Coca Cola plus Vitamin C...

For a while there I was proud of Coke. While Pepsi has spent the last couple years goofing off with vegetable and cocktail flavoured versions of it's most popular drink, Coke kept it simple and didn't try to impress us by doing weird/stupid stuff. Well no more. To be fair they didn't just copy Pepsi's ideas outright, but instead tried a different tactic and seem to be trying to market Coke as a sports drink. First it's the vitamin C, then what's on for next year? A version with amino acids and polyphenols?

Come on Coke! Do you really think anyone's going to replace their morning orange juice for a glass of Coca Cola? As if vitamin C can even survive surrounded by all that acid, fizz and sugar. Do you expect me to believe that by drinking this, my health is going to improve? Please. I drink Coke for the sugar and the caffeine, not for the great health benefits it gives me. I drink Coke when I'm hot and tired and when my body craves sugar and general unhealthiness. In other words I drink Coke when vitamin C is the furthest thing from my mind.

Some health stats? Doing a quick bottle check shows that Coke doesn't even know how much vitamin C is actually in here. The nutrition information reports one bottle containing between 13 and 51 milligrams... Interesting. Not sure what this is supposed to imply, but it doesn't really inspire much confidence. Most likely the vitamin C has a half life of about 2 minutes or something, and if you're lucky, you may get a few milligrams in you before it disappears. If you're hoping to prevent that cold and beef up your bodies immune system, then this is probably the wrong drink.

So how does it do on taste? When I took the first sip, I thought for a second that they had added some citrus flavour, but this wasn't mentioned anywhere on the bottle so I chalked it up to a combo of that weird taste you get from aspartame, (or whatever it is that they put in diet drinks nowadays) plus the addition of said vitamins. Does vitamin C even have a taste? Anyway it's a toss up if adding some orange flavour to Coke would've made this more exciting or not.

To be honest the taste isn't that bad, but I have to give it a thumbs down because overall the whole idea of a softdrink with vitamins is just plain annoying. Next they'll be putting vitamins in cigarettes and the tobacco companies will be trying to convince us they're healthy too. And the saddest thing? There are people out there dumb enough to believe it.

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Cyclo Camping!                                           (Entered Jun. 30, 2008)
Most people automatically assume that to go camping you need access to a car. However in a country like Japan where there are like, a billion or so cars and only about three roads, it can be useful to have an alternate method of transportation. For those of you who don't have access to helicopters, and are tired of the endless traffic jams out to the countryside, I recommend taking your next camping trip on a good road bike.

That's exactly what UK Mike, Jason and I did last weekend. It was a new experience for me, but Mike and Jason are vetrans, having already taken two cyclo camping trips. Check out their reviews if you're interested. (Mike: trip 1, trip 2 -- Jason: trip 1)
You might think that biking out of a city the size of Tokyo would be a logistical nightmare, and you'd probably be right, but we were helped out immensely by the Arakawa Bike Path, which stretches practically uninterrupted from Tokyo Bay to somewhere deep in Saitama. We traveled for almost 80 kilometers in one direction without managing to reach the end! The path itself is amazing actually. Not only is it long, and adjacent to a river, but much of it is wider than most regular 'car' roads in Tokyo.
Here I am on Saturday morning, all fresh and ready to go. Everything I need is on my back and in my nice new saddlebags.

I met up with Mike and Jason about 20 minutes down the Arakawa bike path where I received a free pair of toe clips courtesy of Mike via Jason. Mike recently bought new clipless pedals and shoes, so he gave me his old toe clips which he had previously inherited from Jason. They made a big difference in performance and speed actually. Here's Mike installing them for me.

Then a bit farther down the road we found this guy crossing the path. It's hard to get an idea of his size, but he was about as big as a football. After some some good photo ops., we picked him up and put him in the grass for his own safety. Doesn't look too impressed does he?

I managed to keep up with the guys for about 40 km before my endurance started to flag. Around the 50 km mark I eventually fell behind and had to go at a more lesiurely pace. Here I am deep in the Saitama countryside surrounded by nature and rice fields. The weather was a bit hazy and not too hot. Perfect riding weather maybe?

This structure looks like a bridge, but is actually just a bunch of pipes with arches above them. Not sure what it was for, but it seemed to stretch on forever. Unknown to me at the time, we were only about 5 km away from the campsite. A relief because I was getting pretty tired.

