魔法のスープ

MY MIND IS BLOWN

Blown up, up, up and away to the land of food heaven where cheese comes ready made from cows and steak grows on trees.

Ok so maybe those things are not available on earth, but something along those spectacular lines is! MAGICAL SOUP. 

soup: my face when.....

As you can imagine, soup in not usually anything to write home about, but as I am literally right now writing home about this one, you know it's special.


Here it is:

looks like a big bowl of dry vegetables right? WRONG!!! This is 'at home soup' and it is gloriously mythical in it's jesus like miracles. I was doubtful at the start about its powers but now i am a believer.

So when I first saw this soup bowl, I only picked it because the shop was so empty it looked like everybody had been disaster shopping and it was the only thing left. After shaking it about to try and make it look a bit more appetising and the contents just flopping about sadly inside, I then glumly took it to the till and prepared to be parted with my hard earned (lol hard-earned) yen.

Upon purchasing my lunch, I was asked the same question as every time you buy something in the convenience store; 'do you want it warmed up?'. I refused and casually mentioned that isn't the premise of soup be to be liquid and as such i'd need to put water in the pot before warming it wouldn't I. They laughed.

open soup pot. note the pale looking noodley thing in the top left.

So, slightly confused, I returned home with my box of flappy bits of vegetable off cuttings and opened it up. I then ummed and ahhed about whether to do as the shop worker said and directly microwave the pot water free, or go with my soup instincts and fill the bowl from the heated kettle.

I caved and lobbed it into the microwave as it was.

As it whirred and span around, smelling of smoke as my microwave usually does, I looked in through the door and shook my head in doubt and the future sadness that would come in the form of my extra dry ruined soup pot.

BUT, to my amazement, I opened the microwave door after 2 minutes and there it was........

SOUP!!!

This confused me even more. I was astounded at the magical water that had appeared suddenly moistened my vegetables. And even more astounded that I had soup at all in the first place. I was so confused that in fact I went and bought another soup box to try making it again with much more prior inspection. My conclusion from observations is as follows: the noodley bits I mentioned in passing earlier disappear when heated and in their place a butt load of water is created.

OR..... it is indeed magical soup.

ウオッウオッウオーーー！！

Tokyo game show

I went to the Tokyo game show a long long time ago, maybe even in September!! I genuinely just forgot to write about one of the coolest things I've been to while here in Tokyo. 
Before you all raise your eyebrows at the idea of spending an entire day at a show where people just play games and mill about: Heres a little fact file for you:

- Forty-two percent of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (37 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (13 percent).

So, i'm in a perfect demographic to have a valid reason to loiter around a selection of PS4 hardware (other consoles are available) and otherwise spend my day considering skill points and doritos (+4 flavour).

When I arrived at the event there was a mind boggling number of people waiting........

How to make a simple but long lasting queue for any day of the week:

- take one of the largest cities in the world

- add a pinch the fact that it is known for being technologically advanced

- combine with a pre-mixed packet of the largest anticipated game show in the world

- season to taste.

We were waiting for what seemed like 5.2 centuries, we even had to resort to using an umbrella as a parasol to avoid potential sunstroke.... Living in Tokyo you become used to standing on the subway for extended periods of time in the cosy hollow of a abnormally tall man's armpit, but the sheer amount of humans in one place at this show was astounding and the number did nothing but increase as the day progressed. It got to the stage where upon falling into the  flowing river of a crowd, you would be whisked away in the direction of the people current never to be seen again.


The highlight of the game show for me was watching the final fantasy XV trailers as the square enix booth. This is because final fantasy XIII and XIII-2 are the 3rd most played games of my life at over 90 hours a piece. (my top played game is Pokemon sapphire at 634 hours). 








The trailer for the new instalment looked AMAZING, I couldn't take any videos of this awesome sneak-peak because the crowd handlers would get angry and wave 'no photography' signs in your face, however despite this I did sneak a few photos anyway! The game itself is astoundingly beautiful and the team at square enix has really outdone themselves this time, it has made me want the game so much and it hasn't even got a release date yet. They have changed up the turn based paradigm mechanism we have been seeing in most of the recent instalments of the final fantasy game series, and I can't wait to see what effect this will have on the game play (and pretty much absorb into the TV screen for a few hundred hour not to be seen in a social context apart from when eating)

The new consoles also featured heavily at the show with 2 of the biggest stands being from Xbox and playstation respectively. They had workable demos of most release titles, so you could try out the PS4 and Xbox1 before their launch dates! The downside was, if you wanted to play one of the games you had to queue for over 100 minutes to get a ticket for 5 minutes demo.

Two of the games I really liked the look of were; 'deep down' and 'psycho break' (the latter has had a title change to something extra boring like 'Mr Arthritis's monotonous adventure' for UK release) These 2 games were being demonstrated on some of the biggest screens I've ever seen and the animals, dragons and people look almost as realistic as a film scene. It seems crazy that only 10 years ago I was admiring the  a bunch of grey, jerky, square ass pixels and enthusing about their high quality lifelike appearance. 


Of course no Japanese gaming and general nerd fest would be complete without a little cosplay!! If by some small chance you live at the bottom of the sea, or in a small winding crevasse and you haven't heard of cosplay; it means costume play. As in, people (mostly women) dress up as their favourite characters from animations and games and generally flaunt about in skimpy clothes while drooling gaping mouthed men take pictures of them. Here are three of my favourites!!

