Tsurumai Park

I went to Tsuramai Park today by bike.  Along the way I visited the school but found nobody (was a holiday).  I also stopped at the OSU area to check out the computer stores - again!  Anyways... in total it was about a 20km bike ride.  I took a whole bunch of pics on the way - sadly my camera batteries were very low but the phone pics turned out just fine.

Hehe, this is how a stop sign looks like in Japan.  止まれ (meaning stop) is usually just written on the road but sometimes there is a sign (which looks like a yield sign!).  The kids crossing sign was ok but I wanted to capture the one which has the deformed kids... I saw it just before this one so maybe next time!

Quite often you see these old style homes.  I don't think all of them are temples.  The well pruned trees are always nice to see.

Right in front of the Tsurumai Park is the Nagoya Institute of Technology.

The park is quite large with a few ponds and lots of place to relax.  There was also quite a number of people relaxing.

This building is the Nagoya University Hospital - medical division of the university.

Tropical Island:

This building has a large auditorium that is being used for concerts and such (MM is coming here in November - hopefully I can go!).

Large rose trees.

Fish and turtles were gathering around the bridge.

Some pics of the trip from the park to OSU.

Here is an example of a drink vending machine (this one with Coca Cola items) that sells both cold (blue) and hot (red) cans of stuff.  The hot stuff is mostly coffee...

... although I had to have a hot milk tea! Hehe, probably not the best choice for a hot day while biking but it was good.  Most of the machines you find only have the cold drinks.

Took a few pics of this nice shrine.  I think I already photographed it before :P.

A typical "larger" street.  You can bike on the road but it is probably safer on the sidewalk.  Although there isn't all that much room to pass somebody.  Granted, there are some that are half of that width on some smaller streets.

On the way home, I stopped at the grocery store to pick up some food to make dinner.  First, some packages of strange mushrooms.

Finally some beef.  I marinated it while waiting for the rice cooker (it's slow!) in sake, sesame oil, and soya sauce.  I wanted to add mirin but the mirin I bought at the store turned out to be mirin vinegar (basically rice wine vinegar).  Doh!

Here is the final dish.  Nice stir fried beef, some mushrooms fried with onions, rice, and some salad with sesame seeds that I bought at the store although I wasn't too pleased about it - a bit too sweet kinda tasting.

That's it for now.

Sushi, Pokemon Transformers, and OSU

Hmm.. how to write this complicated multi-topic post while drunk on Sake?  Easy! More sake!
Well, lets start with the sake.  I finally managed to buy a sake at the store.  There are so many varieties that I had not clue what I'm getting.  I noticed they have carton versions of some of them and some are smaller (500ml or even smaller) so you can try in smaller portions.  So I got this one:

 On the back are scales to show you how sweet/dry/whatnot the sake is.  It's kinda like wine.  I'm not an expert in either so I just went for something on the sweet side.  I don't have sake cups so I'm drinking using a rice bowl (yeah!).  I need to get some of those original square wooden boxed for drinking sake.

I didn't have dinner since it was late and I'm tired.  So I just cooked some rice that I'm eating (by itself) with the sake.  Rice here is pretty good if cooked properly!  I'm just getting the hang of it.  A lot of the rice in the school cafeteria is a bit overcooked... I like it a little harder.

When I finally woke up which was rather late and did some laundry and stuff, I went near lunch time to the nearby mall.  The main goal was to get a haircut!  I read about a huge chain of haircut places (on this awesome blog that has tons of Nagoya information) that only do haircuts in 10mins for 1000yen (~$12) which is really cheap for a haircut here.  It's called QB House.  The place is awesome.  The first thing that you see is a light that indicates how busy it is - it was green when I came which means not busy.  Then you go in and buy a ticket at a machine where you insert 1000yen bill and get a ticket.  Then you wait for the next available barber - there were 3 haircutting at the time.  Each station is like an all in one enclosure with a closet to put your coat/bags, all the stuff they need for hair cutting plus a vacuum like tube that sucks your hair pieces out of your hair once they are done.  Since the person didn't speak english, I showed him how long I wanted it - he also asked if around the ears showing me and I said yes.  The haircut is quite nice - basically what I wanted, still long on the top but nice and clean around.  I'm quite happy about it.  To celebrate, I stopped at the conveyer belt sushi place for lunch:

Was quite tasty!  In the mall was also some cars being advertised and of course there was a pikachu car.  Parents with kids were lining up to take photos with a pikachu mascot by the car!

