Robot Restaurant in Tokyo

One of my backpacker mates was flying back through Japan after a trip through Asia, so wanted to catch up again.  Just so happened to be a long weekend.  Since we'd both seen lots of Tokyo, we decided to sample the themed restaurants the city has to offer.

You could go to a ninja restaurant where they do lots of magic and appear out of trapdoors and swap your food without you noticing, or we could go to a pitchblack restaurant where you cant see what you're eating.  We ultimately decided to go to the new Robot Restaurant which cost about 10 billion yen (lol) to build.

It was bloody fantastic.  It was so random.  One minute you'd have an army of girls in bikinis all dancing, the next minute the stage was flooded with robots all fighting and then the next second there was a dinosoar, and then a tank, then an airplane, then some motorbikes, lazers, explosions.  It was absolute chaos for the senses and you wouldn't want it any other way.  The epitome of Japanese entertainment in a nutshell.

I got some photos with my shitty mobile phone camera, but unfortunately pictures and words will never come close to experiencing this in person haha. What a trip!





The waiting room



The seats for the show

Fireworks Festivals

Summer in Japan brings along a tide of various festivals.  Celebrating seemingly anything from the greatness of fire, to the prosperity of the ocean.  Some of these (most of these) festivals come along with fantastic fireworks displays.

I went to the coast near Hamamatsu with my friend and we watched on of these celebrations.  Even the locals can no longer remember why they have this festival, but hey.  Good fireworks!

It was really interesting to see how different firework displays are held in Japan.  Instead of having an 'orchestration' of which fireworks explode, to ultimately end up with a big ass finale.  They let off most of the big ones one at a time, so that everyone can fully appreciate the whole firework on it's own.
During the one-by-one-big-ones, they break into smaller 'orchestrated' displays which are often sponsored by a company or individual.

Sometimes you can have a ramen shop sponsoring a display, or even a rich guy wanting to buy a firework for his anniversary.  They announce it on the speaker and let the crowd enjoy it haha.   Good idea to offset the cost.

While the firework display overall was beautiful, we were a bit unlucky with low cloud cover.  So nearly all the 'big ones' exploded behind clouds lol!  The crowds cry of comedic dismay in unison was very funny!  But I guess in Japan changing schedule isn't so easy due to bad weather so it went on ahead anyways.

Still a fun festival though and look forward to seeing if I can go to more of them.

Visit to Hakone!

Mum came to visit this week.  Was still working but we managed to get away for the weekend.  Went to Hakone up the mountains and saw a very good outdoor art & sculpture museum, some lake, sulfurous & volcanic landscape, ate black eggs, and of course with any trip involving mum, plenty of food!  Also went to Tokyo for a quick sight seeing tour and to see my sister too! よかったです！










































Sulfur interacts with the calcium carbonate in the shell and turns it black.  The egg inside is great though.







Yellow sulfur leaking from the ground.