Today I smelled food being fried in the kitchen and since I was feeling hungry, I thought I would see if there were any nibbles available.

Well I was surprised to find a friend had gone out to the river bank to pick some Acacia flowers to turn into Tempura. It tasted ok with some salt sprinked on it with a subtle, knd of sweet flavour from the flowers.

From this:

To this:

Today we drove up to some view point areas in the surronding hills. Unfortunately the sky was a bit misty so the camera couldn’t pick out the sea and distant mountains in any great detail but here are a few snaps:

This snap shows the view across the city towards the sea of Japan. There is a shipping port in the far distance but it can’t be seen here.

Here is a view of the distant mountains from the other side of the hill:

A nice view of the forest vegetation (there should be a colorful display of flowers below but we were there at the wrong time for this):

Around this area we spotted some ants building a nest. Once I homed in with the camera they were a bit nervous and stayed in the hole, but one brave one came out with a bit of gravel to add to the pile outside:

Afterwards we had lunch at a popular buck wheat noodle restaurant, the meal only cost 500 yen each (~MacDonalds price but with 99% less fat :-). These Noodles are hand made by the owners. You dip them into the soy sauce to eat after you mixed some of the green wasabe into the soy sauce to give it some spice. The other items are pickles, soy bean curd, leaf veg and onion.

Isn’t the web amazing? It used to cost a small fortune to phone Japan from the UK and costs alot to call the UK from Japan. But with Voice Over IP (VOIP) it’s virtually free! I say “virtually” since I pay a tiny fee every 6 months for my VOIP account.

It works by sending the call data over the internet and only using the regular phone network for the last leg of the connection to the phone you are calling. To set it up you download some software from the VOIP provider and connect a headset to the audio jacks on your computer.

To make a call, you enter a telephone number and click on the dial button and you here the dialing tones just like with a regular telephone. When the person at the other end answers, you chat away. There can be a slight delay across the link but most of the time it’s not noticeable. The clarity is generally superb.

To receive calls, the software sits in your taskbar waiting and pops up if a call is being received allowing you to click on the handset icon to answer the call. Your number is one assigned to you by the VOIP provider. In my case it’s a UK national call rate number.
The company I use is VOIP Cheap

It’s pretty wierd the first time somebody calls you on your PC and took me by surprise. Kind of like when some fax software answered my land line phone on another PC and took a message. I had forgotten it had this feature.

I am starting to capture video footage of my life in Japan, but it will only be about interesting things like an extension of some of the spectacular pictures that I have managed to catch with my camera.

For videos, I am publishing them to Google to save me from Bandwidth problems. So I will treat this post like a list area for the videos and add to the list as more get published.

The Videos:
Bamboo Cutting by Maestro Yoko in Japan

Driving in Kanazawa Japan

Shortly to follow will be a clip of running down a mountain

My friend stumbled across a neglected Porsche 911 which was modified by Ruf. By knocking on doors he found the owner that is into racing Porsches and let him have it at a knock-down price. I saw the car today after it has been serviced and brought back to life. It’s a growling, snarling beast of a car ready to rip down the highway.

The car I am driving now is a really low power micro car that is very practical and really boring to drive. But it doesn’t entice me to drive fast. Unlike the sports motorcyles I used to own where the adrenalin rush was so good.

Here there are plenty of bored cops on bikes and most people drive pathetically slow and cautiously. So much that it is really difficult to pull out of road junctions. They see you waiting to pull out and slow down on the approach so making it much harder for you to do a right turn!

At weekends, I hear a helicoptor hovering over the city for ages and circling. What are they up to? Are they looking out for the fast cars? With a 50Kph limit on main roads I don’t think I can fully enjoy fast cars here.