2015-04-18: Bedroom Banquet

We have a busy day planned for tomorrow. So today is a day to replenish energy stores and clear our minds. Time for a banquet in bed based on 7/11 food!

Food & Beverage Review: Bedroom Banquet

One of the little quirks here is that even a simple plastic bag gets a little bit of fanciness applied

Lemon Highball (sake, ice, lemon juice and sparkley water) and chips. Lemon highballs are a common mixed drink at most of the Izakaya. To me they taste mostly like water. This makes the lemon juice a more important element than normal. I could only find one lemon juice and it wasn't so great. Further testing required.

Smoked cheese and Egg Salad. This makes the whole thing healthy. The eggs are really good looking even just from the 7/11. Nice golden yolks and not cooked solid.

Gyoza on shredded cabbage with Japanese squeezey mayonnaise. Japan has an almost Belgian or Dutch love of mayonnaise. The Japanese mayo typically comes in the kewpie doll squeezey bottles and comes out star shaped which is pretty cool.

Fried chicken (because Nagoya) and rice. The chicken is called something like Aga Dori and Dori is at the end of lots of street names so I am guessing it is street style fried chicken or something. Basically boneless fillets deep fried with a thin batter. Pretty good, available at almost every corner shop but sold out Fri and Sat evenings quickly. People have opinions on where the best ones are. I think Family Mart has been recommended more than 7/11. But Family Mart is like an extra fifty metres down the road.

Assorted meats with varying sauces. We probably need more plates. Many of the sauces are of the demi glace / red wine reduction types in theory. The burger style patties are the best of these usually and often have cheese stuffed inside like a secret treasure.

I am a master of presentation. I may have also been a little drunk by the time we got to this.

Rating: 6.5/10 (Much better than anticipated, dessert was a step too far)

All things being equal convenience store food is not so bad and has a pretty good range of options. I am not sure I would recommend this particular menu to anyone except the fried chicken. Good and juicy and greasy.

2015-04-17: Appearances can be deceiving

At our Japanese class our teacher got confused when we were answering some questions. This is not an unusual occurrence. Ewa pronounces extra letters at times and I just make up words when I feel like it.

The cafe we study at has an ashtray in the toilet. This is unusual.

For once this was not the root cause of the misunderstanding. I had said that, roughly speaking I moved to Australia when I was 20 and was there for 20 years. Poor teacher thought I was confused between "20 years ago" and "for 20 years" because, according to her, we are 25 and 30 years old not 38 and 43.

Duck and Weave, Duck and Weave, then kick him when he's not looking

A couple of other locals have had similarly bad guesses at our ages. At boxing this morning I figured out how to use this to our advantage. I will try and enter the youth boxing tournament. I figure they will hit me a lot but they only look to weigh about 20 kilo which I ought to be able to take and grind out a win on style points.

Under 15's could be pushing gullibility levels though

This is how you get achievements! Find a combination of skill level / weight class / age which is weakly populated for a competition.

Traveling Advice: Stupid Showers

We are encountering a lot of the "shower on a hose" arrangements. I have always hated them as they invariably swivel to aim the water where I am not. Then I end up cursing and trying to figure a way to twist the hose around the taps to achieve a flow directed where I want to be.

And I don't get what the low holder is for. I am starting to suspect people here shower while kneeling.

I thought I had accidentally solved this issue in Tsuwano when I noticed that the shower head actually swivels separate to the hose. I felt very proud of myself and envisioned a future free of fractious faucets. Unfortunately this only works on about 60% of showers.

Rating: 6/10 (because it works 6 times out of ten)

Supposedly they won't crap near water or something equally idiotic

In the eighties in NZ there was an urban belief that putting a plastic bottle of water on your lawn would stop dogs crapping everywhere.

Of course they can't crap on the lawn if it is completely covered so she may be on to something

Apparently stray cats are more of an issue here but the same principle is believed by at least one old lady down the road.

Ox tongue for lunch. Just included this because the bowl is supposedly of oxtail soup. It is so clear that I was surprised. On the bright side I guess dogs won't crap near it. Oh and it did have some flavour, was okay. Prefer mine.

