What's Up

 So we start with a sign I saw on the way to badminton.  I'm not entirely sure what it's trying to say, nor am I sure what the picture is of.  For reference this was taken outside a hairdressers.

 I've been growing strawberries for a while, and the harvest has really increased towards the end of Summer.  Apparently strawberries are at their best one year after planting, so year two will hopefully be even better.

 I've got 3 different types.  One is a great plant with amazing red flowers, that produces half a malformed strawberry ever 3 months.  One is a monster that creates great big thumb sized things, but once ever month or so.  The last type is what produced the above.  Sometimes they're big, sometimes they're small, sometimes they even look like strawberries - but they're far more productive than the other types I have.

 I don't know about you, but I love playing happily to exhaustion.  Especially when I can do so at the popular spots of the metropolitan area.

There are so many native english speakers in tokyo and they couldn't find a single one to point out how weird this sounds.  Amazing.

(Foreign visitors only)

 I went to watch the sumo this week.  I'm not sure what this sign is trying to say, but I hope Will is okay.

It turns out that I'm not a big fan of sumo.  It's pretty dull, and the slowness isn't helped by the fact that each bout lasts less than 5 seconds with a 10 minute break between.  I'd like to think I'm fairly patient, but good lord a whole lot of nothing happens for a long time.

One weird thing I noticed is that even though I had less than zero interest in proceedings, when the crowd roared the hairs still raised as if I were watching something I cared about.  I found it pretty interesting that this is a human reaction seemingly regardless of situation.

Bonus - Wally of Where's Wally fame is somewhere in this picture.  Can you find him?

 After finding Wally, we found this burger in the local supermarket.

 It was less than a quid, and tasted bad.

 Really, really bad.

 My latest plant growing project is the mighty pineapple.  Pineapples are great because they're the only fruit/vegetable I know of that eat you, as you're eating them.  They also looking incredibly cool when they're growing in your house.

So the search was on for a system that would let me know one.

There are basically two techniques people use to grow them on.  Both start with buying a pineapple.  You rip the top off (or cut it off, making sure to get rid of as much flesh as possible) so you're left with the above.  Take off the bottom few leaves.  And this is where the techniques begin to diverge.  Do you take off a lot, or a few?  In the early stages there aren't many roots which means the plant will be losing a lot more water through evaporation than it will be pulling in through the roots.  I'm not sure how bad this is, but I bought 4(!!!!) pineapples and did a test.  I left a lot of leaves on two, and only a few on two.

The next step is another divider.  Do you leave the bottom of the this bundle of leaves to dry for a day before planting?  I did with this one, but the results were unfavourable, so I didn't with the others.

The last point is whether to plant these stems directly into soil, or start them in water first.  Those initial 4 were split 2 by 2, water/soil.  Unfortunately only one survived.  So I bought a couple more.  So far, of those two, only one is left.

For those interested, what keeps happening is the middle leaves keep rotting from the inside out, so I'm fairly sure that you have to stop water getting into the leaves before they're growing.  One has tons of tiny little roots sprouting and I'm hopeful it'll turn into a plant one day.

The other has a few roots but is much younger than the other so it's still early days.

The plants take 3 or 4 years to mature and develop fruit, and require another plant to fertilise the fruit (which is why I've bought so many). 

In Vietnam we saw loads, and they look like they've been glued onto an entirely unrelated plant by a vandal.  Seriously, check them out on google.

This is my mint plant.  It's growing like mint, which is to say like a weed.  What I didn't know was that the mint flowers are absolutely miniscule and incredibly dainty.  Totally at odds to the plant itself.

I'm including this picture because it made me laugh.  It's an ad call for engineers, but if you make them look like utter idiots why would they join your recruitment company?

Anyway, that's it for now.  I've finished some more exams, but I have some more important ones coming up (nearly finished with it all!) which is why I've not updated in a while.

I'll keep taking pictures of engrish wherever I see it though, so next update hopefully I'll have some more pics.

