Washed out

The weather didn't mesh very well with our plans this weekend, in the same way that salt doesn't mesh very well with slugs. Originally we were supposed to join 200 JETs at a Hanshin Tigers baseball game, followed by celebratory or commiseratory drinks. Fate had other ideas, however - the heavens opened early in the morning and didn't let up until even the most optimistic people had given up hope of the game progressing as planned. Before the cancellation was officially announced, we asked our cab driver what he thought our chances were.
"Mate, you've got Buckley's," was the gist of it. Unfortunately he was spot on.

We showed up to the stadium, where station guards with megaphones were apologising profusely on behalf of the weather and tiger-striped men were dejectedly lining up for the train home. We joined the few people actually disembarking and scuttled out into the blasting rain to meet whoever was left. The organiser was the most ashen-faced of anyone - far from enjoying the fruits of his labour he was now having to think about refunding tickets to 200 people - he wasn't even going to be in Japan long enough to catch the rescheduled match. I flitted around chatting to the JETs standing around until Lisa started calling me a social butterfly - definitely the first time anyone's ever said so. Mel and Adam mysteriously announced that they were heading off to an art gallery, others were heading to Osaka and others still were off in Kobe somewhere - try as I might, it was clear I wasn't going to make it to every flower. Eventually we decided to go into Osaka with Abel and Sinead from Nara, making vague promises to catch up with people later. Between the buffet pizza (and dessert pizza that tasted like melted Easter eggs), cheap games and hilariously nerdy shops in Den-den town, it wasn't a bad alternative to the big game. By early evening we were shattered and decided to abandon further plans in favour of heading home to not eat anything ever again.

Sunday the weather turned gorgeous just to annoy, but we spent most of the morning getting ready for a dinner party in the evening. We had promised to bring dessert but weren't entirely sure what it was going to be, so after extensive googling for recipes made up of what we had in the fridge, we settled on a tart-like thing. True to form, we couldn't stick to any part of the recipe so we ended up with a biscuit-based, white chocolate and coconut cream thing topped with peaches and lingonberry jam. For reasons I can't identify, it neither disintegrated nor fused with the pan and we ended up with something that looked quite deliberately like a cheesecake. We packed it into a bag and headed off to our dinner party, which turned out to be a lovely Chinese-themed meal that our dessert looked very out of place in. By the time the Peking duck came out, we had polished off about 3 bottles of wine, 6 beers, a bottle of champagne and a flask of 30 year old Chinese spirits, so we figured people wouldn't notice. The cheesecake thing came out perfectly and noone burst into tears when I offered them more, so I consider it a complete success. It might be time for a career change I think.

While we missed the Easter break, we've got a 10 day holiday coming up starting Friday, during which we'll be off to Nagasaki and Hiroshima. That is if weather permits - this morning we had an abrupt 10 minutes of crashing hail and thunder which delayed my train, then the stormclouds cleared and everything's been sunny and pleasant since. I hope that wasn't the warning shot.