Grass Tiara actually brings to mind a nice image. Too bad the store namers probably had no idea what it meant.
Hard to tell the meaning of this. They were next to a kid's stand full of hats.
For Rob's buck's party we went fishing and I caught five fish. I forgot to bring the camera, though, so they were really big ones. This is another boat which we went on to see some whales. Karen and Alice were both enjoying it immensely in their own separate ways. We didn't see many whales but lots of dolphins insisted upon not being photographed for most of the voyage.
We also visited the Big Banana, the largest attraction in town. Alice is still small enough to find most bananas quite sizeable.
The other sight to see is the Pet Porpoise Pool, where you can get close to many marine creatures, even if you don't want to. Here's Alice freaking out about a seal kiss.
And here she is struggling to flee a dolphin kiss.
Peacock's arses are almost as attractive as their fronts.
This is Evan, Durand and Asia's baby. This photo is here so my other friends actually know what he looks like, and that he exists.
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.
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.
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.
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.
