Adventures in Japan

Let's Just Say I'm Sitting on the Right Chair

This is our toilet. It's nothing too fancy. It doesn't have a heated self cleaning seat or anything. What it does have, however, is a little hand washing sink on the top of it.

When you flush, clean water pours into the sink (and over your hands) and then from there, the hand-dirtied water flushes out the bowl. Saves time, effort and water.

I want one for when we go home. With a good seat.

Glorious

The wet season is going to hit soon. But right now, the weather is <insert title here>! The humidity is not oppressive yet and the sun has been shining! We had an absolutely lovely weekend. On Saturday, we went and caught another AkaInu gig. The opening band was called Midori. It was... interesting. The good kind of interesting. The keyboardist would take running leaps at his instrument. And he liked to yell. They all did.

I can't remember the middle band's name. DMBQ maybe. They escaped from the 70's. They should have stayed there. I was all excited when they came out, all duded up in their heppest of finery. Their hair was pretty groovy too. And the music, I enjoyed for the first little bit. The next little bit after that, I appreciated on an ironic level. After that Carla and I found an empty stretch of wall along the back and sat down. There were no songs, it was all just jammy lameness. I like my songs to have a beginning and a middle in addition to the drawn out ending. Some might say without middles and beginnings, endings are worthless. I like to call those people "Correct."

Even though the music was very loud, I managed to sleep during some of the second set. I woke up just as they finished.

AkaInu was AkaInu. I sure hope they play whilst Ry is visiting.

After the concert, we spent just long enough in an izakaya to miss our last train home. Luckily, Ben and Jon have a spare room and live a five dollar cab ride away. So we stayed up till about 3, drinking and playing video games. Would have stayed up later but Ben was a bit under the weather.

So under, in fact, that he had to skip out on all of Sunday's festivities.

There was a free rock concert in some park somewhere. All the bands were local, which is not to say they were bad. I'm just trying to give you a sense of scale. About the size of Regina's Folk Fest. But with more, y'know, RAWK!!!

The weather was awesome. Hot and sunny and good. The bands were mainly unremarkable, mainly because the weather was so remarkable. The park wasn't all that big. One of the bigger ones I've seen in Osaka, but not a patch on the one in Tokyo. Lots of dirt, too. There were plenty of food and drink tents and nice grassy knolls to lay down on. Good times. And we were given free Red Bulls by a cute girl. That was a delightful bonus.

Abrupt change. As we were quasi-jumping/dancing near the stage, we espied a young man clad only in his most under-est of pants. These boxers had a large hole torn in the posterior area. His exuberant jumping, when coupled with the even more crazy than usual AkaInu performance the night before led Carla to dub this weekend "The Weekend of the Unexpected Japanese Genitals". She may not have used the word genitals.

Speaking of genitals, it was Michiko's birthday last week so we had a dinner for her Sunday night. That might have been an inappropriate segue.

We had Mexican. It was cheesy and good and spicy and good. And good. One of the guys working there was a little creepy, he kept trying to talk to us in Spanish. And dance with us. But he kept giving us free tequila, so no harm done. After the meal, we went and karaoked.

Good times.

Tyler is a very, very small fish.

She is the size of an ant. She went to a host club. She drank too much and died. Rest in peace.

That is a story one of my students wrote. I am so proud of him.

Recap

Huh. We had a whole week off, yet we managed to blog not a once. And that was two weeks ago. We're getting kinda lax.

So, what happened two weeks ago? Well, one of our friends turned 30. As luck would have it, one of his favourite DJs was playing a gig that very night. So we went and saw Digweed. It was good. The night before that, we went to Kishin's (the birthday boy's) house to try and mix our own Stongbulls (those fabulous Hub drinks). The night after Digweed we had a bar-b-q over at Darrelle's (a girl from Regina, how crazy is that?).

Our whole week off went on like that. Our mornings were spent recuperating from the night before. We slept until one of our phones woke us up. On the other end of the phone was always someone wanting to go out. One of the least relaxing vacation weeks I've ever had. Good times.

But we had planned on finishing our wedding invitations during that week. Didn't happen. So this weekend past we really buckled down. Spent all Saturday working on them. Everyone we know called us at some point that day, asking us to come out. We remained focused on our goal. Sunday, pleased with ourselves, we set off for a big flea market. The market is on almost every weekend out at the old world expo grounds.

We picked a weekend where it wasn't on. In it's stead: children's marching bands.

Luckily, there is also an amusement park out that way. It was good fun. Been a while since any of us rode any rides. After that, we all went out for yaki-niku. Delicious. We tried some new stuff this time, mainly seafood and garlic. It was all good. After that: karaoke!

Busy weekend. Of course, I forgot to bring my camera.

Even in Japanese, curling is funny

Men With Brooms has been on Fox a lot lately, but I only just now noticed the Japanese title. It translates to something like "Leslie Nielsen's Naked Men With Stones" or possibly "Leslie Nielsen's Men With Naked Stones", I'm not sure which one makes more sense...