This is lighting and vanille from final fantasy. They look really like the characters its actually quite impressive. although I do predict that the vast majority of small asian girls wearing this costume would probably achieve the same level of similarity.

This dude is a ..... I have no idea. He was probably very happy with himself though as he was chosen to appear on the stage as one of the best cosplay artists at the show. The Japanese people also seemed to enjoy his look very much.

and this is Blanka. I spent a lot of time on street fighter 4 last year (millions and millions of days) and the character I play was this dude. The crazy Brazilian chlorophyll-coated, raised by electric eels monkey man and I had a great relationship as I electrocuted all the other players. When I saw this guy dressed up so awesomely, I chased him like a loon half way across the warehouse to take this picture. and I'm glad I did.

good time had by all.

thanks for reading! ill be back sooner than you think!!!

魔界から恋文は書きにくい

It's the weekend!! So, I went for a little excursion!


My mother often tells me that I should get some work done, but hey, haven't i got the rest of my life to work?


so keeping this in mind, Tokyo dome was our destination. Our intention, FUN :D


Tokyo Dome City is basically a big complex of fun stuff to do! You can go bowling, roller skating, karaoke, shopping and even ride a big-ass roller coaster!
They were even holding an Oktoberfest on the last day of November, (maybe they didn't get the hint on when to hold it). This meant we saw a bunch of people in lederhosen casually strutting their stuff in the chilling autumn air.





Ok before I tell you about my day I want to talk a little about my lunch, because it was served in a super awesome way! I ordered tomato risotto (yummage), but instead of coming on a boring normal plate, it instead had its own little fiery stove underneath, to keep my rice toasty warm. Yes, I did burn my mouth.

clever clever fire stovery

Also, look at this parfait:

I don't have anything to say about this, I just wanted to make you all jealous :D

pretty city theme park!

The main reason we went to Tokyo Dome City was, if you can believe it, not the risotto (again, yummmmage), but was in fact the roller coaster. Every day when we go to lesson and ascend in the lift to our classroom in the sky, I stare out of it's glassy glassy windows at the python of roller coaster tracks in the distance. And once I realised it was actually in mechanical working order and not just a very elaborate statue, we had to visit the site of it's origin. It even goes directly through a building!!

zoom, get out the way wall!

Sadly, after looking closely, it seemed my large western (and sexily curvaceous) body would in fact too large to fit in the roller coaster, as the seats seemed to be ergonomically suited to the frame of an 8 year old child.... so I didn't even try to ride it. Luckily there was plenty of other rides around too and I very much enjoyed going on the pirate ship. Was like being a child at flamingo land again. :) yey boats!

wheeeee!!! there's me in the middle!!!

The highlight of the day was however, the haunted house!!! *insert spoooooky ghost noise and lightning strike here* I was very excited to go to this part, as horror mazes are one of my favourite things to do, as well as actually a part of traditional Japanese culture. *citation needed*
Currently around Japan there are over 50 haunted houses or 'obakeyashiki' and currently two of the longest and voted scariest of these spooky attractions are located in Japan! The one at Tokyo Dome however is just a baby cousin of these monstrously horrific mazes but was still really creepy!

us still alive after the horror!

Increasingly horror houses in Japan give you a mission to complete while getting to the exit! The one we went in was called 'love letters from the spirit world', and the storey was as follows: 

Once a man fell in love with a witch and she in turn sent him love letters, the man's wife however found out about this and hid the letters before the man could ever receive them! In anger the witch came through to the mortal world and viciously murdered the man's wife and children and vengefully concealed the bodies, just as the wife had hidden the witches notes of affection. She then wrote one last letter....

The gaps are the locations where the bodies are hidden, you have to find them and complete the letter!

So, letter in hand, in we went!

As you may imagine the house was horrific, if you add up all the distance that I jumped and was in the air during that time, you could probably reach Saturn.

The worst part was probably the fact that all the doors in the house were closed and you had to open them yourself in order to continue forward. This meant you couldn't see what was in the next room or even predict when something would jump out in your face, as such my progression through the rooms full of faceless dolls and flickering TV screens was extremely cautious, but this approach was not wise and bit me square in the bum.

The reason? As I was so tentative in my wanderings I managed to set off the same motion sensor three times...... It went a little like this...

You know the saying:

fool me once, shame on you,
fool me twice, shame on me,
fool me thrice.... there isn't even a phrase for this line, I must just be an idiot. *sob*


I also managed to stuff up completing the love letter due to the fact that writing Japanese in a LIFE OR DEATH situation when dead children's bodies are falling on you willy nilly is surprisingly very difficult.

So instead of writing 'behind the mirror' [かがみ - kagami] I accidentally wrote 'involuntary nocturnal tooth grinding' [はがみ - hagami]

- and, instead of a 'in a well' [いど - ido], I wrote 'in my intention' [いと - ito]

- and, for 'inside the cupboard', I just wrote [こばーど - kobaado], which isn't even a real word.

So sorry dude, you put the responsibility of avenging your family in my hands, but it looks like the bodies of your wife and children will never be found. As when the police find the letter and take it in as evidence they will think it was written by either an incompetent and illiterate moron or an insane child.

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