Here are some of the latest delicacies I discovered in the kitchen of a Korean-style restaurant.

First served is the cow’s stomach (served raw or cooked to your liking):

Tip: choose the second stomach since it’s the most delicious out of the 4 apparently Yummy!

Next on the menu is many people’s favourite, raw cow’s liver (I tried it and can’t say it’s my fav):

And finally, it’s the famous fatty beef (1 piece costs £9 for 120g):

Ideal for vegetarians on a low-fat diet

Here’s some quick tips on starting a Web Site so it stands a chance of success in terms of getting listed in Search Engines and receiving visitor traffic.

Pay for your hosting so that you have all the essential things you need such as FTP, statistics, email and a load of features you never realised existed until you paid for your hosting. Plus you will get free support from your hosting company. Check out our hosting company in the link at the bottom of this page for really great, yet cheap hosting.

Register a .com or regionally specific domain name according to your needs. Don’t be afraid to include dashes in the name to keep it to 2 or 3 words of relevance to your site topic.

Research the keyword phrases that people use to search for stuff related to your topic. Then use these phrases in the page names and title tags of your web pages.

Add your own original content to each page on your site and build at least 10 good pages before you upload them to the web.

Use XHTML and CSS code to build your site. Visit w3.org to understand what this means.

Validate your site code, spell check it and test it in different web browsers. Also, ask friends to preview it and get their feedback.

Finally, when you think you have a good site to be proud of, submit it to Google to get the Googlebot to crawl your site and queue it for listing in the search engine. However, the best approach is to let it be found via an inbound link from another site such as a directory. So if you know anybody with an established website, beg them to link to you!

Of course there is a mountain of things to learn and master, but hopefully this quick guide will help you start out ok

Today I was given something to eat that was like burger meat wrapped in cabbage. I tried to eat it with slippery chop sticks but just squashed it. I prefer the really cheap chopsticks that offer some grip

There was a knife and spoon available so I grabbed the knife but is was useless without a fork. So I asked for a fork, moving the knife in a sawing action and pointing at the food and the spoon. I thought it must be obvious that all I need is a knife. But Obachan brought me another spoon ???

Later I remembered my friend Yoko finding it hard to use a knife and fork when she visited our house in the UK. So I guess in Japan, a fork is not needed. A knife is used alot for preparing food such as skinning fish.
Watching Obachan eat the same thing with chopsticks made me realize that I was doing the correct thing in squashing it and then biting through half way. I did eventually get a fork after a small search in the kitchen draws

If only I had said “FoKu” rather than “Fork” it would have been easier.

It was a nice sunny morning so we decided to go for a walk to one of the Samurai districts of the city. I took plenty of photos along the way so you can see some here.

Very close to where I’m staying is the old castle:

It used to be surrounded by a moat but now only a few pools remain. But they have some friendly carp:

Here is a statue of the Samurai Lord that used to live there:

We continued our walk via the fashion shopping area into the old Samurai area. Here we visited the site of an ancient Samurai House with an amazing garden:

There are coy carp, a waterfall and many trees and shrubs to be seen. The ropes you can see are to hold up the tree branches after heavy snow fall. A common sight in Japan where the trees are looked after because of the famous cherry blossom season that is nearly upon us.

Here is a view from inside the house:

The floor is covered with Tatami mats, one of the door panels is finely decorated with artwork and there are wood carvings above the door (not visible here).

Here is a display of the Samurai armour, a nice Bonsai tree decorating the home and a Samurai sword plus short sword:

The main gate and servant’s gate of a Samurai house:

The Samurai street:

Local houses in poor condition:

These houses are typical of many of the older houses in Kanazawa. If you look carefully you can see the wood is neglected and they never do any exterior maintenance. So every 50 years or so the houses are demolished and new ones built.

The house I am staying in is uncared-for too but it’s only around 30 years old so I am treating some of the wood to make it look like new

It will be interesting to see what the locals think. Some of them never heard of DIY I think.

Today I wanted to use my PC in a different room so I connected it to a different monitor to “save time”.

Unfortunately this caused Windows XP to fail to start so I switched off the PC and connected my usual monitor.

Then XP went into a loop continually rebooting my PC. All I could do was boot up into safemode. Pressing F8 can get you into safe mode as well as from the command line.

Then I tried system restore to an earlier date but got the message “your computer cannot be restored”! I tried an earlier restore point with the same result. I tried again and again with the last saved restore point. Finally it did restore itself! The last thing I wanted to do was re-install windows XP.

It seems like you need to be persistant with a stubborn opperating system.