Sorry to have been absent for so long. Between guests and work and surprise work and finals I just didn't have time for the blog. Gwen and Nicole headed out today... Russell and I are pretty bummed out about it. Hope you all enjoyed the guest blogging, though. I'm looking forward to a lazy evening, so I'm going to start with a lazy blog post. Mostly just pictures. I wasn't present for most of the misadventures of the past two weeks, but I do have a few nice snapshots to share. Starting at the beginning ...The first weekend Gwen and Nicole were here was pretty packed with action. On Saturday we went to Nara (an ancient capital of Japan and highly recommended by many - also easy distance by train). There are enough things to see in Nara that we really only hit up the biggest attraction - a large park walking distance from the train. One of the attractions of the park is a rather large (over 1,000) herd of small deer. They are quite comfortable with the equally large (or perhaps larger) swarms of tourists in their park and often gather around the food vendors waiting for said tourists to splurge on some deer cookies. The deer cookies are packages of special brown wafers that are meant for the deer and that are sold in most vending carts in the park - in some cases that is all that is being sold. When we were first approaching the park we saw a man being swarmed in a not too friendly manner by hungry deer. We were a bit concerned for his safety, but then we realized he was being stingy with his cookies. You can't just hold a bundle of deer cookies over your head and then act surprised when the deer try to climb your frame. Nicole took the more "Snow White" approach to feeding the deer, doling out bite sized pieces quickly and efficiently to all deer equally. She suffered only minor skirt nibbles. This park is also home of an especially large Buddhist temple - one which is now only a very modest version of its original glory (which burned down twice). The first picture is of the outside of the temple, and this following picture is of the statue inside. It has a rather enormous (largest in Japan??) copper statue of Buddha sitting on a lotus. For scale, imagine that there is a crowd of people maybe four or five feet deep between me and the fence around the statue. Now notice that you can't see any of their heads. On the following Sunday, it was Nicole's birthday, and she had expressed an interest in swimming. Russell and I had not really considered such a thing yet, but we got to work looking for potential swimming holes. We got off to a late start, so my grand plans to go to the beach resort three hours from here just didn't seem doable. Instead, Russell found a beach just on the other side of downtown Kobe. I was nervous about running into my students (in my bathing suit that is about two sizes too small) so I just camped out on the beach and graded papers. The other three intrepid souls took to the water... after contemplating it for several minutes. After the beach, we went into downtown and enjoyed a public bath (have I described those yet?) and then headed over to our favorite vegetarian restaurant for birthday dinner before a good long round of karaoke - a not-so-surprising hit with Russell's a capella comrades. One highlight (lowlight?) of the public bath experience was accidentally splitting off from Russell before he had the chance to grab his soap out of my purse. He had to ask the gentleman scrubbing down next to him if he could borrow his soap. In Japanese. He was offered shampoo too, out of what he imagines to be pity. While I am truly sorry to have put Russell in this position, the resulting story is one of my favorites of the weekend. I'm sure Russell doesn't appreciate that at all. In a completely different vein, I also enjoyed the black-light mural on the wall in our karaoke room.
My last story for tonight (but I promise there are more to come) is of our experimentation with the "cake" setting on our rice cooker. I had not gotten around to investigating said setting, but Gwen and Nicole got right to work on it. According to the Internet, it is quite possible to make cake in your rice cooker (at least it is if you have a cake setting). They chose a banana cake recipe and went to work one evening. The following pictures document the experience.






While we waited for the cake to cook Nicole and I played SET and Gwen knitted away at her amazing cable knit blanket. As time wore on, however, we shifted to science experiments - and let me tell you, the pirate eye experiment is worth recreating right now in your very own home. You know you want to. Its pretty amazing. The end result of the cake, as luck would have it, was pretty amazing too. It has a slightly spongier texture than I am used to (probably due to all the steam in the cooker) but it is definitely cake. I wonder if we could make rice cooker cobbler? I mean, to be honest, this has opened up all sorts of potential culinary experiments. Most of which will probably end in ruin and be documented right here. Stay tuned. Stay tuned also for the more imminent post on this last weekend. I only got to spend Sunday with everyone, but it was a fun-packed Sunday.

Did I mention I miss those two?