O Bento

'O Bento' is the Japanese refined version of lunch boxes. It's either home cooked (eg. B always brings one for her Chigiri-e class) or bought in convenience stores (which we btw have zillions of), supermarkets, department stores, train stations and specialized o bento-shops. You can find them in any price range.


The main ingredients are typical rice, meat/fish, cooked vegetables and pickles.






But often you find regional or seasonal specialties as well, always making it an exciting hunt to find the best o bento where ever you are in the country.



An o bento bought at a train station is called an ekiben (eki means station) and is really popular. Its impossible to travel by the shinkansen (bullet train) with out having half the train eating ekiben.

It gives the train a distinguished smell of food, which you only notice as a gaijin.

Itadakimasu!

Take Sumi

B's never ending journey into the world of Japanese culture has this time let to a Take Sumi class with the Chigiri-e group.

On the country side amongst rice fields a retired man has set up a work shop to keep him self busy in his golden age. It is quite common, that Japanese men tend to find a hobby after retiring from their ordinary work.



So what is Take sumi? 'Take' means bamboo and 'Sumi' means burned. Take sumi is bamboo left in an earthen charcoal-burning kiln for a week. Hereafter you can make tons of stuff of the black bamboo. The end result is common in Japanese homes as it is used in baths (for health benefits), in rooms or cars to remove bad smell or simply for decoration.

It was a great fun day accumulating in a birthday celebration for my chigiri-e teacher, and the end result after a hard days work was this thing for the wall - a sort of kabin for flowers. Very Japanense!

Fitow went by...

Yay! Finally a blue sky again!!! 

The last couple of days has been nothing but grey and quite wet, probably because of the Typoon that past over Koriyama. "Fitow" gave 600 mm of water, or the same as what we get in Denmark in a whole year! 
It hit hard, with windspeed of 180 km/t according to the Danish Meterology Institute.