Why can’t I keep the other 12? And do I get to choose which twenty?

An actual dentist’s office near Hibarigaoka station. The slogan is supposed to mean, “Keep your teeth as healthy as a 20-year-old’s until you’re 80.”

Uh oh…

I was just at the dentist (paid $1.20 for a consult after a whole 2-minute wait–damn that socialized medicine!), and they wanted to arrange for my next checkup in December. Thing is, I couldn’t remember the December schedule at my school. I didn’t have the work calendar on hand, and had not added the information to my iCal app.

iPhone to the rescue. Specifically, a new feature in 3.0: mail search. The calendar I was sent a few months ago would not be on the phone still, but the new mail search feature goes back to the mail server and searches there, too. And there it was! I downloaded the PDF file quickly and made the appointment without trouble. Cool.

They’re not fooling me! Seen today in Ikebukuro:

One peeve I have is washroom hand driers. If the place you’re at doesn’t give you towels, the least they can do is give you a viable alternative, and most electric hot-air blowers don’t come close to doing it. You sit there for two minutes rubbing your hands, and the rubbing probably does more than the air jet. But there is one type I actually prefer over towels, and it’s this kind:

It’s the Mitsubishi Jet Towel. You dip your hands in and pull them up slowly as two blades of hot air on either side and gravity scrape the water from your hands. Works like a charm. Wish they were all like this.

So far, the place where we’re staying is proving to be far less impressive than the places we’ve stayed at before. “Ma Maison” is, at best, a mediocre hotel.

Some thing are nice: they have an indoor swimming pool (if you enjoy that), the rooms are spacious, and the service is very good. However, that is offset by the fairly disappointing food, the bad towels, the minimal water pressure, and outside the pool, the lack of anything to do if you have no car.

One thing that Sachi and I have gotten used to in these places is the fantastic food. I suppose that if we hadn’t been spoiled at the other places by top-flight cuisine, the food at this place wouldn’t seem so bad. And it wasn’t bad–just not too good.

The first course was salmon and scallops with onions and dressing. The scallops were very good, but the salmon was tasteless.

The second course was a cold potato soup, coninuing with tastelessness theme–one which would dog the whole meal. The cook definitely needs a refresher course in spices.

Along with the soup they gave us bread. It’s hard to get bread wrong, but they certainly didn’t get it too right. The cook again got spices wrong, using Thyme in the olive oil, leaving a very strange aftertaste.

The next course was Tai (sea bream), again very bland. We forgot to take a picture before eating….

Last was a filet steak with potatoes. I know from experience that it’s very hard to screw up filet, but they managed to somehow. Maybe the cut was just bad, it was stringy and hard too chew, even tough. The red wine sauce was simply unremarkable.

Like I said, not a terrible meal, but hardly all that great. Just not what we expected from our countryside inn. Still, there’s always a good opportunity for a photo… And as I said, the staff are one of the better things about the hotel. After we finished the steak, we didn’t feel like coffee and cake, so we asked if they could bring it to our toon, and they did–a big tray with the coffees and desserts, all the more impressive considering the up-and-down trek from the kitchen to our room, at the far, far back end of the building.

Breakfast this morning was more of the same–food that looks classy but was not all that great. A salad for breakfast, followed by runny eggs and a sausage that was somehow bland. And why do restaurants serve rock-hard butter with soft bread, so that you can’t spread it and instead have to litter the bread with chunks of butter?

Later we went swimming in their pool–not bad, until I got a look at the junk in the water. Seems like with this place, every silver lining has a cloud…

We’re here at the inn, and have discovered that Softbank’s coverage here is a matter of meters; the mountains block coverage in the hotel, but if you step out on the front porch, you can get the barest of intermittent signals–coverage is better across the street (which is the lakeshore). I found out when I went there and took this photo:

So I can blog… I just have to go across the street to send. And to check my email, or make a call.

Here we are in Kawaguchi-ko, just off the bus. We’re at the base of Mt. Fuji, though you wouldn’t know it just by looking. We un-lucked into a stretch of rain, and you can’t see much of anything…. But you can tell that you’re in the countryside from all the English mistakes.

