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.