Ready, Steady, Cook

On the Saturday 28th Feb, we all visited the Ecole de Cuisine et Nutrition Hattori in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Yuki's brother, Kentaro, used to work for a credit company but grew tired of office life and decided to throw caution to the wind and train to be a chef. He's been training now for the last two years and I think will soon start work at a French restaurant. 

Saturday was an open day where the students got a chance to impress visitors with the fruits of their labour. There were a lot of people there and a lot of displays to get through - I felt a bit like Alan Partridge at Swaffham County Fayre. Kentaro's creation is the picture at the top of the page.

There were a lot of oddities on display which always adds a bit of interest. The oddity that caught my eye was this roast chicken, which looked like it should be behind doors in Area 51. A bit odd!Still, there were a lot of great exhibits that obviously took a long time to complete. A lot of the students presented 'French' or 'European' style food, but I was much more impressed with the simplicity of the Japanese foodstuffs.

Perhaps my favourite display was that of a Japanese garden. As you can see below, the detail is quite fantastic! Rice for gravel, sushi for the river bed and path, red fish for flowers, and small cuts of sashimi for paving slabs. Very impressive, even if I do detest fish! I would love to know how many hours were spent preparing that. Clara began to tire of traipsing through the many rooms of food, so we decided to wait outside while the other members of our group finished the inspection. As we were making our way out, we stumbled upon a display of wedding cakes, my favourite being the cake modeled on a horse racing course. Wow! Anyway, that's it for now.

Books and Art

My silence in the blogosphere accurately indicates a lack of things to report. Work is busy but enjoyable, Yuki has had a bad cold this week but seems to  be getting better, and I am coming to the end of a long weekend after having had the day off on Friday.

It is rare for me to visit central Tokyo, so it was nice to hop on a quiet midday train on Friday and make the journey into Shinjuku. Whenever I visit Shinjuku, the first location to visit is always Kinokuniya Book Shop. The shop has a healthy range of titles and I usually pick up a few books on each visit. On Friday though, nothing much seemed to inspire me and I was loathe to spend ¥2,000 on a book that risked being put down after a few pages. A lot of books can be fairly expensive to buy in Japan, so you really need to be sure you want to read one before making a purchase. Nothing really grabbed my attention but I ended up buying 'Kidnapped' by Robert Louis Stevenson and a book called 'In the Company of Heroes' by Michael Durant, a helicopter pilot who was shot down and captured in Mogadishu, Somalia. Both were pretty inexpensive, especially 'Kidnapped' which was only about ¥400. It was interesting to note that a lot of the old classics sell at a considerably less price than books recently published. I will be taking advantage of that fact next time I make a visit. 

After Kinokuniya, I walked back towards the train station and stopped off in the Dubliners Bar for a few pints. I don't really like the place to be honest, but it is convenient and lets me enjoy an overpriced pint of Kilkenny. 

The unexpected highlight of the weekend was visiting the local Higashimurayama Town Office to look at selected art work produced by local children. There are tens of primary schools in the area and therefore only 2 children from each class had their art work displayed. Clara was one of only two kids selected from her class to have a picture displayed and was therefore feeling a bit proud of herself.

As the pictures will attest, some of the art work was fantastic. It was hard to believe that some of the work was produced by primary school students. Perhaps I was more impressed than most of the other visitors as I have always been appalling at art. In my final year of mandatory art classes at Portree High School, I was ranked 116th out of the 117 students in my year. Number 117 was off sick for the year. When I return to Scotland and meet some of my old school friends, they often make a passing remark (along with a smirk) about the art work I used to produce. Perhaps my finest work was a packet of digestive biscuits.

The weekend is almost over and therefore I will be taking the usual early morning train across Tokyo to my job and small apartment in Chiba. I have been enjoying my work recently which is refreshing although I do not relish having to sort through about 300 emails when I return. 

I'll try and do an update soon. Although the long weekend is over, in less than a month we will all spend 3 days in the Fukushima countryside at a log cabin which has a nice onsen nearby. Not too long to wait until then.