Enough with the natural distasters...

Hi All,

We just wanted to thank you all for all of your phone calls, emails, texts and facebook messages and let you know that we are safe and sound. We will try and write another blog entry soon!

Thank you, Starbucks

I really like coffee. Most of you can probably come to that conclusion after reading blog after blog about a trip to the city. Every single day starts with a trip to Starbucks, and typically a mid-day visit later on. Unfortunately there are no coffee shops like Starbucks (or Seattle's Best or Doutor or any of those other chain brands) within a 30 mile radius of where we live. The closest thing that will give you coffee in a takeaway cup is McDonald's, and no offense, but McDonald's coffee is only good in an emergency. This is great for my wallet, but bad for my coffee cravings!

Don't get me wrong, I am not one of those people who needs coffee to fuction on a daily basis (although Bryn would probably argue otherwise!). I just really, really enjoy it and am a much happier person if I can have a nice cup of coffee at some point during my day. Of course they sell coffee in the grocery stores here, but it is either a no-name brand that tastes more like dirty water than anything else, or instant coffee which is pretty much the same times 500. It's okay in an emergency, but it doesn't satisfy my craving for something that smells and tastes nice and comforting.

If you look really closely, you can see that I am, in fact, standing in front of a Starbucks. It happens to also be my favorite Starbucks in the whole world (so far) with a prime location on the Kamo River in Kyoto.

My solution to the lack of quality coffee in Tango is to stock up on bags of beans from Starbucks whenever we go to the city. It is always our last quick stop before hopping on the train home - a quick pop into the Starbucks under Kyoto Station where I buy a couple bags and have them grind the beans since I don't have a grinder at home. This works great, and provides me with all the coffee I need until my next venture into the city.

At the Starbucks in Yokohama's China Town patiently waiting for Bryn to take the picture so I can start on my latte...

However occasionally there are weeks like this when I have run out of all of my Starbucks and don't have a trip planned in the foreseeable future. Oh my gawd, what am I going to do?!? I tried just drinking tea for a few days, and it's nice and all, but it's not the same as a nice, hot cup of yummy coffee. So, the other dayI broke down and got a bag of "Yokohama Bay Blend" from the "gourmet" foods shop in Omiya. I had really high hopes as I measured it out into the french press the other morning and patiently waited four minutes for it to brew. The damn stuff tasted like mud. Ugh. So NOT the way to start a Monday morning! I tried it again on Tuesday morning - much the same, and there is nothing worse than a bad cup of coffee if you ask me.

Yesterday was Tofu Tuesday, a silly thing Bryn and I are doing to mix things up every week. Since the start of the new year we have been trying to incorporate tofu into our dinner every Tuesday and have so far done pretty well (and even had some yummy meals!). I needed to stop at the store on my way home to get some tofu to put into the Korean soup mix we had bought over the weekend. Mine (the department store between where I work in Amino and our house in Nodagawa) has good tofu, so I stopped off there. As I walked into the supermarket section, out of the corner of my eye I spotted that familiar green mermaid logo I love so much. No way! I thought...there is no way on earth they would sell anything Starbucks way up here in the middle of nowhere. I looked again and sure enough there it was, my beloved Starbucks! It was only a small display, so not wanting to take any chances I threw a couple boxes into my basket...there's no telling how long they will continue to stock it.

I was SO excited to try my new found Starbucks this morning. It's not the regular bags, it's in Japan's form of semi-instant coffee. They use a cardboard apparatus to hold a makeshift filter filled with coffee grounds over your mug. Then, you pour hot water over it and it filters through making you one cup of coffee. I will admit that it isn't the same as brewing a cup of fresh coffee from a real bag of beans, but it is WAY better than the crap they call coffee otherwise.

Tah-dah!

So, long story short, I may have found a solution to my coffee-less time between city trips! I am thinking I will stop and stock up on some more soon before Mine stops selling it just to be sure. I don't want to find myself coffee-less on a Monday morning again!

Rediscovering Soil

As you will all know, February 22nd was the day that my hometown of Christchurch got seriously damaged by a pretty nasty earthquake. Liz and I were enjoying the comfortable surroundings of Starbucks in the Landmark Tower Plaza, Yokohama at the time. We had managed to get a table bathed in morning sunlight, and it felt SO nice to be sitting in the sun after such a long winter. We were discussing Liz's schedule, and I was trying to memorize which seminars she was going to at which times, when I got a text telling me about the quake. It was quite a shock, as you can imagine.

Anyway, long story short, I was very lucky that my friends and family were all ok. The city will be rebuilt, and it will be better and stronger than before. I'm excited for the future of Christchurch. For now though, it's time to let people grieve in peace, and to be grateful for what we have.
It may be 15 years before Christchurch recovers, but it WILL recover.

It's been a hard couple of weeks, but things are really looking up now, because Spring has come to Yosano. It's still only just popping its head out from beneath Winter's thick blanket, but it IS here!! The snow has melted!!! The plum blossoms are starting to provide pink and white explosions of colour, and the daffodil buds are stretching higher and higher towards the light. The days are noticeably longer and the daytime high temperatures, though still depressingly low most of the time, are getting into double digits more and more often. In a matter of weeks the cherry blossoms will BURST Into flower and Life will return to Japan. It sounds a little over-dramatic, but anyone who has ever endured a winter in rural Japan will attest to what a BIG difference the cherry blossoms make.

pink and white plum blossoms starting to flower

This winter HAS been a beautiful one. There has been a lot of snow, which really makes the mountains pretty, but it's also made getting around harder and less appealing, and now it's such a relief to see the colour of the soil and the green grass, and to see how wide our narrow roads actually are (since the piles of snow on either side made them much narrower for a good part of winter). Can't wait to smell that sweet scent of cherry blossom in the air soon. It's been a long time coming.

Today Liz and I went for a midday walk. We didn't really have any destination in mind, but we just wanted to get out and enjoy the early beginnings of spring. Along the way we visited our local shrine, which is just a few minutes walk from our house. The shrine is old (1298 years to be exact), and has an impressive pair of stone lanterns and a large stone torii gate at the entrance and a flight of stone steps leading up towards the shrine (as you can see in the photo above). Once we got up there, it was like we had stepped back into winter! There are many tall trees around the shrine (like most shrines in Japan) and so I guess the sunlight never really reaches the mossy ground there to melt the snow. There was only a small amount of snow, but it was still enough to make it feel colder up there.
We came home via the supermarket at picked up some noodles for lunch! YUM!

Tomorrow is Monday and the start of another school week. Things are winding up at school, as graduation is next week and the end of the school year is on March 24th. Really not long to go till spring break. SPRING break! SPRING!! Doesn't that sound nice?? haha