What's pho lunch

Yesterday I stumbled on a little hole in the wall pho place near work.  Some might think, big whoop, but bowls of that tasty beef goodness have been few and far between since I came to Japan. Sure there have been plenty of other kinda of tasty beefy bowls to be had, but sometimes you have a craving.  The place, as I said, was a hole in the wall.  The kitchen is also located at the front of the store and doesn't have a door, so you could in theory stand and watch your food being made or slopped out or what have you.
Gotta say that the food was good, though a touch on the salty side but all in all goodness galore. And it gives me a good excuse to post a pic. What more could you ask for.

Karuizawa boarding

Well, well, well. Looks like I find myself back here after over a year and change's absence.  Well I wanted to document my first boarding outing since I came to japan, so here's I is.
Karuizawa is a small city on the way to Nagano from Tokyo.  Now the great thing about the slope that I want to is that it's also on the way to Nagano. As in get off the bullet train and walk 5 minutes to the lodge. Can't top that.  So what's it like? Well it's smaller that a mountain but larger than a molehill. About Blue Mountain size. The boarding itself was decent, but with the daytime high of 4C today it was a little soft in spots and a little icy in others.  All in all though, a decent day.

Fall froliking

Its kind of hard to think of it still being fall on this, the 30th day of November, but this year in Tokyo its still a true statement. The trees still have leaves, of many a hue and the weather is quite nice. Tomorrow's high is about 13C so I can't complain in the slightest. But what would fall be without taking a little time out to look at some of those beautifully coloured trees. While most people think of Tokyo as nothing but a sprawling megalopolis its pretty interesting to note that a lot of the surrounding countryside (which is still in the municipality of Tokyo) is really beautiful and about a million miles away from Harajuku, Shinjuku and the like, even though the actual distance is more like about 50 miles.

At the bottom of Mt. Takao

One of these beautiful escapes is Mt. Takao where I went last week. It's only one 45min - 1 hour train ride out of Shinjuku station, but its great. Unfortunately it gets pretty crowded on the weekend, but that's Japan. The leaves were pretty .. um.. pretty and I managed to get my hands on a massive pork bun near the top. Nothing says tasty like a hot meaty snack on a cold autumn day.

Mt. Fuji

Another cool thing was that I was able to get a chance to see the legendary Mt. Fuji from on top of Mt. Takao. Mt. Takao is only about 300m tall, while Fuji is about 3000, so its still a pretty impressive sight. There were a bunch of people standing at the top of the mountain waiting to get a sweet picture of the sun setting behind Mt. Fuji, so I stayed and tried my hand at it too..

Speaking of sunset, there are two ways down the mountain, the cable car and the usual "one-foot-in-front-of-the-other" method. We chose the latter, which maybe wasn't the best idea, since we had stayed at the top to see the sun setting over Mt. Fuji. To make matters worse we took the narrowest, steepest, slipperiest route down in the hopes of seeing a waterfall that was next to the trail. (There were several signs posted saying that you should *not* try to go down this way since it was steep).

Through the trees

Well with the light fading very quickly, and no flashlights, we made a bit of a mad dash down to the bottom before the rabid squirrels and zombie rabbits decided to take a stab at tearing into our flesh. Just as things were at their darkest (literally) we saw the light (literally) at the end of the tunnel. We made it down to the foot of the mountain where there were lampposts a plenty. All in all a good little afternoon.

The Suds Boat

Wouldn't you like to ride a boat with these people?

Now that the semester is done, and I've all but had it up to my eyeballs in Lyapunov functions, Linear Matrix Inequalities, congestion control algorithms and whole host of other things that no one cares about, the summer of fun can begin. Well the 2-3 weeks of fun, anyways. What better way than to kick it off with my first ever trip on a boat larger than the center island ferry.

And what better way to celebrate a trip on a 4 deck gargantuan mammothocity than with a beer or twelve. Yes indeed, let me introduce the Tokyo Bay Yukata boat cruise. 2500 yen for 2hrs of all you can drink fun and frolic on a big ass boat. Special thanks to Dean for arranging the tickets for this, especially since when we got there the tix were sold out as evidenced by some poor sad sack running around looking for scalpers.

