A wry look at Wall Street, told in the voice of a outsider who has a much bigger problem than mere money to deal with. The world of investment banking may be even more dodgy than we thought. Now they tell me.
Monthly Archives: January 2003
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Gosford Park
A rollicking English country estate whodunit. Great fun. Stars more famous actors than you could poke a cloak and dagger at.
Amrita — Banana Yoshimoto
The story of an extraordinary few months in the life of an unusual family in Tokyo. The narrator is engagingly curious, with a tendency to wax philosophical; the plot starts off conventionally but then comes over all mystical. Quite fun to read.
Hakone — near Mount Fuji
Stayed in a ryokan with an onsen (spa), fabulous food and, marvellously, good heating. And the view of Mount Fuji from the aerial cable car was stunning – no fog, no obscuring cloud, just a magnificent white mountain.
Sasebo
We spent the new year in Sasebo, a town outside of Nagasaki. We stayed there with Joanne’s host family from when she was an exchange student here. That was fun, though it severely tested my rudimentary Japanese language skills. I have been learning the Japanese equivalent of BBC English, but Sasebo folks speak some kind of dialect. (It reminded me of when I first moved to Scotland.)
Karaoke stripper
A lot of karaoke machines display a “Calories” rating after each song to show how well you sang the somg. Some are a bit more fun.
One night in Sasebo, our hosts took us to a bar where the karaoke machine had a different way of rating your singing: After each song, the screen would be covered with a pattern and a percentage: “0%”. Then the percentage would count up to whatever your rating was, and the background would dissolve piece-by-piece, slowly revealing a naked woman. If you scored 70%, the woman would still be fairly well-covered.
Fugu
At the same restaurant in Sasebo where we ate live fish, we were treated to some fugu, the famous blowfish that is supposedly fatal if incorrectly prepared. It was good, with an exquisite texture, and there were no ill effects (except to the poor fish).
Eating live fish
We were taken to a very nice restaurant during the new year. Among the many delicacies we had were a fish that had been freshly filleted and turned into sushi. The rest of the fish was artfully arranged on the serving plate. It was still twitching. On the next plate was a similarly spasmodic squid. Both were delicious.
New Year in Sasebo
Japanese new year in Sasebo (Nagasaki prefecture). Sake, sashimi, rice cakes, temples, cats, snow.