Refuge of a Maladjusted Moose

I think I have been up to two things of note since my last update - one was a trip to a restaurant to try out a local delicacy and the other was a trip to Tokyo to erm..... well it was more situational really.

Starting with the easy topic we went to Amanohashidate and had some Crab. It's a pretty famous thing to go eat around here and can be quite expensive as they are kinda tight with the fishing quota's for it. I don't feel like going into detail (as it was a few weeks ago now and I talk about food enough as it is) but I will say this. It was a bit much....

This picture doesn't show it well but essentially we were served grilled crab, crab stew, crab soup, crab custard like savoury dish, crab sashimi (raw crab (actually very nice)), there was also a few other non crab things and well..... I might have missed something. It all started very well with some simple grilled crab and sashimi but then it just got too much. I gave up before the end not so much because I was full but just because I couldn't face any more crab. And yet this kinda meal is a very popular treat here....

I don't really think it works, too much of a good thing, far too much. But it was good and an experience even though it was REALLY expensive.

Oddly the best thing about the short trip to Amanohashidate for crab wasn't the crab but was instead the walk afterwards. We walked across the "stairway to heaven" land bridge bit. It made for a very nice walk and I suspect we will do that again.

More recently (last week) we went to Tokyo as Lok had a conference there. This gave me a chance to wander around and well.... geek out a bit. First day I went to Ginza to see the Sony building again. It was nice.... lots of stuff I couldn't afford, some very thin TVs (OLED for those in the know), many MP3 players, blah. It was good and all but its just a giant Sony advert and they don't really disguise the fact. Also if you look at tech blogs enough there is nothing new to you (or me).

Wandering around Ginza a bit I stumbled across a very odd art museum. It was free, gave me tea, and I think it was trying to support some charity but there wasn't really anyone to explain it to me. What was perhaps the weirdest thing about it was the art. It was lots of pictures of Planets and Solar Systems using lots of colours. It looked very like Computer Generated stuff till you got up close and realised it was painted. This made it somewhat impressive but most of the pieces weren't really of interest to me. I did like the last one I saw but was unable to get a postcard or anything of it.... It kinda had a man (read tiny speck) on a mountain looking over a huge barren landscape with the moon in the sky and stuff. I'm not great at describing this kinda thing so I'll leave it there. But it was odd and a nice little find.

The next day I went to Tokyo National Museum where there was a very good exhibition on Sri Lanka's Buddhist civilisation from 500bc to present. I new nothing about it and left feeling I knew a little. So it was quite good, very bilingual, informative, with lots of pretty things to look at. It was a special exhibit but I'm glad I paid the extra to see it as the rest of the museum was just a collection of Japanese artifacts shown of more as individual art pieces then any kinda informative collaboration.

The second half of the day was spent at Akihabira. In like one gigantic store. For like 2 hours. Hehehehehe. It was filled to the brim with electronics and it was just so very nice to see everything in the one place. It could really make me get back into building computers and such though. Its odd but just having everything in the one place at a reasonable price makes things so much more tempting to buy then having to trawl through endless web stores just to get what you think your looking for. It was also nice because it also contained almost all the kinda items that you'd go to Akihabira for in one place which is much nicer to go around then the district itself. It didn't however contain the kinda manga that make Italians turn pale and stagger out of shops in shock saying "there's just so much.......". Just meeting that Italian was worth the trip.

My final day in Tokyo was a lot less productive. I looked around a couple of districts but never really found anything of interest or what I was looking for. Also got a fair bit of shopping done but don't think I got anything in the end.

On the way back to Yosano we stopped in Kyoto for a short while to see some of the Autumn leaves. This is another popular Japanese past time and shows a real appreciation for Nature's Beauty and for the Seasons in general.

I think that's a nice note to leave it and I'm fed up of typing too.

For more pictures look under the areas I have talked about.