Honey Toast

Went to Keiko's cousins place at the weekend, and what a swanky place it was. Bigger than the average place in Ireland, with huge flat screen TV, underfloor heating, automatic baby rocker, and an automatically opening toilet, the controls of which I just had to snap for your viewing pleasure. They were extremely nice and brought us out to lunch and dinner. Their four year old son was fun to play around with and knew more English than most of my students his age. But I just couldn't shake the unsettling feeling of sitting in their kitchen having coffee and chatting with the parents of two kids; like I'd crossed over some invisible boundary where I was now hanging around with people who's families consisted of their children and not their own parents. I just felt old suddenly. During the week I got a chance to order honey toast in a restaurant. I'm presuming that I'm not alone in thinking this dish is unique to Japan (and thus worthy of a pic). Consisting of a hollowed out bread loaf with cubes of bread in the centre its served as a desert. Its actually pretty nice.. Also this week my landlord also caved and finally gave us a heater and dvd player. The heater is a small kerosine yoke but, man, it does the job well. For the first time in ages my toes were toasty warm during the evenings. And the electricity bill should come down a little now in the future. In order to get kerosine for it we'll have to run out to the supply truck when we here the jingle playing outside at weekends. Thats the jingle that sounds like some nazi-era German childrens choir extolling the virtues of the reich. But I'm assured its a harmless winter song. To take advantage of the dvd player I decided to check if my Irish dvd's worked by playing an episode of Phoenix Nights. My American and Canadian flatmates could barely understand any of it and were amazed to hear how strange the Bolton accents were. I still thought it was absolutely hilarious. But they also got a chance to see The Office and they thought it was brilliant. Of course, having been on a diet of Japanese variety shows for so long anything else is an improvement.