Stand-up comedy in Tokyo, The Punchline

It's Friday night and we headed off to Harajuku (原宿) to get our first taste of stand-up comedy in Tokyo.

First we rushed a bit of dinner at the sushi bar (回転寿司) on Omotesando (表参道) then hobbled down to Pizza Express where Punchline; a standup comedy event, held about once a month, which drags comedians to asia. Last night there were 3 comedians, 2 from the UK and one from Canada at some point but who currently lives in the UK.

Basically, A guy managed to organise taking over a restaurant for one evening a month to host a small stand-up thing. The place was packed with foreigners, I guess the thing was aimed at ex-pats missing a taste of home...I have to say that it was the most amount of white people I had been in the same room in with for a long time. The stand up itself wasn't too bad, there were some hilarious bits, but mainly all three comedians focussed their acts on sex which made it a bit crude and tedious at times... so the hilarity wore a bit thin. To be honest, for the princely sum of 6500yen (and that was just for the show) it was a bit much... I don't think I'd really want to go again in Tokyo...I'd rather wait 'til I'm home.

Cat cafes... have a coffee, pet a cat.

I've been informed that places exist in Tokyo for you to have a coffee with a cat...

For those unable to keep their own pets and don't carry around silvervine (またたび - I'm trying to find out where i can buy my own little plant of this stuff...) with them all the time to attract the strays... There are places where you can go have coffee with cats or kittens lounging all over the place. Generally called 'Cat cafes' [猫カフェ] or[猫喫茶 (ねこきっさ)], there are several in and around Tokyo (click the name of the cafe to link to the site):

Calico (きゃりこ)
東京都武蔵野市吉祥寺南町１－５－７　雪ビル４F
Tel: 0422-29-8353
Open ALL WEEK 10am to 10pm (last entry 930pm)
Entrance Fee:
1hr - 800yen
30mins - 600yen
for every extra 10mins - 120yen

Rien cat cafe and cattery
東京都世田谷区等々力7-10-17
Tel：03-6712-0982
Open:
Wednesday to Friday 2pm to 9pm
Saturdays and Holidays (inc. Sundays) 11am to 7pm
Entrance Fee:
upto 30mins- 1000yen,
for every extra 10mins - 200yen
(probably expensive due to the fluffiness and cuteness of the Norwegian Forest cats they have here)

Cats shop (ねこのみせ）
東京都町田市原町田1丁目2-9小林ビル202号室
Tel:042-722-0544
Weekdays and Saturdays: 12noon to 10pm
Sundays and Holidays: 12noon to 8pm
Closed every Tuesday and Friday
Price:
150yen for every 10mins

Nennekoya (ねんねこ家）
東京都台東区谷中2-1-4
Tel:03-3828-9779
Open: Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Holidays 11:30am to 6pm
Price: They just ask that you buy at least one drink per person, drink and cake sets range from 600 to 1000yen

ねこ・JaLaLa
東京都千代田区外神田３－５－５－１F
Tel:03-3258-2525
Open:11am to 7pm
Entrance Fee:
upto 30mins - 500yen
for every extra 10mins - 150yen

'curl-up cafe' カールアップカフェ
東京都目黒区原町１丁目７-４
東急目黒線「西小山」駅より徒歩1分
03-5755-5393
Weekdays: 12noon to 8pm
Weekends and holidays: 11pm to 8pm
Closed on Mondays (Tuesday, if a National Holiday falls on Monday)
Entrance Fee:
upto 1hr - 1200yen
upto 30mins 900yen
upto 1hr + tea set - 2000yen

for every extra 1hr - 800yen
for every extra 30mins - 500yen

(there's a nice list on this site - some in oosaka as well)

Chinese New Year 2008 (year of the rat)

