Much more practical when it's snowing!

Tonight being the 8th of the month, the restaurant called 八方園 (pronounced 'Happouen') does a 食べ放題 (all you can eat) dinner of 焼き肉 (grilled meat) lasting 90 minutes for 2980 yen (about £20) including a drink. We went along with a couple of friends of ours, Taro and Miho, and after all opting for a beer as our drink, then proceeded to order copious amounts of meat to cook to our liking on the grill in front of us.

What was interesting though was the セセリ (pronounced 'seseri' - the light meat at the bottom of the first photo). None of us knew what it was, so we asked the lady and were told it was meat from the neck area of chickens. It was certainly very tasty and we enjoyed more than one plate. We ordered a plate of everything on the menu just to try them, but I think everybody's favourite was the ハラミ ('harami') coated with salt (塩) and lemon sauce; it was fantastic!

As a really kind gesture once we'd paid the bill, perhaps because we were the last people remaining in the restaurant, we were brought free strawberry ice cream. I'd love to go back again, but unfortunately we won't be around for the 8th of next month!

Well of course I wanted to bring Liz, my visiting friend, to my favourite eaterie Ichibun! The master seemed prepared too, as he surprised us with a couple of new dishes.

First up was a salad of まぐろ (tuna) on dressed cabbage, which was scoffed in an instant. Then he brought us a ドリア (doria), made with rice and seafood and covered with melted cheese. Finally after we had ordered and consumed a couple of our regular dishes (ramen etc) he brought us a complimentary dessert of lemon ice cream with berry compote and home-made strawberry jam. And as always everything else was 500 yen a dish (about £3.50).

Hopefully Liz was convinced of Ichibun's calibre after that. (I'm seriously going to miss Ichibun's food!)

First let me state that these weren't all mine! There were many of us, and after coffee in Tully's this afternoon I decided that I had to take Liz to Masamura (マサムラ) as they're probably the most famous cake shop in Matsumoto (松本).

The four cakes in the photo coated with icing sugar are the main reason I love this shop; cream-custard filled choux buns (シュークリーム). The baby ones were 110 yen (about 70p) and the large one 200 yen.

My car's odometer on the way home displayed tonight's cinema seat numbers - 11,12,13. Spooky!

Even after finishing it I could easily eat another!

This weekend my friend Liz visited from down in Shiga prefecture, and her main objective (apart from to see me of course) was to see the snow monkeys, for which Nagano is famous. I hadn't yet been either so today was a great chance to go.

A great number of macaque monkeys come to Jigokudani Monkey Park (地獄谷野猿公苑) in the winter months to bathe in the hot natural water. Despite not having any snow coverage yet it was still fascinating to watch so many monkeys together, enjoying themselves and completely oblivious to the people taking photographs. I guess they must be used to it by now!

I was particularly amused seeing the monkeys after they'd dipped their heads in the water. It was like their heads had suddenly shrunk! I commented that I thought it made them look a bit more like old men.

There's a great website about the park and access to it and its environs here. The map provided helped us to find the lower parking area and from there we took the quiet 1.6km track through the forest to get to the park.

Here are four of my favourite photos from the day.

I took my friend Yuzo for lunch today to Misoya (みそや), a popular miso ramen (味噌ラーメン) restaurant in front of Nagano station. There are only counter seats available, and at meal times you often have to wait for a seat. Today we were lucky though and got a seat straightaway.

While I'm not so keen on 'ordinary' miso ramen, this one I really enjoy. It has quite a lot of garlic in it, and a reasonably strong flavour. The pork meat (チャーシュー) is also very tasty, and the soup goes very well with the plentiful beansprouts and green onions on top. But I can't quite pin down why I find it so enjoyable, I just do.

Anyway it's just 650 yen (about £4) and well worth a visit if you need to eat quickly around Nagano station.

