Day 4 (15/12) - Ishiya Factory, Yakiniku, Susukino (Part 3)
We then left for the Ishiya Shiroi Koibito factory, in part to see if we could get lucky.
The factory was closed till January 22nd (or thereabouts). The tour guide had claimed it wasn't being made anymore, but I'd bought a packet at Chitose and it'd been made a few days before our arrival so production of smaller quantities was evidently still happening.
Guide with sign announcing closure of factory
Sold out at the factory
Manufacturing process
Shiroi Koibito Factory display area
All their chefs
Outside the factory
I've no idea what this was supposed to be. Maybe Baba Yaga's hut.
Their truck
Playground opposite
Shiroi Koibito Factory animatronic show (wth?!)
The tourguide thought I was 30. Wth.
For dinner we had yakiniku, which was good.
Live abalone on hotplate
Kobe beef
For some reason, none of the items we were given were marinated. At the end I experimented with miso soup (too weak), tempura-ish dipping sauce (okay) and dipping soy sauce and pepper (I put too much pepper, but the soy sauce went well).
Geisha are very expensive. You can spend 20,000Y an hour (at a normal nightclub) or 100,000Y for a night for them just to sit with you (they won't sleep with you). But you pay, among other things, for their tight-lippedness. Unfortunately some women are hired by companies to pose as geishas and then perform industrial espionage.
Apparently the reason Jap restaurants all cover their entrances with cloth pleats is to prevent you from looking in to see how popular they are (and by extension how good the food is). When you pop your head in they will have someone shout greetings at you so you'll be obliged to eat there.
Businesses put cups of salt outside their entrances because the word 'salt' also means 'business'.
Christmas is not a public holiday in Japan, yet the Japs are remarkably fond of and enthusiastic about it, with carols blaring, Christmas decorations up and it being used as a theme.
Sumo wrestlers aren't allowed to eat beef.
We then went to Susukino, the
Susukino
"BoA New Sexy Club"
Notice how you can see the bodies, but not the faces.
"http://soap-susukino.com/lemon.ya"
Presumably this is a Soapland.
Acidflask informs me that this reads: "Ready for a challenge?"
McPork - only 100Y. Unfortunately I was feeling full from the Yakiniku and didn't think to try it. DAMN (Minrui: "nice teriyaki sauce.. lol. the patty was quite tender.. unlike the usual mac burgers..."). Another reason to visit in May (Minrui: "huh... u will take 6hrs plane to eat macdonalds??").
Club sign. Acidflask informs me that you view possible selections on a TV monitor and then order them.
Tissue paper advertising a similar club my father got handed
Ski masks, presumably for those planning a robbery.
"21st. Jog. for joyful human stage."
Don't look at me.
"Aoyama Flower Market. Holy Flowery Christmas"
Helluva lotta restaurants.
I popped into a Mister Donut for a small purchase and to use the loo, and found that the toilet arrangements were terribly sexist:
The unisex toilet
The female toilet
There were only 2 toilets in the establishment.
The Honey Old Fashioned donut I had partially made up for the outrage, it being very good, which made me wonder just why Dunkin Donuts is so big, with such good alternatives?!
I saw yet another non-CJK (an ang moh) and my first blonde Jap.
The tour guide said Japs in the north speak a lot faster than in the south because it's colder. Right.
Tips for the tour leader (from Singapore), tour guide (from Japan) and driver were collected, but they defeated the point because they were aggregated and of a specified amount - we couldn't show appreciation for varying levels of service.
We were given a feedback form, which didn't say feedback would be confidential. Hurr hurr.
My parents complained about the tour, but when I asked them for feedback to fill in the forms, they didn't want to give any. As Hurr Hurr commented: "i'm singaporean, i like to bitch in the privacy of friends but i'm not passionate enough about the issue to actually protest."
The food they gave us on the trip was alright, ranging from mediocre to quite good, but generally you can get better Jap food in Singapore (and I'm not talking about places like Inagiku). I'm not sure if this is because they brought us to cheap places, but perhaps the fact that we always got red tea rather than green is a clue to this.
The Singapore guide didn't do much. Actually I'm not sure why you need guides from Singapore - in Greece we did fine with just the local one. They're only useful when the local guide has communication problems with the group, and in our case out local guide was a Singaporean who'd lived in Japan for 10 years.
They kept encouraging us to go for expensive extras (the crab for the first steamboat, which we had to buy separately and 7000Y Kobe Beef at Yakiniku) and snowmobiling (which wasn't even in the itinerary), and were suspicious about it. For example, though the crab was expensive we couldn't pay for it with credit cards, and had to tell them the name of our guide before making payment (payment for the Kobe Beef likewise had to be made in cash). Then we were told not to discuss snowmobiling with other tour groups, ostensibly because their guides might not have taken the effort to bring them for it (but probably because snowmobile commissions were not coordinated, and some groups were brought directly to the Snow Resort where there was also snowmobiling, as well as dog sledding and other interesting activities). Meanwhile the dangers of included activities like snow rafting and snow tubing were emphasised to discourage some of us from going (probably so they would pocket the commission) - tellingly, the snowmobiling, probably more dangerous than the previous 2 activities, was encouraged as being a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Paper crane on the bed
Snowing from hotel window
More snowing