Big Fat and Stubborn

So, I've been watching Sumo Wrestling with my father in law and it turns out that there's more to it than two fat people trying to push each other out of the ring. If you've been keeping up with sumo, like most people, you know that there are many foreign wrestlers in the mix these days. Mostly from eastern Europe, but also a smattering of guys from Mongolia. In fact, the only yokozuna is Mongolian and he has been on about a 3 year winning streak. Not an unbroken streak, but he basically wins most of the time. His name is Asashoryu, or Blue Dragon. He has a ritual after every win where he grabs his envelope full of money with almost as much vigor as it took to win, and then gives his wiper (that's right, if you were that fat you wouldn't be able to reach Uranus either) a stern look and hobbles off the pit.

These guys all wear mawashi the looks like a giant diaper or maybe underwear. I guess it Depends. These giant diapers are usually gifts from their biggest fans because it would be pour form to buy them themselves.

In order to gain weight they skip breakfast. Counter intuitive, yes. But apparently they long ago figured out that if you wait until you're very hungry, your body gets tricked into thinking that food is scarce. When food is scarce, the body starts to store extra food in the form of fat rather than cycling it through. Because, who knows when you'll eat again! So at the peak of their bodies' willingness to hold on to every last bit of energy, they dump in a huge pile of rice, twice a day. Clever. That's the party line, but I'm pretty sure that if you look close enough, you can see the outline of a whole person that Asashoryu ate!

Anyway, that's the sumo lesson for the day. At that, I leave you with this picture of a pet store in Kichijoji.

We haven't written much in our blog recently, so it might be time for an update. This is a picture of a huge pile of yakiniku meat. Four of us ate 16 servings-worth of rib and some other part of the cow. We also had a serving of vegetables to please the cholesterol gods. For those who don't know, yakiniku is a cook-it-yourself kind of meal. It's more than just a pile of meat, though; it's an experience. If you look carefully at the person on the top right(me) I'm wearing a paper bib that is covered in meat juice. Mmmm. Meat juice. By the time we finished, my meat bag (aka my stomach) was very, very full and heavy. The man sitting next to me went home and ate a bowl of noodles. I'm not such a big man after all.

This next picture is taken right after eating at the yakiniku restaurant, :) at the 5 month mark. The sonograms are no longer relevant because the bean is now more like an eggplant, ie too big to show on the ultrasound machine.