loose your reservations

Japanese eat a lot of things that i have never eaten before, which is nice, because if i like one thing, than that's eating new stuff.
recently i had a nice chat whit a promotional saleryman inside the supermarket. he passed things to me to let me try it, like dried little fish and dried squid, etc. than at some point i lost ability to guess what i was tasting, because things started to look really odd. afterwards my friend told me it was basially snail variations. at that time i thought, how lucky that i didn't care about eating this kind of food. it tasted good btw. but i know people who wouldn't have been so calm after learning that they just have eaten snail.
now, i didn't have my camera ready back than. so instead i will post some pictures i took of the free appetizer at a izakaya (japanese style bar) which was given as a free treat. very tasty, indeed ;)

coffee, please

In the morning on your way to work, there is nothing that catches the mood your in better than a good old can of hot "deepresso", isn't there.
seriously, as mentioned before the output of new products in japan is amazing. every month dozens of new names are introduced which than turn out to be old concepts. as with can coffee from vending machines, basically they all have milk and sugar in them and taste equally bad to a west-europian.
this is a new one, and somehow i think it won't last much more than a month or so. i mean what have the designers been thinking?? (and "georgia" is one of the leading soft drink companys!)
for those wo are clueless, coffee is associated to have deep lavour sometimes...

bicycle diaries III

Eyes open, this is serious japanese stuff! i think this kind of story won't happen anywhere else.

first. japanese use bicycles to commute from their homes to the nearest station. from there on they use the train, abviously.

just as a side not, for these kind of short distances the japanese invented a special type of bicycle, which you can see briefly on the first picture. it usually looks like a womans bike and to make things worse, it has a basket in front. (i may add, that if you leave the bike, say, longer than one week unattended it will be used as a trash bin)(this is due to the complete absence of trash bins in tokyo, but that is another story...) it also comes with a fixed lock attached to the rear wheel. this is indeed believed to be sufficient against any criminal approach. and it works well, who would steel this type of bicycle anyway?

yet, by looking at the two pictures one might have notices something: there are no bicycles on the picture to the right. these photographs were taken at the same place (nearest station to my home) at the exact same time in the morning. very mysterious, isn't it.

now consider again that everyone uses the bicycle to quickly rush to the station, and back home in the evening. everyone! ... that simply means a lot of bicycles, which completetly block the infrastructure around the station, all day long (untill the commuter returns). the local government therefor forbids to park bicycles around the station in a radius of about 500m! and every morning an old grandpa sticks tickets on every single bicycle to remind the owner of this fact. he will also line the bicycles up neatly so they take up minimum space. that is except for one secret day every month... on that day a truck shows up and takes all of the illegally parked bicycle away.

you can recover it for a fee of about 4000 yen (which apparently is the approximate price you would have to pay per month at a commercial bicycle parking lot, which is usually not close to the stations entrance ;).

of course all this is just part of a monthly routine, and as you will guess noone has ever changed his parking behavior because of any of the above mentioned events.

short summary

To keep it short. i had some nice hours around gokuji. autumn is at hand. it was a lovely afternoon. ;)

bicycle diaries II

Another amazing discovery: there are more versions of the old lasersword swinging grandpas out there. found this one today.
i'll call it the tinguely version ;)

bicycle diaries

Well, the food was plenty and my own belly began to grow some. so i decided to buy a bicycle and drive to work and back from now on, in order to do something about the state of mine. timewise it's the same distance as by train, from door to door about 50 minutes.
very interesting experience so far. today i took my camera to shoot one of the most amazing nightly activities of japanese streetlife: construction sites on roads. just like the shopping district in shinjuku the same saying applies: less is a bore. there are uncountable warning mechanism around construction sites and here are the three variation of what i call the darth vader mechanism: a old grandpa working for ( i guess) 5 euros an hour, swinging the old lightsaber.
version 1 is the natural form - the old grandpa. he usually is very shy. it took me some distance to take a picture succesfully.
version 2 is the techno screen. it might not look very much, but the animation is very smooth vor a 100 by 50 pixel screen
version 3, finally, is what i call the kraftwerk stile. it's a fully automated doll swinging the saber.

toast, anyone?

More food. time for some serious oddities.
this is something i see all over tokyo, mostly in italian restaurants.
basically it is half a loaf of toastbread with some icecream or syrup topping. this restaurant shop proudly displays a monstertoast at the entrance as it's main attraction?
don't ask me why, i didn't even remotely feel tempted to taste it. all available for for about 700 yen (~5 euros).

"i have a baby in my belly"

Japan is an ageing society. the government has understood the problem and introduced some measures or plans for measures that should encourage the young to get children. (of course not touching the major cause - something anyone who has been in touch with the japanese education system would immediately identify: financial matters) But small measures sum up, hopefully.
however, recently i was lucky to identify the first installment of a series of measures on the train, where else. (I am not talking about the newly errected gates on the platforms of marunouchi line to avoid young drunkards falling in front of the train before having given birth to a new japanese... although very interesting by itself)
i am talking about the priority seats. one should know that in all trains at the end of each car there are priority seats, distinguished by different use of color and a big sticker indicating that this is for elderly, injured or people involved with small children outside or inside their bellys.
there is a big problem with commuting masses and drunkards (see above) on the train, especially at night. these people are tired and want to sit down. in order to not loose your seat if it is marked priority there are at least two different ways how to behave. tested succesfully by myself. first method would be to fall asleep immediately. best method in my opinion. works even better with newspaper in front of the forehead or earphones blocking accoustic signals like those of caughing elderly, etc.. than there is the shirankao. it translates to "have-no-clue-face". basically it is about the right questions to ask yourself, i mean how are we supposed to differentiate an elderly from the average person in an ageing society? same goes for pregnant women in a society changing food preferences from fish to meat?
but wait, here is where the government sees a chance of improvement. pregnant women should wear a sticker just like the one on the picture above, so there is no doubt about it anymore.


well...

i see two problems here. first, will any japanese, i repeat, j a p a n e s e woman, renowned for their modesty, wear this sticker, imposing their state upon other commuters?
secondly, do work-all-day commuters even care after they have sunken into their hard earned seat? only time will show.

welcome newsZERO

Japan is a place of restless changes. that applies to food products as well as with television. so, seeing new kinds of sweets every month and your favourit ones disappearing suddenly from shelves (like the melon-pan filled with green melon cream, or the peach juice with little peaces of peach) that doesn't necessarily mean the end of it. they certainly will appear again under a different name or by a different company, a few months later.
these days some recycling was done on television. on channel 4 they started a "new" news programm called "news zero". very amusing name, isn't it. infact it works the same way all japananese news programms work: five to six people sit on a long table, preferably old journalists on one hand and young good looking girls on the other. everyone presents some kind of story that might be called news even. the old guys present more serious ones than the young girls, obviously...
after that everyone comments on the other one's story, comments range from "how sad" to "that sounds fun", period. usually world news are excluded.
so, the zero is actually quite faithful to the concept ;)