Konnichiwa

Surfing in Ski Country

Surfing the internet, that is. I am sitting in the Edleweiss Cafe of Prince Hotel in Niigata,Naeba as I write this post. Isn't WiFi amazing? Better when it is free, as it is now.

Tomo is out being challenged by the ski hills.  He is an advance skier.  He does black slopes.  

Prince Hotel has a ski school for kids, named Miffy - after the famed character.  Kai and Taiga are now in school.  Kai is actually on skis. He even went up a ski lift today! He is doing pretty well and is very enthusiastic.  He comes down the bunny slopes nicely but can't stop.  Stopping is tough.  Reminds me of the first time I was on skis.  Can't stop too. Just went from right to left to right, instead of stopping.

Taiga is too young to go on skis although I think we will try to convince the Miffy school otherwise next month. Kids can go on skis only from 4 yrs and Taiga's b'day 4th b'day is early April.  They will not let us this time, but when he is 1 month short next month, I think we will try a little harder to convince them. Taiga's class spends 1 hour indoors playing with toy cars and 1 hour outdoors playing with the snow. Including tobaggon rides. For whatever he is doing, it is costing me an arm and a leg which is a little hard to justify. So you could say I am buying myself some quiet time here!

Miffy school has a great reputation.  Also, I was very impressed when we came for a look-see here last year.  This was soon after the Natasha Richardson incident.  All the ski schools we looked at did not care or stress head gear at all.  Miffy did.  So much that in the aftermath of the accident, they were encouraging skiiers to use helmets and did free rentals of ski helmets.  Great marketing?  Whatever.  I am sold.

The boys did 1 class yesterday and are doing 2 classes today. We are planning to be back another 2 weekends in March to round off this ski season.

It snowed quite a bit from late afternoon yesterday till this morning.  But since this morning, it has been sunny.

As the boys are skiing, I have been busy doing my own stuff.  Like getting to know more about my Mac. I am not fully utilising all the functions on my Mac and have spent hours watching the video tutorials on the Apple site. I have been catching up reading my Time magazines. Ever since having Kai and Taiga, my subscription issues tend to lie around unopened.  I brought along a parenting book I bought a couple of weeks ago - Einstein Never Used Flash Cards.  I like the book.  But watching those tutorials have taken up a lot of my time and I am not sure whether I can get to reading the book before we head back to Tokyo tonight. Anyway, we will probably be back here in 2 weeks time, and that book is probably coming again too.

May post some shots/video footage later.

Halloween @Tokyo Disneyland

I know, we were crazy.  What were we thinking?  To go to Tokyo Disneyland on the 2nd day of the 3-day weekend - during the popular Halloween month?

If I had it my way, we would have gone on a weekday.  But Tomo being a sarariman (salary man)  with the accompanying sarariman mentality (i.e. one can never take leave!  Only females take leave), I have long given up arguing or even hoping on this.

We were expecting crowds.  But we figured, with our kids so young, we probably would not be going in to most of the rides anyway.  We were there largely to soak in the Disney atmosphere and just to give the kids some excitement.  They have never been to Tokyo Disneyland before.  They liked the one in Hong Kong - their first.  And have been asking to go back.  So they were quite incredulous when I finally told them there is no need to fly all the way to HK again, when there is actually a Disneyland in our backyard.  Which we can go to by car in less then 1 hour.

We left the house at 8am thinking that we would be there before 9am.  We never factored in the traffic jam.  We were travelling from the West of Tokyo to the East of Tokyo.  Somewhere around Shibuya (which is Westish of Tokyo) , traffic on the Shuto expressway slowed down.  By the time we got near Tokyo Tower, it was a dead jam that just inched very slowly and often came to a standstill.  We thought it was caused by an accident, but later discovered that it was caused by the crowd going to Tokyo Disneyland!!!   We decided not to turn off the expressway where everyone going to Disneyland was turning off.  We bypassed that exit, left the expressway at the next exit (the expressway was TOTALLY EMPTY after the Disneyland exit) and u-turned back using the local roads.  We saw an airport limousine (lucky us) and figured that the driver is probably using the back streets to get to the Disney hotels.  So we followed him.  That was a very good move. (Credit to be given where it is due - it was Tomo's idea.)  Had we followed the Disney crowd, I think I can safely say we would have been in the jam for at least another 2 hours as we lined up to exit the highway and followed the line to enter the Disney car parks.  

And another great idea from Tomo?  To buy the tickets in advance.  He called me as I was on my way to ballet class a few days earlier and told me to get the ticket from the Disney store, which is next to my ballet school.  As it turned out, by the time we arrived at Disneyland, they have stopped selling entrance tickets for crowd control reasons.  There were hundreds of people milling around the entrance hoping to get in later.  Disneyland actually stopped charging for the car parks as many people had parked their cars only to find that they could not enter Disneyland (and Disneysea too).  Very decent of Disneyland.  Looking at the license plates of the cars, more than half of the cars were not from the Kanto (Tokyo) area.  There were from as far away as Osaka, Niigata, Gunma.  Poor guys if they have driven all the way here but can't enter Disneyland.

