Really?

Some signs are really self explanatory.

Edo-Tokyo Museum

The other weekend we went out with some friends to Ryogoku and the Edo-Tokyo Museum. Edo is the old name for Tokyo. Most of the museum contained huge reconstructions of Edo era buildings and scale models of the town. From the outside the museum looks like it's hollow.

It's a very impressive looking building on large stilts. It's meant to be a reconstruction of a raised warehouse structure.

This looks like a woodworker's shop. The scenes were very interesting although you couldn't go inside them like you could at the Shitamachi museum in Ueno.

Here is one of the very detailed dioramas. It's so detailed that you can't really see anything in it except a bunch of people.

This one is a little less busy.

Old Japanese phone booths were called white boxes. They look very cool, but so do blue, Tardis-like phone booths.

Alice tries the jinriksha. After the museum we went to a small, secluded garden. It was like the ideal version of a Japanese garden.

Ryogoku is the home of many sumo stables, where young sumoka train to one day fight in the many sumo tournaments each year. Sumo is the national sport of Japan, and it's very entertaining to watch even if you don't know what's going on.

Here we all are at the main sumo stadium. We arrived about ten minutes before closing time, just fast enough to take a look at the small sumo museum.

This was the most interesting photo I saw there. A sumoka playing baseball. I'm sure they do other normal things, it's just hard to visualise those things.

We also visited this temple which doesn't look like a temple. They had a pet cemetary on the side and a lot of cats hanging about. Temples often kept cats to keep the mice from nibbling on the scrolls. These days they are probably kept just to amuse the monks.

We also went to an izakaya, which is like a Japanese pub, the big difference is that they serve a variety of food to snack on as you drink. They have these places in Korea too, it's such a good idea, I wish they had a few in Sydney. It's far less boring to eat and drink, you can drink more, and the food is usually very good yet not everyday fare. I remember eating chicken hearts and lungs on a stick in Korea, here they had tamer options. We ordered a mini pizza, a chees plate, some sultanas, a sausage plate and finally some ice cream for dessert. While there is a lot of food, it's still a pub and drinking is the main idea. We drank beer and I tried some weird Japanese drinks. I can't really remember what they were, strangely enough.

More Alice

This is the Alice dental clinic.

Alice Garden is a cheesecake shop.

Rainy Day

What to do on a rainy day? Go to one of the huge deparment stores and wreck up the place. Well, the stores don't advise you to do that but it seems to happen anyway due to the massive amount of human traffic walking through them. This was taken in the Seibu store in Ikebukuro.

Tokyo View

Right next to our apartment in Roppongi Hills is the Tokyo View, an art gallery, viewing platform and aquarium all rolled into one. We kept putting off going there but on a cloudy day we decided we had nothing better to do.

The viewing platform is actually better than Tokyo Tower's because it isn't anywhere near as crowded and you don't have to line up very long to go in. Of course you still have to line up, because it's in Japan. They have various cafes and bars too, so you can sit with your drink against the glass and gaze out on Tokyo.

The aquarium was less about education and more about building really weird fishtanks than most I've been to. They had a lot of fluorescent fish and lights, and most of it was in a pitch black room which was difficult to drive a stroller around. They had some furniture which contained fish tanks, like a couch and coffee table. They also had a large fountain-like tank in the middle. I quite liked the shallow open air tank at the entrance. It gave some good reflections of the view.

I suck as a photographer, though, so I didn't get any good shots of these reflections.

The Mori art gallery had a long and boring exhibition about Le Corbusier, some French architect who seemed a little dated. Alice got really unhappy at about this time so maybe I'm judging it too harshly on the whirlwind circuit we made. Oh well, at least it's in character.

Finally

On the 2nd of October, around eleven a.m., Bek and I were married at the Minato-ku Ward Office.

Purezento

Now, if only it were soundproof and I could get the lid taped shut.

Alcohol

Alcohol is so cheap in Japan it makes me want to drink more. A large bottle of Smirnoff vodka in Australia costs around 38 dollars. In Japan it costs 11. I can't believe that the rest of the price is tax. Also alcohol is available everywhere. At the supermarket it's in the aisles and you can get it twenty four hours at the convenience store. In fact even vending machines serve up beer, so I imagine it is really easy to acquire alcohol while underage.

This is absinthe. It's illegal to sell in Australia but it comes with a free absinthe spoon here. You may note on the bottle the large number 55, as in percent. They had a higher one at 69, but it was red and absinthe is traditionally green. I wanted the whole aesthetic of smashing my brains out to be perfect.

On the glass is the spoon upon which sits a sugar cube. The absinthe should be poured over the cube allowing a little to dissolve into the liqour. Then two parts ice cold water may be added, turning the green into a cloudy white. Drink, scoff ten more sugar cubes and then go murder someone. The green fairy strikes again.

Absinthe became quite popular after initial reluctance to drink one of the world's most bitter herbal infusions. Wormwood is the ingredient which gives it the distinctive liqourice taste. Herbs added after the distillation give it the green chlorophyll tinge. In nineteenth century France, five o'clock became the green hour, when people retired to bars to sip the increasingly cheap drink.

Unfortunately this price drop was enabled by some shoddy distillation methods, causing the psychoactive chemical thujone to leech from the wormwood and remain in the liquor. More than a few people went mad and some even went on murderous killing sprees. Absinthe was quickly banned, even the well-distilled, thujone-free variants, and most countries continue to forbid it.

My absinthe had little to no thujone in it, so I drank the whole bottle and invoked my super power; my oft mentioned, little used inability to ever get a hangover. I drank about four glasses in an hour and only felt a little jolly. I think if i had four shots of vodka it would have done me worse. The taste and effect were equally disappointing, but the sugar cubes were good. I ate quite a lot of them in between puckering and grimacing over the bitterness. It tastes really bad even for alcohol. Bek declined to join me after the first face pulling.

Old Doll Festival

The Ningyo Kuyo, or Old Doll Festival, is held at Kiyomizu Kannondo temple in Ueno park each year. The ningyo used in the festival are old and worn and belong to school children who come to pray for the dolls.

The kids are quite young as you can see. The priests do some chanting for the dolls' spirits, burn incense, march around sombrely and stoke the fire. Did I say stoke the fire? Yah, they stoke the large metal fireplace in preparation.

For what? Ah well, these dolls are used, they are broken, they want relief from the earthly realm of grabbing hands and careless play. They want deliverance into doll nirvana.

So, they shovel the dolls in and the children file past and give a little prayer for their playthings. Hopefully the dolls will be reincarnated as Barbies far away from Japanese infernos.