I love eating many types of Japanese food and so it’s about time I learned how to cook these things myself. Since today is Pancake Day in the UK, I decided to try my hand at okonomiyaki.

I ate a few of these when I was in Osaka, where they were first invented. I also had one in Hiroshima, which is also famous for having a particular way of making them. The one I had contained noodles and oysters.

This photo above is the Hiroshima okonomiyaki I ate.

Some people describe okonomiyaki as Japanese pizzas, although they really are more like pancakes in the way they are made.

Okonomi means ‘what you like’ and yaki means grill or cook. So you can pretty much put whatever you want in/on them, but I tried to stick to the Osaka style as far as I could, ingredients permitting.

The correct ingredients are kinda expensive so I made do. I had the easy ingredients that everyone has: plain flour, eggs, cabbage, bacon, and I had a few Japanese ingredients knocking around my kitchen: dashi and Bulldog tonkatsu sauce.

The asian food shop near my work stocked ginger; not quite the right type, but beggars can’t be choosers. They didn’t have aonori (powdered seaweed), but I had nori (the big sheets for sushi) at home from past sushi-making ventures. They also didn’t sell kewpie mayonnaise so I used Helman’s (N.B. this was a BAD substitute).

First I mixed flour with some dashi stock (prepared with hot water) and an egg. At this stage it looked a lot like a regular pancake.

Next I stirred in some finely chopped cabbage (ok, maybe it wasn’t that fine. Let’s say it was ‘rusticly’ chopped).

I added the pickled ginger which I’d sliced into smaller bits. It was kind of wet and squishy, but that’s what happens when you buy the wrong ingredients.

Anyway, after mixing all these things together, my batter looked a bit too thick so I added some more hot water and threw in another egg.

After heating a large non-stick frying pan, lightly oiled, I spooned some batter in the middle and formed it into a circle.

I took a couple of rashers of bacon and placed these on top of the pancake, then chucked a lid over the whole thing and let it cook for about five minutes.

When the meat looked less raw, I flipped the okonomiyaki over using a spatula. I defy anyone to try to flip okonomiyaki pancake-style and not make an appalling mess.

The bottom of my creation looked good, mottled with crispy golden brown bits and the whole thing smelled dribble-worthy.

After a few minutes cooking the top, I then flipped my okonomiyaki back over.

The bacon was cooked and it seemed about ready to be eaten.

Okonomiyaki plated up, lashings of tonkatsu sauce, mayonnaise and seaweed applied liberally, itadakimasu!

Admittedly the finished meal was visually an unappealing mess, but it was edible.  It didn’t taste quite like the ones I’d eaten in Japan. But practice will hopefully make perfect, and I plan to invest in some proper ingredients: kewpie, bonito flakes, beni shouga and aonori. It’ll set me back about £15, but I think it might just be worth it.

Mischief’s first word, at the tender age of six months was ‘mum’.

“He can’t say ‘dad’ yet, which is a bit of a prick. That’s how he got the word ‘prick’ I reckon, because I say it a lot,” a disappointed Duncan said.

The cat evidently lives up to his name as, according to Duncan, Mischief’s language becomes vulgar when he feels slighted.

“In the evening time, if you don’t drop whatever you’re doing and pay attention to him, he calls you ‘f**k prick,’” claims a proud Duncan. “If he really cracks the s**ts, he’ll p*ss in his drinking water just to let you know he’s really s***ty,” he added.

It’s not hard to see where Mischief’s foul mouth comes from.

Despite Duncan’s claims that Mischief regularly speaks, when reporters from the Northern Territory News visited, the cat was decidedly reticent. However, on a second trip, the visitors admitted hearing Mischief say ‘mum’ to Sandra, but no obscenities were heard. Duncan now wants to catch Mischief on film to prove his claims.

Happily, Mischief’s talking feline contemporaries have less colourful vocabularies, such as Zola from Carrollton, Texas. This talking cat’s ability to say ‘hello’ got her a spot on America’s NBC News. Zola’s owner has filmed her saying things like, ‘mom’ and ‘help me’ on her 24-hour webcam. If you don’t believe it, check out the footage and judge for yourself.

Whatever you’re into, you’re bound to find a themed room for you at the Fantasyland Hotel in Alberta, Canada. The hotel boasts a range of unusual rooms with themes such as Victorian, Roman, sports, Hollywood and the Wild West. It is located in an enormous shopping mall that encompasses an amusement park, water park, golfing facilities and more than 800 shops, restaurants and attractions to keep you occupied should you grow tired of playing cowboys and Indians.

