What has panda been up to the past couple of weeks since his last update? Well, it involves delicious chocolate cake, dodging baseballs to the face and power flexing in Starbucks. Interested? (umm, I hope so, or else this will be a boring entry! *laughs*) Let's get into it!

Aoyama

I met up with the lovely Risapie for some night time culinary adventures in Aoyama. I love Aoyama - it's cool, laid back and filled with delicious bistros and slickly designed hideouts waiting for pandas to stumble into them. We ended up heading over to the (relatively) new M's Tower complex in Aoyama for dinner at the recently opened branch of the design-oriented Architect cafe. Oddly enough for a Saturday night, we were the only customers when we arrived (perhaps we came too early? Or perhaps everyone else passed out from the heat en-route?). The food was okay, the design and products even better - they had an odd assortment of well designed goods for sale all over the restaurant - all the better to keep us entertained while we waited for our food to come.

Among the foods we ordered was a salad that came drowned in so much balsamic vinegar I almost passed out from the vapours when it arrived at our table. Now don't get me wrong - I love a good balsamic vinegar with olive oil and crushed black pepper salad. Simple is the best, you see. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and when that good thing happens to be vinegar, the limit is set a little lower than usual. Anyway, it wasn't too expensive, plus the rest of the food was pretty good, so we didn't mind so much.

Afterward, we needed something sweet to get all the vinegar out of our systems (does it work that way?) so we headed to a fancy looking bistro in the same complex with a mouth watering display of cakes and pastries in a long glass case that tempted us in. It didn't hurt that they had lovely patio seating (by this point the horrible scorching day globe had set so temperatures were a little more in the livable range) and an inviting lamp lit cavern of a main room. And the cake... Oh goodness, the cake was delicious. Mmm... chocolate. I love going out to eat with female friends because then I can order what I really want (usually the sweetest, most chocolate-y thing on the menu) without feeling like my masculinity might be impugned. As you can see from the pictures, I took full advantage of this opportunity to indulge my inner choco-holic.

Oddly enough, even when we finished up around 10pm or so, the complex - and Aoyama in general - was still pretty deserted. Weird. Could it be that everyone was home watching the Olympics on a Saturday night? I may never know. At least that meant I could get home relatively early to prepare myself for the torment that was to follow. Yes folks, I'm talking about...

Baseball

So some friends (the ones from this post) passed through Tokyo recently - some on their way back to their home countries, others just to live it up before heading back to work - and they wanted to watch baseball. I was invited. So I went. For the first, and only time in my life. Because may I just say that baseball is as eye-rendingly god-awfully boring as I had ever imagined? (Apologies to any of my readers who may be baseball fans. You may wish to skip this entire section because I have nothing nice to say about baseball at all, with perhaps the exception of the cute beer girls. For baseball truly is one of the worst sports in the world.)