Halloween party at borderless house

This is just a small and quick post about the halloween party my housemates held in October. Just wanted to share the awesome meal they made and the cute little rice jack o' lanterns.

A curry dish with rice, salad and a wonderfully adorable halloween theme was just what we needed to celebrate the scariest time of the year!

We spent the longer half of the evening cutting seaweed eyes, noses and mouths. Totally worth it!

Hope you all had a great halloween and lots of trick or treats! I know I did!

Expenses

• 500 yen each

Ramen is serious business

I have been in Japan for almost two months and one thing that I have learned is, ramen is serious business. Like saying that all ramen tastes the same will give you some odd looks and always one person chiming in that you are wrong. You should consider the texture, the flavor, the soup it is served with, toppings, thickness of the soup and a thousand more points that make every ramen unique.

To prove this point I got invited out together with some other housemates to try what should be the best ramen ever according to one of the long term housemates.

If you ever wonder if a restaurant is any good you can always check for how long you will have to wait to get your food. The restaurant we went to was on a main street, had room for ten guests at a time and you had to walk in and out sideways to get to your seat. It was really weird to see such a small place being able to stay open in what I assume an expensive location. There was already a line of maybe ten more people waiting to get in and be served this amazing ramen, with us the line suddenly grew to sixteen. According to my calculations (in my mind) this should be an amazing experience.

We had to wait for maybe 45 minutes or so for us to be able to sit and when we finally got our ramen I got pleasantly surprised. I was sceptical at first as to why we would wait for so long just for ramen, but I once again was proven that quality trumps quantity. That is not to say the quantity was small, it was more than enough to get full, but as I was analyzing the different points of ramen quality and soup I noticed the difference between the stuff you buy at a convenience store and this.

It was think, creamy, lots of flavor without being too much, spicy in a non-intrusive way and a perfect temperature to keep you warm on a cool November evening.

Expenses

• 850 yen for a regular size ramen with ajitama egg

Buying games can be cheaper than buying a chewing gum

I think most people who play games regularly have at least heard about a place called Akihabara in Tokyo. Also known as Electric town, Akihabara is a gamer's paradise. I am not going deep into what you can buy here, since it would be a lot easier to tell you what electronics you can't buy here. Instead I just wanted to share this funny store I saw.

If you want to buy old games in Sweden you are most likely not going to find any store that sell anything older than Playstation 2 games and even then the prices are a bit on the expensive side. Not much but just enough to give a purchase a second thought. I have some friends that collect games and they agree that most purchases are better imported.

Anyway, I was walking around on the main street in Akihabara and found this store selling old Super Famicom (known as Super nintendo in Europe and America) games for as low as ten yen per game. Admittedly, almost all of those games were really old sports games with obsolete stats on famous sports athletes. Baseball is very popular in Japan so it was not surprising that most of it was baseball games. Still, it was there. 

The store also had a huge collection of better and more popular games, old game consoles and gaming paraphernalia. If you have been searching for classics like Zelda, Mario, Sonic, Kid Icarus, Metroid or the like you could find it for a mere 1000-2000 yen depending on the quality of the cassette.

They also fixed several old broken gaming consoles, if you want a Super famicom for less than a pub night, Akihabara's different stores have you covered.

Also, if you are interesting in video game discussions and let's plays, you should check out my classmate's FaceBook page of MASP and his Youtube channel MASP Games. They talk about old school games, gaming culture and generally nerdy gaming stuff.

If you are interested in video game music and hopefully learn to play yourself someday you can listen to another friend, Piano perspective. He is incredibly talented and once I get a piano I will definitely listen to him play.

And just for some silly music and dance:

Small cheese fondue party at our sharehouse

 This was actually some time agao, I just found these pictues. A couple of the previous housemates visited and to celebrate there was a fondue party! With food even!

Our sharehouse has room for up to sixteen occupants which means that from time to time the shared space can get a bit messy, but nothing that a free afternoon can fix. We got the living room all tidied up while some of the Japanese housemates went shopping for ingredients to dip. The picture don't show it, but we also got a setup for a chocolate fondue with marshmallows and other kinds of snacks.

From what I understand cheese is very expensive in Japan, especially the higher quality ones. You can still get some of the softer massproduced cheese for a very reasonable price, but I think any cheese connoiseur would just consider it very hard butter. It is pretty good, usually sold in slices individually wrapped, making it quite easy to pack a slice for your lunch box if you so wish. As a Swede I find it a bit overkill with so much plastic, but who am I to complain. I love buying new writing paper just for the sake of having new and fresh paper that most likely will never be used.

We had loads of bread pieces, croutons, vegetables, fruit, waffles, fried mushroom, marshmallows and crackers. Some of it was of course for the chocolate fondue afterwards but I still tried parts of it dipped in cheese and it was okay! The fruits and the cheese flavor never really mixed, it was more like the left side of my mouth tasted the fruit while the right side tasted the cheese.

