whitebait icecream

I finally realized why I have so much difficulty getting round to blogging. I'm a strong introvert - even calling close friends on the phone requires a whole lot of screwing up my energy level, while personal emails tend to get put on one side to be answered at length, only to be rediscovered with embarrassment weeks or months later. And blogging is even more revealing - I have no idea who will be reading this, or what your reaction to it will be - and so gets put off "until I have time to do it properly." Which might be this year, next year, sometime, never ...

But I know there are family members and friends who would appreciate a photo or so now and then. So I'm going to try and blog more regularly on more impersonal things to get some momentum going again, and slip in photos of the family whenever there's a particularly nice one to share.

Icecream is a bit of a personal subject, perhaps. We all have our favorites, mine being anything remotely raspberry-related. Japanese icecream includes all the regular standards - you can always find chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla - but quite a few flavors that would raise eyebrows if you saw them in Baskin Robbins in Piccadilly. Some are standard flavorings for Japanese sweets - green tea, azuki bean, sesame, sweet potato - that scarcely rate a second glance when used for icecream too. Others are a bit more unusual. Because green tea is a regular flavoring in Japan black tea gets used in the same way, and I still find it hard to adjust to Darjeeling or Earl Grey icecream. And tastes such as pickled cherry leaves or mugwort, while normal for mochi rice dumplings, somehow feel a bit strange in a cone. But occasionally you come across flavors in icecream shops that just make you go HUHHHHH?



Take this selection. The back row is relatively normal - crumbed cookie, cream cheese, milk tea, and chocolate (phew). But the front row starts getting interesting. From the left, we have shiso (perilla, an aromatic green herb), Calpis (a milk-based drink that's more appetizing than it sounds), lemonade, and finally sea salt. In the same shop I tried root ginger icecream, expecting it to be similar to the crystallized ginger version I've had so many times in London. Sadly, no - the taste was raw and pungent, and I was glad I'd tried a spoonful before buying. (I eventually settled for the lychee.)



Or this shop, in Shizuoka. The bottom three tubs are nothing unusual - grape, mango, and shincha green tea. But take a look at the top row. On the right, you might be forgiven for thinking you have pistachio, but no, it's salt ("emerald salt" this time). With wasabi (hot green horesradish), usually used for seasoning sushi, in the center. And no, your eyes don't deceive you. That is actually a shrimp on the left. Shizuoka is famous for sakura-ebi, tiny crunchy pink shrimps, and someone had the bright idea of adding them to icecream to make a local delicacy. I guess it would be perfect with a scoop of wasabi on the side.

But the one below beats all, at least for me.



In the front row, second from the left, is ... shirasu icecream. Shirasu are tiny baby fish, a type of whitebait, that are a local delicacy in the Shizuoka region where Kentaro now works. They're delicious on rice, with a sprinkling of salmon roe. But in icecream?

I bottled out and got the pumpkin, then thought I just had to try and asked for a spoonful. And what do you know, it was very very good. Not at all fishy, but with a very pure, creamy taste, punctuated by crunchy bits when you bite into a morsel of whitebait. Next time we go, I'm going to have a whole cone.

Dancing with a dolphin

Kei's birthday treat at Adventure World in Shirahama, a couple of hours' drive from Osaka. (He's the smallest child in the middle.)

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Taiwan photos

Life has just been too busy to blog! Not so much because Kentaro is now living in Shizuoka - he was around so little before that in practical terms it makes almost no difference to our daily lives (although of course we miss him lots) - but because since April I've been teaching a university class in translation in addition to a tutorial group for postgraduates in scientific English, and the preparation and marking time have taken away every spare minute I had (and there weren't many of those to start with). So apologies to those faithful family members and friends who have been checking in periodically, only to find nothing new since March. We are still here and still well, and the boys are growing up apace.

Kentaro actually has two weeks' proper holiday in his new job, one week in summer and one in winter, which is a fantastic change. We used his summer vacation time to take a family trip to Taiwan, somewhere we'd never been before. Despite a typhoon that covered literally the whole island for the first three days and put paid to a planned trip to the east coast, it was a great trip. Below are a few photos to give you a taste.



