A Fish Out of Water

Birthday cake, curry and tea

Hideaki turned 41 last week, kicking off a month and a half of celebrations: his birthday, our anniversary, the baby's due date, and my birthday. From now on late summer and early autumn will be a busy time, but I do NOT want to be one of those families that celebrates everything all together. That's just lame.

It's hard to justify spending money on a present when there's so much to buy for the baby, so I decided my gift would be to make him a cheesecake. This was actually supposed to be a great big sacrifice, because I hate cheesecake and would be putting all the effort into something that only he could enjoy. I was in for a few surprises though, the first being that cheesecake isn't that hard to make.

Or maybe it's hard to make well- you can see that it's a little messy and I've gone outside the edges a bit with the filling. But for a first attempt by a cheesecake hater, it's not bad. This is an unbaked cheesecake (who wants to bake when it's 35 degrees?) made with mascarpone, cream cheese and cream, based on this recipe (substituting lemon zest for orange zest and omitting the orange slices). Yup, it's a kid's recipe, but perfect for a beginner like me.

I topped it with with nectarine slices macerated in a bit of sugar and lemon juice for a few minutes, and if you can ignore the mess on the crust it almost looks pretty. And it tasted amazing. That was the other surprise- I don't hate cheesecake! In fact, I quite like it. I probably still don't like the baked kind, or the unbaked kind if it was made with gelatin and lots of sugar, but this was delicious and I think I'll have to buy a cheesecake ring so I can make this again properly.

All Hideaki wanted for his birthday dinner was curry rice, and I was happy to oblige as I don't think I've made curry all year (I went off curry in my first trimester and even after my food aversions ended I didn't feel like cooking it). I made what we call keema curry, which is  based on Japanese style keema curry, which is very loosely based on actual keema curry. Our version uses ground pork, garam masala, and lots of onions and tomatoes and I love it because it cooks fast and doesn't need any of that nasty store bought Japanese curry roux. I'm sure it is nothing at all like real keema, but the name has stuck and that's that.

On the weekend I took the birthday boy out for high tea at the Peak Lounge in the Park Hyatt. I love their high tea and we figured this was our last chance to enjoy it for a very long time. He started off with an iced cappuccino, which I'm sure is hardly traditional but hit the spot on a very hot day (I had one later and it was the best iced cappuccino I've had).

The waitstaff were very nice, cautioning me not to fall down those stairs seen above when we entered (Japanese people are very concerned about pregnant ladies on stairs), bringing me a pillow for my back, and not seeming at all disturbed that I had way more caffeine than a pregnant woman should.

The weather was not quite clear enough for excellent views, but a blue sky and the buildings of west Shinjuku weren't bad to look at.

I started with a pot of Assam, and although I know nothing about tea I can tell this was good because that sugar cube in the picture went unused (I normally can't drink hot tea without loads of sugar).

The food began with the classic three-tiered serving of sandwiches, scones and cakes.

The sandwiches were shrimp and tomato, ham and cabbage and I forget the last; all were tasty.

The scones were mango and plain, both delicious and the proper British style that I love (I can no longer eat the giant, dry North American coffee shop kind). The mango ones were nice but I'd just as soon have both plain.

Served with the traditional red currant jam and clotted cream.

The cakes were very well made but were more of a treat for Hide. I may like cheesecake but I'm still not a big cake person.

After the above treats were gone we were periodically brought trays of sweet and savoury snacks to choose from, and we were soon stuffed. I forgot to take pictures of these supplementary treats, but I did make another discovery: I like panna cotta. I don't know if it's a pregnancy thing or not, but it seems I'm losing my hate for gooey, rich creamy things. I'm also not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

So that's one celebration down, three more to go. Just think, the next birthday we celebrate will be an actual birth!

The Peak Lounge
03-5323-3461
Park Hyatt Hotel 41st Floor, 3-7-1-2 Nishi Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo
Open weekdays 11am to 10:30pm, weekends and holidays 10am to 10:30pm

Weekend in Uchibo

We took advantage of a recent semi-long weekend (Hideaki works in weekly shifts, so when a day shift ends on a Friday and a night shift starts on a Monday it's an almost-long weekend) and had ourselves a mini vacation. We expect this will be the last trip with just the two of us for a very, very long time so wanted to make it special, but time and budget constraints meant we had to give up our grand plans for Okinawa and settle for something a little closer. So we rented a car and drove to Chiba prefecture's Bousou Hantou (Boso Peninsula) for a few days of fun in the sun.

