Still Sick...

So the next day I was still feeling quite miserable. So I told my buddy that we should go somewhere that doesn't involve a lot of walking. He told me "no problem, we're only seeing 2 sight seeing things and it shouldn't be much walking". Cool, I thought.

So the first stop was this place, which is an old government site. It's a gigantic empty park to walk around in.
So we had to WALK across this park, which led us to this stream. According to the map there is a temple nearby we can see.

We had to WALK down this road:

And further down this road...

And even further down this road...

And more walking down the road... (This part was cool though cuz they had cherry blossoms along both sides of the road!)
After about a half mile or so we come to a sign that read "Temple, 2.5 kM ahead!" I was like.. Uhm.. I'm not going to make a 2.5km walk and then walk all the way back dude! I thought we weren't going to have much walking!?!?

He made some excuse that it looked like it was really nearby on the map. So we abandoned the temple , and got back on the bus and went to the next region.

.... Where I got to walk up these gigantic stone steps.


Which led to this very tall castle...

Where I walked flight after flight of steep, old-style wooden stairs. Did I mention I had a fever at the time and I was dizzy? Climbing the stairs was a challenge when i could barely walk straight!

I forgot to take pictures at this point except at the top of one of the buildings, I saw this cool hole in the wall. Apparently you are supposed to stick your gun out of this hole and shoot people as they approach! Fun!



This is the view from half way up on top of one of the smaller buildings:After all that climbing i was whiped, so it was back to the next hotel to recover. These past 2 days were the worst of being sick. After that I had a stuffed nose and a cough for the rest of the trip, which was OK so long as the sore throat and fever were gone!

I don't remember most of these!

So the day after the Kobe Beef, the cold hit me full strength. I had a sore throat, runny nose, a fever, dizzy, tired, the works! It really sucked. Since we changed hotels daily, I couldn't just hang out at the hotel either since checkout is at 10.

So basically I had to suck it up and head out and see stuff. Many of these pictures I don't remember even taking because I must have just snapped them randomly while feeling miserable. I think the random nature of the photos reflect my state of mind :).

I don' t remember this statue, but I think I know why I took its picture. :D


I did remember this guy. We were at the Kawasaki museum and they had this robot on display. It would pick up a rubix cube that hand been randomly shuffled. It would literally "Look" at it (all 6 sides) to figure out how it was shuffled. Then it would solve it! Pretty cool.

Uhm... This must have been at the train station. How weird!

This was dinner. A hot pot. I ate it, but I dont know what it tasted like because at this point i couldn't taste anything! booo! I was told it was quite good!

While I was walking down the street I must have seen a sign for The Spaghetti Factory!!!! I didnt know Japan had a spaghetti factory. It's a great pasta place!

This is a photo of the garden in a temple we visited. I don't remember taking these.


This is the picture of the temple itself. That's my friend in the picture with the red backpack. He has a habit of walking right into the picture that im trying to take!

I think this bridge was also in the temple's garden. It was a nice place!

Next post: More photos of random stuff!

Kobe

Our next stop was Kobe, home of the famous "Kobe Beef". Of course we couldn't pass up an opportunity to have Kobe beef while in the Kobe region itself! We went to the teppan restaurant pictured below. They were so popular that they opened a second restaurant across the street!

For those that don't know what Kobe beef is, it is a special type of cattle in Japan which is genetically predisposed to having a lot of marbling in the meat. In the U.S., the amount of marbling in a steak is the difference between USDA "Select, Choice, or Prime" beef. The more marbling you have the higher the rating of the beef.

There were 3 choices of beef on the menu. You had "Kobe Beef", or you had "Premium Kobe Beef", or you had "Ultra Premium Kobe Beef". Of course we decided heck, if we're here we are going ultra premium!

We knew it would be expensive when we realized that the steaks were weighed and charged in grams! We had 2 steaks, a filet mignon and a ribeye, each 260 grams. I believe the price came out to $115 per steak, which is aroudn $0.44 per gram. Below is a picture of the raw beef. It is the most marbled steak I have ever seen.



From here, the steak is cut up into sections. The trimmed fat is set aside for a later dish. The steak itself is cut into the individual sections each served in succession so you can taste each individual area of the steak separately. Below is a video of some of the preparation. You can see him cutting off different parts of the steak and moving the meat into different piles.



Then the steak is seared very quickly on the teppan grill, and served with just salt and pepper and a little fried garlic. This is the most tender / juiciest steak I have ever had!


