Every bike I’ve ever had in my life prior to 2009 has been stolen. From my own backyard, time after time, locked or unlocked. People LOVE to steal bikes. Sometimes it’s because they don’t like you but most of the time bike thieves don’t know or care who they’re stealing from. They need parts or a quick way to get downtown for free. If your bike is nearby and relatively easy to steal, it’s getting swiped. That’s why I think the Brits over in Cambridge (borrowing an idea from Canada) …

I’ve been to prison twice in the past 7 days. It’s not that I’ve been smuggling drugs through Asia on some Brokedown Palace type stuff, I’ve just been hanging out!
Alcatraz
Last weekend, I went to Alcatraz which is a theme bar in Shibuya. The Japanese love theme bars which are pretty eccentric. They range from a ninja bar where the waiters dress as ninjas and do tricks (we’re going soon) to a “Christian” bar where the place is decorated to look like a church. Alcatraz was up there in weirdness and …

Tokyo Lesson #335: Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Sometimes the Japanese really mean what they say.
So anyone who has been to Japan will tell you that everyone here is not so good at translating things into English, especially on signs and menus. I’ve seen English idioms and phrases get butchered on store fronts, signs in stores spelling things totally wrong and menu pages use words that don’t really describe anything at all.
So when we saw a restaurant called Bowels we laughed and thought it was another …

They lied. I checked.

Last weekend, the ladies and I went out to Kamakura and did some sightseeing. The cool thing about that area, which is about an hour away from the city by train, is that it’s easy to get around via bicycle. So we rented a few and rode around to the Big Buddha, Hase Temple and got our first look at Japan’s coastline. I totally forgot we were on an island for a minute there.
Bought our tickets for spring break. A bunch of us are heading out to Thailand in March …

What have I been up to this week? Not much. Regular life stuff, school/sleep/eat. Walk around the city, pop into different shops every now and again.
On Monday, our Japanese teacher Suzuki set us up on a rendez-vous with some advanced students of hers, French guys. They were pretty cool, albeit young (21!). I was hyped at first because I have way better French skills than Japanese. When I got there though, I was kind of quiet with the francais because I didn’t want to sound like an idiot. All was …

Nomi-hodai. Key word for the weekend. Nomi-hodai is the “all you can drink” option offered at many Japanese establishments. We did it two nights in a row and paid for it dearly after day one.

Friday: Went to lame ass Japanese Law class and then headed over to our new favorite restaurant, some Korean BBQ spot. Can’t tell you the name of it because it’s in Japanese, which I cannot read, duh. Anyway, it was our second night in a row going there and the waitress who served us was totally …

Last weekend was our first time really going out to party in Tokyo. True, we’ve been here for a couple of weekends, but we were so jetlagged out the first week there was no way we were making it out. I think we made up for it sufficiently.
Friday: After a lame class on Japan Law, we hooked up with some students and went out for Japanese fast food, basically rice bowls topped with anything from taco meat to curry. It was cheap but it wasn’t yummy. Afterward, we met up …

This deserves to be told. Japanese toilets are a strange breed, folks. The toilet in our apartment is pretty run of the mill, close to an American toilet. Elsewhere, however, you can find one of two toilets: The squat toilet or the electronic toilet.
The squat toilet is basically a porcelain hole in the floor. Your job is to straddle the thing and squat down, sort of like you’re peeing outside, and let ‘er go. There’s a bar you can grab onto if you need it. I haven’t personally used a …

Went out for karaoke earlier in the week with folks from school. We only booked the room for one hour, so as soon as we got in, we got down to business singing songs like “So What,” “Dancing Queen,” “No Scrubs,” and “U Remind Me” which was performed by the next big R&B sensASIAN, Matt Y. Peep game (sorry for the poor lighting. We had the lights dimmed at first):
[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8851381301669500934&hl=en]