I had packed a lunch that we were hoping to eat at on the beach if we made really good time, or at least at a rest area along the way. But we hit traffic as soon as we got on the highway and with the car's GPS telling us we'd be on the road for seven more hours we ended up eating in the car. Inside a tiny rental car on a crowded Japanese highway is not the most scenic of places for a picnic, but it was kind of fun, and certainly gave us something to do in the gridlock. Of course as soon as we finished the traffic cleared up and the trip took three hours rather than seven, but eating on the run did save us a bit of time so it wasn't the end of the world.
 

 

We took the fast way, which involves driving down to Kawasaki in Kanagawa Prefecture and crossing Tokyo Bay on the Aqualine, a cool tunnel that goes deep under the water and emerges halfway across the bay as a bridge. You hit land at Kisarazu, Chiba, and save yourself at least an hour (much more with bad traffic) compared to driving around the bay. The picture above was taken on the way back and shows the bridge about to disappear under the tunnel.

I always love the feeling of leaving ugly, industrial Kawasaki, above, and emerging to the greenery of rural Chiba, below. Actually Kisarazu is itself an ugly, industrial city, but the route we usually take bypasses much of the unsightliness so it really is quite a dramatic change or scenery.

Once you go a bit south of Kisarazu, Uchibo (the inner coast of the Boso Peninsula along Tokyo Bay) is lined with numerous beaches, most of them not very remarkable. We stopped at one in Tomiura called Namuyakita Kaisuiyokujo (Namuyakita Beach), chosen for its lack of umi no ie (beach huts) and other facilities. It wasn't the most beautiful beach ever, but as we'd hoped it was nearly deserted and we had a wide stretch of sand and water to ourselves. So after a few attempts at sandcastles we gave up (wrong kind of sand) and jumped into the water for a swim.

This was the first time I'd been in any body of water bigger than a bathtub since I got pregnant, and man did it ever feel good. It was much harder to float with a full uterus (I'd hoped my tummy would stick out way more in the picture above, but my middle kept sinking) and couldn't do much real swimming, but just being in the water was heavenly.

No, this wasn't Okinawa, but it wasn't bad.

Even Hideaki, who normally considers a water temperature anywhere below 30C to be unswimmable, enjoyed  the water.

When the sand fleas got to be too much (we'd timed the trip carefully to avoid the annual mid-August arrival of the jellyfish, but hadn't counted on stinging sand fleas) we drove to a michi no eki (a non-highway rest area, a smaller, quainter version of the big highway service areas) in Tomiura. Called Biwa Kurabu, its shops and cafeteria were dedicated to products made with the locally famous fruit, biwa (loquat).

So we cooled down with a biwa ice cream, took some pictures of the giant biwa sculpture out front, and planned our next move.

And our next move was dinner at Kanaya, a seafood restaurant in Futtsu. I'd chosen it from an online search because it was cheap and had outdoor seating with a view, and although it turned out to be a bit touristy it did deliver on the view.

We started with anago (sea eel) tempura, Tokyo Bay and the Futtsu area in particular being known for its eel. It was lighter, milder and less oily than any anago I've had before, and actually reminded me of fish & chips.

Next we tried kajimejiru, a soup made with miso and the local kajime seaweed. Kajime is one of those slimy, sticky foods, like okra, that you either love or hate, and we loved it.

I finished off with the zeitaku namerodon teishoku, a dinner set with namero (chopped sashimi flavoured with miso, ginger, long onion and a quail's egg yolk) over rice, fried and marinated smelt, miso soup with clams and pickles. The namero was a mix of four or five kinds of local fish, which I think included tai (bream), kinmedai (alphonsino), aji (horse mackerel) and medai (butter fish)

Unfortunately clouds prevented us from watching the sun finish setting over Kanagawa on the other side of the bay, but the sky had no shortage of shows for us that night- we were treated to a full moon and a local fireworks show. The fireworks were quite spectacular, or at least the ones I saw were- we found a spot on a pier next to a large group of local fishermen and their families, and were first befriended by the fishermen, who brought us cans of beer and a big plate of yakiniku (grilled beef), then by their daughters. These two little girls were fascinated by my foreignness and full of questions, and every single thing that I told them ("Indo" is "India" in English; we came all the way from Tokyo; yes, it's possible for a Canadian to marry a Japanese) completely blew their minds. Living in in the city it's been a long time to get that kind of reaction from Japanese kids, but they were really cute and polite (I had heard them whispering about us long before they approached us, and they actually used the respectful term "gaikokujin" instead of the usual word for foreigner, "gaijin") so I didn't mind their questions at all. I would have liked to have seen more fireworks though!

