Fuji-san from the Shinkansen

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On Friday, we took the Shinkansen (the bullet train) from Tokyo to Nagoya for a concert at the Handa-shi Hukushi Bunka Kaikan. From the train, we saw an awesome sight: Mt. Fuji on a beautiful clear day!

Here's the video!



Sorry it's sideways; I couldn't figure out how to fix that. If anybody knows, please tell me & I'll fix it! The video was taken by my HTC Fuze phone.

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Earthquake in Tokyo and the Dream to Match.

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It was approximately 4:51 am on Friday December 18th and I was having a dream. The dream included me, Jim and Michele.

So Jim and I are in a hall way waiting to go somewhere. Probably back to my hotel room. I was intoxicated and it felt like Jim didn't want to bring me to my room. So Jim goes, "Just wait for Michele, here she comes now." Michele walks up to me and Jim says, "Grab her arm." I replied, "I can't grab her arm, I can't!" As I stumbled about.

I continued to reach for her arm and then I woke up and I sat up in bed. And then I sorta laughed to myself because there was an earthquake happening. So I just laid back down and waited for my "drunken state" to end and then I went back to sleep.

Yeah....

Living in Small Spaces

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We browsed through an 8 story electronics store today. We went there to get a USB cord so I could download photos, which is why all these blogs are showing up at once. Anyway, we came across the appliance section. Tokyo is a very dense city, and, apparently, people live in very small spaces. Check out these appliances.

Here's a dishwasher.

And a range.

And a washer/dryer combination. The silver ion feature is controversial in the US. The EPA has determined that silver emitting washers must be registered as antimicrobial pesticides.

More (less?) on Engrish

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I have to say that I'm not seeing as much Engrish as I expected. It seems to appear a lot on restaurant menus, which aren't so good for photos. However, we did find this shirt today.

Oyster Nirvana

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We visited the fish market the other day, escorted by our friend Yoshimichi (member of Kiriku). This particular market is not huge, but it has an incredibly good restaurant that is more than worth the trip. If you look up "hole-in-the-wall" in a dictionary, you might see this place. Our group of 11 completely took it over. We stuffed ourselves with sashimi, oysters, grilled fish and miso soup.

Here are a few pictures from around the market. This is an eel stand. They kill 'em, clean 'em and grill 'em right there.




These ladies are putting little clams on toothpick-sized sticks and grilling them, carefully turning each one several times. They gave us a sample. Yum!

Here are a bunch of shucked oysters, waiting to be fried.

This is the kitchen of the restaurant.

And, here are some lovely plates of fried oysters.

Down the hatch with one of Warren's favorite foods.

It's not all fish. Here are some giant carrots that I bought for Lois.

...and then we waddled off to the National Museum.

Three Little Pigs - Addendum

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In response to my picture of the Three Little Pigs (Bu-, Fu-, & Wu-), my friend Nahomi found them on YouTube! They appear at about 1:52 in:



If you click through to YouTube, there are actually 2 more parts to the show. It looks very very cute & exciting for kids!

Thanks for the video, Nahomi!!

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Three Little Pigs in Japan

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Monday night, a bunch of us tried to go out to dinner together, but ended up splitting up into a few small groups & going to different places. This is normal for us and actually works out rather well considering that most Japanese eateries are pretty small (some have only 5 stools around a counter!).

My group consisted of PL, Sunghee, my friend Paweł (a Polish man who used to work for our agency & was our guide the first year we came to Japan & who has remained in touch with us all these years), and me. After looking around at a few restaurants, we decided we wanted shabu shabu.

For those unfamiliar with shabu shabu, it is often called "Japanese fondue". You either get a small camp stove type of thing or the table has one built in to it. You get a big pot of water which boils on the stove & you get a plate of meat and veggies which you put into the water to cook & eat. The words "shabu shabu" apparently refer to the "swish swish" of the chopsticks in the water.

There's a shabu shabu place in Mountain View (where I've lived for the past 5 years) and I often go there with my husband and/or friends. It's yummy!

Anyway, this place here in Shinjuku specializes in pork - or "prok" as the sign outside said, but I'll let Patti blog about the Engrish - and was named "Inton" which apparently means "Hidden Pork". The place had little piggies on signs everywhere about the place and pig "footprints" on the floor & walls in a few places. It was all very cute, but what did it all mean?

And so it was we were very confused when the chopstick wrappers looked like this:



The menu also had several items marked with "Boo!". When we asked the waiter what that meant he said that they were recommended items. OK, that's cool, but still - what does "Boo Foo Woo" mean?!?

I have my personal Twitter feed set up to post to my Facebook status, so when I tweeted the picture of the chopstick wrapper, my friend Nahomi (a classmate from Foothill College who grew up in Japan but now lives in the US) saw it & offered an explanation. She wrote:

Long time ago, there was a very popular TV puppet show for small kids. The main characters were three little pigs, and their names were Bu-, Fu-, and Wu-. (I don't know how to spell it in English, though)

Now we only have the way to watch the show by archive films, but their nostalgic name is still popular among Japanese people.

Mystery solved! Thanks so much for the explanation, Nahomi!!

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