We flew EVA Air, which has Hello Kitty as its logo. It felt a bit surreal to fly on a plane with a pink kitten on the side, but it was a good flight and the crew were very friendly.






The day after we arrived we went up Taipei 101, currently the tallest tower in the world. It's due to be overtaken by a skyscraper in Dubai next year, but at least we went up while it still holds the record!









The view from the top.











The boys enjoyed writing postcards at the top of the tower.












Lunch in the food court. The boys were still having a bit of a hard time adjusting, and insisted on familiar food - sushi for Kei, McDonalds for Dan. Kentaro and I were already enjoying Taiwanese chicken and rice.






Kei took this photo of us in holiday mood outside Taipei 101.







The typhoon was approaching and the wind was already pretty strong, so we headed to the National Taiwan Science Education Center, where the boys had great fun with all the hands-on exhibits, a 3D movie (Dan's favorite part of the entire trip), and an entire floor of bouncy-castle-type large inflatable structures. I wish I'd taken some photos of those, as they were so much fun.




The next day the typhoon hit. We had been due to go to Hualien, on the east coast, but all the trains were cancelled that morning. The hotel receptionist told us that services were due to be restored that afternoon, so we checked out, left our luggage at the main station, and went to see the new Pixar movie WALL-E in an almost deserted cinema. When we got back to the station, though, it turned out the afternoon trains had been cancelled too, so back we went to the hotel. The staff were highly apologetic and gave us a better room for the same price, with a huge jacuzzi in the bathroom that made a nice end to a frustrating day.

By the Tuesday the worst of the typhoon was past, but the weather was still cloudy and wet. We headed out on a day trip to Jinguashi and Jiufen, two old gold-mining towns on the north coast about an hour out of Taipei.


The landscape was green and mountainous, very similar to Japan's but with more tropical vegetation.



Jinguashi was the more interesting place of the two. The town has been turned into a "Gold Ecological Park," with the old mining buildings (dating from the Japanese colonial period) restored and one of the tunnels converted into a recreation of the mining process for tourists. Kei was especially excited to be able to touch a huge bar of gold in the Gold Museum.





We were a bit too tired to really enjoy Jiufen. It's a tourist town, with a covered arcade lined with food and souvenir shops and some steep steps that were the inspiration for the landscape in the animated film "Spirited Away." In this photo the boys are eating real crisps - a whole potato sliced thinly, stuck on a single stick, deep-fried, and dusted with curry powder.





The next morning we paid a quick visit to the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall. It's an imposing building, set in a big park that gave the boys plenty of space to run around. They enjoyed standing to attention next to the guards, and watching the marching and rifle-twirling that accompanied the changeover to a new pair.














































Then we flew out to Penghu, a small archipelago of islands off Taiwan's west coast. We stayed in a guesthouse near the beach, one of four run by a wonderful young couple called Maco and Anna (you can see their Web site here). Our room was actually in their home, which they share with Maco's parents as well as his brother, sister-in-law and little niece. They were all unbelievably friendly and warm, offering us advice and practical help at every turn. In the photo, Maco is next to Kei; his sister-in-law and niece are next to Kentaro, and his mother and father are on the right.


















The islands are low and scrubby, covered by grass, aloe, and cactus. The beaches are lovely, with fine coral sand and hardly any people.

























We borrowed life-jackets for the boys, as the surf was still strong after the typhoon.





















This, believe it or not, is a single banyan tree. It's 300 years old, and the roots growing down from its branches have developed into more than 100 pillars. We tried to find the original trunk, but it was impossible to tell which it was.
The stalls around the temple behind the tree sell cactus-fruit sorbet, which is surprisingly delicious with a sour-sweet taste reminiscent of blackberries.



Sunset from the seawall at Makung, the main town on the island.







The town has an old ferry that has been turned into a shop for souvenirs and marine products, with navigation equipment on the bridge that kids can pretend to operate. The boys loved being ferry captains for an evening!






Maco took us snorkeling on our last morning. The water was very clear, and we saw many small, brightly colored fish. We swam out to look at the coral reef about 30 meters offshore, but Maco said much of the coral is dying - whether because of the unseasonably cold previous winter, global warming, or some other reason, he's not sure.




Maco and Anna took us to the airport to say goodbye. They had already become such good friends that Kei cried when we left.