If you prefer something a little classier but a lot less expensive, you could do worse than follow in the footsteps of John and Ann Till from Petersfield, Hampshire. To fund their honeymoon to America, travelling out by boat and then flying back business class, the couple spent two months collecting litter for recycling. They handed in 60,000 items of rubbish to Tesco’s recycling machines and received club card points in return. They then turned the points into 36,000 British Airways air miles. The couple were very grateful to the litterbugs of Petersfield for their wedding gift!

If there is nowhere in the world exceptional enough for your honeymoon then how about somewhere out of this world? In the not-too-distant future, couples could be honeymooning in space. Experts claim that with air travel advancing so rapidly, space travel could become heavily commercialized between 2020 and 2040. You could be flown into space and stay on the moon or in a space hotel where 15 hours would cost an equivalent of two months’ salary. What could be a more perfect honeymoon destination than the moon’s lunar landscape surrounded by the stars, with a beautiful view of the earth slowly spinning miles away? But in light of the current recession, you may want to start saving for your space honeymoon now.

Both the book and the film purported to show geisha as the artists they are and not as “prostitutes, their lower-class counterparts”. While they did go some way towards exploring what a geisha is and does, eventually Sayuri and the other women in the story definitely leave the reader or viewer believing that a geisha will still drop her knickers if the price is right.But regardless of the seedy associations other people might make, many are still fascinated by geisha and find them mysterious and beautiful. That white makeup they wear, those towering shoes, the way they reportedly put themselves through so much physical suffering in the name of their art: all these things serve to intrigue.

The geisha world is inscrutable and lets few gaijin into its midst. There has only ever been one Western woman permitted to become a Geisha. An Australian social anthropologist was accepted into the geisha world in Kyoto a few years ago, but she was thrown out again recently when, according to the Asakusa Geisha Association, she was asked to leave. Other geisha claimed that the Australian woman, Fiona Graham, wouldn’t do all the tasks that were expected of her, such as attending flute lessons. She claims she was bullied and not allowed to become a proper geisha simply because she is a gaijin.

I don’t know what the true story is, but the fact that the only Western women ever to enter the mysterious world of geisha was unable to make a success of it – whether because she failed at it or was forced out – shows how difficult it must be for Westerners to understand what it means to be a geisha.

Before I even arrived in Kyoto, I knew, like so many other tourists, that I wanted to be made up like a geisha and to wear an elaborate kimono. I booked an appointment at one of the many studios which offers this service to women, Japanese and foreigners alike. In fact, when I was walking around the streets of Kyoto, I saw many more Japanese tourists dressed as geisha than foreign ones.

At the studio, I was the only gaijin. They didn’t speak much English but they knew why I was there so I didn’t even need to use my pidgin Japanese much.

First I chose my kimono – turquoise blue with white flowers and a bright red lining. Apparently the colours and patterns on kimono have some kind of symbolism. I have a book which contains a great deal of information about kimono but it’s kind of hard going…

Next my face was plastered in white makeup much like a mime artist or a clown, neither of which would I ever want to resemble. Happily, the make-up artist quickly moved on to pink eyeshadow, thick black eyebrows and bright red lips. It all felt heavy on my face, especially as I’m not used to wearing a great deal of make-up.

After the make-up, the strangest part: a massive styled wig resplendent with kanzashi (hair ornaments).

All this time I had been wearing a thin underrobe. The next step was to be dressed in the kimono.

There is a lot of material involved in a kimono. A lot.

There’s a lot of wrapping, tucking and winding. I could never repeat what they did, or dress myself. And when it was finished, it weighed a tonne! God knows how those tiny little Japanese girls can wear them all day – while tottering around on those ridiculously tall okubo (tall wooden clogs).

But the finished product, despite being uncomfortable, heavy and hot, looked pretty good. Not me, I looked kind of silly – like most gaijin do when wearing kimono – but the ensemble was impressive.

After a lengthy photo session I was relieved to remove the kimono and spend half an hour wiping the white make-up off (that stuff really sticks).

That was when I developed a newfound respect and admiration for geisha. Not only do they wear these uncomfortable outfits all day, they also perform dances and play instruments while being attentive hostesses and all the while remaining graceful, delicate and refined.

I imagined a fusty, decrepit library with a host of lonely words, hangdog and underused, desperate to be voiced and brought back into common parlance.

