Rob is gone and we've both reluctantly returned to the daily grind of our normal lives. (We jointly decided to retire the name "Captain Tenderheart," by the way, as it was originally invented out of the necessity to be secretive which, thankfully, no longer applies.) We had an incredible twelve days together: a three-day trip to Tokyo which, despite two days of rain and my numerous navigational errors, was a lot of fun; an ill-advised viewing of the truly bad Tokyo Drift; a long bike ride and picnic; Rob's first foray into the very naked world of the onsen; a visit to the Nagoya Aquarium; and, most importantly, lots of lazing around and watching DVDs. We got to be a real couple for awhile, instead of two people who live 5,000 miles apart and see each other on a computer screen for an hour once a week. It was nice.

But now of course there is the fresh emptiness of my apartment, the quiet, the half of the couch where he should be sitting and isn't.

Nine months suddenly feels like a very long time indeed.

I have a terrible confession to make. In recent months I've found myself craving the worst things. Foods I would have shunned completely in the U.S., like this monstrous bread creation (basically white bread filled with sweet margarine and topped with icing), now seem not so bad, pretty enticing actually, maybe even...delicious.

When boxes of Oreo Chocolate Pie began popping up on the shelves of my local supermarket, I was immediately tempted to buy them, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. The idea of finishing off six Oreo marshmallow sandwiches all by myself seemed a bit depressing. Luckily, Rob came into town, bringing with him a love of all things strawberry-flavored and an excuse to finally try out these disgustingly alluring choco-pies.

"Do you want to try these?" I asked, casually slipping the box into our cart. "Look -- strawberry flavor. You love strawberry."

"Uh...I guess so."

With that enthusiastic endorsement, I was in possession of the pies, my cover story intact. So that Rob could enjoy the pies, I brought them out while we were watching the pilot episode of Battlestar Galactica (another new obsession). He didn't touch them. I opened the box and put one in front of him and one in front of me. Nothing. Finally, I opened up the wrapping on mine and he did the same.

If you put an Oreo on a copy machine set to increase the size by 125%, then the same machine somehow also softened the cookie, turned the cream filling into strawberry-flavored marshmallow and covered the whole thing in chocolate, you would find yourself with an Oreo Cookie Pie (strawberry flavor). In other words: yum.

After the first one, I kind of wanted another, but decided to wait for Rob to make a move. No luck. It wasn't until the next night during more BG that I cracked open another.

"Do you want one?" I asked.

"Ugh. No. Those things are disgusting."

"Really? But they taste like strawberry. You love strawberry!"

"They make my teeth hurt when I bite into them."

"Oh."

My plan was destroyed. But that did leave two extra Oreo Chocolate Pies for me, so I couldn't really complain. I did, however, object to the unnecessary commentary I discovered written on the box flap the next day. I suppose you can consider it sort of a second review. I'll leave it to you to decide which one of us is right.

This weekend I attended no fewer than three festivals over the course of two days and used the holiday on Monday (Health and Sports Day, ironically) to laze around in my pajamas, recovering from too much beer and taiyaki.

But it was worth it.

On Saturday, a group of friends and I took a bus to Seki in search of the perfect Japanese knife at the Sword and Cutlery festival. (You can read about my search and see pictures of my new knife here.) I also got to see a public demonstration of Japanese-sword-making, an impressive process involving a lot of sparks, hammers and white-clad twenty-fifth-generation swordsmiths.

Thus armed with knives, we hopped on a train headed for the nearby town of Mino, a place famous for its washi, Japanese paper. Every year at this time the historic section of Mino is illuminated after nightfall with hundreds of handmade, one-of-a-kind washi lanterns. I just wandered around for a couple hours, taking it all in. The crisp, clear night, the dark wooden buildings and the glowing lanterns... It was the most beautiful festival I have ever been to and the perfect celebration of autumn. (You can see all my lantern pictures here.)

