Nihon Lights

So Christmas has pretty much come and gone in Japan for another year. Its kind of a wonder that its really celebrated at all, since there really aren't many Christians here, but then again, its not really celebrated much. There's no holiday on Christmas Day, so I spent the day both at school and at work, but what can I say... "When in Rome", right?

Still, even though there's no holiday they do decorate the place pretty nicely.. I managed to snap up a few nice pics around Shinjuku station, and Shinagawa station where they have some pretty nice displays. I was surprised to find though, that the Shinagawa decorations were gone 2 days after Christmas. Don't joke around these folks..

Despite the lack of a Christmas holiday though, the New Year's period is absolutely massive, so the traditional Christmas holiday is really just shifted a week or so to become the New Year holiday. Which basically means that as of tomorrow afternoon I'm on vacation for a week!!! (The don't make exclamation marks large enough to express how happy I am about this)

All this excitement might explain why I'm not sleeping yet. I'm like a kid at, um.., New Year's.

Larger than the average fair

Last weekend was the annual Tokyo Tech open campus and school festival. There have been posters here and there around the campus and such advertising the event, so I expected it would be somewhat of a big deal; something like the old SAC carnival at UofT. What I didn't expect was for there to be thousands of people there, from the community as well as the school. There were student run stalls selling all kinds of foods( chocolate dipped bananas, okonomiyaki, etc) and whatnot. The stalls took up most of the space in the main part of the campus, which is pretty big, so they was an absolute ton of stuff to choose from.

The event was for both days of the weekend, but a typhoon blew through on the Saturday, so I don't think that much really happened that day. I dropped by late Sunday to see that there was a stage set up at the bottom of a hill which was packed with people sitting and watching some apparantly famous Japanese comedians, who came in for the event. I couldn't stay as long as I liked, cause I had some bid-nass (i.e. homework) to take care of. Maybe next year.

A taste of home

This week, I had the rare privilege of having not one, but two opportunities to munch some goodness from the motherland (ish)..

One of the professors in my department went to Montreal last week for a conference, meeting or some other such professorial encounter, and he brought back a box of the tried and true, all Canandian souvenir, maple cream cookies. Been a while since I had some of these, so it was a very welcome snack.

Not being satisfied with a simple dessert offering, I found myself at a T.G.I.Friday's restaurant close to my work a few days later. I was happy to find out that they actually have free refills, but not so happy at the price, which was close to $5. Still, it was muchly worth it. Of course I needed to wash something down with my new found limitless spring of everflowing Pepsi, so I settled on the bacon and cheeseburger. Let me rephrase that; I settled on the ten-dollar bacon and cheese-burger. Still, although it might not be something that I repeat anytime soon, it was a dang beautiful thing..

And in other news, I got my internet connection today.. 100Mbps of blazing-fast bit traffic. Now I can finally start that stay-at-home email spam business I've been thinking about.

Nothing special

Well the summer is beginning to wind down here in Tokyo.. Not so many 35C+ days any more, which gets no complaints from me... Classes at school start next Monday, which doesn't mean that I've been on vacation, since I been doing research and preparing presentations and the like for the last little while.
For those who know them, Ed and Maggie stopped though Tokyo a little while back (although anyone who knows Ed and Maggie and most likely knows that already). I'll try to get some of those pictures up and in here in the next little while.

The sucky part of studying...

is tests. I've never been a fan of tests, exams, quizzes, and the like, and today was no exception. Today I wrote my entrance exam for the masters program at TITech. (Until now I've been a research student).. Holy friggen' crap. Let's just say that I had my hind quarters handed to me in a brown paper bag and was told where I stand. No pretty bows, no bubble wrap, just, "Here, get out, and have a nice day".

I'm exaggerating a little, but the gist is that it was tough.. Lots of detailed knowledge, lots of tedious calculations, and not a lot of time. On top of that there's no outline of what kind of material will be on the exam.. section names like, "Math" and "Physics" are supposed to somehow help narrow it all down. ("Please study math ; there will be questions on math"). I can see now why this is one of the toughest schools to get into in Japan.

Of course, I've been preparing for this test for the last few months, so none of this was a surprise to me. Still, doesn't make it any easier. But I'm finished now, so I'm all smiles and sunshine. Tomorrow I have an interview, but hopefully that will be a less trying ordeal.

Now that I've had my little rant and rave, I'm off to misbehave with a beer and a bucket-of-bird (KFC for laypeople).

My B-Day

Last Saturday was my birthday. I can no longer deny that I'm in my 30's as I've now reached the ripe old age of 31. So you may ask yourself, how did I mark this momentous occasion? Why I went out on the Tokyo town in style of course. Well, maybe not a ridiculous amount of style, but enough to get me through the evening. First I went to a funky yakiniku restaurant for dinner (like Korean BBQ, but Japanese style) where I tried duck for the first time. Good and tasty. The grill at this restaurant is actually a flat stone (or what looked like one), and the guy puts the meat on for you and cleans it periodically and whatnot. Special thanks to Emi for arranging this place and the cake and ice-cream that made a perfect desert.

Since I'm always still up for a good booty-shakin, even at my advanced stage in life, the after-dinner festivities included hitting a Tokyo club, called a-life. Gotta say that its my first time being in a club that offers free hair styling to the ladies. They have a full hair and aesthetic salon inside the club. Music was pretty good, and I was surprised to see that so many people seemed to be really into the music, although sometimes large groups seemed to bust out the para para moves, which was a little bit scary.

We managed to stick it out until about 4am when exhaustion got the better of us and we retired to the benches in front of Roppongi Hills to wait for the first train home, followed by a day of rest, recovery and ramen.

Just another Manic Thursday

Well I figure that its been long enough since my last post that I should pop a little something something up on the old weeb here. I don't really have much to say, but as everyone knows that never stopped any blogger worth his or her salt from inundating the world with their pedantic ramblings. Who am I to break with tradition.

Tokyo's hot. Very hot. Hotter than a steamy night of lurid fornication with the entire Japanese women's gymnastics team. Only difference is that Tokyo's heat exists outside of my imagination. Apparently rainy season is supposed to have started, but I've heard on the news that no one's seen hide nor hair of this alleged rain, and even fewer people know when it will arrive.

Speaking of news, this weeks highlights include: an exploding onsen, and on an slightly lighter note, it seems that Hokkaido meat packing company, Meat Hope is in trouble for selling pork croquettes labeled as beef croquettes. Looks like Nippon Ham might be in a position to pick up some market share.

Like I said, not much to say. I'll try to snag some Akihabara pics for next time.