I felt a little guilty as we flashed our tickets and waltzed our way in, with hundreds of people behind us waiting and longing to go in.

We did not do very much.  I queued up 40 minutes just to buy 1 pop corn bucket. And another 40 minutes to buy another pop corn bucket.  Different pop corn stands sold different pop corn flavours/buckets and Kai/Taiga wanted different ones. 

Kai wanted to ride the Buzz Lightyear ride.  He kept asking to do this the moment he heard that we were going to Disneyland.  So we went to grab a fast pass (at noon), but they were out of fast passes for the rest of the day already!  And the queue was more than 3 hours.  We hoped he would forget, but he kept asking.  Finally, after the Electric Parade at night, we made a mad dash for this ride (thinking that it would be empty as most would be watching the parade).  90 mins queue.  Kai really wanted to ride.  So we went for it.  Surprisingly, now that the  kids are a little older, the 90 mins did not feel as long as I thought it would.  

One thing which the kids enjoyed - which quite surprised us - was the Mickey Mouse Revue.  Nobody wanted to see this, so it was easy to get in.  But it was well done and even Tomo and I enjoyed it.   

Another thing that pleasantly surprised me was that even though the park closes at 10pm, they continued to allow people to queue at the rides up to 10 pm.  So for the Buzz Lightyear ride, where the queue was going for 2.5 hours, they were telling people at 10pm that they could queue but by the time they come out (at 12.30), the park would be closed.   I think most other places in Japan would in that case stop the queue at 7.30pm.   

In all, despite the crowds, we had a pretty good time.  Even after the park closed and we were outside at the entrance/exit area, the boys were still on a high and wanted to dance/play to the Disney music blaring.  So we sat down on a park bench and the boys had a grand time running and dancing around.  Till we were the last to leave and the guards were starting to look at us.

The drive home?  50 mins from door to door.

Here are some pics.

There is Taiga - 2 pumpkins high!

(I used to like the Smurfs.  3 apples high!)

 

Taiga loves his hats ....

With the 2 popcorn buckets.

  

Do you see the ghost on the ride?

Kai, his latest toy and the castle.  He begged Daddy for the toy and mummy caved in.


Saying goodbye to the ghost on our way out of Disneyland.

Baking

I baked my first cake ever!

What brought it on was that recently, I have been seeing some shops in Jiyugaoka selling Bundt cake recipe books.  And the recipes were not your usual cake recipes, they included more exotic recipes likes chocolate mint cake and rum/raisin cake.  That sparked off my budding interest in baking. Then a couple of weeks later, Costco sold the Bundt cake pans at a really good price.  I bought one.  Which meant that I had to bake, at least once.  I went back to Jiyugaoka to buy those recipe books and would you believe it -they no longer had them!

So, the Bundt cake pan laid below my bed until a few days before Taiga's birthday, I suddenly got inspired.  Why not bake Taiga a birthday cake?  Enough with those strawberry cakes that seem to be the only cakes that are sold whole as a birthday cake in Tokyo.  And who needs those recipe books when they are all over the internet (as I discovered).  For free.  (The wonders of the internet never ceases to amaze me.)

But if Taiga's birthday is the next weekend, I should do a practice cake this weekend.  Yeah, I am anal like that (and for many other things too).  So I rushed off on Friday evening to the supermart and baking shop to get my stuff.  What really floored me was when I was standing in front of the zucchinis and checking the recipe again.  The recipe called for 3 cups of grated zucchinis.  That was a real brain teaser to this non-baking and usually non-cooking female.  Just how many zucchinis do I need to get 3 cups?  Walked over to the household section and had a good look at the volume of 1 cup.  I figured that it would probably take 2 zucchinis to get 1 cup, which means that I need 6 zucchinis.  For good measure - who wants to run out of zucchinis when baking halfway - I threw in an extra 2 zucchinis.  At 250 yen each, the zucchinis cost me 2000 yen (about US$20) in total. 

That was not the only substantial expense.  Just before the shops closed, it suddenly occurred to me that I have tossed away my one and only grater when I saw the terrible state it was in.  (My MIL uses it to grate daikon (radish) and since it is not an oily dish, she simply does a quick rinse with only water and puts it back into the drawer).  I would need to get another grater if I am to get grated zucchinis.  This provided the perfect excuse the buy the 4000 yen Microplane grater that I have had my eye on for the longest time.

I should have bought a cake instead, right?  Would have been a lot cheaper.