It wasn’t exactly like that.

The website allows you to search for and select a word to adopt, or it offers words at random so that you might stumble across one that tickles your fancy. Of course, there are a lot of words to choose from; it wasn’t an easy choice. This is what I settled on:

Squiriferous: having the character or qualities of a squire

In context: The squiriferous youth squandered his inheritance with astonishing rapidity.

I’m not sure why I chose that one. Perhaps because, on first seeing the word, it conjured up images of cute, fluffy squirrels.

I should really stop visualizing things; it only seems to lead to disappointment.

Incidentally, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary is celebrating its centenary this month by publishing a new edition containing such delightful new words as woot and mankini.

I wonder who will be willing to adopt mankini in years to come when it falls out of favour, passes out of the vernacular and joins the rest of the lost and lonely words waiting to be adopted?

It’s a tiny village (population 352!) but famous in certain circles for its relaxed attitude towards drugs. Apparently in the ’70s a bunch of hippies descended on the village to hold a festival and now, since the 90s, there is a Mardi Gras festival held there every year that protests against the illegality of cannabis.

Many artists, writers, environmentalists and other ‘alternatives’ settled in the area (and Byron Bay is pretty hippy too) but when I wandered through Nimbin, all I saw was a bunch of vacant-eyed, ancient stoners littering the streets.

The locals sat around outside cafes practically dribbling and muttering incoherently. I stumbled into the range of an irate hippy woman’s tirade about Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Instead of denouncing the PM’s policies, the basis of the hippy’s argument was that Gillard is a “ranga” and that in her opinion all red-heads “should be shot at birth”.

Whatever happened to all that peace and love stuff, man?

Needless to say, Nimbin did not leave a very favourable impression on me. I knew it would be full of hippies and I was expecting hemp clothing and maybe even fire poi. But instead what I saw was just a load of pathetic addicts, obliviously watching busloads of gawping tourists roll through their village. And despite the cheery rainbow flags draped everywhere, I found Nimbin a sad and depressing place.

Tokyo rail and subway map, confusing huh?

Getting lost while travelling is arguably part of the fun. When you’ve got time on your hands, getting lost in an unknown city can be a form of impromptu sightseeing: you can find yourself ‘off the beaten track’, stumbling upon weird and wonderful things that you might otherwise never have discovered had you stuck to tourist maps and guides.

But when you have to be in a certain place at a certain time, when you’re on a schedule, basically when it really counts, being utterly, cluelessly lost in an unfamiliar place is quite frankly a ballache.

A friend once told me that she has a fear of getting lost, or mazeophobia, to give it a name. At the time I couldn’t understand her. ‘What is she, five?’ I thought to myself.

But after my experience in Tokyo, I take it all back. Profuse apologies. I was very wrong.

I got lost in a train station and it scared the bejaysus out of me. You may scoff and wonder what sort of simple-minded fool gets lost in a train station, but this only shows that you have never been to Shinjuku.

Whoever designed that train station must have been diabolically evil or criminally insane.

I had arranged to meet friends at another station but was obliged to change from one line to another at Shinjuku, but the line I was looking for was nowhere near the one I arrived on. It wasn’t a simple case of alighting from my train, walking to the other side of the platform and embarking on the next train.

I left the JR Yamanote line platform and headed for the Metro lines – I was looking for the Shinjuku line, makes sense, right? Shinjuku station, the line should be easy to find. It was not.

I checked every sign but could not see one for the Shinjuku line anywhere. I wandered around and around the station (and this was no mean feat, it’s a huge station). I became more and more frustrated and so I decided to ask for directions.

My Japanese is far from fluent but it certainly extends to asking for and receiving directions. The station attendant seemed bemused by my request, as though everyone knows how to find the Shinjuku line and I must be somewhat hard of thinking. But he deigned to give me a response and, fairly certain I had understood him, I followed his instructions. I shortly found myself outside the station on the streets of Shinjuku. Very unhelpful.

Shinjuku station

Right, I walked to the next entrance to the station (and there are dozens) and asked another person for directions. This time the young man seemed rather concerned that I should want to go to a line so far away. He tried to speak in English, but this only confused the situation further since he wasn’t very good. I got the gist of his directions and walked for another 10 or 15 minutes until I found myself at a completely different train station.

All the while I was trying to find the correct line, I was involved in an texting volley with my friends asking me where I was, with my replies showing more of my panic at being lost and their replies simultaneously trying to calm me while also offering advice.

