tsewei’s blog

Well, not physically.

I’ll be moving on to a new blog. The wacky wombat weblog.

No, I’m neither secretly an animal researcher specialising in wombats, nor can I confirm with you that they are wacky. It’s just an inane blog name that me and au yong came up with.

What it really is: a combined blog for me and him. Sort of like our shared online space, where we’ll continue to rant and write about our lives. Same stuff, but new location.  

But it’s not the end of this blog. tsewei.theuseless.com will still be sticking around. Mainly because he’s too lazy to go through the hassle of migrating all the old stuff we wrote, puh. So all my old jottings and memories will be stored here.

Meanwhile, house warming has begun! So please drop by and pay us a visit! Our new address: http://www.wackywombat.net

I know I’ve only adopted her as my own pet (hehe ) just less than 2 years ago, but I guess I’ve kinda grown attached to Gigi.

I’ll miss how she’ll sniff my toes and jump around me excitedly when I visit. Plus she’s the only dog whom I can share durian with. And no one can ignore the blur look that she always had on her face, tongue lolling out and all. So cute.

RIP in doggie-heaven dear Gigi. We will all miss you.

Yup, I’ve not disappeared with the rest of my Japan postings. I just merely took a break. I can explain.

You see, this blog of mine was about to be merged with this other blog. So I was supposed to stop posting new material while the blog gets migrated. But, things were not to be and there’s still some technical stuff which he will iron out soon. So in the meantime, I’m back here blogging again.

Thus far, my 6-week vacation in Japan has ended. Followed by a 4-day makan-marathon back in KL with family and old pals. And now, school. So begins my final year, 3-day week, and commuting to Boon Lay.

First day of school, and I thought Boon Lay bus interchange disappeared. haha. Ended up 5 mins late for Video 2 class.

It’s kinda strange to be back again, where everyone speaks English (albeit slightly broken) and salespeople in shops are not curteous. But it was refreshing to have taken that long break. Not just because it was great to be able to hang out with Au Yong again like we used to, but also because I usually get sick of Singapore after a while (which I’ve noticed to be one-year cycles) so a change of environment does great for me.

Great to be back, and I will update soon with my backlog of postings.

woohoo! Au Yong applied for leave and it’s approved so we’re headed west to ex-Japan-capitol Kyoto next week!

Will be our first time on the shinkansen (bullet train). I love trains.

Wanted to stay in a traditional ryokan, but turns out they’re pretty expensive in Kyoto. Especially compared to the great package deal we got at JR Tours: Shinkansen + Westin Miyako Hotel + breakfast = 30500yen. w00t! travel in style, baybeee! LOL

So excited. Now gotta plan out travel routes and mark out all the temples + shrines that I wanna see. Ooh, Gion too. geishas! (i hope)

1 piece fresh salmon

1 sachet pasta mushroom cream sauce (for 2)

pepper & parsley for flavour

linguine (too much for 2 person)

1 bottle of red wine

2 sachets of onion consomme soup (just add boiling water)

1 bottle of expired oil (ditched this & substituted with butter)

1 tiny stove

1 bigass cooking pot

1 happy first-time pasta cook (him)

1 pasta-cooking instructor (me)

1 manual dishwasher (me)

2 hungry tummies

1 scrumptious pasta dinner

I never really liked beer. Gassy, bloats me up, bleah. Quite puke-inducing sometimes too, so, definitely bleah.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. For example, Brewerkz. And since my Tokyo visit, Japanese beer. And I’ve just discovered something else — Hoegaarden beer!

Friday night — TGIF (for Au Yong), and a little treasure hunt downtown.

Armed with a not-so-detailed map, we walked up and down the streets of Shinjuku, and finally by a stroke of luck, located our dinner place nestled in a narrow dark alley.

Cafe Hoegaarden. A tiny restaurant serving Belgian food, and of course, Hoegaarden beer!

- the Hoegaarden Grand Cru for him, and the Hoegaarden Le Fruit Defendu for me. Mine’s fruity (yay), his is a little stronger (hic), both excellent stuff. -

Au Yong’s been telling me about this beer ever since his Auckland trip, and after trawling the net for an hour, I decided that this place is worth checking out.

And it was definitely a good choice. Although we had to wait a bit for seats (that tiny place really couldn’t fit more than 20 customers), and we panicked when we *wrongly* realised that the menus could be only in Japanese (turns out there are *some* English labelling.), we were soon sipping nice strong ale, and feasting on yummylicious food.

