Asakusa Samba Carnival Summer 2009

I never quite understood it, but each year during summer, the famous Japanese city of Asakusa, known to tourists as the easiest place to experience Japanese culture in Tokyo, held a samba parade competition, where various groups (probably with Brazilian-Japanese roots) would parade with their best group-dance routines and costumes (or lack of) to impress the judge, and the gazillions of local tourists flooding the streets.

This year, the Asakusa Samba Carnival was held last Saturday, and I got nothing better to fill my boring weekend.

My apartment is just an hour train ride to Asakusa, so I thought, why not go and see some hot Brazilian and Japanese chicks dancing half naked on the streets during bright day light eh?

Here I want to express my utmost gratification to all of the genius Brazilians who created this Samba Culture in the first place and brought it to Japan.

A wonderful Brazilian culture that made it OK for Japanese girls to dress up in thongs and parade it for everyone to see, for free!

And you can take pictures and not get into trouble with the police!

Here's some videos:

Asakusa Samba Carnival Summer 2009 from Taufiq Ali on Vimeo.

Click the SPOILER below for more pictures of cultural exchange fun in Japan!

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Summer Holiday '09 Day 2

The second day of my summer holiday is all about testing the new D90.

I’ve never been so giddy since I last bought my PS3.

The inner otaku/nerd/gadget-mania in me was unleashed!

To test my D90 for the first time, I decided to go to Harajyuku because that place is packed with the most interesting young people (fashion wise) in Tokyo.

> Taking pictures of random people without their permission: Newbie in photography.

It is just a 50 minutes train ride from Hashimoto (city where I live) to Harajyuku, and I arrived at the station in awe; I have forgotten how crazy Harajyuku is.

The place was packed with people, and tourists with their big cameras.

Quickly I realized how hard it is to take photos at such crowded places.

Everything was moving so fast, I can’t really concentrate of using different configuration to check out and compare the different results… I was really overwhelmed by the many functions and manual settings that the D90 offers.

Aperture, ISO, Shutter Speed, White Balance, Composition, Bracketing… I’m lost! It felt too much, and I guess I’m doing this all too fast. I should learn to learn slowly.

I quickly crossed the road from the station to get to Takeshita Road (竹下通り), snapped some photos of the road entrance, and then a heavy pour of rain came, forcing me to get back to the station to find shelter.

And everybody else did the same thing.

The train station is packed full of gothic lolitas, gyarus, hime-keis, homies and huge fat American tourists; all wet and hot.

I can’t stand it any longer, so I decided to go home, after just arrived 15 minutes there LOL.

The train back home felt longer as the bad weather seems to slows down time and I’m a bit blue… but that’s ok because a girl passenger sitting right in front of me on the train wore a shirt so short, I’ve gained little happiness.

You perverts, I can’t take photos! Might get charged with chikan/perversion in public places!

I arrived in Hashimoto, and the Hanabata Matsuri is still going on.

The last time I went, it was during the night, and this time it is during the day, so I take out my D90 and shoot away.

One last thing, did you know that the D90 was the first dSLR that could shoot HD videos?

Although it is a bummer that the D90 will not Auto-Focus when taking videos, the video quality produced was not bad at all.

Here’s a video of a dance performance that I took during the Hashimoto’s Tanabata Matsuri:

Lastly, here's some of the pictures that I took during my first day with my new girlfriend…ok the D90 does not have a vagina but it’s cute anyways.

Festival Ornaments at the Hashimoto Tanabata Festival

The entrace to the famous Takeshite Road in Harajyuku

A broken entrance-ticket machine in Shinjuku Station

Trains coming to Hashimoto Station's Keio Line

Rabbit guy performing in front of Hashimoto Station

Crazy but cool 3rd year high school kid doing street performance

Kakikoori with various flavors

Chicken steaks sold at the Hashimoto Shrine

Cute windmill thingy

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And of course, hot gyaru chicks with short-hot-pants

Summer Holiday '09 Day 1

Today is the first day of my Summer Holiday, so what better way to start it by going to the beach!

I've been in Japan for almost 6 years and a half now, but weirdly enough, I’ve never been to a Japanese beach, so this might be fun!

The Enoshima Beach was just a 45minutes densha ride from my place, and I met with Bentong and Yu at Fujisawa so that we could go together.

Reached the beach at about 10:30 a.m. and there was already a crowd at the beach.

