I love watching my husband try new foods. Here’s how he went with trying a “chef’s choice” of sushi in a Kyoto sushi restaurant. He also decided to try some hot sake (rice wine). He isn’t putting on much of an act, he’s just a very expressive guy.
The sushi
The challenger
Inspection for wasabi
Herring roe…tasty?
Not so much
What IS that??
Not impressed
This needs extra sake to drown out the taste
Ech!
Moving yellow sushi into the “bad” pile
Hm…what next?
Time to consult the chart
Removing wasabi
How bad can it be?
Abort! Need sake!
Ew, sake
Ebi sushi okay?
Difficult to eat…
Hmm…
Not bad!
Sea urchin…tasty?
Eating the cucumber half first
Time to sake up in preparation for the urchin half
A tentative taste of urchin
Huh?
Eurghh…
Choices…
Tuna time
Eh?
Mmm…it’s okay
Finishu!
No thanks to you, yellow sushi
*glares*
*sigh*
N.B. I’m backposting a bit, since today I’m still in Kyoto – this all happened last week.
I absolutely love the many different types of entertaining places to go to in Tokyo. There really is something for everyone. These are just the ones that we tried out.
Cat cafe
Of course, being cat lovers, Spiff and I were completely charmed by the cat cafe. In Tokyo, it’s difficult for people to keep cats as pets because of the small apartments and busy lifestyles. So they have cat cafes, where people can pet cats for a small hourly rate. I was surprised by all the different breeds – Cornish Rex, Scottish Fold and a few I didn’t recognise. There were some very young cats there as well.
We went to the “Cat Magic” cat cafe in Shinjuku. It had a closed room full of cats and a separate room for eating food (you could not take food in with the cats, only drinks). Inside the cat room there were cat toys and various baskets for cat naps and platforms for kitties to walk out of reach. Soft baby-nursery-style music was playing. It was a very relaxing environment. You could buy treats for the cats. We saw a lady purchase a treat and she was instantly mobbed by about seven kitties trying to eat it. I hope they’re getting fed enough!
At some point, the lady who worked in the cat cafe brought out a bowl of dry ice, poured water on it so it went all misty, and placed it on the floor. Some of the cats sat around the bowl, watching the swirling mist. I guess this is entertainment for cats!
Many of the cats were sleeping, but some of the younger cats were friendly and hopped onto our laps for petting. It was a really nice experience! I love that the Japanese love cats. There are too many cat-haters in Australia. I think it is because we have so many unfriendly stray moggies in Australia and many people have never met a nice friendly cat (like a Burmese!).
Maid Cafe
I had to do a bit of internet research on maid cafes because after we went to one I still wasn’t sure what to make of it. A maid cafe is a cafe where the young and pretty waitresses dress up like maids from a manga comic and call their patrons “master” or “mistress”. They act very cute and innocent, and do cute things like put faces on the food, and play fun games. I’ve read that it’s not necessarily meant to be a perverted thing, more like indulging a geek’s manga fantasy by having the characters come to life. But I have to say, it was still kind of creepy.
We went to the “At Home” cafe, which is a big chain and supposed to be pretty reputable. Upon entering, we were assigned a maid who took us to her table. None of us understood very good Japanese, so we couldn’t understand much of what she was saying. Our maid looked about 12 years old, but we’ve been told since that they’re generally around 20 but look much younger.
We ordered some drinks – in addition to being charged an entrance fee we were asked to order at least one thing from the menu each. I ordered an iced coffee, which in Japan is usually served as just black coffee with ice in it, and you add your own sugar syrup and milk. When the maid came back, she put my coffee at the table and indicated that she would pour the syrup in for me, and when I wanted her to stop, I should make a cute knocking gesture and say “moe, moe!” (moe is apparently a word for a manga character obsession). So yep, I did that. Then she let us choose our own coloured straw each.
Then she and another maid got up onto a little stage and involved all of the patrons in a game called “moe moe jankenpon”. We couldn’t tell what they were saying, but it seemed the game was like regular jankenpon (rock, paper, scissors), but with cute hand motions added to it. If you won one round against the maids, you stayed in. The winner got a special coin.
We expected the clientele to be all male geeks, but actually it was a mixed bag. There were quite a few women there, and sitting next to us were a strange couple of some kind – looked like a 14 year old girl and an 8 year old boy. They didn’t speak a word to each other the entire night.
Photographing the maids was not allowed, but you could purchase a photo for 500 yen (around AU$5.00). You could either get a photo with your favourite maid, or just get a single photo of your favourite maid – wallet sized! Hm that was a little creepy, who is keeping a picture of their waitress dressed as a maid in their wallet? We passed on both these options.
At the end we got a loyalty card which had spaces on back for stamps for subsequent visits. If you got 3 stamps, you would “rank up!”, proving once again that Japanese life mirrors video games.
It’s definitely an interesting place to go. If you want to visit a maid cafe, go to Akihabara and look out for the maids on the sidewalk spruiking their maid cafes.
Karaoke!
Okay so not technically a cafe, maybe it’s classed as a bar? Well, we’ve got a few karaoke bars in Australia but they’re nowhere near as good as these ones. Admittedly they are nowhere near as expensive either, so I guess you get what you pay for. Spiff, Divz3r0 and I went to one of the very tall karaoke buildings in Shinjuku, ordered some bitter chocku (an alcoholic drink with a big scoop of chocolate ice-cream in it – yum!) and prepared to rock out. We were shown to a small, neat karaoke room with flashing disco lights on the ceiling and two microphones.
It seems that the singing lessons I’ve been taking for the past few months are paying off – Spiff and Divz3r0’s jaws were on the floor once I launched into The Final Countdown, so mad props go to my teacher! We all sang a few favourites, including the location-appropriate Mr Roboto and Monty Python’s cheeky song Sit On My Face. I was really impressed by the wide selection of English songs.
As a side note, when karaoke-ing, I reckon the key to having fun is to follow a few simple guidelines:
1. Play songs that most people in the room (if not everyone) knows
2. Be prepared – bring your mp3 player playlist of favourite karaoke songs along if you can’t remember any off the top of your head
3. Try not to play more than one song from the same artist – it gets tedious
4. Start with high energy songs
Amazingly, Spiff and Divz3r0 both had fun, despite Spiff having long detested the art of karaoke, and Divz3r0 not expressing a particular interest in it either. I freaking love karaoke, so of course I had fun despite my raging headache. It’s a good night out, but it collectively cost us around AU$80 for an hour and a half. It’s the drinks that drive up the price, but not many people want to karaoke without drinking!
Well, I had a terrible night’s sleep – sleeping on the floor ryokan style does not agree with me. I may have to quietly add some extra bedding from the closet tonight to see if it helps. It is pretty annoying being on the floor all the time, but our ryokan hosts are very nice, and they lay out a tray of hot green tea and Japanese sweets for us every afternoon, which is a delight to come back to after walking all day. The bath experience was nice in the end as well, although Spiff, being such a big gaijin, ended up displacing about half the bathwater in a mini-tsunami that somewhat flooded the bathroom before disappearing down the drain. Hopefully the water was topped up for the next guest!
So today, after drinking a really terrible caffe Americano from Starbucks to make up for the bad night’s sleep, we made our way towards Fushimi Inari Shrine. Basically, it is a shrine on a mountain with a lot of orange torii gates. And I mean a LOT. Why so many? I don’t really know…something for me to look up later I guess. It has many fox statues as well. And cats – like actual live cats, who like to hang out around the top of the mountain. It’s a beautiful area. We were lucky there weren’t many other tourists there, so it was quite peaceful.
Afterwards, we went to the Imperial Palace gardens. As it is cherry blossom season, there were many beautiful cherry trees in bloom, although due to the rain and the early onset of the season, many of the trees were almost bare. We were able to walk in small forests and groves, which were beautiful and serene. We sat amongst the trees for quite some time, just admiring the scenery. Every now and then, a breeze would gently blow, scattering the soft pink petals from the trees. What a beautiful place.
We have just arrived at Fujiya Ryokan, in Kyoto. It’s a short walk from Kyoto station, but of course we got lost and had to rely on the helpfulness of Japanese bystanders to help us reach our destination. It has been raining pretty heavily all day, and Spiff has discovered to his dismay that his bag isn’t waterproof. Luckily my rather ostentatious silver “Guess” brand bag is waterproof. That reminds me, I’ll probably have to remove the dead silverfish from my luggage tag before we go through Australian customs. Why did it crawl in there to die? Guess I’ll never know.
So a ryokan (pronounced kind of like “ree-YOUR-kahn”) is a traditional Japanese guest house. This is our first experience of one and I’m a bit nervous because there seem to be a lot of rules and stuff. Spiff is not at all nervous and in his usual way has made himself at home, by pulling the cushion off the seat, folding it into a pillow and lying on the floor.
