Random Pictures!!



A creepy old guy running around taking pictures of girls in Harajuku.





Ryan holding hands with some kind of dinosaur thing.





They have strict rules.





Me on a dam.





Leo getting down (or showing us his technique for using a Japanese toilet).

The Shimoda salmon festival that happened two thirds of a year ago.




I finally got around to editing a short movie from this brutal affair that I witnessed. Shimoda's big on salmon, so they have a big festival every year where you can be as cruel to fish as you've ever imagined, and also eat them and also bounce around in an inflatable duck that I call American Duck (who seems to appear at a lot of festivals around here).

Things to watch for:

-The Fish Pool Scramble- While I'm not sure if anyone actually calls it by that name, the scramble is where you can pay a few dollars to be one of the many people who wades in a pool and catches a live salmon with your bare hands. The salmon then dies of suffocation, or in rare cases bludgeoning, if rumors are to be believed.

-The 'Beat Your Fish with a Stick' Race- The four contestants stand next to a trough, each with one salmon inside. While you are supposed to nudge your fish with your stick, and have the fish swim to victory under its own power, those who really want to win usually wield their stick more like a golf club than a wand of gentle encouragement.

-The vegetarian holding up a fish that she recently murdered- No explanation necessary, Shimoda brings out the worst in us all.

Sincerely,
Matt

This guy is AWESOME!



I'm seriously regretting that I didn't buy a cd from this band, samurai something-or-other, when I saw them in Harajuku. If you don't believe me that he's awesome, check out his microphone stand for proof.



Honestly, after seeing THAT, who cares what their music sounds like?!?!?!?!

TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL!!!!!

Potato Snack!



Or what we would call potato chips in America. This particular variety was steak flavored, thus the young Archie holding up a plate of steak. When I bought them, I thought it would be funny because meat flavored anything is pretty funny. After I ate them, I realized that the chips are pretty much the same as barbecue chips, in that they are steak sauce flavored, not flavored like the meat themselves. Deliciousness chased away disappointment however, and I decided to make a mundane post on a website about the potato snack after all.

The hidden secret to the potato snack is on the back of the package. At a cartoon steak restaurant, the anthropomorphic fork and spoon should be having a good time, right?



WRONG! While the knife seems to be enjoying himself, that fork is either terrified, or he is wracked with guilt! Don't be surprised when young Archie keels over at the end of the meal and "Forky" is suddenly nowhere to be found.

In true Japanese fashion, this snack did absolutely nothing towards saving the whales.

Taste: 4 out of 5
Packaging: 72 out of 97
Save the whales: 0 out of 2

My House

So after just over 10 months of being in Japan, I've decided to finally post pictures of my town and my house, starting with the outside.

-Click on the pictures to embiggify them.



This is Mt. Nakui. Although short, this mountain is annoyingly steep. Legend says that if you climb this mountain as many times as I have, then you are awesome.



This is the main road in my town as seen from a pedestrian bridge. There's nothing notable in this picture, but that's fitting because there's nothing notable in this town. We have one police car, and to the best of my knowledge it hasn't left the station parking lot in almost a year.



This is my awesome house with my totally rad blue mitsubishi parked in front. Those flowers on the left side are not mine, as any plant life I touch withers and dies.



Lastly, the view out my back window. Those are rice fields in the foreground, a grape vineyard midground, and greenhouses beyond that I've never been in, but I'm guessing house zombie experiments. You can also make out hills in the background if you squint, and those green things on the hills are trees. Above the hills you can see sky and clouds if you look carefully. Also a wrestler. (just kidding about the clouds)

-from Matt.

DEER!

Yep, that's a wild deer that I'm petting right near Japan's most famous torii gate at Itsukushima.
This isn't the deer that ate a brochure and some cigarettes out of an old man's beach bag, we saw that one later.






We were unfortunately there at low tide, but that doesn't mean that Megan and Antonise weren't having a great time! (Mehan and Greg both look confused, so I guess they didn't have such a great time).

Tokyo Teaser video.

Well, I wanted to put at least some sort of video up tonight, so I put together this one minute teaser video of my 10 day long New Years trip to Tokyo. In it are some various short (very short) clips from Tokyo Tower, Ueno, and Yokohama's China Town district.

NICE WHEELS!!!!
(is what you'll be saying by the end of this post)

Somehow I managed to wrangle about 3 weeks of vacation and only use up 4 of my annual leave days. This has earned me the nickname "li'l David Copperfield" (the magician, not the Charles Dickens character), although I'm the only person who uses the nickname. Needless to say, I not only have a lot of backed up video from before the trip when I got sick, I also have tons of fresh stuff to work through. First though, everyone who has heard about my new car is really anxious to see it, so here you go!! Pictures of my new car!!





Ok, I was just kidding. That's not my car, it's actually my friend's car, but he only lets me drive it inside with lots of people walking around. My car's way nicer:





I took that first photo really fast and it didn't come out too well, so I took a second picture for you all. I've named the car Pearl, and from the pictures, I'm sure you can see why, so I won't bother explaining it here and boring you all.





As you can plainly see, Pearl's a pretty sweet way to get from here to there, and boy do I love visiting there, although I wish they had more stuff. Since I'm such a pimp, I've appropriately pimped my ride with the following:


a map
an ice scraper that the previous resident left in my shed
a tape adapter for my ipod (not pictured)
a fluorescent light (blue)

The real problem now is that all the ladies won't stop following me and my boss cruiser.