2015-04-16: Moving On Up

New Apartment Day! 15th floor!

Blossoms gone, greenery appearing.

I managed to get the date wrong and thought we were moving in yesterday (which is why we had nothing planned) but today actually is the day we move to our new Giant Apartment. It is 29m2 - an extra square metre. It is also a mirror image of the old apartment. This confuses me frequently as the toilet is where the bathroom was and so on.

It is a tranquil space on the roof, not porn

Normally this wouldn't be an issue but, as mentioned previously, in Poland I often felt like a clumsy lumbering giant and was sure I would break something given the sizes of the apartments, here is even worse and many things are designed for shorter people as well.
Making it all mirror image is a recipe for failure.

Food & Beverage Review: Nostalgia Food

There is a Polish restaurant in Nagoya. We have to go there to see what it is like. Not tonight though.

The lanterns say what they sell. I can't read the lanterns yet. I saw a picture of kielbasa is how I knew.

Researching the Polish restaurant may have made Ewa a little homesick for Polish food. One of the Izakaya across the road does Kielbasa so we went there to try and assuage the cravings.

Tebasake for science. Shogen Tigers Bar still wins for chicken wings in Nagoya.

They also do whitebait which was popular when I was growing up. I never ate it because of the fish thing but it seemed slightly poetic to have two items from our home countries.

Actually not a bad kielbasa even if it is fried and so the lazy persons way of cooking them (which I like) some good bread would have been great.

This place does use more chilli than most places and the chicken stick variety plate I grabbed had a range of different hot sauces. I still don't know what the flavours are in Japanese cooking yet.

Whitebait are still out of my league

Even simple citrus flavours I am pretty sure are something that is kind of like a lemon flavour but slightly different. I should probably go to a cooking school next time we're hear.

Cheese, Chilli, Wasabi, Green onion, and a topping I couldn't identify

Rating 5/10 (Nice enough but better options abound)

First Night Of Lights

2015-04-15: Horsies & Burgers

We have lovely weather and no activities planned but we have bikes. We could try all the best burgers in Nagoya! Then go ride some horsies.

Food & Beverage Review: Layers Burgers

http://www.layers7.com/
Map Ref

Might be just me but I almost missed the place

Our pointing skills are usually pretty good but here they failed us and we got three burgers instead of the two we wanted. I would like to claim it is deliberate because I want all the tasty burgers but it is just another inadvertent spreading chaos where-ever I go technique. I think this one is my habit of saying a word, e.g. Avocado and pointing at what looks like an avocado burger but is actually something else. It does mean I get to try more things though so I probably won't change.

Kind of a beach shack vibe

Bacon & Cheese: Really good, juicy, lots of lettuce and tomato, not too much cheese. Definitely in the "burger that has cheese" school rather than "cheese that happens to have some bread and meat near it"

Tall burger

Blue Cheese: Good but the blue cheese was of the vegemite strong single flavour type and I prefer blue cheeses that have more going for them.
Avocado & Cheese: Really good as well. Maybe a bit too creamy. I think the bacon should have been in this one and in future will ask for that to bring a bit of salt into it.
All burgers come with onion rings and chips. Chips are good, Ewa says almost as good as mine.

Deceptively small looking

Onion rings are some of the best I have had. I think the Japanese have access to good sweet onions which I never found in Australia. But they are made well too, not super oily and also not too many, usually onion rings leave me feeling remorseful after eating them. These and I still felt like a somewhat acceptable member of the human race. So, bonus!

Buns Are Toasted. I can't believe how many people forget this vital aspect.

The BBQ balcony was closed. I am okay with this as it is fairly unpredictable weather at the moment.
Apparently the owner spent a lot of time in Australia and this might be why he uses Aussie beef mixed with Japanese. Damn good mix too. I think the patty is the best I have had since we started this trip. This does make me suspect that the BBQ mentioned in the BBQ Balcony might be an Australian BBQ and not slow smoked meat. If it was southern US style barbecue I would have to investigate obtaining membership to the secret club that doubtless exists for it.

