James Andrews

As I write this blog post, I am on my way back to Boston. I am on Air Canada to Torronto, and then off to Boston MA. This morning before I left my wife’s house I checked in online. In doing so I changed seat locations. Little did I know, I had just won the Airline lottery. The Airline lottery is simple. If you win, it means you get an entire row of seats all to yourself. I am on a 13hr flight to Torronto, and I have 3 seats, and no one sitting in the seat directly in front of me so I don’t have a seat reclined in front of me. Making PC usage much easier. Yay for Japanese holidays, with the Japanese traveling domestically! <3<3<3

I have been in Japan for the last 9 days. It’s been fun. My wife and I did a little sight seeing, and we went shopping with her father at Costco and window shopping at Ikea. I took pictures of a Japanese cemetery, the Rainbow Bridge, and a few other locations. My first time driving a car in Japan. It’s not so hard once you get accustom to driving on the opposite side of the road. The more complex aspect of it is when you are on really narrow streets, or when turning onto a very busy road from a store or restaurant. You really have to have patients, and if you aren’t patient you really have to learn patients. The directions and wiper controls are switched so many times I wanted to signal, I would turn on the wiper blades instead. Oh yeah good times.

Sunday night I went with my wife to a post wedding, wedding party. Kind of on the lines of a Mr. and Mrs. in the US. A friend rents a location, and charges admission, though its usually the party room of a restaurant and instead of paying $5 or $10 it’s more like $60-$100. It pays for the meal that you are all about to eat, drinks, and then a little bit of money goes to the Bride and Groom. The party started off with appetizers being put out in front of everyone, and then soon after a small salad. A toast was made by a friend of the happy couple. Next was a very long speech by the Misses, and then a very long speech from the Mister. Followed by many long speeches by close friends. I think we went through 15 minutes of speeches before we were able to start eating the food that was growing cold on our table. The restaurant should have waited to deliver the food.

Towards the end of the party we played party games. The first was pastry version of russian roulette. There were 6-8 little Japanese pastries. All of them had An-paste (a Japanese sweet) except for one. The one had mustard in it. Everyone’s name gets put in a bag and if they draw your name you get to come up and get a pastry. If yours doesn’t have the mustard then you get to choose a name from the bag to be the next victim. When you get to 3 pastries left then the game changes. A name is chosen and the 2 people closest to them and that person each go up and choose a pastry. This part of the game I will call “Poker Face”. The idea is for each to member to eat their pastry. Then hold a straight face. Including the person who ate the mustard. The Mister and Misses then have to guess who had the mustard. Not sure if anything special happens, but my wife (who had the mustard) won a very cute Santa snow globe for being the victim, and for holding a straight face. I had An-paste, which I don’t care for, but it was better than getting the mustard.

I am a huge fan of Cirque du Soleil. For many years I have tried to see as many shows as possible as they have come through the Boston area. I even got to see La Nouba at Disney World in Florida, which is one of the shows that does not travel around. I have enjoyed them all immensely. Today my wife treated me to ZED. This is one of the non traveling shows and it is hosted at Tokyo Disney.

As with most Cirques ZED starts out with 2 clowns, that wander the amphitheater harrassing members of the audience, and doing silly things. We were in the first row stage left all the way in the corner. The clowns did there thing, and one was even hiding under the stage near us, we knew he was there, there was no surprising us. The show starts off with the 2 clowns opening a very large storybook, then a very dramatic start to the show begins. The way they drew the curtain open. The main character ZED’s entrance which scared the day lights out of me. I thought for sure something had gone wrong, but it hadn’t. With the curtains drawn it revealed a steam punkish kind of set, which was pretty cool.

All the acts were wonderful. Very well performed with only a couple acrobatic mis-steps, but I expect that, they do this every day, sometimes twice, that’s a lot of hard physical work. The last act was not interesting to me, but I do know that it’s physically hard to do.

I found out that Japanese don’t usually give standing ovations. I don’t know why, but I was standing up clapping, and a few other audience members joined Miho and I. The performers really appreciated it. Some came and shook our hands, and gave us high fives. It was very cool to have them interact with us.

If you are in Tokyo, and haven’t seen ZED, it’s a good time, and you should try to go. As usual it was wonderful. I’ll give it 5 of 5 juggling balls.d