You’d think that having moved to Japan I would now be on a steady diet of fish - and you might be right seeing as I love fish, I love rice and I love wasabi. Which are all pretty important factors when it comes to sushi. But the thing is even though I love it, even though I only ever had access to the European version of sushi which is far inferior to its Japanese counterpart, I haven’t actually been on a complete binge yet. And I’ve been here two months.

Instead I’ve found a predilection for ramen, rice dishes and various other Japanese culinary delicacies such as gyoza (Japanese dumplings) and yakitori (bbq chicken skewers). But all is well again as I’ve started to eat sushi properly and regularly. Having found a couple of really decent (and in the case of one downright amazing) places which do a good sushi at a reasonable price. After all this is Japan - a country primarily known for its massive consumption of fish. If you go to the supermarket it’s Europe turned upside down - the fish is great and cheap as chips (see the joke there?) but the meat is quite expensive and frankly quite crap by European standards.

Continue reading »

Popularity: 2%

written by Laurent

I upgraded the site to the latest version of Wordpress about 3 days ago and since then it seems I’ve had nothing but woes… Oh WOE IS ME indeed. Actually I’m only writing this post because I’ve realised I really like the word woe. I don’t know what it is about it - or maybe it’s because since becoming an English teacher I’ve rediscovered my affinity and love for languages and words.

Anyways, the upgrading itself wasn’t too tricky, but everything that came after it has been a bit of a headache - from weird changes like the handling of links (hence the change to the formatting of the sidedar) to a very weird way of treating div tags and other geeky things like this. All meaning that while Wordpress 2.1 is an improvement on the previous versions it’s also a pain in the neck, especially if you’re not too technically versed and start wondering what the fu*k happened to all the sensible things you were used to.

On the plus side the upgrade meant I got round to tidying things up and adding some nifty plugins like the Sidebar Widgets and brankspanking new gallery (see the link in the main navigation bar for that). I’ve also started tweaking the CSS and changing the look of the site - albeit very slowly and carefully. I’m still learning. Being a geek does have its good sides. And then it’s also got its downfalls like maybe you reading this and thinking ‘what the hell is he on about’.

Edit - I wrote this post and things messed up even more. I don’t know if I’m laughing more out of tiredness or desperation… :-S

Popularity: 1%

written by Laurent