Ren's Footprints

I was wandering the streets of a sort of "Red Light District" one day and came across this night club. I took the picture and the looked it up on the internet. It turns out it is the type of club in Japan known as a "host club" where ladies can pay to drink and converse with attractive men who work at the club. Coincidence, or career of destiny?

Life in Tokyo continues to get more expensive. When I first arrived here I went to CitiBank and withdrew 10,000 yen. That showed up as costing me $881.52. Saturday I went and withdrew the same amount of yen and it cost me $924.39. Some say that US home sales are a major contributing factor to the devaluation of the dollar. It seems that a higher number of US dollars are being spent that don't actually exist through loans, credit cards, and more. This has made the dollar sharply decline in the global market. It is not only the dollar verses yen that has changed, but the dollar also fell to an all-time low against the British pound during my stay here. Here is the up to the minute graph of the dollar and yen.

Since the dollar is so weak, it seems only natural to be eating at home. I actually rarely eat out in the first place so I took some advice to buy some cream and make a Japanese winter favorite known as "Cream Stew." It is a pretty simple stew needing just vegetables, meat, cream and milk. The recipe is found on boxes of dried cream here. I made the mistake of using food to make a utensil stand. That is only done at funerals when a plate is presented to the dead so you aren't supposed to do it any other time here in Japan. Check out the video.

Creamy Stew