...adopted...

Afternoon all.

First off - didn't feel a thing. All is well.

Turns out there was a rather large earthquake in Niigata Prefecture early on Sunday morning. Niigata is miles away from us - just a wee bit North-West of sunny Tokyo town. So we were A-ok.

In the spirit of natural disasters passing us by, we were also promised a typhoon last Saturday, but apart from some frankly spectacular thunder rolling about the place, it missed us.

Dammit.

I enjoy a good typhoon.

In other news, we gave been adopted by my new section chief...

Let me explain...

New section chief chap approached me at the coffee pot a couple of weeks ago and we got to nattering (as you do.) It was clear he wanted to say something so I just let him wander through the weather, the seasons, his hobbies and the like until he finally set up his approach angle and barrelled on in to the point of the conversation...

...turns out that when he isn't being a section chief, he is also a rather prominent local strawberry farmer (!) He heads a group of local produce growers who have formed an organic produce collective that sells at local markets. They harvest what they think they will sell on the particular day of the market and trot off. Generally however, they have a few odds and ends left over at the end...

...which is where we come in....

For the last two weeks, two or three times a week, new section chief chap strolls into work following his lunch break laden with organic produce that until that very morning was still on the vine/tree/in the ground and is now destined for my belly.

Now, anyone who has done time in Club Nippon knows that finding organic food is nigh on impossible, and even then you run into caveats such as "Oh yeah the plant is organic, but the pesticides we used aren't...."

So we were pretty stoked.

For the first time in a long time we had;

- Tomatoes which tasted and smelled just like....TOMATOES!
- Cucumber which tasted and smelled just like....CUCUMBER!
- Onions which tasted and smelled just like....ONIONS!
- Eggplant which.......(etc etc etc)
- Potatoes which.......(etc etc etc)
- Beans which.......(etc etc etc)
- Peaches which.......(etc etc etc)

...and everything else the season offers. As I type there are some fish he caught last night languishing in the office fridge waiting to be taken home.

Sweeet.

We just need to work on volume - the first batch contained 36 onions...that's a lot between the two of us. Soup anyone?

b.