Helloooooooo Boys and Bells!

Boyscouts round two was today and the lesson went over really REALLY well!i had been stressing about the mass lesson for the past 2 weeks so i am so glad its over and i am pleased as punch that the presentation went well and the kids had fun too. i had underestimated them a month ago and the materials i prepared were way too easy. this time we taught for the full two hours and the kids were able to get in a lot of practice with polite requests that they will hopefull be able to use in England next week.


i gave myself this nasty ass blister as i stood at the west gate of the stati0n waiting for my dear friend Bella who was leaving japan tonite and could only spare a very short lunch with me. the blister is painful and everyone was staring at me like i was a lunatic, just standing around sharpening tons of pencils.


this is me with my beautiful friend Bella. we had a very speedy japanese lunch near the station and hurridly snapped this shot before i had to leave her to prep for the boy scouts. i find that the best friends are the ones that can just pick up where they left off. me and bells talked like no time had passed at all even though i hadn't seen her in 2 like years. she's a pretty amazing soul.

Shots from the Camera Phone

Ads at a museum

Fish face

Monster face

Hanami at Yoyogi Park

Lovely Pink Hat

The Best Bento EVER

Yakitori Time!

The Egyptian Look

S and H

Peek-a-boo Kitty

Engrish at the purikura

Konos Pizza in a Cone

Jimbo at the bowling alley

Giant Turtle Shrine of Terror in Nagasaki

Mt. Fuji from the Shinkansen

At the Penis Festival

Fugu Sake

D with his braids unravelled

Warning: wearing these jeans will give you pimples

Return of the King and What kind of Tuna are you?

it's back! yes, i am talking about Burger King! it is back in Japan after a lengthy absence and hopefully it is here to stay. J and i waited for the hype to settle for a couple of weeks and headed over to Sunshine City to get a burger tonight. the line wasn't very long at all and the burgers were good. it was like being back in a burger king in america but for all the Japanese people inside.

Japan follws american trends a few years after they are hot in the US and it seems that the massive-jumbo-supersized-colossal-big-gulp craze has entered Japan. Tokyoites flocked to McDonald's when the Mega mac (read: 4 goddamn beef patties) came out. in fact, they had to limit the amount of mega macs sold in a day because they would run out of meat patties. The King is also pushing the size issue with the whopper, the selling point being that it's huge. watch television and you'll see food eating contests and shows where chubby Japanese tv "talents" go to various big portion serving restaurants. it was quite the eye opener today.

they call obesity "metabolic syndrome" here in Japan. it's "new" for them and it seems quite the juxtaposition to be hyping these massive junk food items in japan while pushing various diet products. what gets me is that by american standards, the girls who "lose weight" are not such fatties to begin with. the diet product commercials show a 105 lb. girl going to 70 lbs soaking wet. it can't be healthy. i realize i am not the pillar of health (especially having eaten at burger king tonight) but i feel like so many of the women in this country are too thin. c'mon girls! keep a little cushion for the pushin'. yes, i know that they preach that fat is bad and you'll die of heart disease and diabetes but you have to remember that your boobs are fat and your ass is fat and your kidneys are held up by fat and you don't have as many wrinkles on your face if there's fat under the skin. there needs to be more balance and less push for the extremes.

one of the funniest things i heard was that my friend Jess was upset cuz her boyfriend lovingly poked her on the side and said, "if you were a fish, you'd be chu-toro." she was very insulted by this but i thought it was hysterical. for those of you who don't eat fish or are not obsessed with sahimi the way we are here in Japan, chu-toro is fatty tuna. it's not too fatty but it's good fatty (chu- means middle). now, Jess's boyfriend is a super cut lean mean surfing machine. he has about 2% body fat and he has a gorgeous body that he doesn't mind showing off. he'd be considered maguro (or just plain tuna -- no fat). then we come to oo-toro, or super fatty tuna. this is the category in which is mostly reside. when you look at people, you can tell which kind of tuna they are from the way they deal with having to move to higher elevations. maguros take the stairs, even when an escalator is available. they bound up them as if they were going down (those turds)! chu-toros will walk up an escalator going up. their guilt of taking advantage of the machine is assuaged by the fact that they are "taking the stairs" by climbing up the escalator. it helps them get to the top with minimal exertion and guilt. then you have the oo-toros. they "keep to the left" on the escalators which means they just stand and let the machine move them up. there's no guilt here, there's no deluding themselves that they are anything but fatties who want to get to the top of the stairs without having put any effort at all into this. i've been adopting the chu-toro lifestyle these days. that combined with watching those tai-bo commercials are really doing me wonders. remember, it needs to be a "full body work out" and that includes the brain! what kind of tuna are you?

