Lioness in Japan

We still don’t know what type of tree it is, but it is definitely not a sakura or plum tree. We had high hopes it would be a cherry blossom tree so we could have our own hanami picnic right at our house. We can only dream. But there is Meguro River (which has an awesome stretch cherry blossom trees) just five minutes away on foot so I can’t complain.

It still lends a very rustic feel to our house though which I like very much…

In recent months, I had been invited to play with the kangaroo’s tennis group which is actually organized by his Japanese language teacher. I’m not sure how long he had been playing with them but definitely for a few years — and they even came to our wedding in Singapore!

They are excellent players and are totally rocking it even though they are over 60. The kangaroo’s mum plays tennis three times a week in Sydney and my dad plays golf twice a week and hikes twice a week. It makes you think you want to be like them when you’re older. Being slow, tired, dispirited, and uninspired are all in the mind.

My tennis is godawful and hope to take up proper lessons when I’m not so swamped with work.

It’s really fun playing with them — lots of laughs and they always head off for nomihoudai (all-you-can-drink) after playing for two to three hours. I always feel refreshed from the clean suburban air and the simpleness of these happy sessions.

We held a really small housewarming dinner with some close friends and they got us a straw kangaroo with a big hollow belly. This lil guy makes me laugh whenever I look at him…My friend said, “It’s sort of like something you would get Derek.” How true!

And they tied an Aussie flag to the nape of his neck — so cute…

Methinks I’ll fill the belly with house slippers for guests. A touch of Japanese in something Australian?

My local supermarket is called Life or ライフ. It’s bigger than the tiny ones in Akasaka where I used to live and this is great news for someone like me who loves to cook.

There are properly spaced aisles instead of narrow passages. If you’ve been to a hole-in-the-wall supermarket in Japan, you’ll know what I mean. They even have shopping trolleys if you need to buy more stuff.

This joint is just five minutes away from my house. Cool.

Well, the kangaroo is anyway. In a dusty Vietnamese bookshop in Nha Trang, he picked up this book by Moe Oshikiri, an ex-model, who wrote a book that is part memoir and part “how to be happy” manual. He thought it was just a self-help book on how to improve your attitude in life and little did he know it was written by a fashion model.

But it’s still highly commendable that he has been ploughing away at this book. He says the vocab is fairly simple since the target audience must be teenage girls. Perhaps the kangaroo will learn a thing or two about women from this book. I have high hopes.

At last, my very own office. My personal cave…except the kangaroo put his weights here as well but he doesn’t use them very often, so I pretend the whole room is mine. I could even start using the weights so it’s really all mine in this room.

The flowers are actually real, believe it or not. They were given to me last August for my birthday and they are still looking quite alive and fresh. It’s got something to do with it being soaked in a special chemical substance that keeps this small bouquet going for up to nine months apparently — amazing!

I’m still always filled with disbelief when I see snow like this in Tokyo. That’s the view from my living room the morning after it bucketed down tonnes of snow through the night. It may be cold but there are blue skies almost everyday.

Since our new house is bigger, it’s also colder. I’ve bought new blankets, Uniqlo heat tech long johns, socks, sweaters, hoodies to keep warm while I work at home. It’s been really hard on my Singaporean tropical self — it just ain’t natural to be this cold all the time.

That’s me with a hot water bottle, a fleece blanket, and Ugg boots.

Hot water bottles (or ゆたんぽ）in Japan are hard plastic bottles that can take hot boiling water without crumpling. Mine comes with a cute green and white polka dotted flannel sleeve as it can feel quite hot without one.

How are you keeping warm this winter?

Happy Chinese New Year!! May the year of the Water Dragon be prosperous and full of happiness for you!

The one thing that sucks about living abroad is not being able to celebrate Chinese New Year with my family. Despite the idiosyncrasies faced in any family gathering, I still really enjoy getting together, eating, catching up, and just hanging out doing nothing much. It didn’t feel like a big deal when I could celebrate every year without fail, but when I couldn’t, it became a huge deal.

I went through a phase where I just shrugged it off, but I honestly felt twinges of sadness inwardly, and that’s probably why the kangaroo had no idea it was such a big deal to me for years. I would go out for a CNY eve dinner with various friends, but in recent years, I started throwing CNY dinner parties at our place because the kangaroo would invariably be travelling for business during that time (post Dec/Jan travel is a must for his work).

So this year, I will be holding a joint party with another Chinese Singaporean friend but that’s next Saturday and I still wanted to do something special somehow on the eve and the universe answered.

I had a dim sum lunch with my Japanese gal pals at Tsim Sha Tsui. I would highly recommend this place — it’s authentic and cheap, complete with a Cantonese-speaking waitress.

By the way, I ate most of this plate of pei dan or century egg because it really freaked out my Japanese friends. I wonder if they think I’m gross? LOL!

Then miraculously, I was asked to play tennis and then go for Chinese hot pot after. Spicy hotpot in Japan called hinabe and my Japanese friends loved it although they sweated and teared and drank a lot of beer in the whole process.

Our Chinese hot pot dinner was at Xiao Fei Yang in Shibuya. There’s quite a bit of MSG in the soup but it was still freaking amaze-balls.

So….I was a happy Chinese girl yesterday…and today…

Gosh another food post — I should really get my head out of my stomach, shouldn’t I?!

I’ve mentioned before that I get a lot of news about trends in Tokyo from my students and it really helps me keep my finger on the pulse because I’m going through a long phase of not turning on my TV.

What also surprises me till this day is that when I bring out really simple articles from the lifestyle news section, my students have the most to say about them. So thanks to this piece on macarons in NYC, I found out that ” fancy” desserts sold at convenient stores are taking Tokyo by storm.

Apparently, there were a few TV shows about conbini sweets (I picked up this habit of calling desserts, “sweets” or スウィツ in Japan, which confused me as it refers to hard candy in Singapore) that lauded conbini tiramisu and cheese cake as being high quality but are very affordable at 200-300JPY compared to department store prices that are 600-700JPY for something similar. I think they brought in a famous patisserie chef to taste these conbini sweets without being told they were so cheap and he gave his stamp of approval but was in shock when it was revealed they were sold at conbinis.

And one of my students said a conbini chain tied up with a famous patisserie chef to produce a range of desserts which were also wildly popular.

I’m not really a dessert person but I thought I would give it a go. Presentation-wise, it’s not bad at all though of course it comes in a plastic container and not a pretty cake box. But when I put it on a plate at home, it looked quite classy beyond its 200JPY price tag and decided to put this one up my sleeve as a lazy-day-dessert-option-but-still-want-to-impress-the-kangaroo idea.

Out of curiosity, I surveyed the dessert sections in all the conbini chains (Daily Yamazaki, Seven Eleven, Family Mart, Lawson) and I think Lawson does the best range with its brand of Uchi Cafe (that means home cafe) and you often find new cakes coming out every few weeks.