So, ryokan rule number 1: leave your shoes at the door. There are a number of slippers provided that you can use around the ryokan, but do not wear them when stepping onto the tatami mats. Spiff’s feet are too big for all of the slippers, so he just wears his socks everywhere. I’m finding it a bit tough to get up the steep stairs in the slippers so I might just do that too.
Ryokan rule number 2: how to bathe. This ryokan has a shared bathroom. So there is a bath with a shower nearby. The hosts will fill the bath sometime in the evening and it will be available for common use for a few hours. You must shower and wash yourself before using the bath. Do not empty the bath water! Yes, all the other guests will be using the bath at some point. I guess if you think it’s gross, think of it like a hot tub.
Ryokan rule number 3: be home by the curfew time. This ryokan’s curfew time is 11pm, if we’re not back by then, we get locked out. In addition, our room starts out as a table and charis in the daytime, and magically turns into beds sometime in the evening. So we really have to stick to the ryokan’s schedule – no partying till the wee hours and sleeping in till midday for us. Toto, I don’t think we’re in Shinjuku anymore.
It was nice that our room had some hot tea and red bean cakes waiting for us when we arrived. Ryokan usually provide meals as well, which I have heard are nice, but we asked for no meals because I’m a bit picky (I don’t eat seafood) and we didn’t want to eat the same thing for 6 nights in a row. Plus, it kept the price down significantly.
There’s a wealth of information at Japan-guide.com for how to behave while at a ryokan. The examples in their pictures look really amazing! Our ryokan is a smaller budget ryokan. I think if you want the full luxury ryokan experience it’s better to stay at a more expensive ryokan with an onsen for just a couple of nights. The reason we chose this one for a whole week was because it’s currently cherry blossom season and everything was getting fully booked! But it seems like a nice little ryokan so far.
My husband and I have spent the last week in Tokyo. I’ve been here before, but it was over 10 years ago and this is Spiff’s first time. I know a little bit of Japanese, having studied it in high school for 3 years and for 1 year at university. So it’s been enough to get by here.
We have been staying at Citadines “Apart’hotel” in Shinjuku-ku. It’s a great place that I found on TripAdvisor, providing studio apartment style accommodation for a very reasonable price. Tokyo accommodation is notoriously small and expensive, so this place is a welcome change. It even has a little sofa and a kitchenette.
However we made the mistake of trying to walk to it from Shinjuku main station. We got lost, and only found it thanks to my meagre Japanese skills and a lot of help from a fellow Aussie named Terry (top bloke, walked us all the way to our hotel!).
Before visiting Tokyo, it pays to become very acquainted with the Tokyo train system. If you have almost any kind of smartphone, the “MetrO” app is an absolute life saver! It works offline and you can actually download metro train systems from anywhere in the world. It not only shows you which stations to go to, but also shows you which direction to go so you know which platform to stand on.
Speaking of great iPhone apps for travelling, I definitely have to say GPS Log is definitely handy for tracking down places that you want to visit again – like your hotel or a place that sells great coffee – especially in Japan where everything is so hard to find on a map. The best part is that it works offline, and if you cache the area maps when you find a wireless hotspot, you’re set (check this site for free wireless hotspots in Japan – there aren’t many because people usually subscribe to their own wifi services on their phone plans).
Of course like any sophisticated city, the train system is absolutely amazingly efficient, and you’ll want to get a “Suica” train card if you’re spending any length of time here, so you can just swipe it as you go through the turnstile. No need to even take it out of your wallet to swipe. Try not to resort to the “gaijin smash”, which is where a foreigner’s suica card does not work, so said foreigner smashes his/her way through the gates, relying on the flimsy little barrier and the politeness of Japanese people to let him/her through without incident. I did this by accident once, and found my suica card did not work on the other end, at which point I decided to feed my card into the machine (DON’T do this), and the machine promptly ate it and started flashing a red light to call a guard over, who looked embarrassed, gave me my card back and just let me through without even paying!
We craftily timed our trip to coincide with the “hanami” (cherry blossom season). So we have been charmed and showered in soft pink petals wherever we go. People are really into the cherry blossoms here. I mean really into them. At the park, they all pull up a tarp and sit around looking at the flowers! There are so many people there it looks like an outdoor concert, but without the concert!
I wondered what happens to all the cherries, but my friend informed me that these types of cherry trees do not produce fruits. But you can buy sweets containing the cherry blossom flowers.
That’s all I have time for now, hopefully I’ll have time later to blog about other stuff we’ve done!
I heard about synaesthesia on a podcast this morning. For the full explanation, check out the Wikipedia article here. From Wikipedia:
Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia, plural synesthesiae or synaesthesiae)—from the Ancient Greek (syn), “together,” and (aisth?sis), “sensation“—is a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes.
