Naked hijinks and eating eggs cooked in the onsen

I just got back from a day trip to Hakone, a popular onsen (hot spring) area, just outside Tokyo.

I managed to pack a lot of things in - eating a black egg that extends your life, taking a boat trip around Lake Ashinoko and asking another naked onsen customer to take my picture (see below).

Here's a pictorial journey:

Taking the cable car up the mountain to the...'egg cafe'? 

 The egg, cooked in a volcanic onsen, which turns the shell black and gives it a strange sulphuric smell. Yum.

Donning the yukata again:

Mount Fuji in the distance:

The faux-pirate ship I cruised the lake in. It was formed over 3000 years ago after a volcano exploded.

Solid advice:

UFC

The weekend just gone, I went to a UFC event. The first few fights were quite dull (plenty of rolling around, with little clarity as to who was winning), but in the final fight, a scary Brazilian guy did this to a not-as-scary American guy (about 1.56 into the video).

Skiing in a blizzard

We went skiing on the weekend and got caught in the craziest blizzard I've ever seen. It was so cold, the light inside my camera froze, even though it was in a padded case, underneath two layers of clothing! Check out the video...

Chicken cartilage at 'Meat Alley'

Last night, I tried chicken cartilage at a cool collection of small restaurants called 'Meat Alley' in Shibuya, Tokyo. Unfortunately, it didn't bust my theory that if you can't eat it in every democratic, first world country, it isn't going to taste good (see: guinea pigs in Peru, chicken feet in China, kangaroo in Australia).

That said, the pig intestine soup was pretty good...

Skiing in Japan: Round Two

I just got back from an exhausting, but awesome long weekend skiing in Nagano, home of the 1998 Winter Olympics. The resort I stayed at was Nozawa Onsen. Here are the pictures!

Not a bad view from my room:

Is it fruit? No, it's a Japanese cake

I saw these in the office kitchen and thought there were fruit. Alas, they were traditional Japanese cakes, filled with a strange bean paste. This paste quite commonly pops up inside a variety of sweet and savoury foods (dumplings, bread, the fish biscuits you see below) and I can't say I'm a fan.

Skiing in Japan

On the weekend, I hit the slopes in Japan for the first time. I went to Ishiuchi Maruyama, which is 1 1/2 hours from Tokyo on the Shinkansen (bullet train). Here are the pics:

The same night I got back from skiing, there was no snow in Tokyo. I got back to my apartment at 3am and there wasn't a snowflake to be seen. Fast-forward eight hours and this was the view from my window: