More Beer!

Hello all!

Last weekend, my girlfriend arranged another visit to a brewery! This time it was Asahi! I was pretty excited again, but this time not because of the quality of the beer, but rather the location and the trip towards it.

The route took us on the section from Shibusawa to Shin-Matsuda, one of the most beautiful parts of the Odakyu Odawara line. From the rather straight sections on the Kanto plains, a tunnel takes you to the curves of the Sakawagawa river flow (酒匂川).

Not my video, but it gives a good impression on how it looks from the front.

Anyway, Asahi isn't the best of beers and you can taste it. At first I thought they were using pure ingredients, like with Suntory Premium Malts, but I was wrong. Very wrong. During the tour, the ingredients were explained and although my Japanese isn't very well yet, I managed to understand that cornstarch, potato starch and sugar are added in the brewing process as well. I was disappoint.

Despite the beautiful surroundings of this hyper-modern factory, the great care they take in maintaining the quality level of the beer (I say 'quality level', not 'quality' here!), the taste is still extremely bland and it tastes more like water, rather than beer. It's a shame this is one is the largest beer brewery in Japan (about 40% of the market) and still only produces a quite boring brew. I guess the Japanese taste for beer isn't that refined yet. My only hope for the future of beer now lies on the efforts of the micro and craft breweries.

Cheers!

The Beers! The Trains!

Hello all,

It's been a while already, so I'm dumping all interesting, uninteresting, related and unrelated photos in this entry.

On a more related note, it's almost been a full week already since I posted something, but that's because not much has happened lately. Anyway, I've been eating rice and noodles for quite a while now, which is fine, but I've also eaten some self made badly prepared chicken. It was still pretty raw and now I feel the consequences of it in my belly for a few days already.

Luckily, today I found some relief, but it has really been a few rough days, consuming a lot of energy and it's still not over yet. I guess I have to endure the soup factory in my body a little longer. A can of Coca Cola can do miracles. I think I'll down a bottle of it later -> goes to visit the vending machine on the corner right away.

Anyway, last weekend I visited a good friend of mine who has an astonishing collection of model trains. We met each other a few years ago in Germany and quickly became good friends.

He lives in a big house, but despite his overabundance of model trains, does not sport a layout in any form. Well, rails on the floor don't really count as far as I'm concerned. He approached me in a careful and very Japanese way concerning this problem and I replied with much enthusiasm.

I have quite some experience with building small layouts, but not with projects that he came up with. On his large layout, he wants to see the following train lines:
- Shinkansen line (17 cars);
- Long Distance line (16 cars);
- Commuter line (11 cars);
- Ikegami-style line (3 cars);

All of these lines should meet at a big station within a dense urban landscape and have a reasonable amount of travel distance in several landscapes.

The commuter line should have a smaller station that connects with a local line (my personal wish) in a suburban area and possible have a full A to B operation possible.

I have a few tricks up my sleeve to make it all a bit easier to build, but it will still be a hugely massive undertaking.

Anyway, the day after playing with trains, my girlfriend and I went to the Suntory brewery in Musashino for a tour and free beers. I recommend this tour to any beer lover, since it's very interesting to see a clean Japanese beer brewery in operation and have three (!) beers at their expense.

Afterwards we went to Shimokitazawa to have dinner at a great Yakitori pub. I drank too much expensive, but oh so good, Potato Shochu (Japanese wodka) from the brand Nigori-imo. Probably too hardcore for you kids. Also, we ate too much skewers of delicious delicious chicken intestines and whatnot. It was pretty much a perfect day.

Anyway, I'm feeling a bit better now, after finishing a bottle of Cola, and the weather looks very good! It's sunny and a boosting 12˚C outside. As always, hover over the images for a short description.

Cheers!

Snowy Films

Hello all,

Today, I'm heading over to a friend to do some hardcore nerding, sperging over trains and catching up on them good old times. Anyway, I've been busy making a few videos of the snow and trains lately, so please take a look below for some impressions of Japan during the Kanto snowstorm of 14-01-2013 and the aftermath. Be warned though, there are trains. A lot of 'em.

The first video is a short film from the front view of a Sotetsu 8000 Type train from Mitsukyo to Kibogaoka. There isn't very much to see here, but it displays nicely how harsh the conditions were for the drivers during the storm.

The second video, I made this morning with footage of yesterday. It was still pretty chilly and snow was also abundant. As this was a rare occasion, I decided to film the entire morning and a short way into the afternoon at Machida, as there are little good places to film at here in Sagamiono. The background music is an old tune I made some time ago. I never used it somewhere so far and this seemed a good opportunity to use it anyway.

Enjoy!

Yokohama in the Snow

Hello all,

Yesterday was a snowy day. Pretty damn snowy. I thought I left all the snow behind in Europeland, but alas, to no solace...

