Coping with solitude

"When I was young/I never needed anyone/And making love was just for fun/Those days are gone
Livin' alone/I think of all the friends I've known/But when I dial the telephone/Nobody's home"
*drums*

Anyway, I was reasonably busy during the week due to classes, but come Friday I'm totally bored and alone. It's weird that now I have a full-size bed to myself, but I still find myself curling up in the corner. Also my hair is getting really long. I've been growing it out, but now I'm kinda thinking it's not worth the effort. Maybe I should buy a comb...

It's mikan season and I'm a sucker for miniature oranges. V calls my clementine eating habits obsessive, but they're so little! You can eat five and that's like eating one regular orange. If you ate two regular oranges, would you be considered obsessive? I don't think so.

When Izumi texted on Thursday night that she was having a ramen dinner with Diana in Harajuku, I totally left my seminar early to meet up with them. Hopped on my bike and nearly killed myself getting from Waseda to Shinjuku Station. Izumi had the day off and shopped all day. V met up with Irene before 11 AM to hit up the Sogo Anniversary Sale in Taipei and shopped til 6 PM. I wanna go shopping too. I can totally go shopping by myself in Tokyo and be totally straight. Yeah!

We went for Afuri, the yuzu ramen place that Diana has been touting forever. Afuri is by far the most effeminate ramen shop I have ever been to. I know that a lot of women avoid eating from due to the overly masculine environment, but they'll always have this place and Ichiran. Afuri was especially so; I think that the men in the store may have been outnumbered by women and the chefs were both girls as well.

Afuri is a very different ramen experience. The two things that really stand out are the broth and the chashu - pork. I had the shio ramen above. The presence of yuzu is pretty prominent in the broth. The flavor profile is very light overall and it almost doesn't even taste like a ramen. Very delicious and perfect if you want something a little lighter than just about everything else you find in town.

The chashu tastes significantly different from what you get normally because it is grilled like yakitori. The smokiness compliments the light broth pretty well and additional pieces only cost 150 Yen. The noodles were very thin and on the well-cooked side (a little too well done for my taste). This ramen hit the spot for me since I had already been eating a bit at the seminar. V will love it for sure, and I'll take her as soon as she comes back.

It seems everybody else was just as bored as I was, and we decided not to end the night and went looking for somewhere to drink in Harajuku. There aren't actually that many options and we had to walk all the way to Cat Street to find a wine bar. The Italian wines were a little better at Carmine than in Ebisu, and the girls were sad once they drank it all. Low key night.

So Friday night, I had the super-munchies and after eating a load of crap, I decided to chow on one of these appetite reducing shortbread cookies we have. They taste very decent and successfully keep you from overeating.

We thought that it worked by expanding in your stomach and thereby taking up space, so I decided to perform an experiment. See below: I left it in a glass of water for about five hours. Result: soggy biscuit. Didn't even get that much bigger. These things work, but how they work is still a mystery.

I should be careful not to turn this into a ramen blog...