A Lovely Weekend

Saturday 17th March

Had a lovely sleep in till 10:00am today, then woke up and did some laundry before heading out at 12:00 for lunch with some ALT friends. We went to a café that one of them had been to before, and it’s a lovely café off the main road next to a river! The weather was beautiful today so the view was especially lovely. The food was also super good too, plus so affordable! Only ¥1050 for soup and salad, a main dish (I got pasta, my friends got curry pilaf, and pizza), dessert (today’s was tiramisu!) and a drink (we all got the “design cappuccino” – coffee with cute as latte art!). So worth it! After lunch we went to 秋間梅林 to view the plum blossoms which were in full peak! The whole mountain was covered with them, and the drive there was really nice because there were a lot of plum blossom trees along the road as well. Spent the afternoon enjoying the blossoms and the weather, and took a lot of photos. After that I went home around 17:00.

Sunday 18th March

Woke up at 8:15am since I had a bento making class to attend today! It was organized by the Takasaki volunteer tour guide group that had taken us new ALTs to a lot of different places before, and this time they were doing a cooking class. Had a tiny bit of breakfast before setting off at 9:15am. The event was at a community centre and it was very cute cause there were a lot of families around too. The room we were using was all equipped with cooking equipment and utensils, and the volunteers had arrived early to set everything up so it was very easy on us attendees – we hardly had to do any prep! We first washed and cooked the rice, and made the dashi for the miso soup (boiling the konbu in water first, and then adding the bonito flakes once it had boiled), and then marinated the chicken for the 唐揚げ. After that we boiled the broccoli for the sesame broccoli side dish, made miso soup, and then got onto making the egg rolls (卵焼き) which was really fun - I definitely need to get myself one of the rectangle pans for it. Then we deep fried the chicken, and made “octopus” sausages (cutting slits in the end so that it’ll spread when cooking and turn the sausages into octopuses). Once the rice was done we started making the rice balls (おにぎり) with the different fillings available, and then assembled our bento! After we’d all finished assembling, we cleaned up a bit and then had our bento together with some tea, and even some dessert – sakura mochi and cake! Once the event had officially finished, I headed home and just relaxed for the rest of the day.