So I haven't posted here in a few days and I know that means that everyone's Buzz feed has been eerily empty. No one wants an empty Buzz feed, especially not Google. I feel as though I have to do my part to destroy Twitter and Facebook.
I pulled all these photos off of my iPhone. So I apologize for the ridiculously bad quality. Its a first generation one, and it has a case on it which has a very, very dirty little glass lens-protector that I have been meaning to remove for about 3 years, so theres a bit of a halo around everything. The photos are anywhere from a few weeks to a few hours old.
This is my favourite kitty from the Akihabara La La Neko Cafe that I went to wayyy back. He was by far the smallest, and almost troublingly thin, but he had a great regal look to him, so I had to take a picture.
Don't worry, thats the last cat cafe picture I'll post. I took about 300 while I was there, and I'm saving everyone's time by not posting them all with very predictable "Awww, KITTY!" captions.
This one is from the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo. Theres not much to say about this, except that I was quite disappointed not to find any REAL mounties at the embassy. There was one guy guarding the door that ushered me in like royalty after I showed him my passport, but no mounted police to be seen, other than this cutout. I'm pretty sure thats a Wayne Gretzky doll or something on the left.
Ahh, the famous Saita-san, caught on film at last. This is us after the reception at the Embassy. I look like a monster! And hes wearing crazy heals on his dress shoes in this pic too.
Okay this is a really zoomed out shot, and the quality just isn't there to zoom in much, unfortunately. On the right is the Yokohama wharf, the longest in the world I believe. It looks like something that the USS Enterprise (the starship or the carrier) would dock at. This ship on the left is the newest of an experimental line of mega-catamarans, a couple of which are in service in the US Navy (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSV-1_Joint_Venture
). A Japanese ferry line just purchased a couple of them, and this is one of them. In true Japanese fashion, the port and starboard sides are covered in favourite A.A. Milne characters (Read: Winnie the Pooh). The ship is massive and looks like that stealth ship from a few James Bond's ago, except flamboyant, pink and covered with Piglet instead of mysterious, black and covered in stealth materials.
I'm really not a big fan of ships, but this one uses magnetohydrodynamic propulsion (known as a Caterpillar drive) that has no moving parts, but induces a current in sea water, and then uses a changing magnetic field to "push" the conductor (the sea water) away. So no moving parts, and this mother can go up to 60 knots (110+km/h).
So yesterday we (the normal crowd of NTTers and myself) went to the Kirin Beer Garden, according to a travel website the 8th most visited attraction in Yokohama (of 9, about 5 of which are hardly a 5 minute walk apart).
When we got in were were greeted by this cuneiform tablet. My brilliant understanding of Japanese was able to extract "Sumer", "Mesopotamia", "Beer" and "Welcome". From the information sign nearby, not the tablet, Katakana was not exactly the lingua franca in 3000 BCE Sumer. It seems as though Kirin (the oldest brewery in Japan) fancies that it can trace the roots of its recipes back to Mesopotamia (where beer was first invented).
And to Egypt (where beer was used to trick thousands of slaves into building pyramids - according to the brochure). The lobby with the ancient beer recipes also had a table for doing origami. If you could follow the instructions there and make a certain shape, you could trade it for an awesome "Blue Samurai" (kind of beer) bandanna. See Exhibit A.
Exhibit A.
The free tour came with some free beers at the end of it. This picture is noteworthy as Jessica is a staunch supporter of alcohol abstinence until marriage (did I get that right Jess? If not you're going to have to come out of lurk-mode and correct me). Don't worry, she didn't actually drink anything. Other than some revolting 0.00% quasi-Sprite-beer stuff. As you can tell from the picture, Arianna picked up the slack.