We took the bus up here because it’s a good, hassle-free way to get to the area. Now that we’re here, and especially since it’s raining and my foot happens to be hurt, we’ve decided to go wild and rent a car for a few days.

That’s the bus just above; we won’t pick up the car for another hour or so. More from our adventures at Kawaguchi-ko soon!

Edit: here’s a bonus Engrish photo from the gyoza restaurant we’re at:

Today, Sachi and I had planned to take a long bicycle ride from Ikebukuro to Shakuhi-Koen, a ride which we figure would have taken about an hour each way, at least. However, threatening rain made us change our plans, so we decided to do a little birdwatching at Kasai Rinkai instead. The main idea was to get out and get some exercise.

We took the Yurakucho Line to Shin-Kiba, and on a lark, decided to walk the rest of the way–just one station, after all. Of course, from Shin-Kiba to Kasai Rinkai is a huge walk, across a big river and in a non-populated area near Tokyo Bay. To add to the festive mood, it was drizzling throughout–refreshingly cool, but very damp and not too cheery.

After walking at least a few kilometers like this, I saw a bird which might have kicked off a great birdwatching day–a Eurasian Jay, right there in plain sight. I got out my camera, and promptly discovered that the battery was dead. I would have replaced it quick… but just then realized that when I had made a quick bag switch at home before leaving, I had neglected to take an extra battery with me. The first time I go birdwarching in a long time, I get a great bird right off the bat… and I find that I won’t be taking ANY photos today. I was royally pissed at myself.

Sachi and I walked through the park anyway, and of course, there were more birds, very close up even, than I have caught at the park in a long time–which did not make me feel better, of course. Then it started to rain harder, and our umbrellas were too small for the task. Plus, our feet were really tired.

To cap it al off, the soft drink machine at the train station was half sold out and the drink I was left getting was lukewarm. And then a group of thoroughly drunk college students were making complete asses of themselves just a few feet away, wrestling each other rowdily over the edge of the platform, almost falling off several times. The photo below catches them at one of their less idiotic times.

But hey, we got a lot of exercise, anyway….

Another thing we did yesterday was to look for wedding rings. We went to several places, including LaLaPort in Toyosu (they had OK rings there, but not great), the Ginza (expensive!), and Akasaka, but we found the perfect rings in our front yard, so to speak—Sunshine City, just a few blocks from home.

The rings we found are very nice platinum bands with a simple yet attractive pattern, with rings in exactly our sizes at a good price. I’m including an image below, but it shows up a problem with the iPhone’s camera: macro shots are definitely not a strength. Hopefully you can get at least a very basic idea of what the rings look like from this.

We won’t have the rings for another two weeks, however, as they’re being engraved.

One reason I like the ring I’m getting is because it’s light and thin. With the promise rings Sachi and I have had for more than a year now, mine is so big that it hurts when my hand is squeezed (happens more often than you’d think), and you can’t hold liquid in a cupped hand. The new ring is a lot slimmer and doesn’t hurt my hand when under pressure. And it looks a whole lot nicer!

Sachi and I went to Subir yesterday to set some more wedding details, and hit upon our first snag: our planner had promised us a bilingual wedding Emcee, a promise we had planned most of the wedding around. However, when we met with the planner yesterday, it was immediately apparent that,while charming and able, she did not speak English very well at all. Kind of made the whole session uncomfortable, actually. We told the planner and she’ll be looking for a new Emcee.

Other than that, we had a good time. We planned the flower arrangements with the first person we’ve met aside from ourselves who has an iPhone here in Japan. And we got to preview dessert trays, even though we probably won’t evense them for the wedding (we have a cake, after all).

Used the GPS feature on the iPhone for real yesterday–drove down to Kawasaki to go to CostCo, using a new route and everything. The GPS saved me from getting lost at least a few times, though the as-usual horribly bad Japanese street signage did get me off course at least twice–at which times the GPS came to the rescue again, confirming that I was lost and showing me where I went wrong and how I could get back.

