Life in Nagano-ken

Snowboarding on a snowcovered mountain road in Hakuba.

This picture was taken on April 2nd.

The famous nanohana flowers of Iiyama.

This photo was taken in early May.

Here is the view from my small garden plot which overlooked the valley. This was a particularly cloudy evening when I biked out there.

I din't get a chance to pick or eat even one fourth of what grew in that small garden plot. I took the daikon that I grew to work once and heated it up on the English office stove. It stunk up the entire office with daikon smell. Woops.

Soba! More specifically, this is Togakushi soba from the famous mountain shrine and soba growing region of Togakushi. Soba (buckwheat noodles) is presented differently at every shop you go to in Japan. The regional variations are usually in the presentation of the noodles and in the ingredient that they use to make the noodles stick together.

In Iiyama, the connecting ingredient was a wild mountain plant called yamabokucho. A little north in Niigata, the connecting ingredient is seaweed.

Soba is one of my favorite dishes in the world, and sometimes I consider opening my own soba shop.

I hurt my knee last October so for two months I couldn't run or bike or even hike. I took up sketching and painting on the weekends, and with the fall colors it was the ideal time. Here's one of the shrines in Nagano that I went to to practice.

I love dried persimmons (hoshigaki) so much that I tried making some myself. A teacher that I worked with at Norin Koko let me pick several types of persimmons from his yard, which I then peeled and hung up to dry on my little balcony.

They never turned out as good as the hoshigaki that I would buy, but it was fun to watch them dry up and to watch the sugar crystallize on the outside. They took a little over a month to reach their best state. I put them up in late November and they were good to eat by New Year.