Friday 28 December 2007

Empty Set Takes A Vacation

And there's a shiny 1 yen piece for the first person to place that reference. That runs to just less than 0.5p in her majesty's sterling. In fact, you can have a whole bunch of 1 yen pieces if you want, I fucking hate the things. I just fill old pasta sauce jars with them and shake my head, otherwise my wallet would be "Costanza-izing" all the damn time.

Wow! That came off grumpy, and believe me even though I had to work on Christmas Day, I'm not feeling all that grumpy at all. Because I am actually on vacation now for just over a week, and some fella called Chris is coming to visit tomorrow! In fact he's probably flying right now! So it would be impossible for him to hear any insult I direct at him huh?


Chris, you stink!


But instead of packing and getting a good night's sleep I seem to be writing words to feed the insatiable hunger of the internet.


What do I have to say? In lieu of an actual proper Christmas, with family and turkey and lethargy and The Great Escape, I instead fitted 6 Christmas parties into 5 days. This included lots of eggnog (made by me to great acclaim, but from the reciped passed on by Richard Swinbank, bless him), karaoke, expensive sushi, cold roast chicken and amazing mashed potatoes and a cold. Yeah, I pretty much assumed when I went down with a cold last weekend that I should just ignore it and carry on, and somewhere around losing my voice entirely on Tuesday I realised this might not have been the best course of action. Oh well! You live and learn, it's coming back now. The voice, not the cold.


So not only did I make eggnog, but Tara gave my recipe for eggnog to a bar we often go to where the barman speaks good English and he added it to their Christmas menu! And boy were they charging a lot! And no, we didn't get it free! We still love them.


Oh, I should blog something about Christmas in Japan. Christmas is pretty big in Japan, but not as a holiday, more as a fun celebration and a December based partner to Valentines Day. Certainly I was shopping on Christmas eve and every watch and jewelery department was just HEAVING with twenty something couples, picking out adorable presents for each other. Shopping for shoes with good ice grips by the way, and I'm still screwed on that front. I found some horrible size 30s (Japanese sizes are in cm, which is... phenomenally sensible) and it turns out I'm probably size 29, and I can't find any of those. Still I saw some awesome smart black leather numbers with built in flip out spikes for ice-walking. Just not in my size.


And today I tried sukiyaki for the first time. Sukiyaki being basically as follows, dip raw meat into a boiling pan of soy based sauce until it's cooked, then fish it out, dip it in raw egg and eat! Whenever I thought about this in the past I kinda assumed that the searing meat would cook the egg on it, but it pretty much doesn't, it's just eating raw egg and it's delicious. We've been talking about this quite a lot, what with concocting so much eggnog, but in Japan eating or drinking raw egg just isn't an issue, whereas in the UK and US it's some sort of leap of faith. I will leave the science to the scientists (or perhaps anybody wearing a white coat and holding a test tube... at the very least a clipboard), but I have no trouble eating raw egg in Japan.


Jesus, what a lot of nothing to write about. Just time to leave you with the greatest song title ever:


"If your face was Georgia, my fist would be home right now." by American Cheeseburger.


No, I've never heard it, neither do I want to. It could never live up to that title.


Oh and some pretty cool pictures taken from the top of the TV tower a couple of weeks ago that I forgot to post before.


Happy New Year everyone!



1 comment:

  1. esus, what a lot of nothing to write about. Just time to leave you with the greatest song title ever:
    tenks

    ReplyDelete