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.

First in the second

So my first post of 2008. Happy umm.. Valentine's Day.. How've y'all been doing? I know that most people reading this will probably crucify me for my next statement, but I just have to bitch a little about the cold in Tokyo. It's cold.. it's damn cold. Not so much because the temperature outside has been hovering around an absolutely frigid 2 or 3C, but because the temperature inside has been hovering around an absolutely frigid 2 or 3C. Someone once told me that houses in Japan are built to allow a draft to pass through so that they can stay cool in the summer. Man they weren't kidding. It's all about brass monkeys and witch's bosoms in my apartment.

On a slightly sunnier note I started this year in grand style.. by losing my wallet. I went out for a New Year's eve dancing jamboree and came home without any cash, credit cards, or maid cafe point cards. Luckily for me though, when I called the club a few days later, someone had turned in (or found) my wallet with everything intact except for the cash I was carrying. All things considered, it could have been much worse.

Between New Year's and now its been mostly business as usual, though I did manage to take in an amateur symphony last weekend, and I went to listen to a buddy DJ at a very tiny club/concert venue. Weird thing was that it was in the middle of the afternoon. Weirder thing was the other guy who picked up a mic in another part of the club and went on for 10-minutes about his bathroom habits, which somehow had the crowd in histerics. Tim Allen, eat your heart out.

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.