If I could, I’d mount the iPhone above my dash; I had to settle for pulling it out of my pocket at red lights.

Of course, I wouldn’t mind it if Google’s Directions feature worked in Japan….

Yakitori is quite the popular dish in Japan, and rightly so–it’s one of my personal favorites on Japan (and, of course, very easy for westerners to adapt to). Usually it’s just in the restaurants, but sometimes they branch out onto the street. Like this place–just around the corner from our place. Yum!

Okay, so the close-up doesn’t look fantastic… but it tastes great! Though frankly, I never tried that one in the middle–in case you’re wondering, that’s chicken skin. Not gonna try it, either, even if I wasn’t on a diet….

From a local Ikebukuro street:

Sachi and I just finished going over some arrangements for our wedding reception here in Akasaka, and so we decided to have dinner at a local izakaya. Because it’s Sunday, we get a private room all to ourselves.

Nice place!

We got a nice salad, some beer, some Maguro sashimi, prawns in mayonnaise, and the very delicious yakitori you see below. We’ve decided that when we go back to Ikebukuro, we will stop by a nice ramen shop for their terrific gyoza….

Sachi took this photo of me blogging now and sent it to me by email. The things you can do with a couple of iPhones!

– – – – –

It’s about an hour later, and Sachi and I are now at the gyouza place. They mostly do ramen, but their gyouza is delicious–light and tasty!

The place is called Fuku-shin. Here are photos of the ramen and gyouza.

Sachi and I decided to take a walk today, one of those walks where you don’t know exactly where you’re going to go, and the point is to see what’s along the way rather than what’s at the end of the road. So we kind of chose a direction and started walking, choosing our turns as we went.

One place we ended up was discovering a great little supermarket we never imagined existed before, but there it was–great produce, low prices, a really great place, and we never would have found it if we hadn’t gone “bura bura,” which in Japanese means to wander along without direction.

We kept going until we got, quite unintentionally, to Itabashi Station, or near to it, and wandered into a “shotengai no matsuri,” or a street fair. Great smells there–yakitori cooking, along with all manner of foods common to such venues in Japan. One place I asked Sachi we stop at was the kaki-gori, or shaved ice stand. It is often loosely translated as a “snow cone” stand, but these are not snow cones. It’s in a dish, and it’s finely shaved ice, very different from crushed ice. This stuff melts in your mouth, it’s good.

The guy dishing it out at the end there was a sweet old guy who eagerly wanted to speak English and invited us to come back on August 9, when they have their second and last street fair of the year. Don’t know if we’ll make it back, but I can think of worse places to go.

Sachi and I got back home soon before sunset, and in time to be disappointed by our view of the Sumida-gawa fireworks–mostly because they were drowned out by the haze of the day. But it was a nice day nonetheless.

In Japan, a lot of signs are in English, especially for travel. You have almost all traffic signs with English translations at the bottom, and what street signs there are usually have English as well. And virtually every train station sign has English translations, from the signs hanging from the ceiling directing you to different parts of stations, to the signs at each station telling you which station it is. Many train lines even have English versions of the recorded announcements declaring which station you’re at.

One glaring exception to the bilingual rule: signs above ticket vending machines. The signs tell you the price to each station and the name–but in Japanese only. And station names tend to be some of the hardest things to make out in Japanese. Why they never include English, even written in tiny letters, is beyond me. Not that it’s a problem for me–I can read the kanji well enough–but it makes it very hard for tourists and relatively new residents to get the right ticket when going to an unfamiliar place.

There is a kind of restaurant in Japan where, instead of ordering to a waiter, or ordering your food at the counter, you buy a tickets for the items of food you want, turn them in at the counter, and pick up your food. Makes sense in a way, but it really feels cafeteria-ish, too much so for a mainstream restaurant experience. But these are fairly common in Japan, at least enough so that you have a good chance of spotting one on any given day.

Just don’t try leaping off of tall buildings or anything, OK?