December 23rd was a quiet day. My last day of school and the last day in Japan for a lot of classmates. I thought that we would do one last night out, but that didn't end up happening. Instead V and I spent the day with stomachs recovering from the previous ramen madness and had Freshness Burger for dinner. Well, I couldn't handle eating one fish burger for the entire day's meal and added a instant ramen.
It's the Ippudo X Mouku Tanmen Nakamoto from the Tokyo Ramen Show in instant form. You can buy it at 7-11 and it was definitely one the best cup noodles I've ever had. The 23rd was also that day that V's tiny plum tree (now named "Plum Plum") reached it's peak. I guess the flowers only last a week or so since it reached full bloom in a couple of days and then by the 25th had already begun shedding petals.
If we could find a way to fertilize the flowers then we could get it to bear tiny plums. Alas, I suppose no plums this year. V's been looking for a way to bring Plum Plum through US Customs, but in reality we'll probably be flying through Taipai, so she'll need to bypass the customs of two countries. Good luck to her. That was sincere by the way. It's difficult to detect sarcasm on the internet, but that wasn't sarcasm at all. I like Plum Plum. I bought it!
In the past week, I found that one of the analog channels on our TV carries NFL games starting at midnight. They play the games all week long and although the games have obviously been played, I've been enjoying watching them anyway. It's kind of nice since the games are cut so that there are no commercials or timeouts and the game flows seamlessly.
Unfortunately, every now and then the game stops for fifteen minutes or so while they do a BS News break.
BS stands for "Broadcasting Satellite" which is the major technology for TV broadcasting in Japan. Still, poor naming choice.
Christmas Eve came and I admittedly dropped the ball. I spent most of the morning trying to make reservations for a dinner and kept on getting calls for the reservations I made online being unavailable. Finally, got a reservation in Shibuya at what seemed to be a Traditional Japanese - Western fusion place.
Finding nice restaurants in Tokyo is overwhelming since there are so many restaurants and the bulk of them are quite expensive. In Chicago, I can pay $30-$40 an entree and try out places without worrying too much. Well, we don't usually go anywhere we don't know is good anyway. However, in Tokyo the cost for an unsatisfactory meal is disproportionately high. So, I'm extremely adverse to eating anything I don't already know is good. Finding out what is good is also pretty difficult. Not only is it hard to get decent reviews, but I also don't necessarily trust the tastes of the Japanese.
Our favorite tapas place in Chicago plays Spanish TV (not even Mexican!) on the walls. In Japan, I don't even necessarily know if I'll be able to find Spanish on the menu. I've already written about my gripes of ordering French food off menus without any written French.
Japan is a lot like America in some ways. Both are pretty insular societies. Everything in Japan is made for the Japanese and everyone else is expected to conform. As a result, a lot of foreigners either end up staying in a corner of Tokyo where they can get by on only English or are quite proficient at Japanese. Speaking of which, my comfort level with Japanese has increased dramatically without me noticing. Previously, I had to put in a substantial amount of effort in the everyday, but now I find that most things I do don't require me to think too hard about what I want to say.
Back on topic, we ended up canceling our reservation and holding out for a restaurant that's a can't miss. If I had made my reservation weeks ago, I might have been able to something suitable; but it was a little shortsighted of me to try to make a reservation on the day of Christmas Valentine's Day.
We were even invited to Fuku for yakitori and passed it up since we already had dinner plans... Well dinner plans trashed, we went for some Christmas ramen instead. Nearly every day, I ask V what she wants for dinner. Occasionally she says she wants ramen, but what that really means is she wants Ichiran. Recently, that has changed to Ichiran and Ippudo. Ramen at Ippudo is good and all, but thereal dealmaker for us is their moyashi - beansprouts. It is difficult to overestimate just how much we (especially V) love beansprouts. Every time we go, we finish one entire pot of them and they're free! They sell their moyashi sauce in bottles and the only thing we need to figure out is how many we're going to buy.
I wasn't the only guy for Christmas ramen as several couples were there. Hey, as long as the lady is satisfied, I've been halfway successful, right? Right? I did succeed in convincing them to allow me to combine my two Ippudo cards, so now I'm only 14 bowls short of the membership card. Boys'll be proud.
Ok, so it wasn't the most romantic dinner, but I did succeed in buying a Christmas cake. Earlier in the week, we had tried to reserve one. I went to pick it up, and the guy didn't ask my name or anything. Just went in the back and gave it to me.