Rating: 8/10 (+1 if the balcony had been open, if I see the balcony open I will stop whatever I am doing and revisit)

Easier to find than the burger place

To The Horsies! It is only a 10km bike ride to the Horsies but as we are riding on the footpath it took some time. I think the rules for riding on the road are the same as for riding on the footpath, you don't see many helmets or anything. But the road does seem more for bikes going fast, the foot path is for bikes moving quicker than walking steered one handed while an umbrella or phone is in the other hand. I am not sure what the rules are, sometimes pedestrians seem to deliberately stand in groups blocking you and sometimes people on bikes fly round blind corners and pedestrians scurry.

Japan is either FLAT or MOUNTAINOUS. Nagoya seems to be flatter than Białystok.

Activity Review: All The Best Burgers in Nagoya

We have eaten at Layers and despite the apparently small size of the burgers we are not eating any more burgers today. All things being equal they would probably be disappointing after Layers anyway.

Rating: 2/10 (Even by our standards this is pretty lacklustre dedication to duty)

Just Strollin'

The Horsies place (ARC - www.arc-jpn.com) apparently does a lot of work with disabled kids. The disabled kids, I assume, have a great time riding the horses and mostly do it on the lunge or with a guy leading the horse. For obvious reasons they aren't doing jumps or dressage. Based on the kid that was there before us they really get a kick out of it. The coaches look happy too. Bloody do gooders.

The Little Pony went Crazy though

I am sure this is why the horsie and I had a 5 minute discussion regarding exactly who was in charge of deciding where we would go and how fast. Once we had sorted out the dynamic of our relationship he realised he was allowed to go fast. He likes going fast and conveniently forgot who was in charge of the choices. That was okay, I like going fast too.

Cultural Observation: Joining The Team

Almost everything here looks to have a joining fee. Often one that looks ludicrous to an outsider. To join the boxing gym cost the same as 3 months membership did. Even apartment renting typically has key money. Which seems to be a month or two rent to show you are dedicated to the team of the apartment (in theory you get this back like a bond in Australia but I am told in practice don't even consider it).

I would join his team

The horsies is either $60/30 minutes or you can join for $1200 and then the lessons are about $20/30 minutes. Obviously if you join and ride a couple hours a week for a year it is half the price to join up.

Rating: 5/10 (I still don't know if the membership continues while we are away but that would make it 6 if so)

Lady Bike Makes It Up The Climb

Other competitors were not so strong

2015-04-14: Old, Decrepit plus as a bonus Sweaty

Ewa's first time at the Aichi Budokan; place of awesome warriors of noble spirit and such, they are so noble they let me train in the hope that I will become a noble warrior.

1.3 units of noble

Nagoya put on it's finest "yeah normally it is sunny and nice but today? Not so much" impersonation of my home town in NZ. Fortunately no one translates "bone chilling cold rain that cuts through you like a knife" very well so it was at least remotely close to room temperature water that doused us.

I can claim it was rain water...

Also we forgot our umbrella and our brains weren't active enough to realise every shop we passed sells umbrellas. I know in Australia I owned an umbrella but I never used it. Here everyone has one if the skies look foreboding. Even the heavy metal sulky kids.

Linguistic Skills: Omiyage

Omiyage are the souvenir presents you bring home from places to give to everyone else. I still get that word confused with Gomi which means Rubbish.
We gave out our Omiyage from Tsuwano without actually saying This is rubbish

Rating: 8/10 (-1 because I thought the word a few times)

Stairs don't seem worth it really

2015-04-13: Learning Time!

Back in Nagoya. With our burned faces after two days in the sun.

Even Tommy Lee Jones and his Robot are sad

Everyone else in Nagoya is sad as it is still raining. Normally it should be 30 degrees and sunny at this time of year.

