Fashion, Fish, and Faux Pas

Dear followers,

I have exciting news for us... Houghton Mifflin has offered to publish our blog so long as we don't infringe on any intellectual property of Julie and Julia! Tentative title: 524 Diseases in 365 Days.

We have been eating lots of crazy, unidentifiable food and meeting lots of people, but mostly we have just been observing the Japanese fashion sense. We have all agreed that this best describes it: Japanese dress like wizards trying to pass for muggles. They are working with all the same raw materials, but somehow manage a much sillier result. I say that with the utmost admiration.

Exhibit A:



















Exhibit B:

















Fish Market

As one of the most highly anticipated events of the trip, the Fish Market did not disappoint. The Fish Market is the largest fish market in the world. Every year, over 1, 500,000,000 (1 trillion, 500 billion) lbs of fish are sold there for a sum of over 6 billion dollars. Having been there, I am not surprised by this figure. It is a endless maze of fish vendors, each one slaughtering their still alive fish in front of you in a more gruesome way. They feed their tunas, which are as big as Nick, into huge table saws like the ones they use on cows. We saw one guy performing an abortion on a littler fish with a coat hanger in the back of his Prius. They floss the pointed end in its tail and out its eye socket until it stops wriggling.

We set our alarm for 4:30 AM in order to make it for the morning tuna auction, but since Rise and Czarna slept through theirs, we had to rush to make the first train. We threw our clothes on in the dark (this must what trendy Japanese do to achieve such oddly combined outfits), and literally sprinted to the subway. We had a number of casualties. The exhilaration of running through the empty streets made us a little over-zealous. We were so busy whooping and waking up the neighborhood, that we failed to remember left foot, then right foot, then left foot again. I don't know how models do it. Czarna twisted his ankle and fell straight on his face, and Casey tripped on a handrail trying to live up to his gymnastic Asian genome. When we got to the subway, we found out that a) there are no homeless in Japan and b) the subway doesn't open til 5. It was eerie having such a traditionally chaotic place all to ourselves. Normally, there are all sorts of people avoiding eye contact with us (the subway in Japan is so different from Argentina. In Argentina, everyone is chatting or ignoring the solicitations of gypsy kids; in Japan, everyone is quaking in their boots because of the tall white people. If only they could understand all the wildly inappropriate things we say about them.) The shyest of Asians would likely spontaenously combust if they viewed the music video we filmed in the deserted subway:















At the tuna auction, the buyers scrutinize the fish like nothing you've seen. They each have little ice picks, and they are permitted to poke and prod a little cross section the buyers have cut. I don't know anything about tuna, but even I could tell that these specimens do not end up in cans of Chicken of The Sea. The auctioneers are extremely animated, and after one spectacular performance, I started applauding uncontrollably. The entire warehouse of buyers and sellers stopped everything they were doing, and stared in awe and confusion. Eventually order was restored, and one buyer thought the whole episode was so funny that he gave Rise and me his sticky pad that he used to write down details about which tuna he wanted to bid on. We will treasure it always.





The auction floor. This was before the shit hit the fan. The one guy is poking a tuna that has piqued his interest.








TUNA AUCTION
















Inappropriate photos:

Cherry Blossoms













Sack or shaft?





















Gross pet store/prison. Inside the cages are the cutest puppies and ferrets you will ever see. We are staying in capsules smaller than these cages in Nagoya.














Karaoke advertisement.



















I LOVE TRANSLATION.


Con amor,
W