Craft fair

Ayako found a craft fair that was happening at Garden Park on Saturday, so we head down there and first enjoyed a picnic in the park.

 After, we enjoyed wandering around the fair.  It was a beautiful fall day and there were hundreds of sellers from across Japan.

 I think this may have been the best craft fair that I've been to since it was free, there was a great selection of crafts and and there was lots of room to move around since it was outside.

Typhoon (#15, Roke)

September is typhoon season in Japan and we had our second big typhoon so yesterday.  This one though actually made landfall in Hamamatsu, so it was the biggest storm that I've felt here.  Luckily I didn't hear about any major damage in our area.  We had our recycling box fly down the street but that was about it.  The winds started coming from the north-east at first.  You can see the wind starting to pick up speed here:

Here's a view of our neighbour's house:

The wind got the waves going and so finally the fishing boat near our house started taking on water:

There was a calm in the storm for about 30 minutes, but then an even stronger wind came from the south-west.  It made quite the noise as is went by our house:

There were a number of boxes and containers that went flying by as well:

Luckily the fishing boat has drainage holes on the sides, so it was above water a few hours after the storm had past.

Work & play in Kyoto

I recently traveled to Kyoto for two days to attend a teaching conference about extensive reading.  There were many well-known speakers in the field attending, so it was one of the better conferences that I've been to.  

Since I was in Kyoto, I also made sure to do some sightseeing to places I hadn't visited before.  My first stop was the Kyoto Imperial Palace.  This is where the Emperor lived when Kyoto was the capital of Japan (until 1869 when the capital moved to Tokyo).

To have a tour of the palace, you need to make reservations prior to the day, although the tour is free.  It was a one-hour tour and all of the tour was from the outside of the palace buildings.  We weren't allowed to enter the buildings.  Still, the buildings and gates were very beautiful:

For lunch, I had nishin-soba (Pacific herring in buckwheat noodles in soup), which is a well-known dish of Kyoto.  Very delicious.

In the afternoon, I visited the small town of Ohara, which is just north of Kyoto.  There is a famous temple there called Sanzen-in.  The temple had wonderful wooden hallways that were nice and cool for my feet.  I've figured out that one of my favourite things is walking barefoot in quiet temples.  They also had a beautiful garden:

Outside of the temple, the ground was covered in moss and there were faces carved in rocks placed here and there.  It was very peaceful to walk around:

Here is another picture I took at the temple as well as another nearby temple:

Free trip to Nagoya

At the beginning of the summer, Ayako entered a radio show contest by writing about what kind of trip she would do with some prize money if she won. Her essay was one of the six chosen, so she won a ¥10,000 ($120 CAD) gift certificate from a travel agency. With the money, we got a free hotel room in the centre of Nagoya for a night.

During the 2 days in Nagoya, we looked around at some areas we thought we might like to move to next year. In the evening, we could do a bit of shopping and also got to enjoy a Nagoya special dish of pork cutlet with miso sauce on top:

Since we were staying overnight on a weekday, the hotel (Princess Garden Hotel) bumped us up to a fancier room. The hotel was very nice, especially since the usual cost of staying there is not so high and it's in the centre of the shopping district of Nagoya (Sakae). We definitely recommend staying there if you visit Nagoya.

Unagi Pie Factory Tour

Yesterday was one of the 'hot' Midsummer Days in Japan according to the Chinese Zodiac, although it was actually cool and cloudy. Nevertheless, it is customary to eat eel on the 2 Midsummer Days since it helps give you energy to cope with the heat. While I was in Korea, the same days were observed, although it was customary to eat dog there.

Ayako and I enjoyed having eel on rice for lunch at home. Afterwards, we drove down to the factory where a local snack is made from eel, 'Unagi Pie' (unagi means eel in Japanese). Some of you reading this may have tried this since this is the local snack that I have brought back to Canada. The snack is made of thin pastry with powder made from eel and is baked into a thin, sweet biscuit covered in butter and sugar:

When we got to the factory, the parking lot was full with so many people wanting to take the tour. On the tour, we got to find out how the idea of Unagi Pie came about and how they are made. We could also look down into the factory and see the different steps of Unagi Pie being made. At the end of the tour, we had our photo take with human-sized versions of the snack. The original version is in the middle, and with nuts on the left and with brandy on the right:
On the tour, we were given some sample-sized Unagi Pie, but we also bought some in the gift shop at the end of the tour. We bought the 'family pack', which was specially priced since it contained the Unagi Pie that wasn't worthy of selling in stores.

It was nice that we could fully enjoy having eel for both lunch and as a snack on this Midsummer Day. It's definitely one of my favourite foods in Japan.

Anniversary lunch

It's near the end of the semester for me and so I was lucky to have Friday off this week. We had decided to go for lunch to celebrate our fourth-year anniversary. We went into our local town where there is a famous eel restaurant. Eel is my favourite Japanese food and so we were both looking forward to this meal. We arrived at the restaurant 10 minutes after it opened and it was almost full. We had asked the waitress to take a photo but she had shaky hands and we got a blurry photo. So instead, I'll show you our individual photos with our yummy eel on rice meal:
By the end of the meal, the restaurant had many people waiting for tables, so I'm glad we got there early. The meal was good, although not our favourite place in the end, but we still enjoyed having our anniversary lunch there.