We managed to get the girls to come out and meet us at the designated camping spot, an added bonus! Here they are preparing a feast for us tired men.

And here are us men manning the barbeque, vegetarian on one half, meat on the other.
Mike bought ground beef at the store hoping to make hamburgers but I told him it couldn't be done because you need breadcrumbs, eggs, etc. to hold the meat together. However the girls somehow managed to make them stay using just onions. Way to go girls! They were awesome actually.

After dinner we chilled outside for a while, then headed to a jazz cafe that happened to be near the campsite, about a 20 minute walk. You might wonder what kind of campsite has a jazz cafe nearby... I wondered too. It was a bit weird to find this place out in the middle of nowhere, but the place was fairly packed. We headed back to the campsite around 11pm, set up the tents in the dark, and right on cue, it started pouring rain.

It rained all night non stop. We were prepared for rain but hoped, in vain, that it would hold off until later the next day. Here we are under a small shelter having a subdued breakfast. Our bikes were soaked, and taking down the tents was a messy business indeed. Without much fanfare, we began the long trek home, the girls going one way, us guys the other.

Biking in the rain was fun only for about 30 minutes. Unfortunately for me the ride home was about 4+ hours. I thought I was tired yesterday, but the trip home was really rough. This time my energy was only good for about the first 10 km. The next 50 I was just concentrating on keeping the pedals moving, and the last 10 went by in a haze of pain. My knees, lower back, wrists, feet and my butt were all killing me and there was no longer any comfortable position to ride in. Nevertheless I managed to make it back in one piece.
Now, sitting here writing this, all I can think of is how I can't wait to get out there and do it again!

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Getting Boned...                                          (Entered Jun. 23, 2008)
I always figured that sausages were just ground up hooves, eyeballs and brains, but it turns out that sausages are actually animals. Not sure how I could've been misled for so many years but I was finally shown the truth by none other than Pizza Hut. Yep. If you have a look on their menu you can order sausages with the bones left inside. My buddy Scott and I were curious to see this for ourselves, so, while at his place the other night, we decided to include an order of bone-in sausages with our pizza.
Here's the box with three dead and cooked sausages in it. Still unclear on what the part of the sausage this is though. Are these fingers, or is this the whole animal and the bone is like a spine? I thought I had an idea of what natural selection was, but Darwin has some explaining to do now.

Although I look hungry, inside my head I can't help thinking that eating sausages with the bones left in is pretty gross. Kind of like serving a roast chicken with the head and legs still attached. Why couldn't they have deboned these things before cooking them?

And here's Scott ahh.... enjoying his bone sausage. Not sure what thoughts were running through his head...

I find it fairly ironic that after all the work someone went to get the meat off the bone in the first place, extra time is then spent putting it back on again. It's kind of like skinning a tiger, making a fur coat, then giving it back to him to help him stay warm.

All jokes aside, when you gnaw your sausage down to the bone, you start thinking about the logistics of how the bone ends up in the sausage, and how gross this actually is. Where exactly do these bones come from? Are they clean? And if so, how do they clean them? Do they give them to a bunch of dogs to gnaw for a while or do they dump them in a vat of acid? Do they use the bones from the animals they grind up, or do they outsource the work to some bone specialists? Do I even want to know the answers to these questions?

So what's the final word? Well the sausage itself is nothing special, but with the addition of some random animal bones their ranking drops down to plain old 'gross'.
I've got no problem with fresh bones. When you eat ribs, those bones are seeing the light of day and meeting your teeth for the first time. However it's hard not to get over the fact that with bone-in sausages, the bones you're sucking on are recycled. God only know what they've already been through before ending up in a box at your front door. Next time I want a sausage on a stick, I 'll just eat a pogo.

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Japangrish!                                                 (Entered Jun. 19, 2008)

I sense that this might be a garbage can...

Maybe if it was written four times it would be a little clearer....

And modest too...

Sometimes customers need things spelled out for them....

Is this supposed to help me keep it, or lose it?

Depending on the washroom 'air quality', this air freshener could be very aptly named!

A product name that doesn't exactly inspire confidence...

For those that don't mind if their tea isn't working anymore....