After successfully influencing Yu to buy a new pair of swimming pants, we head on to the beach with our sunscreen lotions on.

So I got to be honest here, one of the major attractions of going to a Japanese beach during summer is none other than: Japanese girls in bikinis HAH!

But I’m blind as a duck so I have to wear my glasses in order to see the beauties, so I went into the water with my glasses, and only a few minutes later that I realized that this is an extremely stupid thing to do.

Getting deeper into the water to hide my boner, I mean, to experience the wave, I didn’t know that Japanese beaches has such strong waves!

Before I knew it, a strong wave knocks me off balance; I got sea water in my nose and ears.

Then I realized that it was too late: I’ve lost my glasses during the tumble.

It was impossible to recover it.

So I got off the water and went to the spot where we put our stuff, to relax and slap myself on the head for being such a stupid pervert.

As I squished my eyes to make sense of my surrounding, I could slightly see that there were like hundreds of sexy Japanese girls in their cute bikinis running around playing frisbees and beach balls, laying down and doing some other stuff that they usually do when on the beach, and I can only project this image clearly with my imagination, because I can’t see shit without my glasses!

:(

Next time I’m going to the beach, I’m wearing contact lenses!

LOLs, am I a scary person?

After that extremely unproductive and failed attempt at ogling sexy Japanese girls in skimpy clothings for FREE, we went our separate ways, with me returning to Hashimoto.

In the afternoon, I placed an order for a Nikon D90 with the 18-200mm kit lens, after a thorough research and opinion-asking activities.

I really can’t wait for my first Digital SLR camera!

Then somehow, I went to sleep.

I was probably quite tired, and I woke up at about 8:15 p.m. to the sound of my door being knocked.

My Korean co-worker told me that there was a matsuri (festival) being held just 5 minutes from our apartment.

I quickly washed my face and get ready to go out with him.

Does that sound gay?

Damn homophobes hahaha.

It’s Hashimoto City’s 58th Tanabata Matsuri (七夕祭)!


The festival was great with a lot of people showing up, including loud kogyarus (子ギャル) eating chocolate bananas in their skimpy short-shorties.

After a decent amount of watching cute girls in their summer yukatas and ganguro gyarus being drunk while pushing their baby-cars, I decided to buy a pack of tako-yaki, and went home to eat it.


It costs me 500 yen, and this is probably the worst-tasting tako-yaki that I have ever tasted, and I’m really disappointed because I love tako-yakis to death!

I guess that is pretty much what I did today.

Not bad for a first day of holiday.

I cannot wait for my shiny new D90 to arrive at my doorstep tomorrow!

Doki doki doki!

Edogawa Firework Festival

If last week I joined my co-workers and went to the Sumidagawa Firework Festival, this weekend I joined a shady group of 300 people and went to the Edogawa Firework Festival, where the scale was just different from the Sumidagawa Firework Festival.

There were just so many people!

It really looks like a huge summer rock concert as people camped about the Edo-River.

Here's a video of the opening act, and sorry for my 'over-excited' voice on the background:

People crowded the train station after the show, and it was several times worse than the usual train morning rush that I had to endure to get to work; but it's OK because I'm wearing my fav 3/4 pants!

Sumidagawa Firework Festival Summer '09

Hanabi Taikai （花火大会 - Fireworks Festival） has been a favorite summer event in Japan for hundreds of years, and this tradition is still on the top list of the things that the festival-loving Japanese people loves to do during summer.

I've been in Japan for more than 6 years, and I have never missed going to a Hanabi Taikai at least once a year, and for Summer 2009, last Saturday I went to the Sumidagawa Firework Festival, one of the top 3 Hanabi Taikai in Tokyo.

This was also my first time going to a Hanabi Taikai in the Kanto Area.

Different from my past experiences in Nagaoka, Nagano, Akita etc, Hanabi Taikai in Tokyo is quite different; the number of people attending was just staggering.

Upon arriving at the Hikifune Station, I could see thousands and thousands of people, with many girls in pretty yukatas, flooding the street.

The nearest combini was prepared with extra food for the many crowds.

It's good business.

I went to this Hanabi Taikai with my fellow co-workers (about 20 of us), and some of them are determined enough to get a good place for us that they went to secure the place at midnight, about 8 hours before the show started.

