Japanese People Make Awesome Cake

Seriously, very good cake. It's always small but decorated incredibly ornately. I don't make cake, but I do sometimes make this.


The thing you are supposed to notice is the stuff in the middle, which is saba, 鯖, meaning mackerel, in miso sauce. I am basically like a chef now except that I can only make a couple of things and I get all the recipes from About.com. But, anyway, I digress.

It is graduation time for the elementary school kids, which is sort of nice, but also too bad because now all the sixth graders that I've gotten to know over the last few months are becoming junior high schoolers. Sixth graders are sometimes the hardest kids to teach because they don't think that learning is inherently fun, so they don't always pay attention, but some of them are great.

This weekend I went to an enkai, 宴会, for the end of the school year, with the people from the office, and that was fun. I am getting so good at singing the theme song to the Doraemon cartoon, apparently. I guess that is what happes when you play it almost every day. Soon it will be spring vacation, so I might be able to take a short trip somewhere, probably just within the prefecture or something. I hate planning, though, so I have not done any of that. We'll just have to see.

I'm well over halfway into The Confusion, which is the second book in the Baroque series from Neal Stephenson. It continues to be excellent, but if I finish it, I won't have the third one, The System of the World to read. If anyone in a more English-friendly country would send me that, they would be pretty awesome and might get something weird and Japanese in return, but we'll just have to see.