The Signs are Everywhere

Halloween has definitely landed in Japan, as you can tell from the decorations at the mall to-day. It's even more pervasive than last year.

You'd never guess it only recently started to catch on. I was with a Japanese friend, Shuichi, and he told me he was amazed how quickly Halloween was catching on, too.

We were there to get lunch at a shabu-shabu restaurant with a friend of his. It was my first time eating shabu-shabu, which is a sort of buffet style restaurant where you pick up dry noodles and uncooked vegetables at the bar and then boil them in water or dashi at your table. You're given strips of raw meat sliced paper thin and you swish each piece in the boiling stock, cooking one bite at a time. We had various dipping sauces, too, as well as a small dish of raw egg for dipping the meat in. It was good but I couldn't keep up with the quantities of food my companions were capable of eating. After four trays of pork each as well as noodles and tofu they also had ice cream and fresh waffles for dessert. I contented myself with some ice cream with pineapple.

Here are some more big beautiful spiders I've seen recently lately: