Tokyo: Outside the art gallery that was closed.

We tried to go to a cool looking art gallery thing, but of course it was closed. Instead we looked at this above a 20 metre drop and got vertigo.

Something to aspire to.

from The Trouble With Girls #1

Sick Sick Sick

Exacerbated, though not caused, by my trip to Tokyo, I've gone down with a real stinker of a cold.

So not much of anything here this week I expect, but at least I dropped by to let you know.

Oh actually while we're here:


And if you don't think that's the best photoshop ever you're an idiot.

Tokyo

I went to Tokyo and saw Radiohead and bought sneakers and met friends and had a wonderful time but I was running mostly on momentum and now my brain is like a small mammal donked on the head by a shovel and I seem to have lost my voice.

Good night.

Sapporo Food: Let's Sushi Party at Hanamaru!

Hey, no posts for a few days because I'm flying to Tokyo to see Radiohead rock the humble-sounding Saitama Super Arena. If I really loved you I'd find an internet cafe to post from, but y'know....

You're adopted.

Anyway here's tonights menu: tasty, tasty sushi! After I managed to shut Demode Queen down by writing about it I wasn't sure about naming any more restaurants, but this place isn't going anywhere. Hanamaru is a kaiten sushi (conveyor belt sushi) restaurant in the huge Sapporo Station complex. It's pretty well known, and pretty popular so you'll always have to wait for a table, but it's easy to sign up for and worth the effort. It's on the 6th floor of Stellar Place right next to Daimaru, the fancy-dan department store.


Oh look, it's some of my friends eating sushi! Hi friends!

Hanamaru is fun because it involves a lot of shouting. Someone's always shouting something to someone and then that someone makes the sushi you eat. It's a system that works well for me. Even better is when they make a special order and ring a bell and ask if anyone wants some. Everyone shouts at the same time, kinda like West Side Story, but with raw fish instead of mambo. Now let's look at some sushi that I seem to have photos of on my computer:


fig 1: Salmon. This is raw salmon on rice. I know, you were thinking that salmon meant tuna, but actually, no, it's just salmon. Everyone's favourite, everyone eats a lot of it.


fig 2: Chanchan-yaki. This is seared salmon with spring onions and a sweet miso sauce and it's delicious. Chanchan-yaki is really a whole salmon cooked with the sauce and is a speciality of Hokkaido, but a few places do sushi versions. I recommend it!

A Bagful of Sticks and Carrots

I figure that, being pragmatic, one of the main uses of this blog should be to give people an inside view of what living in Japan is like. I mean, coz clearly there's not enough blogs and sites doing that already.

Ahem.

(The ahem is meant to indicate that the preceding statement was sarcast... oh never mind)

So here's something you get from day to day life in Japan: shop assistants love bagging and wrapping things up for you. I'm pretty sure I've gone into this before, but my mind is fried this week, so humour me. Seriously, much more than in the UK, and to a farcically impractical degree. I have a pretty good understanding with the donut shop I buy coffee at now, whereby they know me and just give me the coffee, in my hand, and I walk out the door. At first though it was coffee, in a paper bag, in a plastic bag, and then it tips over as soon as you pick the plastic bag up. I like the new deal.

This can be tied into Japan's phenomenal service culture of course, but it's really, really wasteful when the supermarkets are always giving you more plastic bags than you need, or bagging your groceries for you into far too many bags. Wasteful... until yesterday that is!

As of October 1st, both of the Supermarkets I go to regularly have stopped giving out free plastic bags! Not only that, they are using both the stick (5 yen per bag) and the carrot (1 yen off your shopping if you bring your own bag) to incentivise their customers. Seriously, I'm astonished and delighted, but now I have no idea what I'm going to use as bin bags at home coz those medium sized Daiei bags were just the beans.

I guess I'll take one for Mother Earth.

Let's put a smile back on that face!

My day today, as they say, both sucked and blew at the same time. I'm lucky I found this thread on one of my internet haunts with so much music and video... that'd be music video, joy. Click to commence smiling.

Not a proper music video, but a scene from The American Astronaut, a movie that just rocketed to the top of my want-to-see list (N.B. I don't actually have a want to see list):

Just one big smile:

You know, why does anyone even remember that he was in the Sex Pistols when he did stuff like this for PIL?

This one is even better if you remember that the actual idea was that the car was the pop-star here, possibly the car was singing the song:

Ah, man... that feels better.