We stayed at a love hotel in Kisarazu, which sounds naughty but is actually quite practical- love hotels are easy to find, don't require reservations, come with tonnes of amenities, and are far cheaper than regular hotels or inns. Plus: jacuzzis! This place was rare in that not only were its windows not blacked out, it actually had a balcony. The night view was kind of pretty, with airplanes landing and taking off at Haneda airport in the distance, boat lights in the bay, and a rainbow light show on the weird bridge to nowhere seen in the picture above, taken the next morning.

The next day started with breakfast at McDonalds, and then we drove back down to Tomiura to Haraoka Kaisuiyokujo (Haraoka Beach), chosen for its promise of decent snorkeling from an online search. That's the last time I trust a stranger's definition of "decent snorkeling", as there was absolutely nothing to see underwater, but it turned out to be a really nice beach with an endless shallow area, a few wide sandbars, and the finest sand I've seen in Japan. Perfect conditions for sandcastle making.

We made a fairly impressive castle on one of the sandbars, and Hide went a bit crazy and took about seventy thousand pictures of it. Here are a select few:

This beach also had sand fleas, so after a short swim we drove down to Tateyama to Okinoshima, a former island now connected to land by a sandbar. The beach was terribly crowded and we barely found seats in one of the umi no ie, where we had overpriced yakisoba (fried noodles) and other snacks for lunch.

We escaped the packed beach to the island, which had a few snorkeling spots that were blessedly empty of people. It wasn't great snorkeling but we did see some neat fish and got lots of swimming in. This was only Hideaki's second time snorkeling but he already had the hang of it, and I was the one being all nervous and tired (a big pregnant belly will do that).

All tired out, we drove back up to Futtsu to Shinmaiko Kaisuiyokujo (Shinmaiko Beach) to check into our minshuku (family-run inn), Kinkaitei, shown above. We'd stumbled across this place on a trip a few years ago and really liked the food and the funky, laid-back atmosphere, so had vowed to come back some day, and here we were.

Minshuku are always Japanese style, with tatami mats on the floors, spare furnishings, and a closet full of futons and bedding that you set up yourself. Our room was typical, but it came with a little balcony (accessed by climbing out the window) with a loveseat, mini hammock, and view of the beach.

Dinner was served on the patio as the sun was setting, and although the clouds again prevented a spectacular display we could hardly complain, as the view was still lovely and the food fantastic. And plentiful- I kept taking pictures, thinking all the food had been served, and then more dishes would arrive.

Our dinner, front row from the left: rice; grilled local fish; miso soup. Middle row: vinegared octopus and wakame seaweed; deep-fried eggplant stuffed with pork; kabocha no soboroni (kabocha squash simmered with ground chicken). Back row: nukazuke (rice bran pickles) of cucumber and shiro-uri (Japanese pickling melon); assorted sashimi.

I forgot to take notes so don't remember what kind of fish it was, except that the second from left is kinmedai (alphonsino) and there were two other varieties of tai (bream). It was all delicious, especially the kinmedai, which unfortunately I could only have a little of as its fairly high in mercury and I'd just had some the night before. Lucky for Hide.

I finished with a banana crepe (Hide had locally made vanilla ice cream) and we sat enjoying the view, then went out for a night time walk on the beach.

The next morning I woke up bright and early (I don't know if it's a pregnancy thing or what, but these days I'm lucky if I sleep past 5:30) and left Hide sleeping while I went for another walk on the beach. Above you can see Futtsu's famous Tokyo Wan Kannon (Tokyo Bay Bodhisattva), one of the largest Buddhist statues in Japan. I also took a swim, ignoring the sign that prohibited swimming before 8:30 (nobody was awake to report me).

I can still see my feet! Or at least my toes.

Breakfast was on the patio again, and again the dishes kept coming and coming. Clockwise from left: rice; goya (mitter melon) dressed with tuna; aji no himono (partly dried and grilled horse mackerel); miso soup with eggplant and myoga (Japanese ginger bud); nukazuke of cucumbers, shiro-uri and umeboshi (salted ume plums); nori seaweed sheets and soy sauce (to eat with rice); fried egg with salad; and hijiki seaweed simmered with soybeans and vegetables.

Breakfast kept us too full for another swim, so we hung out on another patio, trying out the hammocks and comfy seats and staring at the beach until it was time to checkout. We drove home in time for Hide to have a quick nap before heading to work, thus ending our last trip as a couple. Hopefully not our last vacation ever though- we plan on having the portable kind of baby.

See more pictures from the trip here. 