Ingresso (イングレッソ) is a small Italian restaurant and wine bar owned by Mario (as he's been nicknamed), a portly Japanese guy with a great sense of humour and a real passion for Italian food and wine. He learned to cook in Europe and then opened the restaurant in its current location near Nagano station just over a year ago, having first run it in a different part of town.

At lunch time his complete lunch menu comprises starter, Italian-style bread (and olive oil), a pasta dish, and finally dessert and coffee for 900 yen (about £6). That's what we went for today (and in fact every time), as although there is also the option of just taking the pasta (and bread) for 600 yen (about £4), where's the fun in that!

Today's starter was a wonderful truffle quiche with rocket. I then opted for the gnocchi, which came with a tomato and spinach sauce liberally spread with parmesan cheese, rather than the spicy tomato spaghetti with Italian sausage. I had that myself last time I came and it's great; unusual to be able to eat such sausage here in Japan.

Finally was dessert of panna cotta with golden kiwi and fruit compote, with which I drunk an espresso.

There is a blog which Mario frequently updates. I'll definitely be visiting again for lunch in the next couple of weeks.

The master of our favourite local diner, Ichibun, brought out a couple of surprises tonight when we visited.

First he brought out a large dish of pork stew, with which he served slices of fresh baguette. The meat was so amazingly soft and tender, and the taste was really delicious. We were all so surprised that he'd made it for us, and then... it was gone in a flash!

We also ordered his potato okonomiyaki (made by adding potato to the normal flour and egg mix) and his Indian-style curry, plus a salad of daikon and scallops. (I took no photos of these.)

As a dessert he surprised us yet again by producing home-made warabimochi (蕨餅), a jelly-like substance made in this case with just potato flour and water, and covered with a sweet black-sugar syrup and soybean flour. My mother-in-law then quizzed him on how it's made, and we couldn't believe how easy it sounded; just potato flour and water!

Finally, the master brought out a miso ramen (味噌ラーメン) for us to share. Nice! Although by this time I was seriously full, so couldn't eat much of it.

I'm really going to miss Ichibun and the 500 yen (about £3.50) lunch and dinner dishes.

Apparently (according to my other half) this is the best spicy ramen with tofu (マーボーラーメン) in the area. Actually the place we went to for lunch today is located opposite my old Japanese language school in the 川中島 (Kawanakajima) area outside Nagano city, so until March this year when I graduated we used to go here quite regularly. The restaurant's name is 永楽 (pronounced 'eiraku') and it is the only (thanks to the above-referenced statement declaring it the best) place I've eaten this ramen.

The slightly spicy soup contains mince and tofu, and underneath this top layer of meat and tofu lie the noodles. Very tasty! Reasonably priced too at 650 yen (about £4.50).

It's not too clean a restaurant I feel, but in truth it's probably typical of a 中華食堂 (Chinese-style diner). Thankfully last year they finally made the main part of the restaurant non-smoking over the lunchtime period. I do wish they'd hurry up and outlaw smoking in all public places like other countries, but I sadly don't see that happening for quite some years yet. But at least it's moving in the right direction.

I was like a child in a sweetshop this afternoon when Amazon delivered my latest order. In fact I'd pre-ordered these lightsaber chopsticks a few months ago after first reading about them on TokyoMango. I ordered one of each of the three colours, and back then on pre-order they were 785 yen each (about £5).

After much thought I decided to open Yoda's smaller green ones to use now, and I'll keep Luke's and Darth's in Japan for my return. I guess I could then even create two mixed pairs of chopsticks, one red and one blue. Then every meal would be like a lightsaber duel between good and evil. (Oh dear.)

They've recreated individual handles for each based on the 'real' lightsabers from the Star Wars movies. Opening them revealed some of the detail they've gone to - even the tiny button on the handles is painted green. 

I'll be trying them with my first meal tomorrow, woooooooo!

From the Tokyu department store. Yum!