Sheep Festival

Last Sunday, Ayako and I drove up north of Hamamatsu to watch a festival celebrating sheep. Actually, the reason we found out about the festival was that we knew that they serve handmade soba (buckwheat noodles) and we wanted to try them again. The only problem is that you can only get them during the fall when the leaves are turning and everyone flocks to the area or when a festival is on. Therefore, the first thing we did at the festival was enjoy some handmade soba and some tempura made from mountain plants (on the table in front of Ayako):
After lunch, we looked around at some of the stalls selling crafts and tried some other drinks and snacks that were for sale. Next was the first main event, which was sheep shearing:
It was definitely slower than the sheep shearing competitions that I saw back home at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair:
The second main event was a race between the 7 lambs that had been born in the past two months. They each had a different colour ribbon on them and you could bet on the winning sheep with your festival entry ticket:
I chose the lamb with the green ribbon since he was the youngest but wasn't the smallest so I guessed he was good at running for his dinner. And so the race began:

As you can hear, I was excited that my lamb was the winner. Everyone who voted for the green lamb received a small lamb doll made out of wool. Very exciting.

UPDATE: We found out that while we were watching the lamb race, we were being filmed for TV. A number of our neighbours saw us on TV that night and were excited to tell us about it when we saw them.

Stalactites & Stalagmites

Recently, we went to a local tourist spot that we had yet to visit called Ryugashido. It's a cavern that takes about an hour to walk through. Here's a photo of me outside of the entrance with a scary looking dragon behind me:
They had a good path with many explanations along the way and lots of interesting formations to look at:

I liked some of the mini-lakes that formed underground:
It was interesting to see some small plants growing down there:
Afterwards, we enjoyed some delicious gelato in the souvenir area:

Earthquake - update

Today is day 6 since the earthquake in the Tohoku region. Life in my area has returned to it regular ways and I haven't seen anybody stocking up on food when I was at the supermarket. There is increased helicopter activity since there is an air rescue squadron at the self-defense base in our city.

There was a 6.4 magnitude earthquake near Mt. Fuji last night. Since we can see Mt. Fuji from our house, we could definitely feel the earthquake here (magnitude 3 in this area). I heard on the news that there were 2 people with minor injuries. There was no tsunami warning since the earthquake was inland. There haven't been any aftershocks since then.

It seems that most of the news from what is happening in Japan is being reported pretty quickly around the world, so there's not much more that I know that hasn't been reported. The main for our area is that we are 500 km away from the area hit by the tsunami and we have a strong wind that blows west to east during the winter, which makes me feel relieved about any radiation blowing this way.

Earthquake and tsunami

As you've probably heard, there was a large earthquake and tsunami in the north-east part of Japan yesterday. We definitely felt a lot of shaking during the initial earthquake which lasted a couple of minutes (very long). Since then, we've probably felt about 7 aftershocks. The earthquake took place about 500km north of us and so that's where most of the damage has been. The nuclear station was affected was east of Tokyo (about 300km away from us) and so it seem like we should be alright. I'll let people know if I hear anything else.

Retirement party at traditional restaurant

There was a retirement party for three university professor from my department last Monday. We went to a traditional Japanese restaurant for the event. You can see the three professors below:
It was a formal meal with many small servings. It was the first time I had been to a restaurant like this with each person sitting against the wall with their own tray in front of them.
It was a delicious meal, and since the department paid for it all, it was even more enjoyable.

Birds with their prey

I've been lucky living in our house by the lake since I can sometimes get some good photos of the birds that live in this area. I was surprised when I looked through my blog that there weren't any of these photos, so I'll start putting some up.

The first set is of birds catching fish. Last week I got a couple of good shots of a Black Kite, which is a common bird of prey in this area:

About one month ago, I got this shot of a Cormorant trying to eat a whole eel. It took a number of attempts.
My favourite set of shots is of this Grey Heron eating a fish whole:

Snowy day

Well, I guess we did get another day of snow this winter. On Sunday, it snowing on and off during the day. Since it was cloudy all day, some of the snow even stayed on the ground:
And when we woke up on Monday morning, there was quite a bit of snow (for Hamamatsu) on the ground:
On Sunday night, Ayako made a yuki daruma (Japanese snowman - made with 2 spheres):
By the morning, he had lost his eyes, but had gained some snow at the base:
Ayako and I enjoyed going for a morning walk in the snow. It felt like a Canadian snowy day in December.

Here are some more pics from the house:

Happy Birthday to me

I was lucky that some friends still on their new year's holidays, so they could come visit out house and help celebrate my birthday:
Ayako made some delicious dishes and our friends from Toyohashi and Iwata had fun getting to know each other:

Of course, there was also a delicious cake that I thoroughly enjoyed. It was called ultimate lemon cake and it definitely had a super lemon taste:
Here we all are (minus Eiki taking the photo) before the Toyohashi crew had to head home:
It was a fabulous birthday indeed.