Capsela: New Drink

All the good stuff comes while shopping. Today I discovered this:

Capsela! 1,000 mg of Vitamin C, a little Vitamin B1, a little B6, a little more Vitamin D and a little-more-than-that of Vitamin E. Sixty one calories in all. Totally forgot the price.

J loves strange drinks. It's kind of his thing. So I hit the payload here. Those little ball looking things are just that, little ball looking things. The incredible part is that they are floating at perfect neutral buoyancy! They aren't all floating to the top or sinking to the bottom, each one is suspended almost as if frozen in candle wax. But it isn't candle wax, or gelatin, it's a drink -- not exactly like water, it had a thin syrupy consistency. I don't know much about chemistry but I remember when I used to scuba dive and we had to attain neutral buoyancy and it was no easy feat. I would imagine training those tiny spheres to hover at various levels of juice altitude is a tad laborious as well.

Here's J posing.

Here's his expression after his first taste. I can attest, it was sour! Deliciously lemony. The little capsule-like things actually didn't have much taste. As well, they were soft, gelatiny even.

We tried to see if the yellow ones tasted different than the white ones but our tests were inconclusive. Or maybe the drink itself was just too damned sour. And by 'too damned sour' I mean really good sour, cuz I like sour.

Here's the artistic shot.

And what is up with all the panda bears sitting on capsules on that homepage (link) up there?

Dolls...again

It's not that I don't want to let this doll thing go...or maybe it is. Maybe I'm just being terribly lazy because I only had a few hours sleep. Or possibly I just want to bother Jean. He he he.

Yesterday I spent ten hours with a group of interpreters driving (and walking, lots of walking) around the city. It was a pretty amazing day. I met a famous comedian (well, kind of, he just went screaming past me and I took a picture of his back). I got to go into a shrine -- a section that normal people are never allowed to enter. I saw a wall covered in 800-year old blood and viewed katanas that were actually used to behead people (!!). Not only that but I climbed down 1,159 stone steps and ate freshly picked strawberries.

At some point during the day we visited an exhibition of ancient hina dolls. So I just thought I'd post some pics. They're pretty rotten quality. Unfortunately.

It was funny. When everyone saw the above and below dolls they began to whisper behind their hands about how creepy they were. They actually look sweeter in the photos.


This guy was really old. Yea, I didn't take note of the date.

Here is one of the court musicians. I liked his face.

And these guys too had great expressions.

Okay, just an interesting aside. In Japanese you have several different ways of saying numbers. The number one can be "ichi" or "hitotsu" or even "wan" (one). Because of this it is fairly easy to make words and sentences out of a series of numbers. For example, there's a famous hair restoring product and the last six digits of the phone number are 783-640. Which if you change to sounds becomes "nayami muyo" or "you don't have to worry about it." A famous English school's phone number ends in 32-4929 which can be read (and easily remembered) as "mi ni yoku tsuku", "you'll remember it well" or "you'll learn it well".

So, the ha-ha-ha thing about those 1,159 steps is that you have to climb those in order to pray at the temple. If you change those numbers into sounds again it becomes "ichi ichi gokurosan" or kind of "Thanks for making that long trek!"