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| From Japan 119 |
Yummy Reimen!
The website above has a good description: "Reimen are boiled, cold noodles served in a sauce of soy sauce and vinegar, and lavishly topped with thinly sliced strips of omelet, ham, cucumber, tomatoes, ginger and sometimes also chicken and pork. The toppings are arranged in a colorful pattern on top of the noodles, the customer has to mix the dish." So happy I can have this, Somen, or Katsudon every day. Oh, and I caught some show that was having some topic on cats... too cute. The 2nd cat picture is of Tama, a station cat, that was even featured on the Colbert Report:
(It starts at 2:33)
"That's the most adorable financial disaster I have ever seen."
Anyways, Japanese people love cute animals, especially cats.
7/29 Tuesday:
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| From Japan 120 |
Err... seriously... wtf...
Oh the shows you find on tv here. Well get back to that... first, more peach food. Mmm... peach Anpan (red-bean paste filled bread). Alright, so it wasn't that good, don't really like red-bean paste, but it was peach, so it was edible. Next are some pictures of a very cutely-silly looking dog. It was amusing when the guy from the show approached the dog and then the dog jumped on him. Later they showed the guy running away from the dog on the beach (it was pretty funny). Next they showed "comical dancer Umacho". Yes, that's right, he is wearing a horses head (no clue why). Later on they got the people on the show to also wear the horse mask and start dancing... yeah... I don't think I can explain it...
7/30 Wednesday:
Work... sorry, no pictures.
Yup, that's Cameron Diaz, one of the faces of Softbank (another cell phone company).
Seriously, American commercials suck compared to this :P. So simple, yet so enjoyable. I never really liked Cameron Diaz, nor the song, but I actually loved this commercial (ended up singing along most of the time it was on). I think its the dancing that makes this work.
7/31 Thursday:
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| From Japan 122 |
Mmm... more peach steam cake.
Ah, never get tired of the peach food here. Steam cake and some peach and yogurt cream thing. Soo good. *sigh*
8/1 Friday:
Sorry, no pictures again. Tomorrow I'm invited to a company BBQ (Japanese BBQ). Can't wait.
Too cute. Not quite sure exactly what the one cat says at the beginning, but this is a semi-translation of what the cats say at the end: "hey..what did you eat the day before yesterday..? Ah....grrrrr forgot".
Another Softbank ad. Another of the faces of Softbank is a talking white dog (more on that another time). So, in advertising one of their plans (White Call), they have these white cats... mmm... not quite sure why....
8/2 Saturday:
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| From Japan 124 |
Mmmmm.... Japanese BBQ.... sooooo much better than American BBQ... :P
Japanese BBQ is soo good. So, I met up with my group leader (subleader) at Futamatagawa station (somewhere between Shonandai and Yokohama, via different train) around 9am and we walked to the "Child Wildlife Park" where we would be having the BBQ. There were a lot of trees around, but didn't really provide much shade (although it was mostly cloudy anyway). The guy with the "Unoversity" shirt is the subleader (Inomata-san). Japanese BBQ is a lot like Yakiniku, just put sliced raw meet on the slab to cook, and tastes soo good. The guy in the "1789 Hoyas" shirt is Mao-san (one of the guys in my small group, he's actually Chinese). The chubby guy in the blue shirt with the France flag is Yuusuke-san (not in my group, but works at the desk opposite mine and was the guy who showed me around Akihabara). After a while, some people started constructing a makeshift chute for Somen (yay Somen!) out of plastic bottles (hehe). I also got a picture of the awesome 10,000,000 Yen dried squid package (hehe). The guy in the bright yellow shirt wearing white cloth as a bandana on his head is the head boss (general manager) of our section (Ohara-san). So the way Somen is supposed to be eaten is by streaming water down a bamboo chute (in our case, plastic bottles covered in plastic wrap) and dropping the noodles down the chute with the water and the people eating it grab the noodles as they go past and then dunk the noodles in the Somen sauce (?) and eat it. Our makeshift chute didn't quite work... it ended up leaking in the middle, then the noodles would get stuck under the plastic wrap, and the chute would half collapse. Eventually we got it mostly working. It seems that they also dropped small things like grapes and jelly beans down the chute with the noodles (not sure why). Sorry again about the sideways video, I keep forgetting not to do that, I'll edit it at some point. And in the next video it may be hard to hear, but the little girl has shoes that squeaked, it was cute. So after eating meat, veggies, clams, Somen, and more noodles, we took to the Japanese summer tradition of splitting watermelons. Suikawari is usually done at beaches, it's sorta like whacking a pinyata, only on the pinyata is on the ground and people tell you which direction to go. The tall guy with the dark green shirt taking the picture of the kid trying to whack the watermelon while his blindfold falls off (hehe) is Kohno-san (another one of the guys in my group). I took some pictures and video of the kids trying to crack open the watermelons and then we started cleaning up. As we left I took some more pictures around the park and then headed off to Yokohama so I could see the new Naruto movie that just came out. Since the showings at the time I got there were sold out, I bought tickets for later on and decided to also go see the new Indiana Jones movie. It wasn't quite as bad as I heard it was. On the way back, I saw people were filming a scene near World Porters for a TV drama I had watched a few times on TV (eventually even saw the scene on TV that they were filming). I tried to grab a picture without a flash before they left, so that's what the blurry picture is at the end.