Some Half Arsed History

When Admiral Perry turned up here and said I have lots of guns, let's make some guns versus swords history so Tom Cruise can do a samurai movie in New Zealand and get that whole Libertarian love of New Zealand thing going the Japanese started modernising everything at a quick pace. Certainly it lead to some odd things like taking the new European "invention" of Callisthenics and trying to mix it with Naginata (which does make a certain kind of sense but also looks ridiculous to me now).
One of the things they modernised was learning bayonet fighting. From the Stinky French. They already had some bayonet stuff developed over the previous few hundred years but the modernisation thing sort of pumped it up into a whole separate martial art called Jukendo.

His house was easy to find; it was the one with wooden guns mounted in the garden

When the French got beaten up by the Prussians the Japanese changed the whole bayonet thing to be more of a style they were comfortable with, i.e. more along the lines of traditional Japanese spear / sword techniques than the French fencing roots. Thanks to some helpful friends in the Naginata community we had our first Jukendo training today.

Rating: 9/10 (except for the whole We found New Muscles thing. Eventually we must get to a point where we already have the muscles a new activity demands)

The only way I see it being happy is if it mostly to do with monkeys riding robots, the rest of science is generally depressing

Ewa won at Jukendo by doing more stabby stabs than I could in a 15 second interval.

The All Japan Jukendo Teams Championships are on this weekend in Tokyo so I think we have to revisit any plans we had made. Fortunately neither of us remember making any plans so this should be pretty simple.

Not as cheerful as the mountain town in the spring.

2015-04-12: Fasterer Horsies, Fasterer!

We. Bloody. Well. Did. It!

• No Japanese to speak of
• No real idea about the existence of the festival
• No real planning 
• Half the country away

And we got to see mental bastards going mental with mental horsies in mental outfits !

Sure He is proud of the strike and the form but if he knew the zen like state we enter for travelling he would be impressed

This, I think, counts as our finest achievement in half arsery ever.

I think I managed some interesting photos. I want to know what the hell those pebbles are all about.

If the Shrine yesterday was for Blacksmiths, Warriors and Sake then I think this shrine should be consecrated to the God Of Expensive Camera Equipment. My camera is not cheap in the scale of Things You Can Buy but I know it is cheap when compared to the crazy sums people can and do spend on cameras.

And some photos which were purely documenting the environment

Today reinforced that. Every second person had a lens the size of themselves and about half of those people had these giant tripod mounted fully automatic, press a button and it takes pictures until you tell it to stop with your remote control things.

Japan has OCD, even their mental people line up in height appropriate order

Fortunately I accidentally made a nodding acquaintance with one of the more professional types of camera guys. It was purely through laziness. All the judges, riders etc were getting set up and looked like they were going to go to the shrine for a bit of the God thing. Probably they were luring the expensive cameras towards the God as an offering.

So they lined up like we told them? Yeah and now I will make them gallop hands free! ahahaha how do we get away with this each year?

There was a mass of people taking photos of them and I don't really like masses of people taking photos of the thing I want a photo of so I wandered up to the flags by the steps which I figured they would take. I assumed that the guy doing all the yelling would yell at the camera people and then I could get some nicer photos.

Our Gods Will Feast On Your Nikon and Lay Waste to Your Pentax!

While I was sitting waiting behind the flag this other camera guy came up, moved the flag, saw me and laughed. Then he went to the flag on the other side of the door.

This. Dude. Is. Terrifying. Even before it all started you could see he was a big unit with some hardcore skills. Plus he was at the front of the line, people at the front either suck or rule. Small people with skills are cool and all but big units with skills are terrifying people. Fortunately most of them have that whole martial arts self restraint thing pressed into them and they don't actively hunt fat bastards down for sport. I can't ride a bike fast enough to get away from this one.

Then when the guys were all in the shrine praying we went down to the finish line as Ewa wanted to watch the first ones from there. It was 3 deep already but the guy that had laughed at me behind the flag was there already and let Ewa crouch down under his Tripod Drone Camera of Doom and get some nice pictures.

Probably just a reminder to the Big Unit; Don't Be Hunting Down Fat Bastards On Bikes. Bad for tourism.

The guy I was nodding acquaintances with decided to talk to us. He started by asking if we spoke Japanese. We said No. We even said No in English. He spoke at length to us in Japanese.