Impressive determination, and I am very thankful for them because if they didn't do it, we would probably end up sitting on hot pavements.

Before the show started, we went to find food.

Then it began.

Everyone was locked looking at the sky.

It was just brilliant.

I hope I could do this again every year.

Anyways, of course watching fireworks while having fun with your mates is great, but using your camera's fantastic zooming capabilities to 'further one's horizon' is also another great dimension of fun, too.

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Here we could see that even Japanese girls dig ipod touch! That's the only motive of the picture above: to show you that there are Japanese girls who owns an ipod touch, and they're really into using it that sometimes they forgot to err... put their drinks on more suitable places?

Yes people, you can thank me on the comment section! ;)

Sasaki Nozomi

It’s still summer holiday and I’ve been doing a lot of meaningless traveling and short trips to weird but fascinating places; but unfortunately I can't blog about it because it would basically ruin my reputation and future prospects.

In doing that, I’ve also lost the time and will to write anything new on this blog, so I apologize to those who said that they come to this blog because I update it frequently.

Anyways, I’m taking a break from going to weird places doing stupid things because ramadhan is coming up and I want to start focusing on my presentation that I’m going to give next week.

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Anyways, this is Nozomi Sasaki (佐々木希), the Akita Bijin (秋田美人) slowly rising to fame in the Japanese entertainment world. Her first prominent tv appearance is on a comedy show, and she got tremendous attention afterwards when the cameramen loses his concentration and tried to constantly zoom in to her face only, ignoring the other guests present. Then she got called「鬼のように可愛い」by the M.C., which means cute as a demon.

Here’s a quick profile:

のんちゃん Non Chan
1988/02/08
Akita City
168cm
80 - 58 - 82 cm
Fashion magazine model + gravure idol

There are better pictures that you could find on the internet. I recommending Really Cute Asian, they got tons of great pics!

one nose-bleeding afternoon

I don’t know whether it’s the sudden change in humidity and temperature, or maybe because of the sudden rise of girls from the education faculty wearing (even more) flesh-baring summer clothings that never failed to catch the attention of visual-based creatures like the human male; I got a terrible nose-bleed in the afternoon today at the lab.

The nose-bleed was not that bad actually, but you can’t help but felt a bit surprised when you see all those blood on the tissue.

I cleaned my ‘bloody’ nose with water, stuck it with a well-twisted pieces of tissue, stopped thinking about perverted things, and the bleeding magically stopped. I don’t know what I did right, but it helped.

With the nose-bleed problem solved, now I can go back to doing the boring fortran practices. It’s really an alien programming language to me, and I’m still not used to the basic structures and flow of how the program reads its codes.

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Why would a straight guy like me, would even consider drinking an extremely gay drink such as jasmine tea? Well, for the sake of diet of course! and I'm doing pretty good with this diet thingy.

blue hawaii + unagidon

it starts to get really hot around here and i'm thirsty all the time.

what better way to satisfy that uneasy feeling of thirstiness, by drinking pepsi's newest limited edition carbonated drink: the pineapple and lemon flavored blue hawaii pepsi!

at first, i was a bit skeptical about buying it. i mean, it's BLUE!

but my curiosity beats my consciousness to be careful with what i put into my body.

the bottle made the same psttstst sound prior to opening. the smell is quite sweet, and kinda fruity too. the taste? hmm lets just say it's not pepsi. and i don't think this is what a pineapple + lemon drink should taste. and i don't even think that if you mix pineapple juice with lemon juice, the result would turn out to be BLUE.

talking about satisfying the senses, one of the things that i like about summer is eating unagidon! (うなぎ丼) unagidon is basically an eel (belut sungai in malay) dipped in delicious tare souce, eaten with white rice - kind of a japanese meal. i ate the new unagidon menu from the nearest sukiya (a famous japanese eatery here) and it's just beautiful.

the combination of the fleshy eel, the sweet tare sauce, the softness of the onsen tamago (hot spring eggs) ; is just perfect, it's an art. just thinking about this made me hungry for more.

anyways, there is a myth that if you eat unagi, lots of unagi, you could 'upgrade' your sexual prowess in an instant, just like tongkat ali. i don't know wether it has been scientifically proven, but i guess i kinda know why such myths existed: a healthy unagi, is one with a long, nice girth with a hard and fleshy body. just like a healthy penis. yap. it's just my theory though.