i love oysters!!!

summer is the season for iwagaki (rock oysters) in japan! so i went for some oyster lunch with a couple of my friends to this tiny little place near my home station. yum!





and a little sea urchin too! my B-I-L calls it cat vomit but i think this was great! an exy but good lunch!

Happy Birthday Jules!!! (part 1 and 2)

went to yoyogi park to celebrate jules' 25th birthday (again). it was a great day in the park! definitely hot as clown balls but with good friends and good eats, it was a good day!

Keets pops some champagne (after popping the question the day before!)


cheers!!


good times at the park:



jay leads us in the birthday song:


show me sexy!




birthday twins!


kyoko lend alisa her hat:


also added to the ranks of the engaged: congrats to Chieri and Issac!


teddy does his extra special birthday dance:


and a week later, the girls and i got together for what was supposed to be jules' special birthday dinner at a pricey tofu course at Goemon in Hakusan. the food was only ok (which really pissed me off) and it was mostly just ambiance and a bitchy waitress. sorry dude! i promise i'll make it up to you!



those sake bottles were hard to open!


since the food was only ok, i won't bother with the bigger pix:

we brought our OWN cake! Happy Birthday Dude!!

Eat like an Egyptian

Went to get my egyptian grubbage on for monthly dinner this month in the gay red light district of Shinjuku. The joint was called Luxor. pretty good food, nice atmosphere and rockin' sheesha!

the salad was great!! good fish-in-tomato-sauce-stuff as well:

on the left, that's camel steak (gamey but it tasted good) and chicken kebabs, and this beef-a-roni like stuff that the girl is mixing (which was pretty tasty):

but i think the star of the evening were the sheesha bongs. we got 3 flavors of tabacco: apple, mint, and coconut banana. i had to leave earlier than everyone else but they smoked the nite away!







thanks to my lovely dinner companions! see you for the next dinner!

Hozuki Ichi at Sensoji Temple

First of all, happy 100th installment of Rantings from the Asylum! thank you for staying tuned to the inane ramblings of an idiot. and now for something completely different . . . .



ah yes, it's that time of year again when the local people (as well as tourists armed with their cameras -- myself included) flock to Sensoji temple to partake in the annual Hozuki (ground cherry) market festival. these plants are really interesting. they are like paper lanterns on the outside and on the inside they have this little tomato looking fruit. apparently you can eat it but the Japanese don't. instead, children squidge up the tomato thing for a long time until it falls off the stem. then they poke at the hole with a toothpick and ever so slowly squish or pull out the insides until it is hollow. then apparently, you blow air into the hollowed out balloon like carcass that was once the tomato thing and when you bite down, it makes a farting noise. i'm not sure i understood the whole thing but hey, that's culture for ya!

on to the pix!

just outside the station, there were several charming little rice cracker shops:



mom and Kumiko stroll down Nakamise Dori which was unusually covered to prevent the possible rain from seeping through.


like i said, there were LOTS and LOTS of people!


a couple of vendors hawking their plants:




some unusual ornaments at the gate of the temple. apparently they only use these at this festival because the black lanterns on the sides are supposed to remind you of the ground cherries.



cleansing the bad and breathing in the good . . .



there were lots of little side streets lined with the hozuki stalls:


beautiful colors!


some particularly sly sales ladies:


who cajoled my mom into buying a stem:


afterwards, kumiko showed us where the equivalent of the japanese mann's chinese hand prints were.


perfect fit!