Live At The Budokan: Parklife

Apologies to those of you on dial-up...theres a few photos today.

Right then.

The other night I had my first shift working behind the bar at this dodgy English pub I've been dj-ing at. If anyone has a thirst for a pint of Stella with a 3-inch head, I'm your guy.

After my shift I was talking to these two Japanese guys at the bar, who clearly only wanted to talk to me because a) they wanted to practice their English with a native-speaker, and b) they were pissed off the 3-inch-head Stellas I was pouring for them. Anyway, they were asking me about Melbourne, and when I told them there were lots of trees and grass, they said:

"Grass? What is...grass?"

Meh. I guess its funny if you've spent time in Tokyo.

Anyway, this weekend was all about nature. After breathing the lousy Tokyo air for so long, we wanted to get away for a bit and hug some trees. Saturday we ended up at a place an hour out of Tokyo called Kichijoji. We were trying to find the huge park with the lake and the zoo, but we instead found this:

Usually childrens slides are made of metal or plastic. This one was made of concrete, and not very slide-y. Unsurprisingly, no children were playing in this park.

We eventually found the good park:

Around the lake local artists set up stalls and sell some of their works. We got some postcards from one of them

You can see more of her work at http://yume.pya.jp

The zoo was closing, so we only got to see a few of the animals.

What are youse lookin' at?

Sunday was the Takao Quasi-National Park:

Takao Quasi-National Park is up the top of a mountain. As we are possibly the laziest people on Earth, we thought it better for us to take the chairlift up to the top.