The weak point is the dead centre should you ever be chased by a smaller unit. Big units wear cloth because you ain't getting near hurting them.

Cultural Observations: Japanese speaking to Foreigners in Japanese

They Fucking Love It. I have been hanging out with Japanese people for some time because of the Naginata and Kendo things. I still remember my first seminar when a little old Japanese Lady that looked eerily like my Nanna had just shown me kata where I was worried she was pissed at me because she obviously wanted to kill me so badly.

We had a break, I ran off to smoke, she followed me, she asked if I speak Japanese, I said no. She launched into a 15 minute speech in Japanese. It involved much poking of body parts. Probably as aids to the corrections she was telling me about. But I was young, skinny and pretty then so maybe it was just an old Lady getting her grabs in.

We are hoping that the stirrups at least make it safer when you fall off, less chance of having your foot stuck.

Since then I have found that Japanese people in particular seem to love talking to me in Japanese after I say I don't understand it. No other nationality seems to do it as often to me.
I don't know why, maybe they just think "he looks too smart to not understand me so I'll go for it".
But I doubt it

Rating: 8/10 (It's good because I hear lots of words and learn quickerer)

Note the entirely safe and completely required broad edged blade. It's like they made a bow that fires knives.

The basic format is a 200 odd metre track about 3 feet wide. This has a rope on each side then another one 3 feet further on the spectator side. From my observations this counts as pretty serious OH&S by Japanese standards. There seems to be a fair amount of "really? you want to get closer to the galloping horse no one is steering and maybe annoy the guy that is actively practising killing people? knock yourself out buddy".

Still putting his fan away, there is like at least 20 metres before he needs to use the bow.

Archers do an (almost) standing start and I think they are allowed to have the first arrow nocked (although the Big Unit didn't do this, in his first run he was still dicking about with his fan halfway to the first target). Targets are at 30, 90 & 120 metre points. From the start they are into a gallop within a couple of steps. The entire run takes maybe 30 seconds.

The boards get taken away to calligraphers that write stuff and sell them as souvenirs. We are not materialistic so didn't get one.

Of the three shots to be made the first was the most common hit. Only a couple of the riders consistently hit all three targets. They were the riders using the arrows with the big vein cutting blade tips. The lesser skilled archers used big rubber ball tipped arrows.

The fancy spectators (not including the Gods that are being amused) appear to sit at the second target. This seems like the worst one to sit at. The first target you get the incredible start and the likely hit. The last target you get the chaos of the finish.

30 seconds is a pretty good time to fire 3 arrows in my opinion. Even standing still at a range with stationary targets. Doing it on a horse at these speeds is damn impressive.

Some of the horsies just can't take it seriously

The horses are probably trained in their job but they are still, shall we say, excitable due to the noise and crowds. I am not sure I would want to ride that level of frisky with boots, a helmet and in a safe sandy arena. If I did I would want a decent set of stirrups, not some olde timey open things. I'd also quite like proper reins. Plus I would hang on to the reins the whole damn time.

Even the rubber tip shatters boards pretty easy.

After firing the three arrows the rider and horse attempt to stop in a maybe 10 metre run off area. A reasonable number of times the rider decided to let the handlers deal with this and chose to dismount mid gallop with varying degrees of grace and choice. A couple of the horsies had less efficient brakes and used the handlers like those water barrels at free way exits to slow them down.

Lunchtime had a play which I am not sure the style of. I don't think it was Noh or Kabuki but I am an Uncultured (and Unkempt) Man in many ways.

Red guy and White guy have a fight. White guy had a bow and arrow but (spoiler alert, although if you haven't seen it yet I think I can safely say you aren't exactly trying that hard, it is probably hundreds of years old) he lost.

Red guy was kind of dick about it and pranced around for some time.

Then I got distracted by these three who started doing their own version. It escalated fairly quickly and the kid with the blue jumpers nailed the tiny kid in green pants in the back of the head with a folded up chair. Too much Wrestlemania I guess.