Couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the day after meeting Eri Otoguro (乙黒えり). ^^. I was pretty much on cloud 9.

I’ve been a quiet fan ever since I saw her in the Onechanbara (お姉チャンバラ) movie.

For a time, I had this Onechanbara poster as my iPhone wallpaper. ^^.

Although Eri was born in Bangkok, she grew up in the Kanagawa back in Japan. Wikipedia says she’s half Thai, English and Japanese. I didn’t get to ask her about her background, but I guess Danny did?

You can follow Eri at her blog.

Eri, Mai, Danny and I had lunch at Daikanyama’s Sign cafe. It’s right outside the station. Feel free to stop by and sit at our table. ^^.

Mai is a cultural attache, promoter, event producer and english teacher. But even more, she’s Tokyo’s Party Girl!

You can keep up with her via her party reports and blog. She even DJs!

Mai and Eri are the best of girlfriends who had a fateful meeting… pretty much like how Danny and I first met.

It’s amazing how people meet. You have any fateful encounters of your own?

Eri made her debut appearance in 2001 in a Hong Kong movie called “The Stewardess”. Have you seen it? Since then, besides onechanbara, she’s been in commercials and other films including Shaolin Shojo (少林少女).

And not forgetting being in this one happy group!

I’m looking forward to a little project which we might be starting together.

All fingers and toes crossed. ^^.

Made 2 new friends today.

I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship. ^^.

Eri’s trilingual like me. She speaks Japanese, English and Mandarin.

Was told that she’s going to Taiwan to further her acting career. Taiwan is so lucky… Please treat her well. ^^.

Meanwhile, I’m going to go watch Onechanbara again!

It’s been too long since I last wrote a post about ramen. Doesn’t mean I haven’t had any though.

Met a good buddy of mine over the weekend and decided to try out the new Taisyouken (大勝軒) shop near Keio University.

The shop is at Hiyoshi Station right opposite Keio University’s Hiyoshi Campus. Any one planning to further your studies in Japan? The Graduate School of Science and Technology do offer international courses for graduate studies.

Very compact inside. This place used to be a tonkatsu restaurant which I occasionally frequent. Now it’s a ramen place.

The standard “chinese noodle” (中華麺) goes for ¥800. And for ¥800, the serving is humongous!

I had the “chinese noodles with vegetables” (野菜盛り中華麺). A hearty ¥850 meal. I had doubts about finishing the entire bowl of ramen. But I sticked with the “jiro strategy”. A painful lesson learnt from a visit to the Jiro Ramen main shop.

If you have a big bowl of ramen, attack the noodles first. Forget everything else and attack the noodles first. Once the noodles are in, it’s smooth sailing from there on.

When we were done, we was so stuffed that we decided to skip beer and go straight to cocktails for after-dinner drinks.

大勝軒 is famous for its tsukemen (つけ麺). That will be on my table the next time around.

I was undecided at first, between the Canon G11 and this Ricoh GR Digital III.

Both are excellent cameras, but when I asked myself,

“Which camera would I have more fun with?”

The answer was pretty obvious.

I’ve been a Ricoh fan ever since I bought the R8 almost 3 years ago.

But now I’ve gone hardcore. The GR has a cult following in Japan and I’m now an initiate in the cult of GR. (As if being in the cult of Apple wasn’t enough.)

I’m not going to talk specs and profess of what a technically impossible marvel the camera is or is not. Instead, what I’m going to talk about is how much fun I’ve been having with this camera.

First off, I really like how it feels in my hand.

Although it’s pocketable, I like to hold it. Holding it isn’t such a bad thing too.

A camera in your hand is worth 2 in your pockets. ^^.

I’m not clumsy, so the odds of me dropping (?!?) aren’t very high – haven’t dropped it once… yet.

I do have a modified shoulder strap. I don’t like shoulder straps that takes forever to remove and to put back on.

So I went to Tokyu Hands and looked for some hook-clips. What are there called? I even had a hard time describing it to the store clerk. When he eventually found what I was looking for, I asked him and he said “plastic clip”.

I was looking for something smaller. But these were the smallest I could find.

Do you have a strap on your camera?

I like how the controls are organized on the GR. If you’re in manual, adjusting aperture or shutter speed is just a turn of the dial. Really easy to play around in the respective priority modes. Loosely translates to more room to experiment.

In my opinion, programmed mode is sufficient for most shots. Let the camera churn out the optimum parameters while you just adjust exposure.

The F1.9 28mm prime lens is a thing of beauty. It’s really fast!

Thanks to the wide aperture, this camera works wonders in low light.

It’s a prime lens, so there’s no optical zoom.

If you’re interested in the differences between a prime and a zoom lens, here is a good read. Here is another!

Prime lens are known to teach you how to frame your shots. Because you can’t zoom, you’re made to move closer to or further away from your subject.