Cultural Differences: Pregnancy information

This is the cover of the June issue of Ninsugu, a popular Japanese pregnancy magazine. The cluttered layout is typical of pregnancy magazines here (and Japanese magazines in general), as is the very young, obviously not pregnant (and possibly not even capable of conceiving) foreign model. I didn't buy this issue, as I'd bought the previous one and found it completely useless. At the time I'd been really hoping for some good Japanese information on pregnancy to compare with the very good information I have access to in English. Since I wasn't getting much from my doctor and midwife and couldn't find anything useful online I figured a magazine might help, but it turns out that the one I bought was a big piece of garbage and that useful information on pregnancy in Japan is quite hard to come by.

It's bad enough that much of the pregnancy advice and information in Japan is completely different from western advice. What Hideaki and I find really frustrating though is the relative lack of official health guidelines or common-sense, universally agreed-upon information and advice during pregnancy. I have loads of information available to me in English: my own government, like those of most developed nations, sets guidelines for pregnant women. So do countless official medical associations and private and public organizations. Tonnes of books, magazines and websites are out there, and most of their advice is strikingly similar and based on the latest science. And of course there are certain things that everyone back home knows and takes for granted, without having to consult a book or website (like don't smoke and drink during pregnancy, abstain from fish high in mercury, avoid overheating yourself with hot baths and saunas, eat well, and so on).

Here in Japan, however, there doesn't seem to be any official organization that offers pregnancy advice (or if there is, nobody I know has heard of it). Although there are a few common sense sort of things that everyone knows, some of which are the same as back home (no smoking and drinking), and a few more that are unique to Japan (avoid chilling yourself, stay off your bike), there don't seem to be as many universally known rules. Instead, the advice and information a woman receives during her pregnancy will almost completely depend on who or what she consults.

Google "pregnancy" in English and tonnes of informative, useful websites pop up. Google it in Japanese and you get a mishmash of awful, hard-to-navigate sites (to be fair most Japanese websites are awful and hard to navigate though), many sponsored by private companies with commercial interests. The information they offer will vary widely and depend on who is paying for the site. When searching for something more specific you will likely be directed to a question-and-answer type of website, where the advice will of course be all over the place. Admittedly the same thing happens when searching the internet in English, but at least you'll have a pick of several more official sites before you are reduced to reading Yahoo Answers.

Japanese books and magazines are little better, mostly featuring cutesy cartoons relaying the most basic information, tonnes of profiles and interviews of real mothers and mothers-to-be that reveal what they did during pregnancy, and pages and pages of ads (in fact some pregnancy magazines are just catalogues with a small editorial section at the front). And virtually all pregnancy publications are completely aimed at mothers, with no information whatsoever for fathers- something Hideaki finds really annoying.

The cartoons and interviews make the magazines and books cuter, easier to read, and more accessible and reassuring, and this in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. But for those who want real information, these publications can be quite useless. For example, a pregnancy magazine I bought had an article called "My Pregnancy Rules" (the first two pages are shown above) and showed pictures of real moms (mixed in with models pretending to be pregnant and posing cutely) with their tips for how to deal with the various challenges of pregnancy. These moms offered help with stuff like "keeping warm", "giving up caffeine", "preventing constipation with wheat grass juice", by sharing their personal experiences and advice. But there was no actual medical information offered along with this advice. For example, nowhere in the article did it say exactly why the woman wanted to quit caffeine, or if the reader should follow her example. That caffeine is bad and that everyone should quit it was definitely implied though. Some of the tips were for things that are unquestionably good, like getting enough folic acid and quitting smoking. But for a woman with no other source of information, wading through all of the tips to find real, useful, science-based advice would be difficult indeed, and she would be left with the impression that drinking wheat grass juice and wearing socks at all times is just as important as giving up cigarettes and alcohol.

Books aren't much better, and the few that aren't filled with cartoons are really hard to read, with endless blocks of text and no pictures. I mean, there aren't any books that offer good information in an easy-to-read format. There's no "What to Expect When You're Expecting". The books also tend to reflect the author or editor's personal views or commercial interests rather than relaying established medical information (the wackiest piece of info I've read in a Japanese pregnancy book so far: "Yes, it's OK to have sex while pregnant, but use a condom"). Of course, I'm not completely literate in Japanese and haven't done an extensive search of pregnancy books (I gave up in disgust early on), so I could be missing something, but I suspect not. Stippy.com has an interesting post about Japanese pregnancy books, and I completely agree with the author's assessment.

