Browsing: Hanging out in Taishi-Cho

Brett graciously agreed to let me stay at his house for a few days in August while I was travelling around. We had some great adventures, cooked wacky vegetarian food, and I got my butt kicked in chess sooooo many times... I renamed all these pictures later, so they're out of order. sorry.

Click on a photo to enlarge it.

Aki and Junko, friends of Brett's from school, came by and helped us do some cooking. Here they are spiking a gyoza with tou-ban-jan (REALLY spicy).

Aki, Brett, me, and Junko, playing cards.

Here's the lates fashion from "American Mura" in Osaka city.

Brett in a yukata, and Aki (A different Aki, her name has different kanji too)

Here is the chess board. I am about to beat Brett. Or so I thought ... this turned into one of the many outrageous massacres of my stay in Taishi-cho. I did manage to actually beat him once though!!!

The wierdest store ever. This place is devoted to selling bears with claws and blood, and other such paraphanalia. Very wierd ...

Here's a bunch of the claw bears, and their bloody claws and mouths ... so odd. By the way, this store seems to be aimed towards middle school girls, or at least there were a bunch of really young girls in there when we walked in...

Here's Brett and Aki posing with the bloody claw bear sign outside of the store ...

< < home

Here is a store devoted to selling plastic food models. Most Japanese restaurants have plastic samples of food in their windows. Here's where they buy a lot of it. Sorry you can't really see inside, but that's what's in there!

Here's a Japanese poisonous blowfish, the "Fugu". Just chillin' out in a grocery store, waiting for the unkowing cook to buy it and take it home ...

Ah, behold the glorious Tanuki... here is a tanuki statue we found in Brett's garden (yeah, this lucky bastard lives in a hosue!)

Staring down the business end of a tanuki statue is never advisable. Risky business at best.

I went down to Osaka city with Brett and Aki, and we foudn this super cool moss-covered Buddha in a temple in the middle of an alley in the middle of the city ... very odd.

The Buddha had its own little pavillion and covered area, you put change in the box and threw a few ladel-fuls of water onto it. So cool!

Showered and refreshed, the moss-covered Buddha goes back to sitting around looking buddha-rific for another couple hundred years