Japan (11) - more food and Japanese toiletexperience

Last night we had sukiyaki for dinner. You can check the link for more info if you don't know what sukiyaki is. The main ingredient is beef, but very thin sliced and very tender and soft. The cows that are used for sukiyaki beef get special treatment and food. This treatment includes massages and lots of beer in the cows diet. This result in a very soft, tender yummy beef that is hard to get outside Japan.

Sukiyaki is prepared in one pan on the table. Everybody prepares his own meat and vegetables and sip them in a small cup with raw egg before eating. Not everybody like to use the raw egg, but it's also okay to eat your own prepared meat and vegetables with rice. At least one time during our visit we eat sukiyaki. It's one of my favorite Japanese dishes. Below you can check some of the pics from last night.

Although not planned I bought a small compact digital camera yesterday afternoon. Noriko and I were at Yamada, a chain of electronic stores. While we were looking around we saw some very cheap priced compact digital cameras. I was looking for a technical good and not too expensive camera for quite some time. My current camera (Nikon Coolpix 5700) is a good camera, but it's a little too big to take with me in the pocket of my jacket. This new camera (a Nikon Coolpix P2) will be used for snapshot purposes. I only wanted to buy a camera here if the price difference was big enough with Holland. It was. Some models were on sale and they gave some extra discount. In Euros I paid between 165 and 170 Euro while the average price in Holland is between 335 and 390 Euro for the same model. A huge difference in my opinion. Noriko also bought a small digital camera because her old one is in bad condition.

It's a pretty advanced camera. It's good for point and shoot, but there are also enough manual settings for the more creative photographer. The sukiyaki pics were shot with the new camera.

Finally something about Japanese toilets. There are two types, the old Japanese squat toilets (a modern hole in the ground) and the high-tech toilets with the latest in electronic convenience. Check this link to watch a short funny animation how to use the Japanese squat toilet (requires Flash). The same site also provide a toiletmap of Tokyo with the dirtiest and most clean toilets.

Here, here, here and here you can find sometimes funny info/articles about the high-tech toilets. The pics below show the toilet at Noriko's mother's house. It has a warmed toiletseat, bidet, a bottom washer function, some nozzle that sprays water against your bottom with quite some power. Some even more advanced model toiletseats also provide a blowdryer to blowdry your bottom after you used the bottom washer function.

It was very funny the first time I was confronted with these high-tech toilets. Now I'm quite used to it. I must admit it's very convenient and very hygienic.

Here are the pics.

This is how it looks from above.

This is the controlpanel. with the first two buttons you can arrange the temperature of the toiletseat. The second button is the bidet-function. The third one is the bottom washer function. This symbol speaks for itself I guess. And the last button is for stopping the bidet- and bottom-washer funtion.This is the overall look. The water reservoir on the right is also the sink where you can wash your hand after flushing and where the waterreservoir is filled.

Maybe it's a guy's subject, but I thought it was fun enough to share with you.

Japan (10) - Funny Engrish and other stuff

Noriko was outside Tokyo from Monday till Yesterday visiting some of her friends. The day before yesterday I helped Noriko's mother to replace most of the ceilinglights downstairs. It took some time to find out how to remove the covers of the lights. Once I figured out it wasn't so hard. Those were all round TL-lights and I totally replaced 8 of those lights. When I was replacing the lights Noriko's mother was getting ingredients for the dinner that I was going to cook. I made a Dutch dish called Hachée (pronounced hash-sjay), a kind of beef stew. See pic below. Noriko's mother and sister liked it very much. Taito our little two and half year old nephew didn't eat it because he already ate at the daycarecentre.

A little more than a week ago I made Dutch pea-soup. They also liked it, including Taito. He ate a lot of it and kept asking for more. For more English info about Dutch food and recipes you can check here.

Yesterday I went to Ochanomizu and Shinjuku. From Ochanomizu I don't know the exact Chinese characters but I would say that the name literally would mean the water of tea or teawater. Anyway near Ochanomizu station there is a street with lots of musicshops where they sell mainly guitars (acoustic & electric), but also other instruments like violins, keyboards and wind instruments. It's nice to wander around these shops and watch all those gorgeous mouthwatering (is this proper English?) and expensive Gibson-, Martin- and Takamine-guitars. Although compared to Holland it's not that expensive, because of the good exchange rate between the Yen and the Euro. I still find about 2400 Euro for a Gibson J200 a lot of money, but It's a little more than 70% of the prices that you pay in Holland for this model. Depending on the guitarmodel, prices here in Japan are between 60 and 80 % of those in Holland.

After Ochanomizu I went to Shinjuku station to check the nearby Kinokuniya (Japanese), a 7 floor bookstore with also one quite big floor with foreign (mostly English/American) books. In the past I also bought some of my Japanese studybooks here. I always like to check here. I found and bought an interesting and nice illustrated historybook about the battles at Kawanakajima. I wrote about this battle earlier in my Nagano part 3 post.

But the actual reason for this post and where the title (Funny Engrish) is reffering to was something I spotted on the way from home to the nearby station Oizumu Gakuen. It was on an outside barbershopsign. People who saw the movie Unagi (The Eel) know what kind of sign I'm talking about.

They use a funny English word for barbershop. You can check the pics and see what I mean.

It's a quite well known phenomenon in Japan. It's considered very cool to use English in Japan, but sometimes things get a bit out of hand with often funny results. There is also a website dedicated to all these funny Japanese Engrish with loads of exemples of Japanese funny Engrish.

Oops

About once every 4 to 5 weeks my mom gives me a haircut. She always use a set of clippers and gives me a few millimetres length haircut. So it's always pretty short. Only last Sunday the set of clippers broke down halfway the haircut. I couldn't go home with a weird screwed up kind of short mohawk, so my mother used a device she normally only use for my sidebeards. There are no combs on this device to set any hairlength, so the only model that was available was a model football hooligan. It's not completely but very close to bald as the pictures below will show.

It's a relief to see how fast my hair grows back. There is already quite a difference between my hair now and one week ago.

Funny

Create your own Einstein image and put in your own text. The result you can save. I saw the link to this website on my brother's weblog. I thought it was funny and put in my own text and put the result here.