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It's been a while since I've seen some good old fashioned Japlish when I've been out and about.

I was starting to worry that their robots were coming online, that universal translators had rendered me useless.

Luckily, google has yet to perfect their translation services.

All that trouble

The best part about Japlish is that it's often perfectly understandable, if given a moment.  It's endearing to see just how close the author came to getting it spot on.

Having said that, I don't want to make trouble a lot for whoever designed this thing, but as always, how hard would it have been to check this?

If the Japanese media and old people are to be believed, Japan is swimming in foreigners.  You can't walk ten feet without wading through a sea of the unclean.  So why couldn't the editor for this picture have leaned out of his office window and shouted at any of the passersby?  Odds are that he would have happened upon more foreigners than Japanese, and the chances are that he'd strike upon an english speaker to boot.

Having spoken with a few others it seems Japlish is still rife.  I think my brain is filtering a lot of it out, which is a shame.  I'll have to retrain myself.

Spitting image, down to the mustache

Bonus picture:  I answered an casting call for 'typical Englishman,' and I think they captured my likeness perfectly.  What makes this better is that it's the British Council cynically preying on the local public.  For shame!

(No one tell anyone outside of Europe that this is a hundred years out of date - I'm pretty sure our tourism industry would collapse overnight)

Some Interesting Foodstuffs.

Ok so I'm finally getting round to putting up some of the pictures I took before the storm, randomly around Yokohama.

This first batch are interesting food items I've seen about the place, and with no further ado, here they are!

Ok so at this stage the foodstuffs in this box are still alive.

They just come outside and whack it on the head essentially.

I don't really know what the one swimming around is, but it was tiny; not much of a meal to be had with that guy there.  Maybe a sandwich.

Then again, eating bread here is taking your life into your own hands, so you've got to contend with the bread and the poisonous fish.  I don't really like those odds!

There are assorted shellfish here.  I know it's not a very good picture, but they were being aerated so...

This also presumably means they're alive, or maybe it's to keep them fresh; who knows.

They didn't look particularly delicious though, so only those who really like slimy shellfish should probably eat these things.

Ok at this point I feel I should stop and say:  This was actually outside a chinese restaurant, not Japanese.  I know they eat disgusting things over here in Japan, but china and the chinese have the monopoly on that particular plaudit.  As the saying goes, the chinese will eat anything, and so far this appears to be true.

If the English saying, 'you are what you eat' is also true, this makes an awful lot of chinese people, and those who frequent chinese restaurants here, quite disgusting and rather slimy.

So this is a close-up of the two dimensional fish at the bottom of the box.  They're still alive too.

People in England are always looking to obtain the freshest food possible; yet they baulk at the idea of having a live fish swimming around in front of them.  This is the ultimate freshness, either go for the most fresh produce in everything, or put up with frozen food!  Put up or shut up!

I like this sign because it's a perfect example of Japlish, or Engrish, whichever you'd prefer.

Deep 2 Deep is the shop name, with a random 'import' thrown in for good measure.

It also says 'sweet heart beat,' in the bottom left, and in the middle of the actual heart itself, '...beat...'  Very interesting design going on here, I think you'll agree.  The philosophy seems to be, throw as many English words together as possible.

Ok so I include this basically because I really liked it.  The incessant rain we had during this time also makes it look much nicer in the twilight of whatever hour this was taken.

Most of the 'sculptures,' using the term loosely, that exist here in the street are extremely abstract, and generally fall under the category of, 'we had too much money and too many artists, so we needed to keep them fed.'  There are one or two good ones though, and knowing these kinds of things are entirely subjective I guess it's merely statistics that dictate there should be at least a few I like.  This just happens to be one of the ones I do.

I'll take some photos of a horrendous example at a later date.

This was on the side of a supermarket.

What can I say.

They have *almost* got it right, but not quite.

I want to give the person who penned these lines a hug and a gold star for effort.



Ok so I'll get round to doing the typhoon in  a minute.