Oh dear, it seems to have taken me a while to recover from the raucous week of rock and roll debauchery, I must be getting old. But now I’m back, and I want to turn up the soundtrack to my life another notch.
Last week saw the first train outage I’d encountered – I’ve been here two and a half months and I’ve not encountered any problems. So there was going to be utter chaos when it did happen – and there was. There was a flash thunder storm (which looked particularly beautiful from the six floor) which lasted about twenty minutes earlier in the evening, so I decided to stay at the office for a bit until the rain went away. By the time I left the Yamanote line was broken, the first clue was that the barriers were open – that never happens, then there was a train full of bored looking commuters in the platform. I joined them for a little while, until it became obvious there wasn’t going to be much movement in the near future. At which point I nipped down to the subway station and caught a random train deciding to get off somewhere that, for whatever reason, looked interesting.
There was a work celebration last Friday, to mark the (successful) passing of a deadline. We were taken to a Brazilian restaurant not far from my flat where they fed us meat. Lots of meat. As much as you could eat. There was a bit of veg too for those not convinced about the idea of eating cows. Then there was a token scoop of ice cream to take away the taste of beef – of course, since everything works over here they’d melted and refrozen the scoop of icecream into the bottom of the little bowl so it didn’t spin around or roll off when you tried to spoon at it.
We were efficiently ejected from the restaurant as they had more bookings for the tables, so we retired to ‘Oh God!’. An Irish film theme bar with a decidely seedy 80s mirrored nightclub feel to it, except for the perfect victorian chandalier over the pool table. They were showing the Mexican while I was talking to some Indians with a background of noisy drunken Finns talking Japanese. I felt so cosmopolitan.
On saturday I met up with Nobue-san, a Japanese friend of godgirl and minusbat, who was much better at reading the local menus than me – we ended up in a wonderful little traditional Japanese restaurant around the back streets of Aoyama somewhere. The company and the food were great, although the setting reminded me a little more of a stable than an eatery. Then there was the ice cream. A perfectly formed cone of soft ice cream turned up in a little silver cone holder, complete with handle and everything. Am I the only one who finds this unusual? Do we have those back home and I never noticed? Should I buy one and bring it home?
2 comments