So if there is little published information out there, can't Japanese women just get advice from their doctors or midwives? Maybe a few can, but most doctors here tend to offer little information and some actually get annoyed by questions, and midwives tend to be long on traditional wisdom and old wives' tales and and short on actual medical knowledge. My own doctor, luckily, is happy to answer whatever questions I ask, but gives no unsolicited advice (except for warnings not to gain too much weight, of course). He hasn't mentioned anything about getting enough nutrients like folic acid or calcium, for example, or avoiding mercury. My midwife (I go to both a doctor's office and midwifery clinic) does offer plenty of advice but much of it is suspect: keeping with the nutrition example, she has advised me to get plenty protein (but not beef!) and iron without mentioning any of the other important nutrients, and has a long, long list of "cooling" foods to avoid, including all fruit and dairy products.

So from what I can see, most Japanese women get most of their pregnancy advice from their friends and family, and when they need something more turn to magazines and books. There might be some good publications out there, but I haven't come across them yet (please comment if you've found one). I'll stick with my What to Expect When You're Expecting, thank you very much.

Now, just for fun, here are some pages from my copy of Ninsugu:

A typical use of cartoons in an article about budgeting.

A guide to undergarments in the three trimesters and after birth. I especially like the alarmed look on face of the second trimester lady as she suddenly notices the size of her belly (see this larger picture for a better look). Thank goodness she can buy gigantic underwear and girdles to cover that thing up!

Here's a guide to the "Perfect Maternity Wedding". Not that there's anything wrong with getting married while pregnant, but I find it hilarious that dekichatta kekkon (shotgun weddings) are now so common that pregnant brides have become a major demographic worthy of magazine articles and ads.

This is an illustrated article about what to expect at your first visit to the ob/gyn. Amazingly, most Japanese women never see a gynecologist until they are pregnant (or trying to get pregnant), so this could actually be quite a useful guide.

Also useful is this picture of a Japanese gynecological exam chair, as it lets me show you the special torture I go through at every doctor visit. As you can see in the picture at top, you start off in what seems like a regular chair, and it feels like you're just sitting normally (except that you are not wearing pants). Then the nurse presses a button, which causes four things to happen simultaneously: The entire chair will rise, the seat back will recline, the seat where your butt was will drop away, and the leg holders that were under your knees will lift and separate. One minute you were sitting comfortably, and suddenly there you are, trapped on your back with your legs up in the air and wide open, and your ass dangling at eye level. It's just awful, and makes me dread every visit.

See the little cartoon uterus at the bottom of the panel? She's saying, in that chipper yet reassuring cartoon uterus way, that this is the same chair you'll be giving birth in. Now, perhaps some idiot out there would find ytat reassuring, but that's one piece of information that I did not want to know.

Canada Part Two

During my trip back home earlier this summer (read Part One here) my belly received plenty of attention, and everyone got to feel the baby move (and hiccup, which it does daily) at least once. I also accidentally cured one of the minor pregnancy woes that had been waking me up at night for a few weeks.

I'd been having leg cramps and noticed that they disappeared after I arrived in Canada, and suspected it was because the super-soft and comfy down mattress topper that was on my bed in the guest room, and maybe also the very big fluffy pillow that I was putting between my knees to help with my lower back pain (as opposed to the firm latex foam mattress and hard pillows I have at home Japan). I didn't have "proof" until I was moved to another bed to make room for more guests. It turns out that an air mattress, even a really good one, is just as bad for leg cramps as a foam mattress. The cramps improved when I added the down topper to the air mattress, and completely disappeared again as soon as I was back on the down topped-regular mattress. And back home in Japan, with a brand-new fluffy mattress topper on top of our latex mattress and a rolled-up sheepskin between my knees replacing the pillows I used to use, my leg cramps haven't returned. I'm guessing that the mattress topper and sheepskin allow for better circulation, and simply by changing my bedding I've cured something that no amount of stretching or walking was able fix.

So as a public service to any pregnant ladies out there suffering from leg cramps: change your bedding! If you don't have a soft mattress that allows for circulation get a mattress topper, and if you sleep with a pillow under or between your knees change it to something fluffier.

Anyway, back to the trip home. The main reason I'd been invited back home was for a baby shower, which my mom threw in our backyard. It was a beautiful day and it was wonderful to see everyone and they all brought lovely presents that were both cute and portable (as I'd have to carry everything back with me), and I wish I could show pictures of the loot (but I won't because that seems wrong somehow).But I treasure it and already have it packed away in the baby's dresser and I can't wait to start using it all.

I was busy being the guest of honour (OK, technically I'm merely hosting the guest of honour) and opening presents so didn't take any pictures, and pretty much all of the pictures other people took were of me. So please bear with me for a while, and to make up for all the me pictures I've included some cute kid and sister pics as well.

