Blue skies and scrubbing - Fri 26 Apr

It was a freezing night last night, and there was frost on the ground this morning during our pre-breakfast work. The mountains behind Azumino were shrouded in mist at their bases, and during our work, the frost turned into devilwinds of fog.

Nobi and I constructed a hoop frame with netting for climbing plants.

The other experience workers got stuck into a keyhole garden.


This is one of the first days there have been beautiful clear blue skies during my stay in Nagano.


Today was my turn in cleaning the pension. I enjoyed my traditional vacuum + headphone singalong. It still surprises me somewhat that I get praise for my headphone singing, rather than copping flack. There have been requests that I sing at dinner. :O I guess this explains the karaoke phenomenon in Japan, and the embarrassment about the same in Australia - we know deep inside that all our friends are itching to bag us.

Then I got to clean the communal bathrooms for the first time, lifting the floor boards from their concrete supports to scrub both sides, using just hot water and a scrubbing brush. Collected human detritus goes into the rubbish.


Scrubbing was interrupted for some delicious grub, a potato, anchovy and rosemary pizza on a tomato base. YUM!

After lunch, I had a nanna nap. I burned the oil a bit last night with vocabulary and blogging.

I helped with the team's dinner again tonight. We made a salad of slivers of radish and carrot, raisins, mandarin and fennel greens, drizzled with balsamic (warmed to sweeten it by evaporating some of the vinegar) and olive oil. Should have put the mandarin on after the dressing though, it nicked all the balsamic flavour, leaving the salad tasting a little naked.

I asked Saki san, who studied a year of French cooking and works in the kitchens, to help me out with some knife technique tips for cutting strips of vegetables, and also for very fine slicing. It's quite an art, and the practice was not unlike learning to drive a manual car. Hopefully it will eventually fall into place. I've always admired fast kitchen work, and it sure would be handy to operate at about 5 times my previous vegie prep pace.

I got to see wasabi plant turned into the only variety I'd seen before coming to Japan, i.e. paste in a tube Yasuyo san ground the vegetable into a paste against a dimply grating dish. (I've also eaten wasabi flowers and I think I've had it in tempura as well at Shalom Hutte.)

The mains for dinner were soba noodles, and tempura greens. Truly delicious. After eating our fill of soba, the water from the soba noodle boiling was poured into the sauce remains in our bowls to create a soup for us - the water contains most of the nutrients. It's like two courses for the price of one.

Yasuyo san ate the leftover prepared wasabi to avoid wastage. Brave.