From my experience, this is not always a bad thing. Depending on what you’re shooting, moving the camera around will change the angle from which the shot will be taken. This change in angle will show you things that standing still and zooming in/out doesn’t.

If you own a slr or dslr, you simply can’t do without a prime lens. It’s so much fun to shoot with.

Being able to shoot 1cm away from the subject in macro mode is just amazing.

Furthermore, prior to this camera, I never thought that shooting in black and white was so much fun!

There are so much more features on the GR that I’ve yet to explore and experiment with.

It will take time, but I think this is the beginning of a long affair. ^^.

Fun might be subjective – you might not agree with what I see as fun.

But don’t you think camera reviews should included an afterword that talks about whether the camera is fun to use?

Falling in love with this camera was something that I did not expect.

Visited a good friend of mine in the morning to see his newborn baby girl. She’s so cute! I volunteered my babysitting services – pretty sure I can do everything except breastfeed and clean shit up. Somehow, I never picked up those 2 skills. ^^.

Isn’t she cute?!

子供欲しいね。

Love this isotonic drink. I drank my fill when I was in Malaysia for the lunar new year.

Drink 100 plus and all your grades will be 100 plus! ^^.

A pity they don’t sell this in Japan…

Took this photo with my Ricoh GR Digital III. Been shooting alot of black and white photos ever since this camera fell into my hands. ^^.

We all need a little junk food every now and then. Are burgers still considered junk food? There are still fast.

The hawaiian burger – Just 1 of 4 in the Big America promotion.

Wrapping looks pretty good.

But why don’t they ever look like they do in the advertisements?!

Tasted yummy though.

Ever wondered how part-time hourly rates go in Japan?

McDonalds pays anywhere from ¥800 (high schoolers) to ¥1065 depending on which timeshift you take. Includes 30% meal discount.

Mos Burger pays pretty much the same as McD. But high schoolers start off a little better here. They also cover transportation costs.

Japanese izakaya rates are slightly better, starting off at ¥950 per hour. But in exchange, you don’t have much choice in terms of hours.

If you want to manage an izakaya, monthly rates are ¥241,000.

Yoshinoya seem to have the better of hourly rates. After all, everyone loves a good bowl of gyudon.

How are part-time rates where you live?

Most foreigners I know living in Tokyo are extremely grateful for the low crime rate. I know I am.

The little things, like leaving your belongings on the table while you go order at the counter, leaving your handphone on the table while you eat etc., are very common occurrences. Anywhere else, I’m pretty sure things left out of sight will just simply disappear into the great unknown. Never to be seen again.

Although it really is safe and comfortable living here, I’m always vigilant – lest I start taking things for granted.

Saw this outside the Omotesando Koban (Police Box). Missing persons, arson, murder, extremists etc. I do feel pain reading some of these posters…

Thought I’ll help spread the word.

Why can’t we all just get along?

Just great. New spam. Imagine my surprise getting an email from UPS when I didn’t send anything their way. I did pause for like 2 seconds to think if I did – side effects of food induced drowsiness.

I was curious. What’s in that zip archive? Something NSFW would definitely help in curing my after lunch sleepiness.

So I clicked and Snow Leopard unzipped.

Alas, it was a .exe file. Off to the trash with you. Good thing those don’t work on a Mac.

Window friends beware. UPS spam is in town.

Our very own stormtrooper was having a radio interview at TBS. Danny was flying lead and I was his wingman.

After AT-ATs were outlawed, stormtroopers everywhere got their very own set of wheels. Even Darth Vader too!

But in Tokyo, the metro is the stormtrooper’s preferred mode of transportation.

We all have to get to where we need to be somehow or rather.

Always a big hit with the kids. ^^.

I sat in during the interview.

The pretty lady next to Danny is Airi Yamada – a famous announcer from TBS. She’s a familiar face on Japanese TV. I was in the same room!

There was a short break before the next segment.

Danny was made to remove his top as it was making alot of noise in the studio. It was really really quiet. I could hear my eyeballs move. ^^.

The guy in the hat is Fukuoka Toshihiro from Weekly ASCII, the number 1 weekly PC magazine in Japan.

When will that empty seat be mine? ^^.

This weekly radio show is called 週刊デジタリアン (syukan dejitarian). It’s on TBS Radio every Saturday night 2430-2500.

Being in the studio was just surreal.

How many characters do you recognize in that picture?

TBS is located at akasaka Sacas, 赤坂サカス. Would love to go back and just spend a weekend afternoon there sometime soon.

That’s a huge helipad! It is a helipad isn’t it?

Couldn’t help but admire the design of the HSBC building.

Have you ever been on a radio show? Even if it’s just dedicating a song to someone. I’ve never had that luxury… Somehow, my calls are always met with the engaged tone.