The left over fat that was trimmed off from earlier is chopped up and used to make fried rice! That was some extremely tasty fried rice! Yum!


Needless to say, that not a single scrap was left on our plates once we were done. At $0.44 per gram even a tiny speck of meat could be $1.00's worth!


Now below is something interesting. Our hotel in Kobe had this oddity in the restroom. You know you pat on "After Shave" on the areas you had just shaved. So... what exactly are you supposed to spray "After Toilet" on????? HMmmmmmm..... I didn't try it by the way. (You can click the photo below for a larger version if its hard to read)


This was the last chance that I was able to taste good food because for the next few days I caught a cold. My friend had caught one earlier and i guess it was inevitable that I would eventually catch it too. It was a fantastic "last" meal of sorts!

New Camera

My dad's friends at work recently purchased new Digital Cameras. They had been bringing all sorts of neat photos for him to see and he was impressed.

Apparently he has the same Monkey-see Monkey-do nature as Vanessa does because soon afterwards he brought home a ton research material on digital cameras, dropped it on my desk, and tried to coerce me into buying one.

I said, "Uhm, I already have a digital camera. Plus the one you want (Nikon D80) is $1300!" He said all his friends at work got one and he wanted one too. So he offered to split the cost with me on it. I had always been curious about these fancy cameras so I acquiesced. So this Sunday I bought this:


It's a Nikon D80 Digital SLR Camera. That means that it works like a professional camera in that you look through the viewfinder (not the LCD) to frame the picture. The viewfinder gets the picture through the lens via a complex set of mirrors so you see exactly what the lens sees. Another cool feature is that the lens is detachable so you can swap it out to suit your particular purpose.

Just as I had pulled the camera out of the box, my brother came over with my niece and demanded I took a picture of her for a birthday party card they wanted to mail out. Keep in mind I had no idea how to use the camera at this point so I set it on full auto, took her to our garden and started snapping away! P.S., I barely know anything about photography at this point, so comments are welcome ;) I think I have a lot to learn to really be able to use this camera.

This shot is using a big zoom lens to blur the background and achieve a "portrait" look.

Another cool part about SLR cameras is that they can take consecutive pictures really fast. Up to 100 shots, 3 per second. This was extremely useful because I just could not get my niece to stand still :) She ran around like a little tyrant while I tried to take these pictures! It's a miracle that any of them turned out!

When we asked her to stand still so that I could take her picture she threw up her arms and shrugged, "Sorry Uncle James that's not possible!" :D


The ability to take a bunch of pictures in a short period of time lets you catch a cool expression right when it happens. And you never know when it will!

I swapped to the non-zoom lens here to capture flowers in the background.:

I wish I had this camera with me when I went to Japan. Even though it is so much bulkier I think it allows for much better pictures than the compact one I have!

Saturday

On Saturday I took Cindy (another Cindy, not the one you all know) and Judy up to the Wat Thai temple in North Hollywood :

Every weekend at the Temple they have a Thai food fair. When you get there you need to buy these colorful tokens that you can use to buy food at the shops:

Here is just one of the food stands. This particular place sells Mango and Sticky rice dessert. To the left you can see a whole bunch of umbrellas and tables where you can sit to eat. All along the corners of the courtyard are food stands selling authentic "street" thai food like: Satay, Noodle Soups, Chicken rice dishes, dumplings, coconut drinks, sausages, etc!

Here is a picture of the Satay. They have Beef, Chicken, and Pork hot off the Barbecue! My favorite one was the pork satay!


For my main meal I had a bamboo salad dish with a nissen sausage:

Another booth had fried bananas for sale. I love fried bananas!!!

Now comes one of the best desserts I have ever had! It is champagne mango over a bed of mildly sweet sticky rice drizzled with a little coconut milk. It may sound strange to eat mangos with rice, but you HAVE to try it! It is absolutely fantastic!

After the Thai temple we wandered around Los Angeles trying to figure out what to do. The girls mentioned that they had also wanted to try a chinese foot massage but were scared to go without someone to watch over them (some of the places are kind of seedy). So they decided that I would escort them to a foot massage place.

I have to say they are a great deal! The price is $15.00 for one hour. You get a back massage, a foot soak in tea, and of course the foot massage itself. Meanwhile you get to sit in huge, plush chairs and watch plasma TVs while getting your massage! The price was just really fantastic considering how expensive a massage usually is! I went it not expecting much (c'mon $15.00??) but I was really impressed with what we got!