But it wasn't over! My festival weekend continued the next morning, when I met a bunch of other foreigners at Ogaki City Hall for the annual Ogaki Festival shrine-carrying. Every year the prominent businesses and institutions in Ogaki construct mikoshi (shrines) or floats, which are carried on the shoulders of happi-clad employees in a parade up and down the main street. Every year Ogaki City Hall invites the foreigners living in Ogaki to carry their shrines in exchange for a lot of beer and goodwill. After the parade, all the participants convened in front of Ogaki Castle, where men on tall platforms threw handfuls of plastic-wrapped mochi down on the crowd. Have you ever seen two seemingly-ancient Japanese men wrestle with each other trying to grab a piece of pink mochi? Or seen a pack of old ladies jump up toward the flying mochi, arms outstretched, like teenagers at their first rock concert? It was madness, I tell you. Pure mochi madness.

And tomorrow is my school's sports festival. I'll run the three-legged race, or ni nin san kyaku ("two people three legs") as it's called in Japanese. I hope my team wins!

I'm sick, so the only candy I can and should eat is kurozatō nodo-ame, black sugar throat candy. When I first heard the term "throat candy," I thought it was all a big racket, because everyone knows their mom always said, "Sweet things are bad for you when you're sick!" (Please read with with whatever voice you use to imitate your mother. I know you have one.) It turns out that rule doesn't apply when you're talking about black sugar from Okinawa, sticky, chunky, unrefined stuff that Japanese people sometimes like to eat whole. Unlike brown sugar sold in the U.S., which is refined white sugar mixed with molasses, Okinawan black sugar has nutrients not found in more processed sugars, most notably potassium. It also has a throat-soothing quality, which makes it a popular addition to nodo-ame. It also may or may not extend your life -- black sugar is one of the foods credited for the extremely long lives of the Okinawan people.

I've tried a few black sugar candies, but none has ever lived up to this one, the first brand I ever bought. That's because lurking beneath the sweet, smooth exterior is a molten core of pure, raw black sugar, bitter, molasses-y stuff with the dark sweetness of the best gingerbread. Crunching through the final layer of the outer candy and into the center is the best part, the two textures blending under your teeth into something chewy yet crisp, like a very dark toffee.

They're pretty addictive, especially when your throat is tickly. I've also tried dropping them into hot lemon tea, the way I see my coworkers sometimes drop chunks of actual kurozatō into their coffee. It's good. But the best part is knowing I will undoubtedly live to be at least 100 years old with all the black sugar I'm eating.

I made another doll this weekend with Chisako, this time an Okinawa doll. The main difference seems to be the kimono, which is made of paper designed to look like bingata fabric. I love this pattern and the way the turquoise looks with the super-bright orange. As I told the person sitting next to me in class, "I'm trying to blind everyone who looks at this doll."

The other difference is that this doll has a nice upswept hair-do, a headband and a tiara. I love tiaras. Other than that, the folding techniques were the same as last time, only the teacher didn't help me as much, which means this doll is a little less professional-looking than the last, but it feels more like mine.

Whenever I'm feeling down, I like to bake. Well, I don't actually like to bake, since when I'm feeling down I don't really like anything, but when I find myself being followed all over the house by a drizzly cloud of gloom, a little voice inside me says quite firmly, "I think you'd better bake now." And I'm always glad when I do.

This weekend the blues struck hard for some reason, but I managed to banish them with these banana cupcakes. The recipe, from one of my favorite food blogs, Orangette, is actually for a cake, but since I had promised a friend some baked goods as a thank-you for lending me an ice-blue ladies' bicycle for Rob to use during his visit, I decided to make cupcakes. I wanted to eat some of them, you see. And no one likes to get half a cake as a thank-you.

I was excited about this recipe because it is a rare thing when a food blog in another country actually posts something I can make. Pungent cheeses, bundles of fresh fennel, baskets of ripe cherries -- this is the stuff of dreams in Japan. Bananas, however, are cheap and plentiful here. Bananas I could do.

And so I left my drizzly cloud of gloom in the living room while I pureed and sifted and mixed in the kitchen. There is something calming about the weighing, the measuring, the following directions, kind of the way it felt to do a particularly satisfying math worksheet in elementary school. I decided to go my own way with the frosting, since the small packets of sad, shriveled coconut I had seen on the shelves couldn't compare to my best friend in baking: kinako. I thought the nutty flavor would work especially well with the banana, since I am a wholehearted supporter of the peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich. It turned out even better than expected -- I posted the recipe here.