Before visiting our local cinema tonight to see Inglourious Basterds (which was great) we decided to grab a big bowl of udon at our favourite udon place around here, 十萬石 (Juumangoku). They have three restaurants (that we know about) in Nagano prefecture, with our favourite being out in 戸倉 (Togura) - a little too far to go in the time we had. So we settled for the second-best alternative closer by.

I went for my usual-for-winter hot and slightly spicy 肉味噌うどん (miso-flavoured soup with pork and vegetables) and it was delicious, with the udon being chewy as they should be. Comparing it to the udon we've eaten recently, it's quite different, being much more rough and obviously hand-made. I really like this quality though, the unevenness of the noodles makes it delicious.

The important thing -- other than the quality of the wheat-flour -- when it comes to making udon is コシ (koshi). Literally meaning "one's back" (as in putting one's back into it) its true meaning is the firm texture of the udon, coming from the power and effort the maker puts into kneading the udon mixture while creating the noodles. Thus you can tell a bad udon if it becomes soft too quickly after being in the soup a short while.

At 十萬石 with your meal they allow you to help yourself to as much salad (well, cabbage) and tea as you like. (As a side note you'll notice that in the second photo the restaurant's name is written on the side of their mugs.) Our bill for the meal was 1995 yen (about £13).

Last night upon arriving at the restaurant we were met with the very strange sight of dozens of daikon lined up outside. Inside we were then met with boxes upon boxes of daikon. So strange! When we sat down I noticed that on top of the boxes was a written notice to customers (photo four) asking to please freely take as many daikon as you'd like, and they provided plastic carrier bags to take them away in. I guess there is a lot of spare daikon available this year; just a shame I'm not too keen on it myself.

The final photo shows the restaurant from the outside as we were leaving to drive home. One thing I unfortunately wasn't able to take photos of is the interior of the restaurant. All of the branches of 十萬石 are really old traditional Japanese-style buildings, and inside they have vaulted ceilings and are decorated with display cases containing lots of samurai memorabilia such as suits of armour and weaponry. Almost museum-like, and very very interesting.

When I came to Japan, because I have the privilege of coming from England, I was able to just exchange my UK UK driving licence into a Japanese driving licence without taking any sort of proficiency test. At first I thought this was because Japan drive on the left side of the road like the UK. But that's not the case, as there are a number of right-hand-side-of-the-road countries (e.g. most of Europe) which also have reciprocal agreements with Japan for licence exchange.

However despite having been a driver in the UK for 13 years and having a clean record, when I received my Japanese licence I was designated a 'new driver'. This is indicated on the top-most licence below by the green strip across the middle. Within this green strip is the expiry date of the licence. (The year is written in the standard Japanese era format.)

The problem is that my licence was due to expire in March 2011 (three years after having received it), but having contacted the driving licence centre a week or two ago, I was told that I could go along to the centre before leaving Japan and pay 4250 yen (about 30 pounds) to extend my licence for an extra year. This gives me enough breathing space.

As an aside it's a real pain in the arse that in Japan everybody has to renew their licence every few years (up to five). In the UK once you have your licence you keep it (providing you commit no driving offences) until you reach old age, no renewals necessary. One would think with such a strict renewal system here it would breed better drivers, but, well that's a whole other subject I could write about, suffice to say that it definitely doesn't seem that way to me having driven here now for two years.

Back to the story, so I went along to the centre this morning and went through the application process (forms, eye test, new photo) in about half an hour, and was then told to go upstairs to 'watch a video'. I was expecting this to take about 30 minutes or so, but oh no. First we had a lecture for 1.5 hours(!) on driving and road safety by some guy with a droning voice. Why is it always the case that they make the presenters of such lectures have boring voices? Imagine if they actually made it entertaining, they might not get a quarter of the class of 50 people sleeping, as was the case this morning.

He covered such subjects as:
- use of seatbelts
- numbers of deaths and accidents
- recent changes to the law
- stopping distances
- drinking and driving, and using mobile phones

I did pick up a couple of interesting pieces of information actually. We heard that although there are more traffic accidents during the day than at night (which makes sense as most people are awake and out then) the percentage of deaths occurring in traffic accidents is actually greater at night.