In order to avoid going to university for another lonely Chinese New Years in Tokyo, Amy came over to our flat, and we spent the whole day cooking a feast for dinner. I spent the morning shopping for ingredients (as well as some of the night before, where I headed to Ikebukuro (池袋) to buy chinese stuff, like pancakes for peking duck, man tou (馒头), hoisin sauce (海鲜酱), oyster sauce...and most importantly Chinese Five Spice powder (五香粉)...So, after all the food shopping, I started on the prep. Cut up loads of veges; for the Peking duck, and for stir-frying later, and also cut up lots of ginger and garlic for most of the dishes. Amy managed to arrive while I had just finished the first round of cooking the duck (we were actually doing twice cooked duck, following my dads delicious recipe), and I was just starting to steam the first batch of Chinese New Year cake.

We wrapped jiao zi (饺子), Amy made Bahgudeh, we gutted and scaled a fish, steamed the fish, made some soup...

People started arriving at around 730...and so we started off with the duck...we boiled the jiao zi, had bahgudeh with rice and man tou, had steamed veges, had stir fried veges, and a steamed fish (It was a bit of a mission to find a suitable whole fish for the dinner....but after trawling through about 4 shops, including one fish mongers, I finally found one!)

Anyway, it all seemed to go down well...

Amy, looking very full (...a split second before I took this photo, Greg and Fumie were seemingly deep in conversation, but some 6th sense seemed to know that I was poised to take a photo and some instinctive reaction in both of them made them pose at just the right moment; it was amazing)

HAHA! the monks are back...

...continuing on the monk thing...(where they are singing in jazz clubs: see here, here and here) they are playing at サ ウンド　ミュージック　バー　Chippy (Chippy Sound and Music Bar) on Wednesday the 13th of Feb...

Hurrah!

"Japan mulls language visa tests"

An article in the BBC news website (full article here)

Despite my laziness and general lack of any natural talent for languages; I would have to say that I'm in agreement with Japan's Foreign Minister, that foreigners should have at least a grasp of the Japanese language before living and working here (for long-term visitors)... it definitely would " improve their quality of life". You try living here and getting on with your life without a word of Japanese...

However, I fail to see how it will stop terrorism OR illegal immigration.

I do however, find the closing paragraphs hilarious... and typically* 'Japanese'

"Last year an opinion poll carried out for the government found that more than half the foreigners who live in areas where they mix with Japanese people would like more opportunities to interact with them.

But only one in 10 of the Japanese living in the same areas wanted to talk to someone from abroad."

ie. the foreigners want to talk to the Japanese, but the Japanese don't want to talk to foreigners...HUZZAH! (the same is probably true if you swap the word Japanese for British)

*'typical, as in stereotypical... in a highly prejudiced manner... it in no way reflects the behaviour or outlook of the Japanese I ever get to talk to , at any length. Bearing this in mind the only Japanese that will talk to me are 1. the open-minded, want-to-speak-to-foreigners-and-would-like-a-more -rounded-society types, and 2. able to speak English.

...Earthquake Early Warning System...

The JMA (Japanese Meteorological Agency) [気象庁 - きしょうちょう] - I was actually looking up the weather forecast for the next few days, and got heavily distracted... (but in an educational way...) - and saw that they have something up about their 'Early Warning' System.... I was just having a peek at how much warning they were able to give, just in case they'd managed to somehow miraculously come up with a way to predict earthquakes before they happen - I live in optimism...possibly a slightly deluded optimism...ANYWAY...I was a little disappointed (but not particularly surprised) that the warning of a strong tremor is zero seconds, or to the order of 10's of seconds if you're lucky...

Update...

Sooooo.... I've been slipping with the whole posting thing lately: but I've finally found time to
1. catch up with blogging
2. wrestle some photos off Greg...

and just so that you know I've now finished posts on:
Kurobe Dam - Part1 (September 2007)
Kurobe Dam - Part2 (September 2007)
Nikko (December 2007)
Christmas Dinner - Part I (December 2007)
Christmas Dinner - Part II (December 2007)

click on the title and it should link you right to the entry.

