Diary 2

I was too late for the meeting with other students at fixed time at Granville Island for Writers and Readers’ Festival. The others had already entered the hall. There were no tickets sold there.

I gave up soon, and changed my mind and dropped in the farmers’ market. I was really lucky eventually because I found Korean chestnuts there, which I had never thought I could see in Vancouver. (Read another article about the sweet)

We call it “kuri” in Japanese. The quantity of the chestnuts of the year affected the number of the times of bears’ appearance to human areas. Recently a lot of bears have appeared in front of humans and people are scared when walking around mountain villages. Bears eat a lot of nuts including chestnuts before the hibernation. Depending on the weathers, it was sometimes harder for me as well to get chestnuts at the supermarkets in Japan.

Around this time of the year, I want to cook chestnuts in a traditional way I showed the other day. Japanese traditional sweets, wa-gashi, is strongly connected with its season, because it has something to do with tea ceremony (sa-do).

My mother learned how to cook it for the first time in my family from my co-worker’s wife many years ago. The couple had been already dead, and my mother has been old and ill for a long time. Instead, I tried to remember the recipe a few years ago and made it sure by checking websites. I tried at home kitchen over and over again until I completed my recipe.

When I found the chestnuts labeled “Korea chestnuts” in the market, I was already imagining their soft and sweet taste spreading in my mouth. “Oh, I can do it here!”