As the January wind rages over the vinyl covered "strawberry fields" here, I'm sure the original fields of Beatles song fame are covered with snow in New York's Central Park where the concept of fresh strawberries in January is as alien as a Boston Red Sox fan in Yankee stadium. But, I digress. Baseball season is a long 2 months away.
Today, I must tout the joys of being able to enter heated greenhouses and gobble down massive berries like the one pictured here. The southern tip of the Chiba peninsula sits on the edge of real winter for the rest of Japan and the tropics to the south. Fierce winter winds rage here howling like banshees in the Irish night, yet we get no snow and the temperature seldom goes below freezing. Due to these favorable climatic conditions there has arisen a booming business in strawberry and flower picking, all of which you can pick to your hearts content for a specified amount of time. Of course all of this for a fee. Today being Sunday I'm sure there will be a caravan of tour busses coming from Tokyo/Yokohama and points north on the infamous Tateyama expressway. The evening traffic jam headed back to "urbania" is something to behold. I have seen it many times as I return from the opposite direction after a fun and frolic weekend in Tokyo. I'm sure such a traffic jam is no joy for parents of toddlers with bulging bladders and a bad disposition.
So if you feel you can inhale about 2 large strawberries a minute, you can challenge my former student's record of 60 in a half hour, hop on a train, give me a "tweet" when you get here and "Let me take you down" to strawberry fields.
As some of you may know I have dropped a lot of weight over the last 6 months by adapting my lifestyle to my age. I can no longer pound down the beers like I did at a spry young 45 years of age. So when I do imbibe I go for quality over quantity. No more do I guzzle a gallon of "Lite"; so while in Tokyo yesterday I made a quick stop, before boarding the bus home, at a pub that specializes in Belgium beer and poor service(by Japanese standards). The beer you see pictured here was a cherry flavored brew with a 6% alcohol level. At ¥980 plus service charge that comes to about $12 a glass. It was good and I'll probably never have another, unless of course the "bubble economy" comes back and companies start picking up the bar tabs like they did in the late '80s. I get misty eyed just reflecting on those days.