Early Morning Revelations

At 8:00 this morning, I was eating leftover pizza with Texas Pete hot sauce over my sink for breakfast and I realized that at that instant, I had become everything my mother told me not to be. Sorry mom.

Hit Me With Some Knowledge, Yo!

J got himself a new phone and for a thousand yen a month (less than ten bucks) he gets to use all the internet he wants. the new cell phones in Japan are amazing. Docomo just came out with one that has a bunch of games that you can play on it Wii style. and Softbank has a new Aquos (a super expensive plasma TV screen company) phone. and when you look at the internet on these things, it's just like looking at a for real tiny computer screen. it's cool. so anyways, J looks up all this info on the net and tells me about it every nite. he did a big research on religious cults and we got into a discussion about different sects and practices. he was telling me all about the Children of God cult that Joaquin Phoenix and his whole family used to be a part of and apparently they can have sex with minors? and then J was telling me about Scientology and how it's not just for crazy celebrities but they have booths set up in malls and stuff they don't say they're Scientology booths but you go in there and it screens your stress levels and stuff and then records it. apparently they have miles and miles of underground computers like in Ohio and Area 51 that stores all this info about people, especially those crazy enough to join. creepy, hun? But we were trying to figure out if there are any FORMER celebrity scientologists. they seem to get sucked in but they never come out? it's like an abyss of insanity! if you know of any, please please please let me know as he and i are itching to find out.

In other knowledge news, i decided to take a day out to increase my cultural knowledge. 2 art exhibitions that i really wanted to see are closing on the 1st of July so today was my only chance to see them. i first went out to Meguro to see Taisho Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia and Deco. The pieces were on loan from the Honolulu Academy of Arts and it was all stuff from 1900 - 1930s Japan. It was such an interesting mixture of Western and Eastern art. many pieces were wood block prints and the areas where the paper was raised and pushed down gave the work a lot of depth that was really interesting to see. most of the depictions were women but there were a few with men and a couple with kids. there was one particularly inertesting woodblock print of two schools girls sharing a book, one in western clothes and another wearing a kimono. It was held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum which used to house the imperial family. it was a beautiful home with sleepy little old docents in each corner. The home itself had a very much east meets west kind of look; even in the massive yard they had a Japanese garden with a koi pond and a tea house and a western garden laden with rose bushes and lawn chairs. How interesting it must have been to live back then! here are a couple pix of a postcard that i got from the museum shop:

here! you can read all about it!: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~nahl/students/Taisho%20Chic.htm


after the museum, i did a bit of shopping in meguro and found that i really like the area. i went out to Ebisu about a week ago to watch The Bridge and that was quite nice as well. i really like the area! and i had the tastiest hot sandwich at Kobeya which is a yummy bread shop near the station. after my brief rest, i went over to Hatsudai which is one stop from Shinjuku on the New Keio Line. There, at the Tokyo Opera City building, i went to see the Architecture of Terunobu Fujimori and ROJO. Apparently they had an exhibition in Venice which brought them some fame. This guy makes the coolest houses. and yes, they are fully functional. He makes treehouses for adults with a fire pit in them so they are known as "tea houses," making them conducive to performing Japanese tea ceremonies. He's a very environmentally conscious architect and he uses natural materials which haven't been processed and he often employs old school building techniques such as snug fitting wood beams that do not require any nails. he chars planks of wood on one side to create a black finish for some of his houses. They really are beautiful. it makes me want a treehouse for my office one day. check it out!


his stuff is really amazing. for more, check out http://www.jpf.go.jp/venezia-biennale/arc/e/10/04.html

Who says culture and edumacation ain't fun!