I must have eaten like ten mussels. (We managed to translate “mussles” on his handphone and picked out the correct item to order kihkihkih..) And they’re fat, juicy, succulent and fresh. Nothing like the tiny anoroxic ones I get back home. And this comes with a healthy serving of carrots, celery, and onion. *slurp* Yummy with the beer too.

And now, it’s time for my little observation on beer:

• beer back home (like Tiger, and Carlsberg.. the import from Thailand types) — icky. refer to: first para of this blog post.
• Japanese beer (like Asahi and Yebisu) — dry and smooth. Goes down really well, and suspiciously all Japanese food taste good with them, so you’d eat and drink and eat and drink and not realise how much you’ve actually drunk (and eaten).
• Hoegaarden — strong, but nice flavour. Can’t drink a lot of it, but it tastes good.

whee~ My tummy loves this country. heheh.

Visited Odaiba last week. It’s an artificial island south of Tokyo, with artificial beach (hmm sounds like Sentosa island haha) and an abundance of weird architechture that was born out of the excesses of the 80s economy (and maybe too high a dosage of sci-fi movies too).

Au Yong was actually there for some tech-geek exhibition for his work purposes blabla zzz zzz. So I tagged along and was left to wander in a fake Venician town for FOUR hours. eecks.

VenusFort, as the name might already suggests, is a shopping place, for women. With of course a special setting — computer-generated skies that changes from dusk till dawn (looks quite real actually), set in stores lined along a fake Venician street, complete with fake cobbles. But it’s kinda cool actually.

I got conned to pay 300yen for an itsy-bitsy piece of strawberry tart at a cafe. Sigh. But it smelt so good it was hard to just walk away from the cafe.
Also, I bought a pair of red shoes!! RED! whee…

Anyway, check out the ferris wheel! It’s huge, and it was the largest in the world, until the London Eye came along and burst their bubble.

The view was fantastic up there. Could see the city skyline all the way, Tokyo Tower and everything. Very very cool. Plus, from the outside, the wheel changes colour. Sorta like the Rainbow Bridge that connects the island to the city.

I like this one. Though the 16-minute ride seemed a little too short. But it was fun. It’s been ages since I’ve been on a ferris wheel.

This time round I took a long ride up north to Ueno station for a glimpse of Old Tokyo.

Unfortunately for me, I missed the sakura by 2 months, so I headed off to the Shinobazu Pond in Ueno Park for the summer view.

It’s a charming little spot, with huge lotus leaves spreading over a large portion of the pond.

It’s almost like a lotus leaf invasion — they’ve taken over the entire place.
But no flowers yet. Later in the summer maybe.

It was very calm on a weekday. No thronging crowds of the cheery blossom season so it’s peaceful. Saw a lot of people walking their itsy-bitsy dogs, or just cycling. Some just hang out by the pond and read.

And it seems the park is a popular spot for homeless people. Most just hang around there and feed the ducks, or sleep.

Apparently you can also row boats at the pond. But I noticed the people were not wearing life jackets! Eecks. Maybe I didn’t see correctly or something. I dunno, the weather may be hot, but dropping into the pond for a swim is not my idea of a great afternoon.

But these fellas are enjoying the water just fine.

Okay now these 2 are drying off at the steps.
They look so cute. Kinda reminds me of the duck that Joey and Chandler had in Friends.
Wait, are these white ducks, or geese?

And completing the picture of a quaint old-styled place, is the little shrine right before the Shinobazu Pond.

There’s a zoo as well, but I wasn’t exactly planning on smelling monkey’s poo for an afternoon so I gave it a miss. There are several museums (on art, history, everything) within Ueno Park, but I’d leave that for another day. It’s not exactly my ability to stretch the afternoon’s hours to fit that much in. But, I did check out the street market nearby, Ameyoko-cho.

With small tiny shops wedged tightly together, Ameyoko reminds me of Petaling Street in KL. You can find all sorts of cheap (and fake) bags, shirts, shoes, belts, etc. There’re also a lot of lil’ shops and stalls that sells vegetables, fruits, seaweed or fresh seafood. I swear they were selling tentacles of a giant octopus that were so huge, they look alien. yeeks.

The cool thing about this street? It’s as if these shops have train tracks as their roofs. The entire street market runs parallel to the train tracks from Ueno station to Okachimachi station. So as I shopped, I could hear the trains chugging by every now and then.

Also, I wasted 100yen just for a piece of pineapple! Fruits are expensive here. Will eat fruit at any cheap opportunity. Imagine paying 380yen for one-sixth of a watermelon. And it’s not even seedless! 100yen for any fruit is the cheapest so far, so I dove straight in for one. *slurp*

It all began with this photo.

