Wendy in Japan

Before I get to the cleaning and organizing, one quick note: I did C25K week 5 day 3 today: 5 minute warm up, 20 minute jog (with no walking), 5 minute cool down. As I said before I didn't think I was ready to jog 20 minutes straight so I went onto the trail thinking that I'd walk if I felt like I needed to and before I knew it the voice in my ear told me I was half way done! I'd jogged 10 minutes without stopping. At that point I walked briskly until the end of the song that had been playing, probably no more than 1 1/2 - 2 minutes tops and then I got back to jogging. The next thing I knew the voice was telling me I had 5 minutes left and one of my favorite No Doubt songs, "Under Construction," started which actually helped me increase my speed a little! Before I knew it I was at the 2 minute mark and there was no way I was walking at that point. It wasn't as difficult as I'd expected at all! My next long run is on day 3 of week 6 which I'll probabl...

Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today. Benjamin Franklin   I've always thought this is a good quote. I was reminded of it while watching Grey's Anatomy recently. I loved it when Meredith Grey said about Benjamin Franklin, "This is the man who discovered electricity. You think more people would listen to what he had to say." I think it's a good point!   I intended to go for a run yesterday. However, I put it off thinking I could do it today and now there's a torrential downpour going on outside and it's supposedly going to be that way ALL DAY! Ugh, why didn't I run yesterday?   Well, Koichi and I went for lunch around 12:30. There's this pan-Asian restaurant with a lunch buffet that we really like. The majority of the food is pretty healthy and then they have the tempura style fried shrimp and chocolate fondue fountain which I assume aren't quite as healthy. I always find it amusing to look at our plates when we eat at a...

According to my C25K app on my iPhone, my next workout looks like this: The problem is, I don't know if I'm ready to run 20 minutes straight. Yesterday I did week 5 day 2 which was jog 8, walk 5, jog 8 with a warm-up and cool down of course. I made it through both 8 minute sections, but it wasn't easy! How do you go from jogging 8 minute stretches one day to jogging 20 full minutes the next? I'm not one to say no to a challenge however, so tomorrow (Saturday morning) I will get up and promptly get my rear in gear and head to the nearby trail where I like to jog. It's exactly 500 meters long so I know one trip down and back is 1k. I guess it'll be interesting to see how many kilometers I can do in 20 minutes, assuming of course I can do even 1 =) (I'm halfway joking) I start my new job next week, well sort of, I go Tuesday-Thursday just in the mornings. I officially start on Monday, May 31st. My hours will be 8-5 and I'll have to leave my apartment a...

Tuesday, April 27 On my last full day in Beijing, I visited the Great Wall via sidecar! That's the second car, which they always take in case something happens to one of them. I must say I felt safer in the sidecar than I did in the taxis in Beijing! The first stop was to see the Silver Pagodas , of which there were 7. Of the 7, 5 of them date back to a dynasty almost 1000 years ago! From the entrance. 5 of them are the size you see here and the last 2 are smaller, indicating their younger age. Incense offerings, which sadly were joined by a few cigarette butts. I wasn't really sure what these were at first, I thought maybe there was some big event or something. However on closer inspection I saw there was writing on them: And my tour guide told me they were Tibetan prayer flags. My tour guide was a guy from Romania who's lived in Beijing about a year and a half. While walking around the pagoda area we had some coffee and chatted for a bit. He purchased some delic...

I bought this cookbook a few weeks ago after seeing it on one of the morning programs I occasionally watch here. （Ｓｏｕｒｃｅ） It comes from the cafeteria of a company called Tanita which makes scales. There are 31 daily special recipes which include the main dish, 2 sub-dishes, a soup and rice and all 31 one of them are around 500 calories! They give tips throughout the book on how to change a few habits when it comes to cooking that will help you become healthier without even realizing it. A couple of the tips I've picked up so far are: measure things! Don't just get a bowl of rice, measure out a serving. Second, don't cut vegetables so small. If the veggies are cut longer you have to chew them! One of the things mentioned on the TV program was the number of times you had to chew when eating one of these meals. It was almost double the amount of times you have to chew a typical Japanese meal. They had a reporter test it out with this contraption attached to her jaw and ever...

First of all, I finished day 2 of week 4 on the couch to 5k program today! On Tuesday I had to walk a couple times on my last 2 jogs, but not today!!!  And now for more China... Sunday, April 25 This was a day of leisure. Christy, Peter (her husband) and I went for what was supposed to be brunch, but actually ended up being lunch, at a place called Mrs. Shannen's. It was incredible! They had all kinds of western food like pizza and bagels and sandwiches and they sold a lot of organic stuff as well. My meal, a veggie pita and I had a side salad. After lunch we walked to a video store where they purchased some DVDs and then we took a cab to a shopping center with a grocery store called Jenny Lou's which had tons of foreign products and they weren't all that expensive really. I was shocked because here if I find foreign goods they're usually not cheap. After grocery shopping we put Pete in a cab and Christy and I went for mani/pedis followed by a stop at another...

Saturday, April 24 What a day! Christy and I met Hillary, one of her coworkers who lives in the same complex, at the gate and got a cab to the city. We stopped to pick up another coworker, Ingrid, and then we went for breakfast at a restaurant called, get this, "Grandma's Kitchen!" They had western style breakfast and decent coffee, which we all needed that morning. My breakfast, a veggie omelet, hashbrowns and toast + 2 cups of coffee! After breakfast Ingrid gave us a sort of walking tour of Beijing. She's from South Africa, but has lived there for around 10 years now. I so enjoyed getting to talk to her and learn about her experiences. The first place we came to was the Confucius Temple. After going through another security checkpoint we walked around the temple and just enjoyed the peacefulness. There were so many people the day before at the Forbidden City and Lama Temple, I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of people at Confucius Temple. If I lived in Be...