Get Your Eatin’ On With the Tokyo Bloggers. What’s on the Menu? Gyoza.

Photo Courtesy of Seattle_roll

Gyōza is a Chinese dumpling, widely popular in Japan and Korea as well as outside of East Asia. This dumpling consists of a ground meat or vegetable filling wrapped into a thinly rolled piece of dough, which is then sealed by crimping.

Gyoza is a standalone food. All you need is a bit of soy sauce and　ラー油　(chinese spicy red chili oil).

The Invite

Of course gyoza is even better with a nice hot bowl of rice and friends. So, if you are free on the 8th of July from 19:30 and live near Tachikawa, drop lhuga a line at Lhuga. Our plan is to reserve a table for ten at Gyoza 1059. Hurry, there are only four seats left.

Of course, beer will be consumed.

Technorati Tags: food, tokyo

Sparkling Cafe

Originally uploaded by lhuga.

I completely misread Mari’s
post, like “strange taste is boom…”

I think this is one of Japanese strange drinks.
Are there anyone who like this ???

変な飲み物が今ブーム! （かも?）
炭酸コーヒー飲んでみました…シュワシュワするカラメルとコーラ入りのコーヒーって感じ。

これ好きな人誰かいるかな?

I just cannot seem to adapt to the rainy season. I am hot, sticky and wet. I’ve been in Japan for a while now, so I keep hoping that my body will have adjusted to the seasons, but the rainy season always gets me. My skin is bad and my hair is some kind of weird curly frizz. My Japanese friends often complain about the rainy season, but I do envy their ability to cope with it. Many of the women in my office have got a new “rainy season cut” and the men just seem to be cruising along, calm as ever. Bring on summer, I say.

What’s this…AiS ??

Originally uploaded by lhuga.

If you can find out what this is, I will respect you!

Hint:
1. Food
2. Originally from Shibuya(maybe)
3. You can also get this at Haneda airport
4. Apparently, a part of word. *AiS**

What do you think ?

これはなんでしょう？わかりますか？
あなたもきっと好きだと思うよ (^^)

I have no idea why Asahi includes the USA into "My Town" local news page. American people may be angry "it looks like the U.S. is the 44th prefecture of Japan!" For me, I wonder if they care about American news the same as Japan domestic news? At any rate, it’s strange. By the way, their deformation of the Japanese map is funny. It will be hard to realize "it’s the Japanese map" for foreign people. On that point, their rival news paper the Yomiuri has a strange Japanese map too. Like I wrote before, Japanese seem to like to draw the map using tag or cell. Why?

By the way, do you know Pringles released print chips? In the U.S, you can enjoy Guinness record statistics. But in Japan it is a trivia and party game in which you have to follow the order (we call it "King game"). I have no idea what is the meaning of this difference. I prefer Guinness records to read a silly order like "make a sexy pose" on potato chip.

Talking of potato chips, I read another interesting news item this morning. This year, the food fads in Japan are not only weird food, but also strong taste.
I wrote that in Japan "light salt" is the best selling flavor of potato chips,　but this year "Double consomme", "Super spicy" and "burn soy sauce", those stronger taste are popular.  Not only potato chips, other snacks, fried noodles, and I should not forget that chocolate. Many foods are getting hotter, sourer, sweeter, bitter. Especially green tea have stronger taste boom, the biggest green tea maker Itoen released "Koi aji = Strong Taste", then Asahi released the stronger taste in their green tea brand Wakamusha (=Young Samurai).　Then today Suntry said they will release the strong taste for their "Iemon". Well this might be a back action against the healthy and light taste boom.

P.S Suntry Iemon has nice green wall papers. It looks cool for your eyes.

Do you remember my old post ?
Yes, Opera software announced the day finally, yay!!
Opera Software’s announcement

There is no information from Nintendo now, I can’t wait !

Meeaooooww

Originally uploaded by lhuga.

I met this pretty green eyed cat whilst I was cycling yesterday afternoon.
It stayed there calm…no meeooow!

昨日は午後から会社を休んで、自転車でうろうろ。
誕生日だからね。
大桟橋から戻る途中に この子と遭遇。きれいな毛並みのおとなしい猫。

Wow, we just had an earthquake in KantoArea !

(link, livedoor’s earthquakes information page)
There are lots of earthquakes recently, scary!
Then will we meet this ?

居酒屋　でん太 (Izakaya Denta)

Well, my little sleepy town has been graced with a new drinking establishment - Rather high-class for these parts, if you ask me. Today I popped my head in as they were getting ready for another day of business. Initially, I just wanted a few pictures of the owner and the outside, but the owner’s wife, Hiromi, invited me in to take more shots of the interior. The flickr photo set is here.

Technorati Tags: food, restaurant, tokyo

Working as a free-lance dance instructor, my job requires a lot of traveling.
I have at least two jobs a day, so traveling by train is an everyday event.

Most of my dance lessons are during the evenings, so I only take a train in the morning once a week.
There is a women only car usually at the end of train, but I just deal with the packed train the one morning.
However, since I take a train every evening during the busiest time of the day,
I take the women only car once in awhile.

Especially with the high humidity today, it is really humid and it often smells bad. Not only the humidity and smell, but also I do feel a lot safer to be in the women only car. Unfortunately, there are countless cases of females being harrased on a train. All my girl friends have at least once been harrased on a train, so I believe this women only car is very useful.

It is though sad that we need to make such space to separate males and females, but the reality is, such harrasements take place everyday and women have had not mcuh support until very recently. Even today, not only the harrasments on a train, but also at work and on a streets, females have not much support. The police does very little to help, thus females often say nobody about what happen. For at least now, I hope every train system have the women only car to provide a more comfortable, safer space for women.