Concerts, food and other shite.

Long time without an update. My bad! I hope you all had a fantastic Thanksgiving. Send me your leftovers. Actually, don't. That'd be gross.

Okay, catching up where I left off. Two weekends ago was fun, but nothing special. I don't really remember what happened, but Manami's mom wanted me to come to their house to eat nabe with them. Nabe means something like "one-pot" and is basically any food served as such. Very family-oriented and Japanese. You sit around the thing and eat. Here's a picture of me looking cute in front of the nabe.



Flash forward to Wednesday. I headed to one of my top 3 favorite areas in Tokyo- Odaiba. It was time to see Mars Volta, and they blew me away. Actually, they blew my senses away, because the next two mornings I woke up with vertigo. I hope that's the reason I had vertigo anyways. All good now. Yeah, I went with one of the other English teachers in town. In the extremely rare event that you're interested in reading a review of the show that I wrote, go here.

Odaiba has one of my favorite views of Tokyo. It's actually a man-made island that was originally created to fend off Commodore Matthew Perry, the American who forced Japan to open it's doors to international trade in the 1800s. And yes, he had the same name as the Friends star. So, it's kind of like you're on the opposite side of Tokyo and can see the city in all it's glory. Here's a bad picture I took with Christmas spirit in the foreground. The blurry, thin red/white thing on the right of the tree is Tokyo Tower, a tourist-trap Eiffel Tower ripoff that is still kind of cool, and the huge bridge is Rainbow Bridge.




Wednesday was also Manami's birthday, but we celebrated over the weekend. I got her a scarf and some chocolate and a body shop gift box thing. When I gave her her presents, she cried. She was really, really, really disappointed...Just kidding, they were tears of joy. How cute is that?

We went to Tokyo to celebrate her birthday and I treated her to dinner at a nice restaurant called Fujimamas in Omotesando. The food was delicious. We started with a calimari appetizer and I got steak and mashed potatos but forgot to take a picture of the latter. Here's the former.



Refined, right? Yum.

Here's a picture from the same area where we had dinner. These dogs were just chilling there, having no qualms about wearing glasses.



A new mall opened near Manami's house, so we went there on Sunday. It was probably about as big as Woodfield, but filled with 80% more junk that you would never need- a cafe' for dogs being a good example. Additionally, it has a grocery store inside of it. Here's a scene you wouldn't see in most American groceries.



That's a man slicing a massive tuna fish into small pieces. He then took each piece of meat, packaged it, and put it into people's hands for buying. Pretty nasty looking, but I don't think you can get much fresher.

Here's another cool thing.



What the hell's that, you say? I don't blame you, I said the same thing. Basically, you put an apple in there, close the lid, then I don't know, maybe it sends an X-ray or something. Whatever it does, when it's finished with the process, it tells you the percentage of sugar in the apple as well as various other information that I couldn't read. I thought it was pretty awesome.

Finally, it's now monday and a new ramen shop opened up right by my apartment, so I tried it. It was pretty good, but was much different than the other types of ramen I've had. You'll notice the broth is a light brown, and I'm not sure but I think it's some kind of tonkotsu ramen. That means the broth is made with crushed pork bones. It was pretty good, but I think I prefer the ol'-fashioned soy sauce based shoyu ramen. Here's a picture.



That's about it for now. I might go to Tokyo Disney this weekend. If I do, I'll be sure to take pictures. Miss you all. See the mustiquers in 25 days...nice.