Monthly Archives: January 2012

Kyoto in late December

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Kyoto is one of the most famous tourist locations in Japan, if not the most famous. Japanese as well as foreign visitors go there every year in huge numbers to get a glimpse of what is often considered to be the cultural heart of Japan, where a lot of the old traditions and atmosphere is still alive and preserved. Needless to say that I had to go there as well and I finally got around to doing it just about two weeks ago together with a friend who is studying in Osaka right now, as well as meeting up with two Japanese friends :)

The pictures below are a general overview of our trip and I’ve added descriptions to all of them, to tell the story of these 3 days I spent there. Still, there are a few things that I want to highlight a bit more, so they’ll be getting their own articles one of these days – so stay tuned and pay a few more visits!

 

Creating Space

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What do you do when you’re a train operator and need more space in your trains for all the rush hour passengers? Operate more trains? No, just use those, where you can simply move some of the seats upwards to create more standing space and usable doors! Quite clever indeed :o

International Cooking Class

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It’s already a bit late, but I still wanted to share a few pictures from the International Cooking Class in Higashi Hiroshima. It’s beeing held two times every month with different people from different countries introducing dishes from their homecountry to the participants. In December a friend and I took the chance to teach some German dishes, which were appropriate for the wintertime  and really had a blast with all these nice Japanese women, who were really eager to learn a lot about our cooking and Germany. So please follow the link below for some pictures and also contact me for the recipes if you’re interested :)

Photo Album

Omu-Rice

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Omu-Rice (オムライス) is basically a rice dish, in which the rice is wrapped in an egg omelette with some sauce on top. While the specific sauce and the preparation of the rice may vary, one of the most common variants includes some vegetables in the rice, while the sauce itself is dark and a bit bitter as well as sweet. But that’s just the baseline and there are restaurants that specialise on preparing the various kinds of this dish in many places in Japan. And apart from the sauce (although Worcestersauce might be a good base) I think it’s pretty easy to prepare this dish yourself. It’s a simple but really tasty food in my opinion :)

Japanese Cuisine

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I still wanted to update the food section a little bit and starting with this article I have a few more in preparation to post over the next weeks. The pictures below were taken in the hotel where we stayed at our field trip to the nuclear power plant in Shimane prefecture (payed by the university, yay :D ). We stayed one night there and our reservation also included a dinner, which consisted of several servings of Japanese cuisine I would normally haven’t eaten (because of monetary reasons or because of taste). But as everything was payed for I decided to eat everything that would be served.

Below are the pictures of nearly everything we ate, but I sadly forgot to take one picture of the deep-fried food in between. Well, I guess I’ll have to go and eat that another day again to report ;)