When you eat cheese there seem to be some rule that you have to drink wine to it. This sharehouse loves wine! You open a bottle and everyone gets a glass. Simply put, it was unnecessary to sample cheese dipped broccoli without some red wine. 

To save ourselves from too much dishes we heated up the cheese in small procelain cups usually used for creme brulé. The cheese turned really stringy and it didn't take long until we had small cheese webs running along all the different plates.

It was a great evening, lots of good food, laughs, weird comparisons of Japan and Sweden. This has to be done again!

Expenses

• I think we paid 400 yen each for this

A quick trip in Shinjuku and a Swedish bar!

I previously wrote about how I visited Shinjuku and enjoyed a view over Tokyo from the Shinjuku Metropolitan Building. What I didn't tell you about was that I found a shop called Swedish bar! I was so thrilled that I forgot to check what they sold and just managed to take a picture. It wasn't until after that I realized that they had accidentally misspelled Swedish so to avoid any further embarassment I have corrected their spelling on the picture below. Phew! Another Sweden-Japan crisis averted!

Oh, and I also took a picture of a mid-November Tokyo. Jeez, get it right, Sweden! Green leaves, no snow, girls in ridiculously short, uh, hair, discount noodles and Christmas jingles being played in most clothes stores.

A meal with a view

Your homework is done, you have cleaned your room, none of your games seem appealing, your housemates are either sleeping or out exercising, working or studying. What do you do?

You decide to go buy a book, take the train to Shinjuku, get out of the wrong exit, think you can find your way back to the right exit, be lost for two hours, think "Screw this" and change your plans to visit the observatory deck of the Shinjuku Metropolitan government building.

I have always wanted to get another view over Tokyo but feel that after the third time paying to get to the top of Tokyo tower it's not really worth it. So when I heard that the SMGB (as I will call it from now) let visitors in for free I thought I could at least see some of Tokyo from there. From the 45th floor?! That's pretty darn high! 202 meters according to Wikipedia.

When you first enter the SMGB you will go through a small visitation of your bags before being lead by very friendly staff to the elevator that will send you over 200 meters into the air. I think the ride took less than half a minute and you could really feel the air pressure change half way.

It feels humbling to see tall building tower over you and it feels even more humbling knowing that any of the tiny dots could be you being observed by someone looking out the window. What feels less humbling is that most of the space is occupied by a souvenir shop seeling overpriced Disney toys. 

But there is a small restaurant that lets you grab something to eat. I could choose between three set meals such as a curry plate, salad or something with more meat. With a price range between 1000 yen and 1300 yen you get wonderful lounge music, an amazing view and a decent meal.

I chose the cheapest set meal, a curry plate, a side salad and ginger ale which was a mere 1000 yen. The food itself wasn't as impressive as one could expect for that price but the atmosphere and the view made well up for it. How to compare it? Like a poor man's reenactment of the bar scene in "Lost in translation". Which reminds me, I need to find a nice smoky jazz bar, drink whiskey and be all broody.

This was on a Saturday and not parrticularly cloudy letting me get a great view over Tokyo. Realzing how insanely huge the area covered by buildings is almost unfathomable. One person builds one house and that impressive. The ocean of concrete squares with different shapes and sizes is art in itself. I wish I had a giant hand so I could drag it along the ground just to feel the texture of the city.

Expenses

• 1000 yen for a curry meal with a view

There is sushi and then there is sushi

 One of my housemates got a sudden craving for sushi and asked if anyone wanted to tag along. I have never turned down raw fish and thought it would be another delicious meeting with nature's little snacks, of course I tagged along.

He asked us what we thought of sushi and all of us said that we liked it. One of my housemates were a little sceptical to the fish but really loved the fried tofu variety. 

What  I didn't consider what that I had never really had freshly made sushi prepared less than a minute from consumption. I had eaten lots of sushi before in Sweden, Ireland, Taiwan, America and on my previous visits to Japan. I mostly enjoyed it like a lot, the exception being the frozen sushi dishes bought at Swedish food stores. They were at best tasteless and at worst the rice was not cooked enough making it taste like wet sand and gave away Nemo's hiding spot.

 Our sushi craving housemate told us that the place we were going to was a so called conveyor belt sushi restaurant. That means that a small conveyor belt is running along all the seating areas in the restaurant with small plates of sushi up for anyone to grab. Different colored plates had different prices and in this case the red plates had a 21 yen discount per plate due to the recent baseball tournament landing one plate neatly on 99 yen.

I had been to conveyor belt sushi restaurants before but this one had this! Tes, that's right, you could special order anything you didn't find on the conveyor belt and have it delivered to your seat on a small toy train! I am not going to bash other restaurants but I definitely think this would be an awesome idea for other kinds of restaurant as well!

When we got our first plates I was first struck by how clearer and brighter the fish looked. I had gotten used to sushi looking like, well, sushi. To start with the salmon had a bright red color I hadn't seen before and it can't really be seen that well on the pictures, but you get the idea.