8/3 Sunday:
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| From Japan 125 |
A Yukata water/ice festival in Ginza, Tokyo.
So, a lot to talk about, where to start... Well, first, my plan was to go to Ginza to see the "It's a Rumic World" exhibit in the Matsuyama building and then do some walking around Tokyo. Before checking out the exhibit, I took some pictures of some of the buildings in Ginza. The exhibit was in celebration of Rumiko Takahashi's 30th anniversary creating manga. Rumiko Takahashi is a very popular artist worldwide with such creations as Ranma 1/2 and InuYasha. The exhibit showed off a collection of her original artwork (never shown to the public before), full scale recreations and scale models of several things from her manga, exclusive products, new anime, and many drawings of Lum (from Urusei Yatsura, Rumiko Takahashi's first full-length series). As with many places, noone was allowed to take pictures inside. So instead, check out this website which goes in to much more detail and actually was able to take pictures inside: http://furinkan.com/features/articles/itsarumicworld.html
So after getting through the hugely crowded and slow moving exhibit, I stepped outside to see these amazing ice sculptures. I had apparently stumbled apon a Yukata water/ice festival where they close off the main Ginza street and put up ice sculptures in the shape of each of the animals of the zodiac as well as things like hats, shoes, flowers, and fans encased in ice. They were all pretty spread out, so it took a while to actually walk from one end to the other. After walking and taking pictures for a while, I stopped in a toy shop I saw and took some pictures of the amazing lego creations (a Star Wars battle, Indiana Jones, and R2-D2), including awesome engrish ("When you lean on a display and ride a load, please very stop it because it is danger"). I also grabbed a shot of Pleo, a cute little robot that has things like light sensors, touch sensors, audio sensors, tilt sensor, and force-feedback sensors. After the toy store I went and bought some water (it was hot... and the ice sculptures made me thirsty). While walking back down the road I saw that some people seemed to be gathering for something and I saw that there some women in Yukata walking down the row of wooden pails. I then saw that there were a bunch of what looked like professional photographers gathering in front of the women in Yukata. So I snuck in and grabbed a shot as they threw water onto the streets. At first I was disappointed because my first shot wasn't that great, but they moved down the street some and took another shot throwing water, I got a closer and better angle and was able to get the amazing shot seen above. I still had other plans, so I moved on, took some pictures of the long row of wooden pails and a sign that I think is keeping track of the temperature before and after throwing water onto the street.
I started heading toward the Sony building (my next planned destination) and took a picture of the crosswalk and the surrounding buildings (including one with a Ponyo poster :P) at the corner where the Sony building was. Next to the Sony building was a "Dry Mist" machine blowing a cool (-6C) mist, thought that was pretty neat. In front of the Sony building was an aquarium, apparently to go with the "41st Sony Aquarium", the Sony building was showing. This was a combination of the "Aquarium"-like view using high-def Sony monitors and the awesome high tech 3D show in the "Communication Zone Opus" area. This isn't the old red and blue 3D, although it still uses glasses (not red and blue), it is definitely different. I don't know how different it is from IMAX 3D (since I haven't seen IMAX 3D yet), but it was definitely amazing to see. I took a video of a little rolly thing that would move to music it played, and I found on the bottom floor that the stairs there light up and play a musical note (like walking down a piano), which was neat.
Next stop, Tokyo station. On the way there, I saw the awesome warning sign "Please do it at the beach" with someone getting caught in a train door (basically, don't rush onto a train). Finally got to Tokyo station, but it took me a while to figure out how to actually get above ground, reason being they closed off many of the exits due to the construction/repair work outside. Like many things I already came across, Tokyo station was also under construction work, meaning a lot of it was blocked off from entrance/view, so then I headed toward the Imperial Palace. Saw some neat fountains and took a lot of pictures. The Imperial Palace was huge, took me a while just to walk through the outer garden (since we aren't actually allowed to go into the main Imperial Palace area). It was surprisingly pretty empty, so I got a lot of neat pictures here. I wanted to try see more of the Imperial Palace (apparently there is an east garden as well), but since I still wanted to go see the Tokyo Tower, I left after exploring the outer garden. On the way towards Tokyo Tower I came apon a little garden area and a reproduction of the liberty bell.
Eventually I finally reached Tokyo Tower. Outside, there was a show outside in celebration of 50 years of Shonen Sunday (a weekly Manga Magazine). They had a monkey doing some tricks, so I took some pictures and video. Unfortunately, I found out that the top floor of Tokyo Tower was actually closed for renovation or something (all the upper floors were closed since at least April, but the middle ones were opened recently), so I decided to come back when they actually opened the top floor rather than paying twice to go to the top floor. As it got dark I got couple more pictures of Tokyo Tower at night as I headed back home. The last picture is supposed to be of a gate I saw, it was pretty dark and I couldn't tell how my picture came out... I'll get a better one later.
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