Funny sort of Easter

For the first time in my life, Easter basically didn't happen to our family this year. We spent it moving Kentaro's stuff to his new hospital, four hours up the expressway. Easter came much earlier than usual in any case, and my usual source of Cadbury's chocolate eggs, the FBC Britshop, closed down last year because of the strong pound (sniff). Seventeen years away from the UK have finally accustomed me to Good Friday being a normal working day, but until last year I'd always been to church on Easter Sunday. This year, we were camping out in sleeping bags in Kentaro's new house on the hospital grounds, doing without a bath as the gas wasn't connected, and rushing to go shopping at the nearest big home center before returning the rented van to the rental company by lunchtime and driving back down to Osaka in our own car.

I did manage to make hot cross buns. I feel a bit proud of myself for that; sneaking a tiny taste of British Easter into the rush and stress of getting a van, a car, two kids, appliances (many kindly given us for free by friends who were leaving the country), furniture, books, futons, and miscellaneous stuff loaded up and driven to Tokai. I slipped the ingredients into the bread machine after coming back from collecting a free washing machine, shaped the dough in a couple of minutes snatched while loading up the van, and got them into the oven 20 minutes before we were due to leave. They were baked and thrown in a paper bag about two minutes before we ran out of the door to pick up Kei from Saturday school on the way to the expressway. As I drove our car with the kids behind Kentaro in the van, their aroma tantalized us for the entire journey. Early Sunday morning I dug the toaster and coffee maker out of the depths of the van, and offered my Japanese family an Easter breakfast.

Dan didn't like them, and demanded ordinary bread instead. Oh well.

There were times during the weekend when I thought we must have been crazy trying to do this with the kids in tow. It certainly would have been easier to have left them with my parents-in-law and gone up with just the two of us - shopping at the home center without the boys having ear-splitting Pokemon battles up and down the aisles would have been a lot less stressful, for one thing. But I am glad we went up there as a family. Now when Kentaro leaves next weekend at least the boys will have an image of where he's living, and we've left our sleeping bags for when we go up to visit.

I take it all back....

Maybe our local city government isn't so bad after all. Even if their prose is mindnumbingly bureaucratic, at least they're sensible enough to get it properly translated.

One of my jobs today was proofreading a brochure for a different city. Up to about two thirds of the way through the English was at least comprehensible, if not all that grammatical. But then it suddenly turned into sentences like this:

They argue at the equal viewpoint as the engine of which it became independent respectively also though it's exchange of cooperating each other, city council and city chief are making an effort toward improvement of a life of city people

The person whose job it was to produce the English version must have run out of time and just thrown the last part through some translation software. I ended up sending it back to the agency with a plea for them to request the original Japanese; OK, I could have a stab at making some sense out of this, but it would be a creative reconstruction akin to trying to reproduce a portrait of someone's face using nothing but a heap of splintered skull bones.

In a sense it is reassuringly bad, though. At least computers aren't going to be putting us human translators out of a job any time soon.

Comments (please)

A couple of people have told me they've tried to comment on previous posts but haven't been able to, so I've fiddled around with the settings a bit. Hopefully it should work now, so please do have another go! (I love getting comments.)

So tired

I've been pretty overwhelmed with work the past few days. March is the busiest season for translators, as all our clients are trying to use up their translation budgets by the end of the financial year, so suddenly a whole raft of agencies that might have contacted me three or four times in the past year are emailing and phoning with job offers. I'm having to turn them all down, as my regular clients are keeping me quite busy enough already; tonight is the third night in a row I've been up well past midnight, attempting to turn mindnumbingly bureaucratic prose from the city government Web site into something that's hopefully vaguely readable in English. As the saying goes, though, garbage in, garbage out ... especially at this time of night. Honestly, some of the stuff I've been having to deal with lately makes Vogon poetry sound relatively appealing.

But I did go out for a rare night on the town with three fabulous friends last Saturday evening, and laughed more than I had in what seems like years. If you're reading this, girls, THANK YOU! Now I just have to find a babysitter who can persuade the boys to go to sleep (something even Kentaro can't do - the three of them eventually crashed out together on our bed at nearly midnight, apparently) so we can do it again soon.