Working and Consuming, Tokyo

This weekend my dad made a stopover in Tokyo for two days. Timing was great, because this week is the world famous cherry blossom season here. The cherry blossom season comes with a typical Japanese tradition: get drunk and eat under the pink flowers.

I had to confess to my dad that that’s basically what we do here in Tokyo, if we’re not working, we drink and eat, there’s not much more to do here.

Ofcourse I try to fill up all that little non-working time with Japanese learning and other cultural activities. But here in Edo nowadays, consuming is pretty much equal to culture, isn’t it?

My dad was – like any other ‘Temporary Visitor’ – amazed by all the capital spend on shopping and dining facilities and the Japanese’s complete inability to speak English. Of course this gave me the opportunity to impress him with my ‘two beers please’ Japanese!

After an awesome weekend and talking a good amount of Dutch again this weekend I celebrated my Dutch pride by cooking a traditional Dutch dish called Hutspot, here’s my recipe on OpenSourceFood

Update: Haha, by coincidence I stumpled upon these two blogs about living in Japan and thus about food/drinking: yongfook.com and gajintonic. Quote of the latter:

Japan is a pisshead’s paradise! It’s a land of happy drunks, relaxed alcohol laws, and hilarious novelty bars which are open all night. arrived in Japan expecting a spiritually-enriching cultural experience. Five years later, all I have is a truckload of dodgy drinking stories…