Maggie learned how to make a maple seed into a rhinoceros horn, and did it more cutely than it's ever been done before.

My Dad got back with the other menfolk near the end of the day, just in time to grill some burgers for us. It was a wonderful day and I very much appreciate that people came and gave nice stuff to the baby.

The next day my brother Greg took over the grilling and did his famous beef ribs. He'd been smoking them for a few days and by the time they got to the table they were smokey, soft, and delicious.

After all of his hard work it seems a bit mean to post this sign, but what the hell. The sign was miraculously discovered in near-perfect condition behind the sink during a recent bathroom renovation and kept for historical and/or humiliation purposes. It dates from nearly three decades ago, when Greg was a little kid, and was written by my sister Julie (who doesn't remember writing it but recognizes her handwriting). To be fair, Greg claims it was all a case of mistaken identity and that the real culprit in the apparent messy bathroom crisis was our dad. To be even more fair, I can imagine that every single bathroom used by a male member of the species could use a sign like this.

Julie, who is probably a little more laid back about bathroom cleanliness these days, having raised a son of her own, joined my Dad and I on one of our morning walks.

We stopped at a park for some swing time, and I discovered something: if you're pregnant, swinging can be a major workout.

My mom took all us kids out for dim sum one day at a local place called Kingsley Chinese Restaurant. We have good Chinese food in Japan, but not really any proper dim sum places, so this was a big treat.

At the bottom of the above plate is one of my favourites, which I identified as radish cake but was corrected- the trolley lady called it turnip cake. I've always thought it was made with daikon or radish (it's called daikon mochi in Japan) so am now a bit confused. Anyway, it turns out that everybody hated it, so I had to eat the whole order (a plate of six giant pieces) by myself. How can anyone not like daikon mochi/turnip cake?

We finished with egg tarts and the mango pudding above. I always avoid mango pudding as I assume, since I don't like pudding, that I won't like it. But it's nothing like regular pudding at all! Now that I know what I've been missing, it's my goal to eat as much mango pudding as possible.

I had really been looking forward to some fruit picking and jam making, but backed out of a trip to Niagara to pick cherries (I was tired and suffering from leg cramps and figured I shouldn't be up in a ladder in my delicate condition). So I just helped with the jam making. We made batches and batches of plain cherry jam, and one batch each of cherry-rhubarb and cherry with mixed berries (wild and farmed blueberries, farmed raspberries, and some raspberries from our garden, all added to stretch out the last of the cherries), above.

The next morning a taste test showed that they all turned out deliciously, although the jam with the mixed berries didn't set (we were out of pectin by then so it wasn't a surprise).

On another day my Dad took Julie and I out for Indian food at a place called Village of India, which does a very good and cheap vegetarian buffet.

My sister is far more familiar with Indian food than we are so I got to find out what everything actually was, and I tried all of the desserts for once (usually Indian desserts kind of scare me, as the ones I've tried were super sweet). They were indeed sweet, but in a very soothing way after the spicy food, and with hints of herbs and spice and honey. Unfortunately Indian restaurants in Japan tend to have a very small dessert selection, if they have desserts at all, so I'll probably have to wait until my next visit home to try more.

Near the end of my visit I met my friend Aspasia for brunch at a nearby breakfast place called Flips. I thought the prices on the menu seemed a bit high, and then my food came and I realized that a single order is actually about the size of three meals. It was tasty, especially the prefect home fries, and I'm really going to miss breakfasts like this here in Japan (and knowing this would be the last such breakfast in a long time, I managed to eat almost everything on my plate).

Sherry, my brother's girlfriend, took to lunch at Man Doo Hyang, a Korean restaurant in Mississauga. It was really interesting seeing how Canadian Korean food, which seems to be more authentic, differs from Japanese Korean food. One big difference in Canada is the free banchan (kimchi and other little side dishes), above.

Sherry had a few questions about the different kinds of dumplings, so we were brought a small plate to sample. These are called "Boiled Chinese Style Dumplings" and seem to be a cross between wontons and what's known in Japan as suigyoza (boiled gyoza dumplings).

We finally decided to share jajangyeon (identified as Korean Style Handmade Noodles with Black Bean Sauce) and soon dubu chigae (spicy tofu and seafood soup), which came in a hot stone bowl with a raw egg (to be added just before eating) and pot of rice on the side.