In the news, the weather was predicted to be windy and wet, but not snowy. It surprised everybody that there was snow, but startled all because of the sheer amount of it. In the Tokyo area alone fell around 8 centimeters, which is pretty damn much for an area that rarely sees snowfall.

Anyway, yesterday was also the day of the coming of age day (Seijin no Hi) for those turning 20 years old, so most of the girls on the streets were dressed in beautiful Kimono and the guys in smart suits. The weather wasn't playing any parts, so they really had a horrible day regarding the weather. However, the  faces were wearing smiles and at our station, a small festival was organised for them.

At the festival, due to the weather, they were giving away soup, amazake (sweet warm fermented rice soup with alcohol) and wood-ripened saké they received as gifts from the big department store, Isetan and the local railway company, Odakyu.

It was 11:00 in the morning, so our day started out well! We kept on drinking small amounts of alcohol to keep our bodies warm during the day, since we had quite some distance to cover.

The plan was to to go to Yokohama and visit the model train and cup noodle museum in the Minato Mirai area. Ignoring the weather, as good Japanese (hurr hurr hurr), we pulled our plan through and bested the snow with all our might.

At the model train museum I was unfortunately unable to take pictures, but it was a pretty impressive museum I can say. Almost all the models there are hand made by one man during his lifetime, so you could say it's a memorial to his lifetime achievements.

 After the model train museum, the real trouble began, since we had to walk all the way from that place to the cup noodle musuem. It was maybe only eight blocks away from our starting point, but the strong winds of the Minatomirai high-rises and the snow made it a very hard road to take.

However, we somehow managed to make our way to the cup noodle museum, which is more a celebration of an industrial giant, where we treated ourself on -what else- noodles!

The museum was an interesting experience and had a good eye for detail, art, entertainment and food of course. I can recommend this place for any student or ex-student to pay reward to the inventor of the foodstuffs of thinkers and survivors in life.

The amount of noodles we ate wasn't really much in the museum, so we decided to head for downtown Chinatown for a good meal.

I must say, it's totally the opposite of the classy Ginza we visited the day before. Ginza is nice if you like that kind of stuff, but I'm more a down-to-earth guy who likes to get a taste of what the working class eats. I think when you eat like the locals do, you can get to understand them better as well. It's one of those virtues in life maybe.

The meal was cheap and very tasty. I had some Tantan-men soup and dumplings (very traditional combination) and a Highball (whiskey soda). A word on that.

I'm known as a beer drinker, but a Highball really opened up a new perspective for me. I don't fancy straight whiskey that much, but watered down on ice, it really gives it another taste and makes it quite mature in atmosphere. I think I'll stick to this for a while. Just to see how it works out between us two.

With a small wine tasting at the station in China town, I managed to impress the salesman on my 'knowledge' on wine (it had a broad taste). I don't know shit about wine though, but I guess I was right on target here. That concluded the day, which was tiring, but a great day out with my sweet girlfriend.

Tokyo and Ginza

Hello all,

Two days ago my girlfriend and I were invited by the big sister of my girlfriend to go on a 'Tabehodai' or 'all-you-can-eat' experience at a classy Brazilian barbecue restaurant in Chiyoda, Tokyo.

For those familiar with Chiyoda-ku, you know what I'm talking about. For those who don't know: a piece of land costs about ¥2,000,000 per M2, so cup of tea will easily set you back ¥800...

The restaurant was not only a very good place in the sense of style, but also in quality, and foremost, quantity. The meat was excellent and they had all kinds of vegetables that are pretty expensive or unfindable in supermarkets, like several sorts of salads, asperges and stuff like that.

Next to that, the view out of the window was something Japanese would pay for as well, since we had a view over the imperial palace. I didn't bother to take a picture though... The food and conversations took up too much of my attention.

I'm very grateful to her that she treated us to such a meal, but ungrateful to myself, because I overeaten myself for the first time. My body was in pain for an hour, but I managed to walk to Ginza somehow.

Ginza is another classy neighborhood with maybe the highest concentration of expensive venues I've seen so far. Not really my place, but sometimes you just have to indulge the senses in such merits of a commercial and materialistic oriented society. I'll write more on my thoughts on Japanese society later...

Anyway, I've made some pictures to give an impression of downtown Tokyo and Ginza.

That's all for now! The next entry will be on the rare snow of yesterday!

Streetviews (1)

Hello all,

Yesterday I went on a stroll to Machida again to visit Yodobashi Camera and look at some stuff. You know, rice cookers and shit.

I have not much to say for this entry, but the pictures I took with the hover-over descriptions. The route from our house in Sagamiono to Machida is for Japanese standards pretty boring, but very interesting to me, and maybe any foreigner.

Enjoy!