The whole baking experience turned out really well.  Kai insisted on doing everything, and I mean everything.  Even taking the butter out to soften at room temperature, he wanted to do that.  So when the recipe called for "cream the sugar and butter" and I figured out "cream" probably means "whisk" and brought out my electric whisk, Kai was delirious at the metallic equipment and insisted on holding it.  We switched it on but instead of creaming it together, it was expelling the butter and sugar with great force from the deep metal bowl and hurling it at us.  Kai was trying his best to deflect the buttery missiles.  But how could I tell Kai "mummy probably made a mistake there in the use of this whisk".  I switched it off and said very confidently "I think the whisk is spoilt".  I am sure there will be a payback time for all these little untruths I tell my kids.

In the middle of all that action, I misread 1 cup of cocoa for 3 cups of cocoa.  So the chocolate orange cake actual became very, very, very chocolate and orange cake.  But it was delicious.  It turned out well.  And the shape came out quite well from the Bundt cake pan too.  Nothing like the cookies I tried making last time.

Only problem was, the cake was rather big and it took us another couple of days to eat it.  I don't think anyone really wanted another chocolate orange cake when the weekend of Taiga's birthday rolled around.  So we bought a strawberry cake for him instead.

And I still have 5 zucchinis sitting pretty in my fridge.  I cup of grated zucchinis requires only 1 zucchini.    

LaLaport, again!

We were back at LaLaport yesterday (surprise, surprise!).

I had written about it before in my previous blog.

What did we discover this time?  The amazing Daimaru Food Hall.  The concept was something along the lines of the Harrod's Food Hall although a little less elaborate.  But I think Harrrod's does not have the the kind of pastries that we have here in Japan.  All those pretty cakes and other confectionaries.  I did not take as many photos as I wanted to as I did not think it would be allowed.  So where I could sneak in a quick photo or two, I did.  There was a Hong Kong dessert shop that sold also some food.  We made a note to return later for dinner, did so, but all their noodles had been sold out by then!  We did however have their little colourful balls.  I have never seen those before and was not too sure what to expect.  It turned out to be agar-agar (gelatin) with little pices of fruit in them.  The real surprise was the taste of the agar-agar.  It jolted me back to my childhood where I used to eat the exact same thing but in egg-shells. No fruit, and colouring was used.  It tasted delicious, Kai and Taiga loved them as I did when I was a kid, and I am now wondering/hunting down a recipe for it.

We went back to Itoyokado.  Unfortunately, Kai is of an age where it is no longer good to just put him into one of those automated rides, without inserting any money, and he is happy just to be sitting there.  We spent a mini fortune on the rides and some games for kids (bowling).  Is there a practice in Japan where parents pool their kids for the rides?  There was a merry-go-round for 2 kids, US$2.  A father put in his daughter and was about to start the ride when I jumped in and asked if Kai could sit in the empty seat.  He was quite taken aback although he said OK.  I gave him US$1 after the ride had started and he was rather surprised although he did not hesitate to take the money!  In Singapore, the parents would split the cost or the kids would sit the ride a couple of times and each time, a different parent would pay.  Or sometimes, the paying parent would just pull any nearby kid to join the ride without asking the other parents to pay.  Taiga, meanwhile was in the large padded area which is free!

Next to this area, is a little room where parents and kids can go in to make and bake cookies. No prior appointment necessary and a mere US$6.80. They have more than 60 different types of cookie cutters. They provide everything, the cookie dough, the cutters, the decoration bits on top of the cookies and the mini ovens to bake them. Best of all, you walk out with cookies to eat! Mmmmm!

We moved on to refullerene, which is the educational toy shop that I had mentioned before.  Very interesting stuff, although lots of it in Japanese.  Tomo got stuck in there and I had to pull him out.  It is next to Akachanhonpo.  I took the ooportunity to take pics of some of the kiddy entertainment next to Akachanhonpo.

Since we could not eat the Hong Kong noodles, we had dinner at California Pizza Kitchen.  The avocado appetiser we had was very good.  As Tomo was Q'ing up (hey, this is Japan!) to get into California Pizza Kitchen, Kai and I took a walk to the Baby Rest Room to fix a bottle of formula for Taiga.  We walked past the atrium and noticed that there was a circle of steam rising from the floor.  Kai was curious, so we walked over.  I encouraged him to walk above the vents where the steam was rising from.  Suddenly, without warning, water shot out!  It became a fountain show, complete with changing lights and music.  This is not uncommon in many places outside of Japan, but I think in Japan, esp the Tokyo area, this is still not common. Kai had such fun, even though he was a little drenched!

On the way home, on the 3rd floor, we walked past a very nice paper/card shop called Paperium.  Clearly, most of its paper were imported.  Unfortunately, it was closed when we walked past although its manager/owner was staring at me, so I had to quickly sneak in a shot of their little card tree.

PS - Did you see in one of the pics above a big eye with a little body dangling from it? I saw it in the amusement arcade where there was a machine for fishing one of these out. I think it looks awful and scary, but according to Tomo, it is very popular in Japan.