Japan through...my eyes?

This post was a long time coming. On Christmas my boyfriend and I spent a night in a ryokan --traditional Japanese style inn-- in Arima (famous for Arima onsen).



But this real purpose of this post is to show off the riveting action shots my iphone took of the performing monkey.



His name was Go-kun.



He can do back flips on stilts.



Jump, Go-kun, jump!



"Thank you for your money."

I could totally turn this into a children's book.

Go-kun and children don't get along so well though. At one point this girl, who looked about five or so, reached out her hands as if to welcome Go-kun into a nice big hug.
Then he almost attacked her. Bad Go-kun.

Last weekend I stumbled upon a small old fashioned candy store in some remote part of Osaka station. They had it all from the dried squid snacks, home made hard candy drops, and gummies in unique shapes to various adult themed candy. At first I perused the store snatching anything that looked strange and unfamiliar to me. Then a young Japanese couple came in. I observed as they pointed to candies saying, "Natsukashii," which means something like nostalgic. I did a second round through the store and grabbed what I could remember them pointing to.



This one actually had me saying, "Natsukashii." Candy cigarettes!!!



And a plastic pipe filled with chocolate paste. It tastes exactly like the inside of those cheap chocolate pies you can get for like 80 cents in the grocery stores back home.

I took photos of the rest, but I'm way to lazy to bother uploading them at this point. Other finds include: a powder you put in water to make it look like beer, penis and boob shaped chocolates, shit shaped gummies, candy that looks like ramen, bomb candy that pops on your tongue, and a little jar of grape flavored frosting complete with tiny wooden spoon to eat it with.

My boyfriend has been going on about the miracle fruit for a couple months now. While on a Namjatown date-o he found the Miracle Fruit Cafe, an opportunity we just couldn't pass up.

After sucking on the fruit, which is really more of a seed, for 3 minutes your tastebuds get confused and mix up sweet with sour. Anything sour becomes sweet. We got a cup of lemon juice and some grapefruit and lemon slices to try it out.


Before: oooo, so sour!!!

After: It's a miracle! Sooo sweet.

He was so excited about this that we hadddd to try the miracle fruit first. In retrospect this was stupid. The only thing there really is to do at Namjatown is eat. With my tastebuds all whack everything tasted funky. I guess you can drink hot water to return to normal, but that so did not work.