March 3rd, 2002. Buckwheat.

It's more than the name of one of the Little Rascals, it's what people use to make soba noodles.

I was supposed to meet M at Motosumiyoshi (a station near where she lives) today after work. But due to some botched communication, we ended up waiting for each other in different places for about 45 minutes. I finally wandered out of the station to give her a call and found her at Circle-K (a convenience store) beside the station, looking at food.

We hit this tiny little soba joint near her place. It was kinda neat, one of the few places in Tokyo that didn't have an automatic door. Inside, it reminded me a lot of Mark's, my aunt and uncle's old restaurant in Hamilton. Probably because of the soy sauce dispensers. Afterward, we went back to her place to watch a tape. It was the second half of The Godfather II. There was a lot of Italian in that movie, and we only had Japanese subtitles. Coupled with the fact that I'd not seen the first half of the movie, it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

During the Italian parts, we stuffed ourselves with junk food that we picked up from the convenience store. I almost puked from all the crap we ate. Here are the pictures (of the night, not of me almost puking).

This place is really close to where M lives. It was really quiet in there, just one old guy sitting in there, reading a news paper. Felt very local.

M's flipping open her little vid cam to show me a movie she made of her cooking class today. They made a fried chicken and roasted banana deal. The bananas were actually pretty good, and the weirdest thing of all is that the instructor was some Chinese dude. I don't remember being able to order fried bananas at Ho-Lee-Chow's. What gives?

My shirt doesn't fit and I hate my tie. Other than that, I like this picture.

I was starving by the time we got to this place, so I wolfed my soba down before M got a chance to take a shot. I'm trying to pose like I'm preparing to eat, but the empty bowl gives it away.

After the meal, we shot over to the convenience store and the 100 yen shop to get something to munch on, while watching the movie. Japan is really a snacker's heaven, you wouldn't believe some of the stuff they have here. And it's cheap too.

Mmmm... 100 yen doughnuts.

What the...?

This is so wrong on so many levels. Doughnuts are not meant to be individually packaged in cello-wrap. They are meant to be greasy and served with bad coffee at 3am, in a tiny shop frequented by truckers, writers and various other nocturnal humans.

M slipped out to go to the washroom and I took the opportunity to snap a shot of the food we brought home. Actually, this is only the half that we couldn't force down.

Saw this guy on the way to work a few days ago. I couldn't photograph him discreetly with my digicam, so I used my phone.

I don't know why he was doing this. He hung on for about 2 stops and then let go, straightened his suit and sat down as if nothing were the matter.

Bumped into some people on my way down to use the computer and struck up a conversation about pond scum. "Pond scum" is the goo floating on the surface of the pond, but doubles as a term we use to refer to nasty people. But we also use "bottom feeder" to describe the same people. So exactly which part of the pond is desirable anyway? I'm sure there's some junk floating around the mid-section of the pond that makes it pretty gross too. It doesn't seem fair that ponds get abused so in our language.

Some one should write a letter.