Hanging About in January and Unexpected Snow

Well after a lot of excitement over Christmas, NYE and our snow trip, the rest of January has been fairly quiet - catching up on rest and recovering. There have been some warmer days which has helped with the recovering.

Below are some pics from our day out to Nanja Town, another food themed 'park' which has 3 sections, gyoza (dumplings), Ice cream and dessert! For anyone planning a trip to Tokyo, we would be happy to return!

We tried a few different varieties of gyoza, including regular, a large round one with a whole prawn inside, beef (pic above is taken at the place it was sold), spicy with minced pork, vegetable with miso butter sauce, and served with habenero sauce - hot hot hot.

PM: Joss wondering when I am going to actually take a photo.

Our tub of shoyu (soy sauce) ice cream. We chickened out a bit here and tried a 'safe' flavour, next time we might get up the courage to try on of the other more exotic flavours: crab, squid, eggplant, abalone, salt, fish sauce, wasabi... and the list goes on!

Over the weekend just gone, Paul's cousin Michael and his wife Shaohua were in Tokyo. We went for a meal on Sunday, it was great to catch up again.

Shaohua, Michael and Paul inside the izakaya in Shibuya having some pre dinner drinks.

At an okinomiyaki restaurant in Ebisu where we cooked up our dinner on the hotplate at the table and introduced Michael to shochu. We were in a small little room with just another table.

Michael in the restaurant, and looking into the main area of the restaurant.

So last night (Monday) provided a surprise snowfall - well surprising to us, not to the weather forecasters. Here are some pics around our apartment.

This photo was taken just as the snow started falling from our balcony.

Our back balcony a few hours later. There was about 5 cm of snow covering the ground, there is still some now (midday Tuesday) on house roofs.

Out the front of our building.

Looking down our street.