St. Patty's Day Madness!

Hello good friends. I've got a lot of updating to do, which I'll try to do over the next few days. But let me first start with our outing from last Saturday, St. Patrick's Day. We started out by going to Yokohama station to meet an old friend, Jason, from our time in Virginia Beach. He is currently on TAD to NAS Atsugi from Misawa Air Base up in Aomori where he is stationed. He brought a classmate along. It was great to see a familiar face! We started off the day with a trip to the Ramen Museum in Shin-Yokohama. The museum is on two-floors, the ground floor having a big giftshop and a small area highlighting a brief history behind ramen and how it is made. The basement level showcases a recreation of a typical street market from late 1950s Japan. It features eight different ramen shops, each offering a style of ramen from a different region of Japan (most regions have their own provincial style). We tried a Hokkaido shop, which uses a miso-based broth - a style I had been looking at trying. Needless to say it was delicious! The only topping I got was thinly-sliced ham, so if I ever go back I want to try something with more veggies. Overall, I highly recommend doing the museum at least once. It's definitely a tourist-trap, but good, kitschy fun.

View of the "city basement" at the museum

From there we made our way to Minato-Mirai 21 (MM21) in Sakuragicho for a stop at Hard Rock Cafe Yokohama. Now, I'm not big on the Hard Rock chain and we rarely ever go there, but our friend Jason collects the shot glasses from them so we wanted to take him there for shopping. We also walked around Queen's Square and took a few photos.



After that, it was already beer o'clock, so we made our way to a favorite surfer bar in Yokohama called "Stoves", where we hooked up with our friend Paul. Stoves is a little pricey and they're very slow at getting the food out on a busy night, but a good time was had by all.



From there, we proceeded on to The Green Sheep pub for an evening of St. Patty's debauchery. The place was a little too overrun with gaijin (especially U.S. military) for my taste, but after Guinness #4, it didn't make much difference. Here's a few more photos:





The evening ended with a late-night snack at Matsuya beef bowl restaurant. The following day wasn't nearly as fun - I ended working on my lecture for the Tri-Service Dental Conference, which I will cover in my next entry...

Until then, later suckas.....!

Babel On & On

Hey, check out this movie! Now, I'm not going to give away the entire plot synopsis here because it will totally ruin it for you, so you'll have to see it for yourself. I think all of the critical hype was warranted, because it is a well-crafted, original, introspective movie. It's basically set in three locations, Morocco, Mexico/U.S. (California/Mexico border), and Tokyo, Japan, featuring characters that are all linked by a series of events that are slowly unraveled through the course of the movie. It's one of those movies that I'm glad I didn't know a lot about beforehand. Isn't funny how those movies that you experience with a clean slate always have the most to offer? They're usually fresher and more innovative that way when you don't have that bias of seeing the carefully selected key scenes force-fed to you through the t.v. spots and movie trailers over and over. Naturally, my favorite scenes in the movie were the ones from Tokyo, but overall I really enjoyed the sweeping cinematography of each of the locales, communicating a real sense of isolation and loneliness. I was left wondering if Japanese teen culture is as out-of-control as it is depicted in the film, but then again I don't know any Japanese teenagers. Somehow, I don't suspect that most kids here live that sort of indulgent lifestyle on a day-to-day basis and that the character, Chieko, gets caught up in it through her own desperation. Incidentally, Brad Pitt does a great performance, one of his more believable roles since "Fight Club".

Add this one to your queue!

Perverts On Parade

Here's an interesting photo I took last weekend while messing about in Shibuya. I think these guys were advertising phone service by NTT. It was kind of creepy, nontheless, as they were all over the place!