Au Yong snapped this some time ago cos he thought I would love the bear as it has a large red button and I love buttons. And he was right.

I thought it was the cutest thing, and I named it ‘pnyek’. It’s just a word I made up. Kinda like the sound you get when you press the button on a squeaky toy. Pnyek!

Soon after we discovered that she has a brother character. Dark brown in colour, sans button. Again, not knowing its real name, we called it ‘pnyok’.

Before I came to Tokyo, I made up my mind to hunt down these bears. And lucky for me, I found the soft toy pnyek on the first day that I was here shopping.

And then last Saturday, we bumped into pnyok on the streets of Ikebukuro!!

I’m sure everyone’s thinking, crazy girl, but I really don’t care. heh.
I kinda wish I’m shorter, so I could hug pnyok like the kids. haha.

whee!
Oh yeah, the real name? Rilakkuma.
Too long. Pnyek & pnyok sounds better.

6 weeks is heck a lot of time to be in one city, especially when your darling is in office, and there’s only so much housework you can do. So when I’m not veging in front of the monitor catching up on missed episodes of Gilmore Girls, or busy scrubbing the wooden floor, or sleeping late and missing out on another mild-earthquake, I’m off on my own exploration, one train station at a time.

This is a lil’ late update from last week. First stop of choice: Harajuku.

It’s a quaint lil’ station, with a wooden clock tower like the old days. On one side is the serene tranquility of the Meiji Jingu Shrine, and on the other side is the exciting energy of Omotesando and Takeshita-dori.

My first stop was the Meiji Jingu, and since it’s a weekday, I missed out on the fashion parade that happens on Sundays at the entrance where Japanese teens don weird costumes for fun.
And lucky for me it’s mid-june and the irises are in full bloom in the Iris Garden. Admission 500 yen, complimentary mosquito bites included.

The purple trail goes on forever.

And the flowers are real beauties of their own.

The place is truly scenic. Tree-lined winding lanes, clear pond on the south with big carps and giant tortoises, and clear water flowing out of a well at the north end.

And beyond, is the shrine and its calming presence.

This place was apparently built in memory of the Emperor Meiji, but had to be rebuilt after being destroyed in WWII.

There’s a huge tree in the middle of the ‘courtyard’, where you could write your wishes on a lil’ piece of wood, and hang it around the tree, and the priests or somebody will offer this wishes in some daily ceremony. Pardon the vagueness in details, my brains can’t store much facts.

And of course, one wish will set you back by 500 yen, so I made sure I wrote wishes for everybody on that small piece of wood.

And within the shrine, they have kindly prepared lil’ pamphlets in English on how to pay respects in the shrine. Cleanse your hands with some cool clear water that they’ve prepared at the side (looks like another well to me), and then walk in, offer some coins, clap your hands twice, and bow twice. Or something close to that, as far as I can remember.

What I like most about the Shrine is its serenity. So quiet and peaceful. A great place for a nice long walk. And it is like a world of its own, cocooned away from the hustle-bustle of the city right outside of it.

After leaving the Meiji Jingu, I took a walk along Omotesando, and it’s one crazy shopping place. It’s like Orchard Road, shopping places on both sides on the road. But with stores so exclusive, I think a closer comparison would be Paris’ Champs Elysees, maybe not that grand, but close enough. Name any designer brand, the store’s probably there. So naturally, all I did was stroll on the streets, and sat at a cafe with my juice and cake, and people-watch.

Of course everyone’s very fashionable. And many actually bring their dogs out for a walk, and they’re the cutest smallest dogs I’ve ever seen. So tiny, my cat’s probably bigger. And some are even more fasionable than me with their itty-bitty doggy clothing. hah.

I liked how the Tokyo Union Church is wedged in between LV and Armani. Such unlikely neighbours. And off the main road, are smaller lanes with the funkiest stores and hair saloons.

So there, exploration trip number 1 on my own went well despite my japanese vocabulary that totals up to only ten words. Everyone’s real helpful, maybe cos they all want me to buy their clothes haha. (I saw a Zara dress for only 1590yen!! but no size!! arggh!!!!) But funniest was when some fella tried to approach me on the street for some survey (or something, I can’t understand). He jabbered away in japanese at 140km/h, me catch no one word, so I just waved my hands frantically and say the 2 words that I know best: Gomenasai, wakarimasen! (sorry, I don’t understand), and ran off.

Must be more cool, calm and collected next time. Next time.