The Caucasian Water was all sold out...

What else would Japanese people drink?

Umm.., so what the hell is this?

Let's name our product by picking random words out of a hat!

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Free Entertainment - Haikyo 2!                 (Entered Jun. 14, 2008)
So it's Saturday night and you have nothing to do. You have no date, there's nothing on TV and you're just sick of all those videogames. Options? Well you can always go on an overnight haikyo adventure! My buddy UK Mike and I did just that the other weekend, making this my third haikyo trip, and his sixth or seventh.
Where to this time? Instead of heading out into the countryside like we usually do, this particular haikyo spot was pretty much right in the city. Negishi racetrack in Yokohama to be exact. A haikyo in the middle of the city presents some tricky problems. For the best chance of success, we decided to do this haikyo in the middle of the night.
Here's a shot of the racetrack building in the daytime. The stands are all that's left. The area where the racetrack used to be is now part of the American base. Apparently it was built sometime in the 1930s, and abandoned after World War II. A nice bit of forgotten history.

We arrived around 11pm and promptly got lost trying to follow our trusty google map. After walking for about 20 minutes, but uncertain if we were on the right road, we backtracked to the station again only to realize that we had been on the correct road the whole time. All part of the haikyo fun though! Passing our first test, we arrived at the racetrack to find that it was surrounded by houses on one side, and a military base on the other with army guys lounging around with a direct view of anybody who felt like climbing the fence. To make things even more interesting, the whole thing was doubly fenced off, and boarded up tightly enough to stop even cockroaches from entering. Around the outer fenced off part, random people kept walking by: joggers, dog walkers, young lovers, etc. It's amazing really how many people walk their dogs at 1:00 in the morning. The odds didn't look great, but by around 2 am things had quieted down enough for us to make a few forays over. A kid could've climbed the first fence, but the second fence... no easy task getting over that let me tell you. Here's a shot of the only possible entry spot. Just to put it in perspective for you, that curved pipe thingy is just under 2 meters tall.

Mike was the first one over the second fence. As for myself, not having Mike's monkey-like climbing skills, I needed Mike to pull me up like a sack of oats. Here's a shot of Mike, looking like some feral animal, attempting his first climb among the creepers and bugs.

Avoiding the direct gaze of the army dudes (although it wasn't army property, so they couldn't really have done anything) we crept along the front and as luck would have it, someone who had been there before us, had broken a section of the wall, and we were in!
The place was huge, black and empty. I'm not someone who believes in ghosts, but I tell you, even with another person and a flashlight, walking around that place was intensely creepy. Doing it alone doesn't even bear thinking about. There was no noise inside at all and the air had a still, dead quality to it. There was nothing alive either, not even insects.

We needed to use our flashes of course, so the pictures ended up looking like they were taken in broad daylight. As you look at them, imagine how you'd feel walking around there in pitch blackness and dead silence.

Not sure what this tub was ever used for.

There were literally hundreds of rooms and doors going everywhere, like a maze. All empty...

Some of the rooms were huge.

I tried to imagine what this place would've been like when it was being used, and full of people. Couldn't picture it though.

Another empty, dead looking room.

We kept climbing and eventually made it out onto the top of one of the three towers and had nice views of the surrounding area.

The sky was starting to lighten, and we figured it wouldn't be good to be seen coming out in the daytime, so we headed back down to make our escape. We realized though that we didn't really know where our starting point was. However by pure chance we stumbled upon a door that had been locked on the outside. Unlocking it we stole out into the pre-dawn light victorious!

Here's a video of our adventure that Mike put together. It may seem a bit lighthearted at times, but I think we made it that way to cover up our nervousness.

After I came back from my first haikyo adventure, I never really thought I'd do another. The thing about haikyoing, once you get over the initial excitement, you realize that pretty much every haikyo is the same. Old, empty, dark rooms with old, dirty furniture lying around. The really fun part I've realized, is the challenge of getting there and getting inside!

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View this collection of antique and contemporary Japanese furniture.

Mike's Blender Info:
Currently: Tokyo, Japan
Born: Ottawa, Canada
Email: mike[at]beddall[dot]net

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	Discgolf with UK Mike and Alex!
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	Mr. Donut vs. Krispy Kreme!
	The Ab Project...
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