Yokohama The Third (or Fourth, I Forget) Day!

So today has been a mega doss day.  I ran out of money, so ended up using today to look for jobs and whatnot.  I planned on doing this yesterday, but I got an invitation to go to a CONVEYOR SUSHI RESTAURANT.  This is an invitation I couldn't refuse.

So we spend a full two hours in the restaurant eating the conveyor sushi.  I'll upload the pictures later, and the video I took.  It really is a conveyor belt with plates of sushi on it.  I'm already thinking of ways I could adapt the conveyor system to help with other things.  Maybe a conveyor beer system for long bars.  Place an order on the belt, the beer is poured and then sent back down the conveyor to the customer.  What a brilliant idea.

So after that we ended up just milling around, playing the taiko drum game (which I love so much I've not taken any photographs of it because I'm too busy playing it) and generally checking out the city.

We watched a man playing a guitar hero style dj game with expert precision; he had obviously practiced long and hard to perfect his skills.  The thing is, he had a wedding ring on...  He was quite young, so presumably newly married, but we speculated that with the amount of time he must have spent playing this game, he won't be married for much longer.  It's also interesting to note the demographic of video game players here, in that everyone plays games.  Old grandmas use mobile phones while listening to their ipod, holding a ds on standby, waiting to carry on playing something when they finish their phonecall.  It's amazing!

The work ethic here also seems to have lead to a 'play' ethic as well.  A large number of people here are unbelievably good at the games, presumably because they've practiced for so long.  This means they have to use their spare time, which is in precious short supply, to play these games until they can do them blindfolded.  It doesn't seem a particularly fun way of 'playing,' but it's kind of Japanese.

The trains here stop around midnight too, I haven't been caught out yet but I'm sure it's going to happen sooner or later.

The trick then is to hit a mangakisa I think...  Maybe I'll stay in one just so I can take pictures and put them on here...

Ok so these are squid!  They're swimming around trying to escape.  They're going to be eaten.  Yummy!

(They're actually quite tasty)


But the fresh ones like these guys here, are really expensive.  To pick your own swimming dinner is a status symbol I think.

So these guys looked awfully like some kind of grouper to me, with the always depressed looking downturned mouth.  Poor guys.  I want to say it's not so bad, cheer up!  But they're about to be eaten so... Yeah it is that bad.  Poor guys...

And finally, octopus.  I don't really like these guys raw, or sushified, but they're really good in takoyaki.

Yum yum.

This guy didn't look very happy though.  Octopi are supposed to be quite intelligent, maybe he knew what was about to happen.

So we enter the conveyor belt sushi restaurant!  This place is entirely unrelated to the fish above, we just happened upon those in our journey to the sushi place :)

So this is, apparently, quite a big conveyor sushi purveyor.  I can see why this might be so, because if I spotted something but was too slow to pick it up, it took about five minutes to come back around!  Worse than the airport!  Essentially the chefs make sushi that's running low, but they also cater for individual orders too.  now that's what I call service.

Ok so this is barracuda!

The portions of fish here are actually more reasonable than I was expecting.  The seaweed rolled sushi is much smaller, and much more delicate looking; altogether more pansy in my eyes though.  Full on, no holds barred raw fish on a sliver of rice is where it's at.  Having never tried it before, I was pleasantly surprised.  I don't think I could eat it every day, but as a healthy treat, versus pizza for example, definitely a winner in my eyes.

Ok so this particular dish is the fry of...  I forget what.  But this freaked my colleague out, she said the fish were, 'looking at her,' when she was eating them...  Oh dear...

I thought they were quite nice though.  They weren't brilliant like tuna or shrimp, but they were bad like barracuda.

ma-ma

Each colour represents a price.  White is the cheapskate one, right at the bottom there.  Pink is third leaste expensive, orange second least, blue is middle of the road.

What you can't see here is that I tried some mega expensive fatty tuna sushi, just to see what it's like.

Apparently the fattiest bits of the fish are the tastiest, but I preferred the non-fatty tuna.  I don't know why...  I obviously don't have the sushi tastebuds.

Ok so the tall signs on the actual conveyor tell the customer what fish is coming past them.

I spent ages learning the japanese names for all the fish, and my buddy painstakingly researched the name on her phone and translator.  Now I've forgotten them.  Worst.  Student.  Ever.

Ok so this amazing invention is the Japanese version of that coin game, where you put coins in a machine, it fired them onto a ledge with hundreds of other coins, and if you get lucky it forces some other coins off the edge.

Of course this is Japan, so you also sometimes get balls, which you then fire into the machine, it goes around that big long track going round loop-de-loops and all kinds of other flashy showy things, then it falls into a slot, either firing a number of free coins onto the  ledge, or going down a slot that gives nothing.  Amazingly over complicated.

Ok so here you can see the coin tray more clearly.  It is actually an incredibly simple game, but it's dressed up in such a fancy way that it took us ten minutes to figure out how to put coins in, let alone what anything else did!

Games like this are scary...

Now we enter, the twilight zone.

Most arcades, like everything else here, are divided into floors.  (Everything is vertically orientated!)

The lower floors are for children and girls, with cute arcade games (and my personal favourite drum game) and the upper floors are for the hardcore no hopers, who don't like being married or spending time at home.

So I include this picture to illustrate my point.  The guys in the ez-boy recliner chairs, are they playing a game?  It has horses on the screen so maybe they're piloting their own horse in a derby?  No.  They're betting on virtual horse races...

So half-life 2 is a pc game...  Why is it in an arcade?

Any way to make money I guess...


I only include this because I didn't take many pictures on this day...






Ok so now I'm going to include a link to you for my youtube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/user/NotAzebu

I've put some more videos up, mainly of the crazy Japanese affinity for playing games.

They have one game where you slam a number of buttons, at speeds that make my eyes glaze over, in order to strike a tune or melody.  The game in my videos is really popular here, and can be seen in practically any arcade.  The surprising thing is that the women here play games too.  They're not as good as the men, but they're an absolute tonne better than me.

I've also included a lemmings/lego hybrid game that I think it fascinating.  A group of girls were playing, and you essentially have to make the group of lemmings pick up a number of different objects on the screen, by layering lego blocks in certain ways.  The combination of the tactile element with the video game portion is really interesting, and something I've never seen done before.  I really wanted to have a go, but seeing as it was only girls playing I thought even that would be stretching my 'oh he's only a foreigner,' license a little too far...