The batter made exactly a baker's dozen, so I ate the thirteenth cupcake, cooled and frosted, standing over the sink. Man, it was good. And you're probably not surprised to hear that by the time I sat back down on the couch, my drizzly cloud of gloom had completely vanished.

Mistakes were made in the purchase of Forme, I'll admit it. The first problem: I thought it was called For Me. This made me giggle, wondering if the candy was intended for selfish chocolate eaters ("For me!") or surprised chocolate recipients ("For me?") Then I got home and noticed the katakana pronunciation -- "forumu." In the bizarre world of katakana, that's just boring old "form." Snooze...

Second problem: I thought there would be some sort of almond cream inside the chocolate squares, something like the substance pictured in the upper right corner of the box. I thought it might be a little like the fondly-remembered chocolate bars I had to sell for a fundraiser in junior high school, smooth rectangles of chocolate filled with soft peanut butter that I inevitably ended up buying off of myself half the time. Alas, no almond cream. Just a faint almond flavor peeking through the unremarkable milk chocolate. Yawn...

A look at the candy's website has revealed that there is a 4mm layer of almond cream inside of each square -- an invisible, nearly tasteless cream, apparently. This candy also has, for some reason, a blog with some cute pictures people have posted of their toys and amigurumi dolls pretending to eat Forme. What the...

I have never been so utterly confused by the niche a candy is attempting to occupy in the Japanese candy world. I underestimated you, Forme. I thought you were just a straightforward chocolate in a rather elegant box. When in reality, you're just as weird as the rest.

I've already discussed the takeover of the candy shelves by dark chocolate, a phenomenon that has meant a lot of tasteful black packaging and not a lot of fun. Recently I've been concentrating mostly on the kids' candy aisle, which is probably why I failed to notice the world of chocolate pills until now.

That's right. Chocolate pills. In its plastic jar, Cacao Power 70 looks like every other dietary supplement in Japan, full of healthy acronyms and unexplained numbers -- not to mention POWER. Until you open the jar and see the candy looks just like M&Ms, the dark brown ones. The outside isn't crackly like an M&M, but there is some sort of coating to keep the candy from melting immediately in your hand. It's more bitter than other 70% cacao chocolates I've eaten, possibly due to all those acronyms and numbers, but it's as good as most plain Japanese dark chocolate bars. Which is to say: it's mediocre, but not awful.

And what are those acronyms and numbers? GABA is gamma-aminobutyric acid, which is supposed to have a relaxing, anti-anxiety and anti-convulsive effect. CoQ10 is an antioxidant which may protect you from Parkinson's disease and strokes. It's unclear how much of each substance is in one piece and I don't even know how many pieces make up a serving. (Or is it a dose?) I've eaten three pieces today -- I can only hope I haven't OD'd.

Now that I know what it is, I realize GABA is all over the candy aisles here. I guess people in Japan just need to relax. Or they need to pretend their dirty chocolate-eating habit is actually for their health. I'd never make such a claim, but I'll still be keeping some Cacao Power 70 at work for any emergency chocolate cravings. Or sudden anxious convulsions.

My love for Halloween costumes cannot be overstated.

At the beginning of October every year, I tell myself, "Okay, Subconscious Anjali. You have three weeks to come up with a good costume. Go!" Happily, my subconscious has never let me down. This year I was struck with a good idea during that hazy morning time when you turn over in bed and think, I hope I have like an hour until the alarm goes off. On this particular morning, I then thought: I've got it! Zombie tour guide!

You see, the parking lot of every tourist spot in Japan is packed with giant tour buses and each of these buses comes with its own Bus Guide, a cute lady in a brightly-colored suit who cheerfully leads the crowd of senior citizens shuffling along behind her, holding a tiny flag aloft so they can spot her at all times. It's not difficult to imagine, post-zombie-apocalypse, cheerfully dead bus guides leading around their still-shuffling zombie charges.

Surprisingly, the most difficult part of wearing a Halloween costume in a Halloween-less country is not the process of locating the costume components. (The Halloween gods were smiling upon my trip to the used-clothing area of Nagoya. Also, the 100-yen store is the greatest costume supply shop ever.) It's riding the train for an hour with your face covered in fake blood, accompanied by a male friend dressed as a giant Pikachu, knowing that no one else on the train has any idea you are doing this for Halloween. You get a lot of stares, let me tell you.