Christmas Cake is a must have apparently. Before Ippudo, we sauntered through the food court of the Tobu department store and it was madness with dozens of people in line at the ten or so different pastry stores, waiting for their cakes. The other big thing on Christmas is KFC; ridiculous lines at every KFC we saw. Someone needs to explain the Christmas fried chicken to us. Cuz, in the Us it's Christmas Chinese food ya know... Our cake turned out to be V's favorite combination: white cake, pudding, and strawberries. I like this Christmas Cake tradition by the way.
While in Ikebukuro Station, we stopped by this stand selling random Hello Kitty things. They didn't have anything that V wanted, but they did have a lottery machine with a wind tunnel filled with paper cards folded into pyramids. I paid the 500 Yen so that V could reach in and pluck one out. Every one is a winner, but we got what I think was the third place prize, a lap blanket:
I haven't used it yet, but apparently you can't properly appreciate how pleasant a small blanket warming your lap can be until you've tried it. So they say.
The rest of our Christmas was pretty quiet. We actually spent most of Christmas Day packing to leave for Taipei. It was a little naive of us to plan to leave on the 26th and "enjoy" Christmas in Tokyo. We packed until god awful in the morning that night. Given another day, we could have gone shopping or something.
There was a pseudo-plan to meet up with everyone for a Christmas potluck. Fortunately, everyone was lazy, so Diana took some initiative and switched us to dinner at Maruhachi. Nothing wrong with Okinawan food for Christmas.
99% of the Japanese beer market is conquered by four companies: Kirin, Asahi, Sapporo, and Suntory. Most of the remaining 1% belongs to Orion and that's only because it's locally popular in Okinawa. So, along with the food I got myself an Okinawa beer.
Except, it's actually made by Asahi? I need to revisit my Japan beer data. Somebody fed me some poor information I think. It actually is different from the other beers I've tried, which all taste pretty similar. Diana thought it tasted kind of like American beer and that might have been correct. She then followed up by saying she doesn't like American beer and likes Japanese beer better, to which I awkwardly said, "...Yeah?"
To cap off dinner, V and I unveiled our second Christmas cake. For some reason, this cake (also from 7-11) was AKB 48 themed, although it really had nothing to do with the girl group. No pictures of them on the cake or anywhere. Just "AKB 48" written on the box. If I had bought the cake for the cute girls, I would have been pissed. Just saying. When we were looking for cakes in the convenience store, we found out that all the cakes were 20% off, but they were running an additional promotion where you could then rock-papers-scissors with the clerk and if you won, get 50% off.
Funny that this was my first time playing jankenpon in Japan. From what the girls were saying at dinner, different regions of Japan do this in different ways. The guy at the convenience store went, "Gu, jankenpon," performing only one pump of the fist and then releasing on "jankenpon" which he said really quickly. This was totally confusing, so we settled on counting to three and then releasing on three.
The whole thing still doesn't make sense to me, but I did win 50% off this macaroon cake.
Macaroon cakes are delicious apparently. We split the thing into eight pieces for six people and ended up with an extra slice. The cake was seriously chocolaty and with nothing to wash it down except the little bit of Calpis V had left, we left a slice behind.
Hard to feel bad about leaving a little bit of a 50% free cake. Dinner was over, and some of the girls were going to go Christmas clubbing (something we could have considered if we didn't have a noon flight the next day).
Took a couple of pictures to commemorate the occasion (and populate the blog).
Miwa always rises to the occasion.
Here's the whole party. Christmas in Japan? Verdict: not overly exciting. It seems more like an excuse to hang out and party. Shibuya was filled with santas on motorcycles and other crazies. Really felt more like Halloween than the Christmas I'm used to. Then again, I haven't had Christmas in the US in three years... Next year, for sure!
Before we left, we set up this thing:
The groceries have been selling mochi for a while. I had no idea why I was supposed to do this, but I decided I should do as the Japanese do while I'm here. Wiki tells me this is called a kagami mochi - mirror mochi. The two discs of mochi symbolize either the coming and going years, the human heart, yin and yang, or the sun and the moon. On top you place a daidai which is a bitter orange; "daidai" means "generations". Sounds like one of those traditions that nobody really knows where it comes from anymore. People just do it for good luck in the new year. They'll forgive me if I just put a mikan on top instead of an actual daidai. Wiki also tells me we should break it open on the second Saturday or Sunday of January for the kagami biraki - mirror opening.
It's a good thing I checked wiki about when to eat my mochi. For those who can't tell, my kagami mochi is pretty out of scale, and it's somewhat laughable how much larger the mikan is than the mochi. It's supposed to look more like this:
Merry Christmas everyone. See you in Taipei.
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