Then he, using an overhead projector (something I haven't seen used since my school days), showed us some statistics that indicated that in Japan as a whole only 30% of back-seat passengers wear seat belts when travelling on normal roads. This percentage increases to just 60% when travelling on the motorways. That's actually quite scarily low from my point of view! For the passenger seat the percentage is only in the 80s. I guess the one positive was that we were also shown percentages for just Nagano prefecture, and these were all slightly higher than the overall figures.

After the lecture was over, we were then shown a 30-minute video which was basically just showing real-life examples of the different kinds of car accidents that happen. I guess it was partly shock tactics, but it was more interesting than the lecture.

When we finally left the lecture room we were all given our new licences, and I noticed immediately that I now had a blue strip instead of green. I found this information online about the different coloured strips:

"Japanese driver's licenses have 3 colors - green, blue and gold - for the term of validity. Green is for the new driver who gets their license for the first time, blue is for drivers who have renewed, and gold is for the excellent drivers who have had no accidents/violation of traffic rules in the past 5 years. It is valid for 5 years."

(I resisted the urge to change the noun 'license' in the above quoted text to the British spelling 'licence' - not to mention the atrocious grammar.)

Unfortunately because of the timing of this renewal, when I renew this new licence in 2012 I will have only had a licence in Japan for four years. So I'll be given another blue licence, and then only on the next renewal three years later (2015) finally get my gold card (assuming I don't flagrantly violate the law in the meantime). Bummer!

Finally I've highlighted a couple of changes on the new licence below:

(1) - They no longer declare me to be British (イギリス). I'm told this is because the new licences have an IC chip inside that stores this information, so my nationality is removed for privacy reasons. The new licence is certainly thicker than the old one, I guess due to the embedding of the chip.

(2) - Interestingly enough on my eye test this time they told me that in fact my eyesight is borderline okay, meaning that I'm no longer legally obligated to wear glasses when I drive. So they removed this restriction from my licence.

Well okay, I exaggerated a bit. But today I went to my eye doctor for my forth visit about my always-dry left eye, and again like the first time I went he gave me the dreaded 'dry eye' test. It's so uncomfortable! They start by telling you they're going to put drops in your eyes that will make your eyes hurt, and thus make you cry. And then if that's not bad enough they get paper strips and hang them over your bottom eyelids. Not pleasant.

If you look closely you can see that my left eye has released 16mm of tears, whereas my right eye is at 34mm; more than double! But on my first visit a few months ago my left eye produced even less, so at least it seems slightly better than it was. And certainly my left eye hasn't been quite so dry throughout the day recently.

It has been a long time - nine or ten months - since I last visited the house of my friend Esdras, out in the sticks of central Nagano-ken. (Thankfully I could keep myself occupied on the 50-minute train ride thanks to the ability to tether my iPhone to my MacBook Air.)

Historically we've always eaten home-made cheese wraps for lunch at his house, using tortilla wraps and cheese he and his wife acquired through a food supplier, but this will be the last time to eat them for quite a while. Luckily he had just four tortillas left, enough for a couple each. Their flavour belies their plainness it has to be said, and with chai tea to accompany them they were very satisfying.

We spent a good couple of hours chatting about OS X and the ways we felt it could be improved for the next version, and then the remaining time was expended, well, expending zombies in Resistance 2 on his PS3. Thanks Esdras!

Yours for just 5.6 million yen (about 4000 pounds) at K's Denki (ケーズデンキ). I love the way they put a bench in front of it so people can just space out and watch film trailers (and probably commercials).

It was my first time to see a wooden-cased air conditioner this afternoon while clearing out an old apartment. As you can see in the photos it's a Mitsubishi unit, and according to a PDF I found online (you can see a segment of it as the last photo) it was made in 1982. I love the wired "micro computer" remote control.