In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme ? color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored, while in ordinal linguistic personification, numbers, days of the week and months of the year evoke personalities. In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be “farther away” than 1990), or may have a (three-dimensional) view of a year as a map (clockwise or counterclockwise). Yet another recently identified type, visual motion ? sound synesthesia, involves hearing sounds in response to visual motion and flicker.
Pretty fascinating, right? And sounds really cool. Which is why I would be immediately skeptical of anyone who claims to be a synesthete – it sounds like one of those cool brain things that’s easy to delude yourself into, and will make you feel all special for having it. I guess a lot of my cynicism comes from my initial reaction which was “wow, maybe that’s what I have?” I’ve always associated numbers, letters and days of the week with colours, and I’ve talked to other people who do as well, so it seems like it might be pretty common to me. But I certainly don’t associate it to the extent where I can pass the test with all the 5’s and 2’s.
Anyway, here’s how I scored in this online test for synaesthesia.
Now, before you get too excited, I do have an explanation for this. When I was a kid, I’m pretty sure that’s what colours the days of the week were on my underpants. Yeah, I had underpants with days of the week written on them. It was cool! Anyway looking at those every day made me associate the weekdays with those words. Does this still make me a synaesthete? Frankly I have no idea. Nice score though, I love doing well on tests.
And here’s the other one I did. It was heaps longer and way more boring.
Notice how I changed my mind on some of those letters? Yeah I was pretty unsure with some of those. Not all of them have strong colour associations I guess. But with M once I saw it next to blue I realised yeah it was definitely blue. Hm anyway, the test notes said: “In this battery, a score below 1.0 is ranked as synesthetic. Non-synethetes asked to use memory or free association typically score in the range of a 2.0. A perfect score of 0.0 would mean that there was no difference in the colors selected on each successive presentation of the same letter.” So yeah, that means I’m synesthetic I guess. But wait, there’s more!
Woohoo, 93%! I love high test scores. Anyway it’s way easier to tell if they’re right or wrong, than trying to pick their exact colour shade from some colour chart thing.
And I aced the days of the week again, although it didn’t really recognise my awesomeness and only gave me 0.79 because I got pretty lazy with getting the exact colour shadings every time. Come on, there were like 80 of these tests to do, I have to go to bed sometime.
So I guess I’m a synaesthete? Does anyone else think this is not very unusual? I guess if researchers are interested enough to look into it there must be something in it.
Trish
Bro, check it out, I found the ending to that bloody Gameboy game.
WTF was that? Freaking weird game.
Anthony
Wow,
how disappointing.
As i remember, and i don’t remember much well at all, about anything…
Dragon slayer was intriguing and challenging as it was hard and infuriating.
One of the most frustrating elements was that as you upgraded yourself, the monsters also upgraded and harder more lethal demons spawned. Unfortunately the monsters levelled up way faster than I ever did.
I can’t foro the life of me figure out how the dragon actually figured into anything now that iv’e seen the ending.
It makes even less sense. I can honestly say that dragon slayer wasted a portion of my life. But I can honestly say that it was no less boring/frustrating/challenging/addictive than any other RPG or even MORPG say for instance, Guild wars.
jesus christ nothing has changed.
Trish
Lol, I think the difference is that most games give you small, achievable bosses so you feel like you’re progressing, rather than showing you the end boss right at the start and saying “just get better until you can kill this guy”. It’s like if in guild wars, you’d just been dropped on noob island with Shiro and a heap of piddly monsters spawning out of a headstone, and that was the entire game.
Maybe you kill the dragon in phase 1, and in phase 2 you just need to get back home for tea? Where you are rewarded with an epileptic fit.
Anthony
that sounds about right, probably trying to teach you lessons in life as a medieval dictator: when you start your conquering, never let your enemies get a breath, run them out of batteries. It would be when you’re on noob island Shiro is hanging out, a few grawls kickin about. You kill the first mob of grawl and you head home with your loot. You come back out and there’s mursaat and you’re not infused. Shit, you think:”time for a cuppa” and leg it back home for tea and bikkies. When you emerge, the charr horde is outside behind the mursaat and some fucking ghost comes and steals all your pants. Insult to Injury.
Slayer was a game for old-school Gameboy. In it, you play the part of a heavy knight with arthritis intent on killing an unkillable dragon. You control the knight through a series of simple brick mazes from a top-down view, as you march around killing bad guys. And when I say march, I mean this guy walks the same way that brides walk down the aisle on their wedding days – foot forward, feet together, foot forward, feet together. It’s not fast, and it’s hellishly infuriating when you’re trying to escape from things, like the never-ending flood of skeletons that pour out of gravestones.
