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.

First (& last?) snow of the winter

It was snowing here for about an hour today:
The snow was trying to stay on the ground, but couldn't. It could stay on my coat though:
It's only the 4th time I've seen snow in Hamamatsu, so it might also be the last time we see snow this winter.

p.s. Happy New Year!

Christmas lunch and dinner

Ayako and I had a quiet Christmas together. Ayako was busy making a 'Japanese Christmas" lunch, which included a vegetable Christmas tree made from mashed potatoes, broccoli, and star-shaped carrots:
The Bûche de Noël Yule log for dessert was delicious:
We had a western-style Christmas dinner (although having ham instead of turkey):
Merry Christmas everyone!

End-of-year parties

The end-of-year parties are in full swing now. I went to a couple over the weekend, although only took photos at one of them. Like last year, we visited a party thrown by a fellow Aichi University professor, Angus, seen here:
The party was thrown at an old house with many rooms and even a sunken hearth in one room, which we cooked sweet potatoes on.
There were a number of professors as well as students there. It was nice seeing some 4th-year students in a relaxed atmosphere since they have now finished writing their graduation papers.

Trip to Kobe

During the first week of November, there was a festival at my university, which meant that I was able to have a bit of a holiday. Ayako and I decided to head down to the city of Kobe for two days. We started off walking around the downtown area and quickly found a nice shrine:

We had heard that Kobe is an international city. We were amazed though at the number of gift stores selling items from one country or another. Most were from European countries but we even found a whole Muslim area with a number of restaurants and stores as well as a mosque in the area:
For lunch, we had a great recommendation from our friend Sabrina about a steakhouse called Steak Aoyama. We went there to try some Kobe beef. Here's our appetizer salad along with some Croatian beer that the chef recommended:
As for the main course, Ayako and I split a sirloin steak and a fillet steak (tenderloin) to see which we liked best:
Here's the chef cooking the food in front of us:
Since we are in Japan, he cut up the meat into bite-sized pieces so that chopsticks could be used. We had ordered our meat to be cooked medium-rare, and so each bite-sized piece was cooked medium-rare. The bread being toasted on the side was also very delicious:
Here was our meal, still on the stove to keep it warm:
The meat was very delicious and we both decided that we preferred fillet over sirloin steak. There was salt that we coat dip the meat into which had come from the Andes. They had a rock of salt beside the grinder to show us where it had come from:
In the afternoon, we continued looking around in the small stores downtown. Later on, we caught a small train to go to a small island next to Kobe. We could see the many cranes in the harbour for the boats. Ayako thought the cranes all looked like giraffes:
We found that there was an Ikea on the island, so we went for a look around to see if it differed much from the ones back home:
Most of the furniture was the same as in Canada although the furniture and things for the bathrooms were quite different. We had a small dinner in their cafeteria, which was huge and had lots of comfortable sofas to sit on:
At night, we went for a walk through Chinatown, which had lots of decorative lights along the streets:

Even the vending machine was decorated:
The next day we went for a walk through the historic area of Kobe, which has lots of historic foreign houses in it:


There were some houses that had been badly damaged during the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 that had been left and not repaired. This is a beautiful stained-glass window of a Persian building that had become overgrown in plants since the earthquake:
Since the historic area is up steep hills in Kobe, it wasn't long before you'd get thirsty. The entire area is residential, so some houses had set up vending machines outside the houses to capitalize on this small market:
We even found a Starbucks that had renovated a historic building:
There were seven rooms that you could choose from to have your coffee in. We were lucky to get one small room to ourselves. I think it was a small study previously:
With the hilly roads and the many cats that we saw, Kobe reminded me a bit of our trip to Kanazawa:
We found another cute cat at a shine that was up a steep staircase:
There was a wonderful view from the top:
We could even have a good view of some of the houses in the historic area:
...as well as a great view of the city:

In the afternoon, we went for a bus tour of the city, which let us see the rest of the city that we had missed:

After that, we headed back to the train station to get a bullet train back home. We had a great time in Kobe and were pleasantly surprised how much the city had to offer. We both agreed that it was the most pleasant of the large cities we had been to in Japan.