Xmas Holidays in Japan, Part 2

To finish up from yesterday’s post, I headed down to 名古屋 Nagoya on a night bus for Xmas day.

The night bus leaves from Tokyo at around 11 PM and arrives to Nagoya around 5 AM. It’s mostly miserable and I only recommend it if you have very little money and have no problems sleeping sitting upright. I have problems sleeping while sitting up, so I made sure to pick up some:

Taurine Eyedrops. Oh yeah!

I visited some friend’s of friends and relatives of theirs and possibly a cat or two during the day, it was pretty uneventful. Although, I did have some fantastic Japanese, home-cooked meal:

That’s some fresh sashimi, some chicken and some other un-named stuff on top of rice. It was even better than I just described it.

I also finally picked up a Japanese Playstation Network Card so I could start playing some downloadable Japanese games on my PSP. While browsing the PSP store (which is absolutely god-awful in any language, they really need to figure out how to categorize things, be able to browse by developer, and have relevant products/search results…) I found this gem:

It’s a 焼肉 Yaki-niku game. Yakiniku is one of the many popular ways to eat in a restaurant where you cook your own food at a table. I know, I know, it sounds silly to most westerners.

In any case, Yakiniku is really tasty and kinda fun. However, as a video game? That means it’s a game centered around cooking food on a grill (without a touch-screen to boot). But I’m thinking, with some slight tweaks (add burgers, steaks, bikini, mud, wrestling, and beer) it would be a hit with western audiences

That evening, I went to Nagoya station to check out the town.

Around Nagoya Station there is a big department store called Takashimaya and it had a pretty impressive light display, such as the first pic at the top…

… and bunch of anime and manga characters dressed up in light stuff too. This is Crayon Shin-chan, one of my favorites.

I finished up the rest of Xmas festivities with the classic tradition of imbibing poisonous liquids to the point of stupidity at an Iazkaya.

And met this crazy dude. I think his name was シンペイ. He was cool. He was also impressed with my Street Fighter 4 abilities, until we had to go sing Karaoke… which lasted until 5AM. So… long night