+ Tap into your creative side and feel inspired by Festival/Tokyo, a performing arts festival that is on till the end of March. This weekend, there are four exciting events going on: Clouds. Home, Sunshine 63, Fireface, Shinkan Shonen (Kumquat Seed). Our top pick is Sunshine 63 as the audience gets to take part in the performance. For more details, surf over to the official website.

+ The weather will probably be wet and miserable, so if you don’t want to head out in the rain, hole up in your nook and watch funny Japanese commercials on Youtube. Here are a few suggestions: an old sake anime ad, a weird but kinda cool MacDonald’s ad, a bizarre exercise equipement one and lots more.

+ If movies are what you need to switch off from that stressful work week, there are three movies out that may tickle your fancy as an escape from reality: Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla, Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, or Disaster! (a claymation flick by the Team America guys. Yes, it was released in 2005, and it finally made it to the big screen in Tokyo, like…now).

+ It could be time to get yourself to hugely popular French crepe café, Le Bretagne. Park yourself there nice and early at 11.30am or as late as 15.00pm as it’s hard to get a table during peak lunch hour. Go sweet with fruit and syrup or hit the spot with a savoury plate of eggs and ham.

Photo: Kim

You can see some other KITTY’s products here, IT Media

Here is a photo from SANRIO’s news release.

Inside of the box(Mobile Phone biscuit — or — Cell Phone Cookie),
originally uploaded by lhuga.

One of my colleague gave me this biscuit, last week. It says, “Yokosuka is the place where the mobile phone was born”

Its shape is a bit old-fashoned, isn’t it ?

I don’t buy any lottery these days.
Because, it seems impossible to win the lottery for me.

However, of course, there are many people who buy it. yes, many…many ?

By the way, I talked about “a cold cataplasm” with my foreign friends
but some asked me what is that? I checked “湿布”(shippu) on online dictionary and they say it is cold cataplasm, hot compress, cold compress. But some people wrote it is very hard to find them in other countries. Then I realized they are so Japanese stuff?? Cold cataplasm, cold/hot compress is like a gel patch containing a substance to reduce pain or swelling.

I found so many site about heating pad in the U.S, you will imagine it. The difference is Japanese patches are disposable, and not only herb, some medicinal component are included. When we have shoulder stiffness or alleviate the tension in your shoulders, we use cold patch. Cold patch is work fine to set up inflammation or acute pain. And when we have chronic pain or stomach pain, we use warm patch.

Salonpas is a major brand of those patch, you may check patch in their ad videos, here (.mpg video) and here (.mpg video). Since we can buy it easily at drug store, in winter season, it is very convenient for sudden fever. Baby (cheek like an apple :-) I can see she has fever!) and adult, we all use it.

Not for pain, we use it for healing and relax. Especially women (of course me too!) use them for leg fatigue (.mov video). After taking bath, cold and good smell patch is very comfortable for bloated legs. Even a office, we may use for small one for neck. If you like it, I heard they started it to export it to the US. Please check drug store.

Anyway when you have a light ankle sprain, you may try instant handmade patch by yourself. Knead flour and vinegar together, it should be ear lobe like consistency. Spread it our into 1/3 inch on the part. Then covered it with saran wrap or wet rag and hold it more with cotton gauze or something. In this way, curiously the paste will be dried in only inflammation part. You can try as much as you like it, usually in next day the light sprain will be better.