Apparently it is getting really popular now because there were no less than 5 foot massage places in the same block/plaza that we were at! And all of them were bustling with customers. I heard that some of them might offer "Special" services but apparently not the one we went to :)

Off to Seattle! And a food-filled weekend

I'm going to seattle for most of next week so I will not be able to edit Japan photos for posting! I did all sorts of fun stuff this weekend, so I'll write it up into 3 chunks and post them as I find internet access.

Friday night I went to Sushi Wasabi with Vanessa. Cindy had written about our last adventure there when we went as a group. As a reminder -- the special deal with sushi wasabi is:

1) You don't get to order.
The Chef decides what you eat, and he serves you whatever is freshly available that day. This means you better be able to eat anything or otherwise insult the chef! Jordan once you eat real sushi we'll have to take you here!!!

2) You get REAL Wasabi.
Since real Wasabi Root is so expensive, most sushi places give Wasabi that is actually green-colored horseradish. Others give you Wasabi that was reconstituted from a Dry powder. Here they actually get the REAL root and grind it fresh daily. It makes a huge difference!

The food was so good we ended up staying until closing time. I have to say that this is still the best sushi that I have had. This includes the sushi that I had in Japan! While I did get to try some new / interesting fish in Japan, the flavor and presentation is still better here!

Next post will be about the Wat Thai temple in North Hollywood!

Hakone Hot Springs!

Our next stop was the Hakone hot springs! Below is a picture of the hotel lobby. Sorry I couldn't get any pictures of the hot springs due to all the naked people running around! So you get to see pictures of the hotel, room, and food!

The ettiquette for hot springs is that you must be nekkid, and it's a giant public bath. Most of them split the ladies from the men, although some share a common bath. As enticing as a shared bath may sound for us guys -- what we end up seeing in those baths are old ladies who are there to check out the young guys who are there hoping to find hot girls (who rarely show)! lol. OH well! So we stuck to the split baths.

Funny Story -- as I was coming out of the bath back into the locker room I was surprised to see a lady there in front of the lockers. I thought I had walked into the wrong locker room oops!!! So I ran out to check and make sure i was in the right place! I was! It turns out the cleaning ladies roam about both the men and womens locker rooms. After the initial surprise wore off, us guys had to oblige them with our special poses :)

Once again its a pretty good deal. Most hot springs are around $110.00 or so. This gets you the hotel room, unlimited access to the hot spring baths, taxi service from the train station, dinner, and breakfast in the morning.



Below is a picture of our room. When you first enter they set up a tea table like this. When you go to dinner, they remove the table and replace it with Futons.

After you have your bath you go to dinner in your bath robe!

Our appetizer was some sort of a green tea custard/pudding:

Another appetizer, snails and Tofu:

You can't have a Japanese meal without some Sashimi or raw fish:

The next course I think is Lotus root topped with vegetables:

After that an herb crusted salmon:

Some rare beef:

Soup! I forgot what the white thing in there was. Probably an egg:

Chocolate cake and Ice cream for dessert:

Breakfast was buffet style. They had 2 buffets. A Japanese traditional breakfast and an american breakfast. I forgot to take pictures of it, but it was quite yummy too!

Not bad for $110.00 huh?

First Pension

A lot of people have the perception that Japan is an expensive place to stay. This is actually false, and you can get around Japan on a budget if you really know where to look! One of the greatest deals in Japan are the pensions. You can consider them like a bed and breakfast but you get so much more!

The price to stay one night is in this particular pension was $70. This includes the room, Dinner, Breakfast, and usually Taxi service to and from the train station!

Below is a photo of the first pension we stayed at.


Dinner is a multi-course french-japanese style meal. The first course that we had was salmon sashimi and prosciutto ham salad:

The next course was soup! It doesn't look like much but it was extremely tasty actually. I was surprised!

The next course is a pan-fried fish dish! As with all the seafood I had in Japan it was fresh and delicious!

The main course is unlimited rice, and steak from the local cattle:

Polish it off with a Jelly dessert in a cream sauce with mint and berries:

In the morning we get treated to breakfast! This is more american style with Scrambled Eggs, Ham, Hash Browns, Salad, Fruit, Orange Juice, Tea, and Bread!

So you get all of that, for the low price of $70.00 per night! Try to find that anywhere in the U.S. I have to say that the dinner alone is probably worth at least half the cost!