...I'm still working on the one about our new year trip snowboarding in Naeba...

Pilates!

Today my legs and my sides ache. Why? because: yesterday afternoon I finally got my arse into the Uni gym to try one of their classes. Access to all the classes run - including yoga, savate, aerobics, etc...is all included in the gym entrance fee.

I definitely used some muscles that I didn't even know I had, whilst attempting to hold some of the positions. Mind you, I was probably doing everything wrong because the instructor was Japanese, and giving the lesson entirely in Japanese...So, I spent most of the time looking at the people beside me seeing what they were doing - with limited success...

Will try to go back next week, to build on my 'core strength' ...see how long I can keep this whole gym thing going for....

Naeba 苗場 [01Jan-04Jan]

Our destination: Naeba 苗場 - an apparently trendy place for young people to hangout and look cool skiing/snowboarding.
Purpose: snow-based-fun&frolics

It's 930pm and we're at the West Exit of Shinjuku station 新宿 and we just about had time to find a cafe to have a hot drink before we met up with Rei and her friend at the bus station...we spent a good hour standing around waiting for the bus to turn up....which happened around 11. The bus was a glorious pink, and it's roof was covered in snow (good to know, as we wanted snow), in addition to the pinkness of the outside of the bus, the lighting in the bus had been designed by someone who seemed to want to spread a message of happiness to the world, but had mistakenly thought that this could be best achieved by multi-coloured lighting... The Overnight bus trip itself would have been fine, if the bus didn't stop every hour for fifteen mins and turn on all the lights, just to really make sure that you knew it was stopping.

Anyway, we got to Naeba at 5am, whence upon we had to try and find our hotel...called White Palace...which was appropriately painted brown (Amy pointed this out to me...I wouldn't even have noticed the irony of the name...). Reception didn't open to 8am, so we napped in some chairs in the foyer/smoking-room-of-lung-death. There were several other Japanese (who'd been on our bus) napping on the floor too....which was kind of reassuring. At 7am (maybe they pitied us and got up early for our benefit) the reception sprung to life and we managed to get our ski wear hired (apart from Greg and Akiko who had to go to a completely different shop to get kitted out...not a good enough range of shoe sizes apparently...). By 930 we were on the hotel provided shuttle bus and heading to the main mountain...

Me in some snow...

After scoffing some breakfast we managed to get on to the beginner slope and Greg tried hard to teach me to snowboard. This mainly ended up being, Greg sitting around on the slope for most of the day watching me fall over in slightly different ways...and over the next 3 days I found MANY different ways to fall over while my feet were firmly strapped to a plank of wood. Some methods involved my neck....which my neck was not very happy about, many involved my knees, which had so many bruises they gave up the concept of individuality and decided to create a merger, to form one very large bruise over both my knees...

We had wondered where Amy and Rei had gotten to, as we'd lost sight of them when we got to the ski lifts....after we got down we found that Amy had basically refused to go any where on the slope and had gone for the safe and non-bruise option of having a coffee.

We did stop for lunch, and then we disbanded again to go on our separate slopes to do our thang....or in my case: try not to die.

When it came to dinner time, we all met up near the entrance of the ski resort and waited for the shuttle bus to take us back. We had time to have a nice hot shower and get out of our ski gear before heading to the dining room.

I ate a lot. I was hungry...all that falling over business is hard work, OKAY!?

After dinner there was still time for night skiing! and very conveniently there was a slope just behind our hotel, which even contained some jumping slidey obstacles for the more experience skiier/snowboarder...meanwhile, I was busy imitating a falling leaf and floating down the slope.

Anyway, this was the routine for the next two days, which my body was not very happy about...We did however, manage to get Amy on to some snow, after she bought herself a sled...

And here are some photos of the night skiing to round it up...

more monks...

from the schedule they have up on their website, the monks are performing TONIGHT!!! ...abit short notice for me....and unfortunately I can't see anything else for the rest of this month...hopefully they will put something up about Feb soon...