As a YouTube commentor called RussianTraitor explains:
“You get more magic spells when you get more experience, which you get from killing monsters – the stronger they are the more exp you get. So, you have to walk around killing monsters, listening to that? boring music hoping you don’t trap yourself or kill yourself until you get enough experience… over time you’ll get more and more magic spells appearing in the menu”
I’m a bit vague on the details, but as I remember you had to go around getting power up item things, which you brought back to your house for more damage and armour points. So you build up a bit of a stash and finally you meet the dragon. The dragon is a 3-headed giant beastie with brick walls covering anything that’s not a head or a tail. When you meet the dragon, you discover that each head deals about a million damage and about a million shield power. The tail zaps you into some random location before you can take a swing at it.
So then it dawns on you – the challenge of this game is to get enough of these items to kill the dragon before your goddamn gameboy battery ran out. Back then it was practically unheard of to be able to save your game, so every time you played it, you had to start right from the beginning again. And if collecting these items isn’t difficult enough with skeletons all over the goddamn place, every now and again some kind of ghost flies past, picks up the item you’re marching furiously towards, and drops it in some other random spot that you can’t see because your gameboy screen is so tiny.
To add insult to injury, every time your guy died, the game would gleefully announce to you that “YOU ARE DEAD!” Also – multiple lives don’t exist in this game. When you’re dead, YOU ARE DEAD! Looks like those 20,000 items you spent hours collecting are gone now, time to buy some new AA batteries and start again.
About the only saving grace for this game was that the music was really, really catchy – a Slavonic Dance, beautifully realised in MIDI. Otherwise, this was a horrible game.
Needless to say, I never came close to finishing this game. What really boggles the mind is that at the beginning of the game, it declares this to be “PHASE 1”. I’m pretty sure my AA batteries would give out long before I ever came close to getting to phase 2. How many “phases” could this game possibly have? Are they all the same, but with bigger dragons?
Luckily I found the answer to this question in the YouTube video below – there are two phases, and judging by the comments on the video, I’m not the only one who never got to see phase 2.
If I had to rate this, I guess I’d give it 2 stars, because the music was okay and for some reason my brother and I used to play it a fair bit, so it must have had something going for it. It was kind of like Legend of Zelda, if it only had one dungeon, was slowed down to half the speed, had no storyline and….okay it was nothing like Zelda. It was a rubbish game and I’m glad I’ve seen the ending of it.
I showed this to my brother, and he had this to say about it: http://hogfish.net/?p=318
I went to Jones the Grocer in Paddington (Sydney) with my friend Annie yesterday. They have a FROMAGERIE – a cheese room! Feast your eyes on this, ladies and gentlemen. And click the pictures for BIGGER pictures.
Oh yes.
Many diet plans such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig let you have virtually unlimited amounts of “free” vegetables – vegetables free from fat or carbohydrates. The rules are, that you can have these “free” veges but any extra delicious stuff like cheese, creamy or oily dressings, nuts, meats or croutons are just not allowed unless you sacrifice “points” or whatever from your other meals.
Surprisingly, even though these diet plans encourage dieters to eat huge amounts of these “free” vegetables, they provide hardly any recipes for meals made entirely of these “free” foods (with the exception of Weight Watchers’ “free soup”).
I’ve never been a fan of salads. I dislike lettuce, and am discontent with munching on other leaves such as rocket, mesculin and baby spinach. I’m alright with them combined with more delicious things, but on their own they’re just not right.
So my Mum helped me come up with a “free” salad that still manages to taste alright, without drowning it in vinegar-based dressing. The herbs add flavour and the finely chopped vegetables help to combine different flavours so you’re not just eating one vegetable at a time. Dieters, enjoy.
Makes 1 large single serve.
- 6 cherry tomatoes, quartered
- 1/2 red capsicum, seeds and stalk removed, chopped into small pieces (about 2cm x 2cm)
- 1 handful cos lettuce leaves, sliced
- 1tbs finely chopped dill
- 2tbs finely chopped mint leaves
- 1/2 cup finely chopped snow pea sprouts
- 2tbs crunchy bean sprouts (such as mung beans)
- 1 shallot, white part only, finely chopped
Once everything’s chopped, put it in a bowl and squeeze over 1/4 of a fresh lime, and grind over plenty of salt and cracked pepper. Toss to combine and serve.