I had expected the jajangmyeon to be similar to Japan's jajamen (both being based on a Chinese dish) but was surprised to see it was quite different. The noodles were chewier than the udon-like noodles used in Japan, and the sauce was much darker and tasted strongly of black beans (Japanese jajamen uses miso and ground pork). It was tasty, as was the chigae.

The rice that came with the chigae was cooked with black beans, kabocha squash and sweet potato (and maybe some chestnut too, can't remember). After scooping it into bowls I was looking forward to eating the crunchy bits that stuck to the pot, but then the waiter came and filled the pot with boiling water! I figured he'd done it to get a head start on washing the dishes and was outraged that he'd ruined our rice, but Sherry assured me that adding hot water to crusted rice is normal and we were to eat it as a soup. So I tried some, and almost liked it. It started off well, with that lovely nutty burnt rice aroma, but then on tasting it had a flavour of... nothing. Apparently this is a wildly popular thing to do with rice in Korea, but I guess you have to grow up eating it to really appreciate it. I'd rather have the un-soaked crusty rice any day.

Except for the rice water this was a very tasty- and highly educational- meal and I hope to go back some day.

After lunch we stopped at a Korean market and Sherry bought ingredients for miyeok guk, a special soup served to pregnant ladies and nursing mothers. It is a simple but very delicious soup made with wakame seaweed and beef, and the version she made was excellent. This is one of the rare new foods I discovered back home that I can recreate here in Japan, and I'll be trying it soon.

My last lunch out was at Rapinis, a local Italian restaurant, with my mom and dad. I had veal picatta, the first time I've had veal in ages (having long considered it cruel). It was delicious, but not substantially more delicious than any other meat, so I can now happily go back to not eating veal for a few more decades.

And my last dinner was pickerel, a local fish that I love and had really been hoping to try while I was home. We hadn't been able to find it until my last full day, so I made my mom buy it and cook it up for me. She dredges it with flour and paprika and fries it in butter, which is one of the best ways to do fish ever.

Served with roasted potatoes and Swiss chard (which I also made my mom make, since I've never tried it before- sadly I was the only one who liked it). A wonderful last supper.

The good eating continued on the flight home. My mom had cleaned out her air mile savings to get me seats in Air Canada's executive class, which of course was wonderful. As with my flight in, I chose the kaiseki dinner, and was again served several tiny dishes of lovely tasty things.

Again, the little dishes were better than the main course, which this time was salmon with tofu and vegetables, served with rice and miso soup. But the salmon was quite tasty and only fared badly because the first part of the meal was so good.

For dessert I had the molten chocolate cake, which wasn't quite molten but very, very tasty.

This time I didn't sleep much, so I was awake for a mid-flight snack. Out of several choices I went with a croque monsieur and salad, and was amazed that the sandwich was freshly made from scratch- this was definitely the best airplane snack I've had. The Japanese first class passengers all seemed to have instant ramen for their snacks, which I find hilarious. Hideaki said it must be because wealthy people never eat stuff like that so it's kind of a treat for them, which makes sense but doesn't make it any less funny.

For breakfast I had banana pancakes with strawberries, which came with fresh fruit, yogurt, a nice flaky croissant (but not as good as the one I'd had on the way over- not surprising since Japan does pastry so much better than Canada), two little jars of jam and a jar of real maple syrup.

Sorry for the lighting: the sun never sets during the entire fourteen hour flight so we had to keep the windows covered at all times, and they keep the lights low for most of the flight as well. This is great for sleepers, not great for taking pictures of food.

I was a bit reluctant to get off the plane, knowing it would probably be my last time ever in first class, but I eventually disembarked and entered regular life once again. On the bus home I rediscovered what discomfort is and found myself wondering why airport buses don't have a first class (but even if they did I'm pretty sure my mom doesn't have any surplus bus miles to share). I did get some neat views of Tokyo Sky Tree, the new tower currently under construction in eastern Tokyo, shown above with the Arakawa river in the foreground and Mount Fuji (you have to look really hard) behind it.

And then I was back home, tired but very happy to see Hideaki and eager to spend a final two months together as a couple.

See more pictures from the trip here.

Pregnancy in Japan: Cultural Differences

I've managed to survive my fourteen years in Japan without experiencing much culture shock. That doesn't mean I haven't faced cultural differences: there have been many, many of those, some of them huge, some of them trifling, and most of them interesting opportunities for learning something new. I thought I'd mostly gotten used to things though, and that there was little left for me to learn. But being pregnant has shown me that Japan has plenty of surprises left for me, and I think I might be going through a bit of culture shock, or at least culture surprise.

