Blog - 31 - The ice age

31 - The ice age

Yesterday I turned 31! The title refers to Baskin Robbins ice cream, which is called "31" in Japan because of the logo. Since I love ice cream I will make sure it's a year with lots of it! I just learned that McDonald's next McFlurry is going to be mint chocolate (starts on Thursday), I'll make use of that!

I had a very nice birthday, so let me recount some of it.

First of all at midnight I received a very nice black forest cake, my favorite! I then opened a big box received from my parents and found a lot of chocolate and other nice treats and gifts.

In the morning we woke up just a little early to go to Tsukiji, Tokyo's fish market, where we waited about an hour and a half at popular counter sushi restaurant Sushi Dai (寿司大). We finally got in just at a good time for lunch and I was treated to a 11-piece course, all very fresh straight from the port!

Then we walked a little bit to Bar Sisi located nearby. Street artist ESOW had an exhibition there a little while ago but when we had tried to go it was closed. This time there was no exhibition but we got to talk with the master who let us browse past exhibition flyers. He also gave us two painted wooden blocks by SKEM, a member of ESOW's RDK crew.

Then we walked a bit more towards Ginza. Kabuki-za was currently closed (the next play begins on August 8) and there was some sort of repair work being done.

We considered going to see a movie, and by chance we passed by a theater that happened to have a screening of Yamagata Scream starting 10 minutes later. The movie had just started that day, and like every 1st day of the month entrance was only ¥1000. The movie is directed by wacky actor Takenaka Naoto and also features Shinohara Tomoe in a sub-role. It's a horror-ish comedy, more comedy than horror (-20% horror 120% comedy, says the poster), about a small village being hit by a curse from 800 years ago and its people all turning into zombies. :)

After the film I got some Blue Seal pineapple soft ice cream at the Okinawa antenna shop (a shop that specializes in goods from a specific area, usually unavailable otherwise, Tokyo and especially the Ginza area has many of these).

We also went to Bic Camera where I picked up my present from my in-laws, "Punch Out!!" for Wii! I feel very nostalgic for this game of which I played the Nintendo version a lot back in the day.

Then we headed down to Shibuya, where we checked out an exhibition by street artist DISKAH at Vulture Journal Standard. The artist was there and seemed like a friendly guy. On display was a large canvas with faces and names of his graffiti friends, among many of his other artwork.

It was now dinner time and we went to have some pizza at Pizzeria al forno.

Back home I had some remains of cake, and played Punch Out quite a bit too. It's a great remake, with incredibly better graphics but also plenty of characters from the old game. Playing with the Wiimote and nunchaku sure takes a bit more energy than just hitting buttons. :) Lots of fun to come!

A great birthday! I'm really glad it fell right on a weekend!

Larger sizes and more photos at Flickr

Posted on August 2, 2009 at 23:45 | Tweet |

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