Feeling exasperated and close to having a panic attack by this stage, I headed back to Shinjuku station where finally I spotted a sign pointing to my line! Relief! I happily trotted along in the direction of the sign and 10 metres along I encountered another one: things seemed to going smoothly at last.

Then all of a sudden, the signage stopped. They had led me a merry dance and then dropped me, without a word of warning, lost in the middle of Shinjuku station, back to square one.

I retraced my steps. There was the last sign I had seen. I tried to visualise its intended direction and walked in as straight a line as I could manage (while dodging the thousands of hurrying commuters). After 5 minutes of walking I felt the panic rising again, in the form of a knot of fear constricting my throat and a dull headache pounding just behind my eyes.

Thankfully the panic was unfounded and another sign hove into view. The bright green lettering told me I reached my destination and I could finally board the train that would take me to my friends who had been very patiently waiting for over an hour.

I suppose I can’t entirely blame Shinjuku station and its lack of signage for my getting lost, and I suppose I may have overreacted somewhat, but that is exactly what a phobia is: an irrational fear.

And after meeting my friends, they showed me a far more convenient method of getting home that bypassed Shinjuku entirely, which just goes to show that local knowledge is invaluable.

I’m not saying that I suffer from mazeophobia, but that I understand now how stressful it can be. And next time I go to Shinjuku station I’ll make sure I leave an extra hour early, just in case.

I went to my first ever rodeo, in Australia. I had no idea that rodeos took place in Australia: I had always assumed it was just like England except hotter and with weirder creepycrawlies. But after arriving in Adelaide, I soon realised my assumptions about the country had been completely wrong.

Unlike England, in many parts of Australia Western style riding (like cowboys) is popular and rodeos are a common event. It just so happened that while I was visiting Clare (about 130 km away from Adelaide) the last ever rodeo in town was taking place.

Why the last one? Apparently running the events had become too much of a headache due to complaints about animal cruelty. While I couldn’t say if any animals were being hurt at the rodeo, I’m pretty sure some of the riders must have left with injuries, but that’s what they signed up for.

I used to be a keen horse rider when I was younger but a nasty fall made me lose my passion, so the idea of falling off angry horses – and bulls – for a living seems pretty crazy to me. Especially as the riders were nearly all in their teens and early twenties. But perhaps it’s because when you’re young you think you’re invincible. Or maybe it’s just because these guys were crazy.

The broncos gave it some welly but soon appeared to be tamed or at least ready to submit once they realised their tenacious riders were not about to let go any time soon. But the bulls! They didn’t give up bucking and kicking, twisting their huge bodies around to try to unseat their riders and maybe trample them after they’d been flung off.

And even after the rider had been thrown off and escaped to safety, the bull was still raging and would chase anyone in its path.

You’d have to be incredibly brave or crazy to want to do that for a living.

Sam Reeves, a bullrider and inventor of the mechanical bucking bull, explained his reason for loving this dangerous sport: “The 8-second ride on the bull is the biggest adrenaline rush in the world. There’s no other rush like it.”

So bullriders, rather than being brave, are adrenaline junkies, which probably is a form of madness. When you keep doing something for the thrill of it, even though it might kill you, in fact when the thrill is that it might kill you, that would seem to most people to verge on insanity.

Yet I can’t help but admire people whose passion for something will keep them doing what they love despite the danger (and often because of the danger). I often wish that I felt even a fraction of the passion they feel.

A couple of skiing and hiking enthusiasts I met in a mountain resort in Fiji regaled me with stories of their thrill-seeking friends. They were a young couple, in their thirties, and yet they already had many dead friends, victims of adrenaline addiction. Most had died while basejumping. The adrenaline hit from freefalling from a skyscraper or cliff must be something truly extraordinary if these people were literally dying to achieve it.

Would it be so bad to die doing what you love? Maybe not, but it would be cruel and unfair to your friends and family who would surely be paralysed with fear every time you sought more great and glorious feats.

I think I can safely say that I would never be an adrenaline junky: a parachute jump (strapped to an instructor!) would probably be the extent of my thrill-seeking. But I do envy these people their passion, if not their brief lives. And I think I can learn something from the bullriders and basejumpers of the world: don’t let your fears hold you back from doing what you love.

I encountered a lot of cool and interesting stuff during my stay in Japan and while there was a lot that I found weird and alien, there was also a lot that I will miss and would like to see at home in London.

The first, of course, is the friends I made there but I’m sure I’ll see them again.

