Bonenkai

A few pictures of Tokyo bay by night, that I took during the year-end party with colleagues. If the photos are a bit fuzzy it's because we were on a boat, not because I was drunk (in fact I wasn't). It is always difficult to take pictures at night, but there is a certain charm to that blurriness, or at least I like it.
Anyway, we had a nice evening on this boat. The website is in Japanese, but if you click on the links you can see the menu.

Premium X-mas party (postponed?)

Michael Jackson is coming to Japan. Not for a series of concerts, no (thank God). He is throwing a Christmas party . Some kind of Gospel singing evening which he will attend for five hours, and at the end of which he will enthrall his "guests" with a speech.
For the modest sum of 400.000Yen (2.600Euro!), your Platinum ticket will give you the right to have a seat (that's not for everyone), get a drink, mingle with Michael and take 1 photo together. So exciting.
If you only have 200.000Yen (1300Euro, Gold ticket to spend, you can still shake hands with Michael, but no seat for you.
The poor chaps who can only afford the 50.000Yen (350Euro) Christmas ticket can still observe Michael in the VIP area while they sip their alcohol-free drink.
The man obviously needs money. Japan is usually a perfect place to organize such events and go home with bags full of precious Yen. But this one is *a lot* over the top, even for Japan. Honestly, people...
The latest news actually announce that the evening was postponed. No wonder, really. I think it is rather going to be cancelled, if you ask me. It's not so difficult to picture an empty venue. So sad...

Turlututu

You would think that in a country where talking aloud in the subway is barely tolerated and speaking on your cellphone strictly forbidden, there would be some sort of strict control on what you can do with a speaker-equipped van.
Oddly enough, it is absolutely OK to blast your loudspeakers in the early morning or late evening and drive around the block, repeating the same recorded message or playing the same tune over and over and over again.

It can be anything from "the garbage truck is coming, the garbage truck is coming" to "sweet potatoes, who wants hot sweet potatoes", along with a strange song which I first thought was some kind of religious chant or something.
But the top-annoying one for me is the Yonaki-soba (soup noodles) selling car, that usually comes on Mondays LATE in the evening. In the old days, 150 years ago, it must have looked something like this picture, with the seller playing the shawm(charumera) to announce his arrival.
Nowadays the "melody" is recorded, and it goes like that:
http://www.geocities.jp/numabe_tama/Raamenya.mid (sorry, I couldn't link it properly). Take into account that it takes about 15 minutes for the car to pass, and you can calculate the number of times you will hear that tune.
I wonder who is eating soup noodles at 11 pm anyway...