One early surprise was the lack of pregnancy euphemisms in Japanese. A few posts back I listed a bunch of ways to say "I'm pregnant" in English, and although I thought the list rather impressive I did manage to miss a few (as pointed out in the comments- it turns out there are expressions I've never even heard of, like "up the duff"). So the list was probably just a small sample of what's available in English, but in Japanese there's pretty much just one way to say it.

First, a mini language lesson: ninshin is "pregnancy" in Japanese, and with the addition of a verb or other word becomes "I'm pregnant" (or "she's pregnant") as in ninshin shiteiru, ninshin chuu, or ninshin desu. Those three ways really count as one in my book as they are all just variations of ninshin.

There are a few other ways to say it: a doctor who is reporting that your pregnancy test was positive might say omedeta desu yo or some variation (omedeta roughly translating as "congratulations"). It is a very polite expression and used more to announce another's pregnancy rather than identify yourself as pregnant. There is also the slang word dekichatta (very roughly translated as "I/we did it", with a strong "oops!" nuance), most often heard in the expression dekichatta kekkon (shotgun wedding). It is also used more for the initial pregnancy announcement and is always used in a slight joking or negative way. There may be other slang terms, but they would be used only within specific groups of people and I've certainly never heard them, and even if I had I wouldn't dare use them as Japanese slang evolves so rapidly that it would probably be out of date by the time I managed to remember it.

So because the above two expressions are rather limited in use, everyone just sticks with ninshin. On one hand it's kind of cool that the Japanese don't see any need to pussyfoot around the subject and are fine to just come right out and say it, unlike us prudish English speakers who often find it necessary to use an idiom. But at the same time this lack of vocabulary fits with the dearth of Japanese slang words, especially when it comes to body parts and bodily functions, which is kind of sad (compare the number of terms in English and Japanese for "sex" for example, or "piss", or "breasts", and you'll see what I mean). It really makes me appreciate the rich vocabulary of the English language.

Another cultural difference I discovered early on is that pregnancy is counted differently here. Japanese women are pregnant for ten months, not nine, and I just couldn't wrap my head around that until it was explained to me that those ten months are lunar months. Which means that each month lasts exactly four weeks, and four times ten equals forty: the exact number of weeks a woman is pregnant (by any country's reckoning). It actually makes a lot of sense.

With the western way of counting a pregnancy some months have four weeks and some have five weeks and there is no clear agreement: one baby book may say that the fifth month of pregnancy lasts from the 17th week to the 20th, others might say from the 17th to the 21st, others the 18th to the 21st. This also messes up the trimesters, with few sources agreeing on when each trimester ends and the next begins. But there is no confusion in Japan: the fifth month of pregnancy (ninshin gokagetsume), for example, is from week 16 to 19, and everyone knows it. The first trimester (ninshin shoki) lasts for the first four months, the second trimester (ninshin chuuki) the fifth to seventh months, and the third trimester (ninshin kouki) the eighth to tenth. Simple, right? The only confusion is that it's kind of hard to tell what month you are in just by looking at a calendar, as calendar months are different from lunar months.

One problem: although the Japanese counting system itself is not difficult, using it at the same time as the western system is terribly confusing. Especially for a math-challenged person like me. I actually had to create a chart to try to match up the weeks, so I'd be able to see at a glance where I was in counting system (the picture at the top of the post is my first attempt at a chart) So back in Canada I'd be eight months pregnant, but here in Japan I'm already in my ninth month. This was actually important at one point before I figured out the different systems and I went around saying I was four months pregnant, as per the western system.

Which brings us to cultural difference number three: the Japanese place a huge importance on the "danger" of the first four months, or first trimester, and it is a big, big event to pass safely on to the fifth month. Early in my pregnancy people kept asking me how far along I was, and since I hadn't reached the "safe zone" of five months would look all worried and tell me to be careful. I found this kind of ridiculous and just assumed this obsession with the fifth month was a silly old Japanese superstition, since where I'm from it's the fourth month that brings you into the safety zone (and people don't really obsess about the perils of the first trimester anyway). But I'd just not been calculating properly, and it turns out that this "safe" fifth month roughly corresponds to the beginning of the second trimester on the western schedule (and the risk of miscarriage does indeed go down in the second trimester). So it was a huge relief to my friends and acquaintances when I announced (a few weeks late, thanks to my faulty reckoning) that I was in my fifth month.

Thankfully healthcare professionals in Japan count pregnancy in weeks, just like everywhere else in the world, and there is never any confusion if I stick to weeks. Except that a Japanese pregnancy starts off at week 0 and a western pregnancy apparently starts at week 1. I think.

Is your head spinning too?