And the taste was definitely much better than I had ever tried before. It almost melted right away in my mouth. My housemate also taught me that you don't dip the rice in soy sauce but instead either take the fish meat and dip it lightly or use your hands and turn the sushi up side down and let the top barely touch the surface of the soy plate. And wow, that made a huge difference. My other sin was that I mixed large amounts of wasabi in the soy, turning it to a small plate of brown fiery liquid. Instead, a properly made sushi should have a small amount of wasabi between the rice and meat as glue. This gives it just that extra kick without killing your tastebuds.

I loved them all, but I didn't care too much for the squid or octopus as I found it to hard to chew. They both tasted great but only the texture was a bit off putting.

I managed to finish ten plates with two pieces per plate and I could barely move afterwards. Though it might've been considered not that high scale of a restaurant, this experience truly taught me a valuable lesson between what is food and what is an experience. I have reconsidered sushi from being a trendy kind of fast food to a gourmand's trekking through the deep seas. Properly made, properly enjoyed.

Expenses

• 20 pieces of sushi 880 yen (got a discount coupon that I used right away)

A trip to Yasukuni shrine

 Wow, already over a month in Japan and I feel like I have only walked around the block once. Everytime I open the door to my house and step outside I am overwhelmed by the fact that I am still in Japan and I still got another eleven months at least here.

I spend many hours studying at school, another three to four hours at home doing homework and it doesn't feel like a chore. Are you supposed to actually enjoy non-play this much? Well, I do and not even once have I felt like it has been too much or I should give up. But spending my time only studying isn't very good now that I have an oppourtunity to experience Japan.

So I decided to borrow one of my housemates' guide book and walk to Yasukuni shrine. At first I planned to just walk and see where I end up but since I have school in the afternoon I thought it better to actually use a map. The road to the shrine wasn't long at all, it took only 20 minutes or so. The streets were unusually empty which made it very easy to keep a good pace.

The original plan was to pass through the nearby park, Kitanomaru park I think it was called, but they were setting up for either renovation or a huge concert, so I let it be. There will be time to go there again.

The weather was incredibly nice and reminded me somewhat of a slightly more humid Los Angeles, a refreshing breeze, a sun barely peaking over the buildings and small white clouds dotting the otherwise clear sky. Against what I normally advise against I didn't bring a water bottle but I didn't feel like I would need it today. A cap to protect my head was more than enough.

As I mentioned the walk to the park was very pleasant and I didn't get caught in any crowds and I could leisurely look at the different stores lined up along the sidewalk. I am still practicing reading kanji which makes it more interesting to see what the next window would be even if it was just a shoe store or a "We heard there would be a demand for aged plastic clocks severely bleached by years in the sun so we sell that alongside with slippers and noodles" kind of store. Sometime I wonder what kind of customers they have and for what reasen they shop there.

When not full of people and cars the Tokyoian streets are actually very wide. Being stuck between nine million people makes you narrow your perspective and keeps your eyes focused much closer to where you are lest you bump into someone and need a hasty "sumimasen" loaded. The people I have met or bumped into this last month have been very polite, smiling and even a few random high fives from young women who apparently have never experienced someone holding a door open for them. Their giggling and quick retreat always makes me smile.

When I arrived at the shrine I first noticed that a lot of mothers clad in black holding the hands of their daughters clad in equally black clothing coming and going to the shrine. I got curious but felt too shy to let them be bothered by a khaki wearing foreigner wanting pictures of them and their kids. I better stick to enjoying the scenery in undisturbed and just let it happen around me. I kind of wished I could be invisible and let the lives around me happen naturally without my foot print piqueing their curiosity. Or something weird like that. You get it.

As I got closer to the main building I saw more and more people, but nowhere near as much as as at the Meiji temple. It felt nice to be at a place of peace and quiet without too many posing people around me. It felt more honest and real. The wannabe hipster in me slightly raised his nose in a "I am special because I prefer another place that is not quite as mainstream Meiji temple.". Another part of me told the hipster he was an idiot and that he should focus on enjoying the now than being proud that his past now is better than other people's present now.

I mentioned wanting to observe without distrubing the surroundings and I think I actually got exactly what I wanted. I walked around the shrine area nad came to a high fence with some very small openings between the planks. I was obviously not supposed to go past this point but I couldn't help at least looking inside. What I saw was something taken directly from an old samurai movie. A very neatly raked stone garden, small bonsai trees complementing its surroundings, black wooden floors and a shrine maiden sweeping the floor with a bamboo brush. She had long black silken hair and wore the red and white clothing very elegantly. At first I didn't see her face, but when she turned around I saw how beautiful she was. I wanted to take a picture but I couldn't move my hands. When she lifted her eyes and looked in my direction I unconsciously skipped back a step so she wouldn't see me. It might seem silly but some things I feel are better not stored as a picture, only as a memory.

Expenses

• Monster Energy drink 200 yen
• Whinnie the Pooh red tea 147 yen