As I said, it was a big boat, a couple "below decks" where most people were sitting around eating and drinking, and the two upper decks, with more sitting and eating and drinking, but also a bit more dancing, and a few less families. I met a few interesting people, including a cool group of Korean tourists, several random groups of Japanese people and one particularly amorous girl who seemed to be having fun squeezing the butts of passers-by.

World famous yukata dancers

As an extra coolness factor, many of the people on the boat were wearing yukatas (think of a kimono, but lighter and thinner, so you can wear it in the summer without losing 10 pounds). There were also the signature "yukata dancers" shakin' their booty on the dance floor to liven the place up even more (not that it needed it with a bunch of drunkards running around taking pictures and trying to spot fireworks in the distance). All in all a good old time.

SushiーQ

My BBQ team

Now it can't really compare to a fat rack of baby backs, topped with a jerk chicken drumstick or twelve, but a Japanese BBQ's not too shabby. So I was pleased to be able to go to the BBQ party held by my work last weekend. We all got on a bus at an ungodly 7:30am at Shinjuku station and headed off to parts unknown (at least to me.. actually I still don't know where we went). A few hours later we arrived somewhere in the outskirts of Tokyo, next to a little river surrounded by green. Funny thing about Japan is that, despite being super densely populated, there's still quite a lot of green space, rivers and whatnot. So we set up our BBQ's for some good ole fashioned Japanese BBQity. Steak, shrimp, veg, and fried noodles made up the menu.. A little different, but all goodness.

Ground zero for BBQ mayhem

Once it got too hot (or once we all got too drunk) it was into to river for a quick cool down. I think it was my first time swimming in a river, and I learned a valuable lesson. River beds have rocks. Lots of rocks. Big ones, small ones, and general all around feet hurting ones. I wondered why everyone else had flip-flops. Still it was all good.

Ready for a smashin'

The day was topped off by the a good ole watermelon smash. Its like a watermelon pinata. You gotta hit it with your handy-dandy wooden sword to break it open before everyone can eat. All good fun.

Long and the short, it was a good day. The kind of thing that I hope to have more of in the near future.

Off my skull

I finally managed to get around to seeing my third movie in a movie theatre in Japan, and other than a nasty leg cramp due to a wee shortage of leg room, it was some pretty good fun. The movie was the new "Indiana Jones" and I have to say that it wasn't too bad. The cool thing about movies in Japan though is that when you buy your ticket, you can pick your seat from a display at the ticket counter. You get a numbered ticket and worrying about finding 2 or 3 seats together when you get into the theater is a thing of the past. Not every theatre does this, but the majority (especially busy ones do). And you can do it online too, which is a neat little feature.

Other than that, its been working and studying and more of the same. I meant to write a post about the stabbing spree that went down in Akihabara a few weeks ago, but I never really got around to that. Suffice it to say, it was pretty freaky that I dude decided to run his big ass truck into a crowd of people and go on a stabbing spree in the middle of downtown Tokyo. They caught him, but I don't know what they're gonna do with him now.

Graduation Day (but not for me)

So the spring has come once again to the shores of this isle. And of course, like the thoughts of all young men in springtime, my thoughts turn to only one thing; cherries. (you can stop giggling now). Yes, the cherry trees are in full blossom and its a sight to behold. And this year the timing was especially nice since the blossoms coincided nicely with graduation day at my school. All the little undergrad boys and girls in their suits and kimono under the cherry trees in full bloom was a sight to behold. Took a picture of it. Wanna see it? Here it goes:

All in all a pretty good day to graduate and I hope that mine will be as nice. Not that there'll be any cherry trees in bloom, since I'll be graduating in September, not March, but maybe they're be some nice fall colours or something.

So after the graduating people were all done with the "listening to boring speeches" part of the day, all the people in my lab went out for our quarterly "drink yourself into a near-comatose stupor" event. Well maybe not "near-comatose", but "drink yourself giggly" doesn't exactly have the same ring to it. Like I said, a good day.

Next week, I'm going back to Osaka (yeah!!) to attend a friends wedding. It'll have been over a year since I've been back to Osaka and I'm looking forward to some good, cheap eats and some of my old haunts, and I may even try to determine the ultimate fate of the bicycle I left behind.