’t hitherto aware of.
I used the word “bright” — comparing the lighting in a izakaya to a typical British pub. They didn’t understand.
Wateru-san turned to […]
It seems there is a whole world of food hidden from the gaijin tourist.
On Thursday when I arrived in Akasaka, I went looking for dinner, found slim pickings, and after a 20 minute walk to Roppongi, bought noodles. Of course, you remember that — you read it and made a point of taking note.
For the […]
Breakfast: Now routine pastry and coffee in Dotour (a pastry and coffee chain) while reading the Japan Times. Dotour breaks up my 4 minute commute nicely.
Lunch: a tray of various nice things.
Dinner: hotel buffet.
Those with a background in French might read today’s heading as “twar”. But it’s not, it’s “toy-reh”, as in “toire wa, doko […]
Apart from work (not diary-worthy), not much happened today.
I had lunch with colleagues in a tonkatsu restaurant.
In the evening I had a stinking headache, no doubt brought on by many cups of the excellent office coffee. I thought a good feed would sort it out, so I ordered a sirloin steak in the hotel restaurant. […]
I got up at a reasonable hour, I bought a “Hakone Free Pass”, which gets me to Hakone and lets my ride around on its myriad forms of transport as much as I like.
The train wasn’t comfortable since I didn’t pay the surcharge for the fast, comfortable, pink “Romance Car”. My early start and late […]
I had half a plan to take the train to Hakone today, but when at 11:30 I found myself still in my hotel room playing Nintendo DS Othello, I realised I’d left it too late.
However, I did manage to get in touch with family friend Geraint, and after a bit of phone tag, managed to […]
I have just done Happy Friday: Japan.
It began at 5:30, and it ended at about 8:30, during which time we managed to sink four pints of strong lager and some sake in a wooden cup.
During this time, my colleagues, who are all very friendly indeed, played “feed the gaijin weird stuff”, and lost: please see […]
Well, I’m at work. I never made it to the Manhattan Bar; I let the DS beat me at Backgammon over and over again in Easy mode instead…
My Japanese colleagues have given me a very warm welcome: three of them took me with them for sushi donburi - at a place where I had to […]
Today I make the unpleasant shift from a diary full of “we” and “us” and “our” to one full of “I”, “me” and “my”.
We woke up, did some final bag organisation, and took a shuttle bus to the airport. Dragging a large suitcase but not wanting to check it in caused some minor confusion, but […]
Today is a day of mixed feelings. It’s the last full day of holiday with Debbie, and when she flies home tomorrow, I’ll start the longest time I’ve spent away from her for at least 9 years (two weeks). On the other hand, working in Japan is going to be exciting.
Today’s mission was to get […]
This morning we thought we’d spread our spending around a little instead of going to the same bakery again. On the way to Namba JR station, we spotted a holographic cake sign, and Debbie saw a picture of a waffle, so that was a breakfast chosen.
I had a “morningu setto” of coffee, salad and a […]
We had breakfast in the same bakery cafe as yesterday, and took the same subway route to Shin-Osaka. We had all the ingredients of a “morning set” deal at the bakery, so they forced a boiled egg on us, which I enjoyed.
Cold boiled eggs are quite common — they even sell them individually wrapped in […]
Stepping out this morning, our first thought was breakfast.
Earlier that morning, I’d received a comment from Gary: “Good diary so far. A bit food themed but that’s no bad thing as far as I’m concerned.” The thing is, this holidaying lark is all about killing time between one meal and the next.
After a pachinko […]
(So - today we have the Internet. I’ll backfill the previous days’ diaries in time — they’re written but uploading them requires a bit of reformatting and picture maintenance)
This morning’s breakfast was a “Western breakfast” of:
Cornflakes
Bread roll
Croissant
Marmalade and butter
Fruit salad
Orange juice
Coffee
Dressed salad
Fried egg served with boiled vegetables
It was a good breakfast.
We checked out just as […]
We both slept the sleep of the just on our futons, and were only half an hour late for breakfast — due to a misunderstanding about where it would happen. Our Japanese breakfast was not a great success - even I found it hard to stomach dried fish and pickled vegetables as my first meal […]
Today was a day of travelling.
The alarm went at 6:30 and we were out of the house shortly after 7:30. The story of how we found ourselves on the Shinkansen bullet train is uninteresting, so I will not recount it here. Suffice to say that bento boxes were bought, and the train was not missed.
Early […]
We set off on foot today, past Nicholai Cathedral — Tokyo’s Russian Orthodox church. Sadly its opening hours didn’t fit in with our plans, so we could only look at it from the outside.
We had a “morningu setto” at the “New York Cafe” - bagel, coffee and “sweet potato pie horn”.
We walked North, stopping to […]
Today, Debbie and I woke up at the same time!
The first order of business was to sort out our rail passes for next week, and book tickets to Hiroshima. We took the Metro to Tokyo station, and found our way to the JR office. Getting the passes was simple enough, although we got a little […]
My body clock continues to act up. Between 3am and 6am I was unable to sleep and resorted to sitting in our half-length bath, reading a book. Then, I fell asleep and at 10am when Debbie awoke as fresh as a daisy, I was in no state to go anywhere.
We decided that Debbie would go […]
Something strange happened to my body clock last night. At 3am I was unable to sleep, yet unable to do anything about it since turning the light on meant disturbing Debbie. At 6am I was raring to go. At 9:30am, I was fast asleep, and at 10am I was reluctant to budge.
Hence it was past […]