Moving on from the sentimental, I’ll miss the food! Japanese food is delicious and always beautifully presented. Despite often lacking in fresh veggies and being a little too heavy on the carbs, on the whole Japanese cuisine is healthy and you can pretty much step into any restaurant you pass by on the street and the food will be good, unlike in other countries where you could be risking at best a bland meal and worst a bout of the squits if you pick an eatery in such a willynilly fashion.

Having previously declared Japanese toilets to be bizarre I find now, after visiting countries where toilet facilities can be considerably more basic, that I do kind of miss those crazy behemoths of the toilet family. Heated loo seats aside (and without meaning to sound too crass), the built-in bidet is a must-have. All those buttons and dials that intrigue you whilst you micturate are surely preferable to swatting away the clouds of flies that occupy the toilets of less sanitary countries.

Although I’d probably need a mortgage to afford one of those high-tech loos and my home would need to be reinforced with steel girders to support its weight.

I miss vending machines on every street. They’re such a great idea – especially when I came across one containing my favourite drink of all time: white grape and aloe vera juice. YUM. (Made by Minute Maid I was surprised to discover.) It became a policy of mine to buy a can every time I passed a machine that stocked that juice. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen nearly as often as I hoped.

But as much as I would love to see vending machines proliferating in London, I know all to well what the consequences of such an initiative would be. If the humble pay phone is unable to escape vandalism and burglary then there is no hope for the survival of a well-stocked vending machine.

Of course that serves to highlight the difference between British and Japanese mentalities, especially of the younger generations. Evidently Japanese teens don’t feel the need to smash up everything in their neighbourhoods.

Another thing I’ll miss about Japan is the near-universal understanding and acceptance of technology – well I guess they invent most of it so they have to be prepared to use it. Young and old alike will get onto a train and immediately whip out their mobile phone. (Oh another good thing: their phones actually work on the subway!) I once sat on a train and out of about 15 people, I was the only one not engrossed with my phone. No, I tell a lie, one kid was playing her Nintendo DS, but that’s close enough.

I think in London, unless the user is a business-type who has a company Blackberry, the older generations tend not to use their mobile phones as much. Basic functions such as phone calls and texts may be used but I don’t think there’s much net surfing or watching downloaded movies happening.

Reading back over my list, it seems the things I miss relate to food or technology which I suppose are two things that Japan is most famous for. It certainly lives up to its reputation in those fields.

However, I will also miss the tranquillity that can be found in parts of Japan. I visited many Shinto shrines during my stay and I found these places to be peaceful havens of solitude and calm. They were also sometimes mysterious or unearthly.

At the Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto I lingered there until dusk, wandering through the thousands upon thousands of reddish-orange torii gates. They formed meandering pathways through a wood and before long I found myself completely alone with no other human beings in sight.

I suddenly felt apprehensive. Ahead of me was a vast pond, to the right some ancient funereal gravemarkers surrounded by incense and to the left were moss-covered stone steps leading away into the darkness.

I felt as though one of the many strange Japanese kami might appear at any moment, a ghostly spirit of the woods like in Hayao Miyazake’s Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away.

And while at the time (big baby!) I was a bit scared, now I think back to it I realise that it was really quite beautiful and wish I could revisit it. If only it could be found in some woods near my home in London. I would savour the eerie feeling and soak up the peaceful atmosphere and cherish them when London’s daily grind becomes too oppressive.

It’s been pretty tough and there have been many times when I really didn’t want to be here but now it’s over I can’t help but wonder what all the fuss was about when I first arrived.

In my first week here, I made a trip to the Tokyo Tower which was very impressive and I did all the touristy stuff, but at that point I was still finding it difficult to adjust to life in Tokyo.

But as I left the Tower and started walking down the steep hill at the Tower’s base, I saw a woman cycling uphill.

She was struggling somewhat and practically standing on the pedals with the effort of pushing her bike up the hill. And perched behind her on a special baby seat was her young son.

Keen to spur his mother on, he chanted in time with her efforts, “Ganbaru! Ganbaru!” (Do your best!)

That’s what I need. Not a small boy on the back of my bicycle, but some kind of cheerleader, someone to tell me to hang in there.

But being a solo traveller, there’s only me. So whenever I found the going got tough I had to have a word with myself, “Come on Maya, ganbatte ne!”

I guess it worked because here I am four weeks on, Japanese course completed and with no desire to book a flight home.

What’s the moral of my story? I suppose it’s always try your best.