I didn’t get a chance to write about it yet, but for my birthday weekend, Waki took me on a weekend trip to Yamanashi to enjoy the vineyards and countryside. It was beautiful, we toured a half dozen vineyards, sampled tons of great wine, and had a fabulous dinner served in our room at a gorgeous ryokan(Japanese inn) Waki reserved for us. Even breakfast the following day was great, everything was so fresh and the air was so clean and relaxing. The following day, we took a bus to the side of a mountain and hiked up and over it. The nature was incredible, we saw a giant waterfall and a beautiful river. From the top, you can see Mount Fuji in the distance, what a great birthday!!

This is one of those wonderful videos that just keeps me loving Japan. This guy installed a theremin into one of those Russian matryoshka doll and plays it like an instrument. I love how serious they look while they play.

I wrote this big long thing about how Chinese food in Japan is ass nasty. Then I decided to just forget about it. People here LOVE the slimy stuff. Nothing’s going to change that. I just have to stop going to Chinese restaurants unless it’s to China Cafe 8(the ONLY authentic Chinese restaurant in this entire country I think).

You can’t make everyone happy. That’s it, I guess. You just can’t. There was a great print ad run by Adobe maybe a year ago. It had a sequence of events in an ad agency. The first frame of the sequence showed a board with many little post-its all over it with the subtitle, “babies”. The next frame of the sequence showed a dust bin with all the little post-its crumpled in the bin. That about sums up this past week for me, or moreso this past month. But hey, that’s just it, isn’t it? You run an icecream shop and someone’s going to come in, order the mint icecream and tell you it sucks and never come back. That’s a bad metaphor, but along those lines, it’s just part of running your own business. I’ve since learned how to manage scenarios like this in the future, just as I’ve learned how to manage countless other scenarios like it in the past. I just have to keep working as hard as I can. Lesson learned.

I guess in general this hasn’t been a great month. The only thing I get to look forward to is my birthday weekend with Waki. We’re going to a Japanese vineyard and we’ll be staying overnight at a Japanese inn in the countryside. That’s exactly the kind of relaxation I need. I just hope lots of sake will be involved…

If you can see, the one in the back has this great sneer on her face. They were a bitter group of hamsters, gathering near Shibuya station. Who knows where they were off too. When I starting taking photos one of the hamsters flipped me off and shouted, “NO SIR! NO PHOTO NO!” Oops, didn’t know it was a private party, what with all the OTHER hamsters running around Shibuya…

If you walk to the end of the Akihabara JR station, there’s a neat “milk bar” near the end. They serve all kinds of flavored milk in glass bottles for about $1 a bottle. You just stand there and drink your milk and when you finish, you hand them back the glass bottle. I wish these things were mainstream and all over the place. That would make Akihabara even more surreal than it already is.

I walked by this scooter and did a double take. The seat was skinned in Doraemon(a Japanese cartoon character with blue fur and a gold bell). I like the sewn bell, it seems to work nicely as a seat cover.