2 weeks on the trot

One of the things that I find mildly annoying about living in Japan is not being exposed to the media (it can be a blessing too, I suppose). If you want to know what's going on you, have to actively go out and look for something to do. So this means I probably miss out on some good gigs, club nights and the like, because I haven’t heard about them. On Saturday, however, I actually went looking for something to do. I called into my local record shop to look at some flyers. Amongst them was a night called Godfather at a club called four4 in Shizuoka. I knew the club, but hadn’t been as it usually hosts hip-hop nights. From “reading” the flyer. I could make out one phrase – “Larry Levan”. It was the only words written in English. Sounds interesting, I thought, so we mulled it over over a coffee. I convinced Kayo it made sense and we popped into some womens clothes shop to buy tickets. We headed home for a bit of dinner, wine and little rest.

I’ve been on a soup tip recently so here’s my recipe for winter vegetable soup with a twist of miso.
Ingredients

1. some carrots,
   
2. some cabbage,
   
3. an onion,
   
4. a couple of cloves of garlic,
   
5. some mushrooms
   
6. a couple of stock cubes
   
7. salt & pepper
   
8. a couple of spoons of miso paste
   

Instructions

1. Put some water in a pan and heat it up
   
2. Cut up the garlic, carrots, cabbage and onion.
   
3. Add the vegetables, stock cubes and salt and pepper to the water. Bring to the boil, then simmer for an hour or so.
   
4. Add the mushrooms and miso paste and simmer for about 10 more minutes.
   
5. Whack it in a bowl and eat it with some bread and butter.
   

I love it – it’s super easy, super healthy, very warming and absolutely freeking delicious.

Anyway....back to the night. Before we went to the club we popped into a wicked little bar called honey roast peanuts for a couple of drinks. We’ll be going back there for sure – it was wooden, warm and cozy.
Got to the club about midnight, exchanged our tickets for wristbands dumped our coats and got straight on down. It’s a small and simple place – a little bar at one end and then a reasonably sized dance floor at the other end. It’s got 4 sets of speakers in the corners delivering perfect sound and a big mirror ball in the middle. The music was proper deep and dirty house all night long – Awesome. I danced in my own unique way for an hour or so and worked up a bit of a sweat on the ramjammed dancefloor and needed to rest. There’s no chill out area or any seats at all, but because they gave us wristbands we could go out and come back again. So we took advantage and went back to honey roast peanuts for a drink and some nourishment. We got back to the club about 3 and danced for 2 hours solid. It was meant to finish at 5 and at about 4:50 they played an awesome Fela Kuti track that seemed to last forever. Someone came on the mic to wish the DJ a happy birthday as he was 50 last week, a birthday cake (complete with candles) was brought and they announced that they were staying open for an extra hour. I was absolutely knackered by this stage so I reluctantly left the dancefloor and headed outside and we jumped in a taxi home – via the obligatory combini store for an icecream and some hot lemon calpis. No ramen tonight though :-( But I did't really care since it was a truly fantastic night out.

Shizuoka is cool!