In the afternoon, I went to Sakae to try to rent some music/movies.  I didn't end up renting anything - oh well.  But I did buy a CD I wanted to buy for a while at Tower Records.  Then I went for a walk and ended up at the OSU Market like yesterday - but it was not raining.  Went to some computer stores again to check things out.  The funniest thing I found these huge manga/dvd/game stores that were concentrating on the schoolgirl genre.

When I buy my computer, I'm definitely getting the Kaspersky virus scanner.  You can't refuse it when Acchan is selling it!

Osu Market

Looking for some PC stores, I visited the OSU Market.  This place is a gigantic mass of stores spanning a few streets that are covered by a roof.  The roof definitely helped today as it was raining rather badly.  The total shopping/walking area is around 1.5km.  Here is an interesting interactive map of the place.  I took a few pictures while in there:

 I gotta get one of those lucky cats for my apartment!

 It continued across the street but I went the other way since I didn't feel like going into the rain.

OSU is a good place for buying PC parts (as one of my lab members suggested).  I went there not really knowing where what is so I didn't actually go to every store but I did manage to visit a few computer stores.  They looked rather like typical Canadian computer stores just crammed into smaller spaces.  You could buy whole computer systems or tons of different parts.  Two large chain stores are also in there, called Tsukumo and Goodwill.

I want to buy a PC and so I am looking for what exactly to get.  I think I decided to get a ready made system by Tsukumo since the price is basically the same as buying the parts myself less the headaches.  Plus, I can get it shipped to me which helps since I don't need to carry heavy boxes on trains.  Perhaps Monday (it is a holiday - again!) I will take a bike ride there to see how well that goes.  There are also other chain electronics stores around where I live but their computer parts selection is smaller (I'm not sure about the prices but they might be more expensive too).

There were two things that caught my eye while looking around.  First, were beautiful monitors made by Mitsubishi.  Amazing looking and also with IPS panels!  In Canada it is very difficult to get IPS panels and those that you can get (e.g., Dell's) are expensive.  The one I really like is the Diamondcrysta WIDE RDT232WX-S 23inch screen with a gloss coating.  Granted, the price is about twice of a regular 23inch TN screen but this one is amazing!  I am strongly thinking about buying it (also bringing it back to Canada with me when I go back).  The second thing was a 2 speaker system by ONKYO (GX-70HD) that sounded so good as a demo that I just gotta have it (well... hehe, I did like it).  The price was around $100 which is not too bad for a good sounding computer speaker system with built in subwoofer.  And frankly, a 5+ speaker system is really difficult to set up in a normal home environment so something that has 2 speakers but sounds great would be excellent (plus it's small enough to bring back too :P).

Yesterday I got invited to this evening izakaya gathering - there was a lot of beer and tons of finger-type foods (mostly on sticks).  The food was amazing and both food and drinks were really cheap.  Plus, it was nice to meet some foreigners that lived in Japan for a while now.  We left the restaurant rather late so I caught the 2nd last train home (around midnight).  Trains here stop around midnight so you really have to be careful if you're out in the evening.  For me, it was around 10km to get home so walking would have been out of the question (plus it rained).  On this picture, the blue dish has a very interesting food - basically, squid parts mixed with squid ink or something like that - very interesting taste.

And because I don't post enough food pictures on this blog, here's today's late lunch consisting of some tempura stuff and udon in broth.  Not a whole lot of food, but I really like udon noodles so it was good :).  Plus, the wooden spoon was awesome to use!  This restaurant was in the basement of a building that is opposite the street of the Nagoya station buildings.

I was near the Nagoya train station buildings because I went to the BIC Camera (ビックカメラ) store.

This place was huge!  Several level of electronics and computers.  There was also a bicycle shop with a large selection of accessories so I got a pump (small enough to place on the bike), a bottle holder (since my bike has holes for it) and some keys needed to attach things and tune the bike.  Sadly, I managed to misplace one of the screws on the bottle holder (probably in the store) so we'll see what can be done about it.  Maybe tomorrow when it stops raining, I'll try to attach those things to the bike.

Hmm I gotta say that some of the pics taken with this iPhone are quite decent (at least for this blog!).