Sakura no Mi, Maebashi

So many things in Japan are just wrong…like the talk show that I’m watching while I wait for my yakisoba here in beautiful downtown Maebashi. They seem to be doing ‘weird body facts’, and had a guy trying to eat udon while standing on his head in front of an xray machine so they could watch to see if it works. It does, of course. In other weird body facts, the staff wants to know if I can eat seaweed and pickled ginger. Who doesn’t eat those things? I said I eat anything except those bugs that grow in rice fields (inago) and they agreed this was a sensible course of action.Good yakisoba though. A freakin’ mountain of noodles, cabbage and meat with lots and lots of special sauce. I could have done without the tasteless tofu, the tasteless soup and the tasteless rice. The onion-cabbage-egg salad was strangely good though.Now the talk show is exploring the effects of huge amounts of habanero powder. First we learned that it hurts like hell on the tongue. Then we learned that if you bathe in a concentrated habanero solution, it ALSO hurts like hell. Remind me not to try this.Ooh, we’ve moved on the effects of random sounds on crying babies – mobile phone vibrations on a table, frying meat, jet engine, dribbling basketball and Rod Stewart music. OK, the Rod was a commercial, but I’d love to see what the baby thought.