驚 - Jing1 - Startle, Alarm, Frighten

驚喜 - Jing1 Xi3 - Frighten Enjoy — Pleasant Surprise

Super awesome day today! Jenny, Walde and I went to New York with a special guest star: Joe of Joe vs. Japan fame! His site, sadly, has been taken over by domain sqatters. But in meatspace he still exists, and plans to go back to Japan as soon as he can to continue studying whatever obscure sub-sub-type of Japanese Buddhist sculpture he studies.

First: Ninth Avenue International Food Festival! It wasn’t quite as good as we’d hoped, it was mostly just a regular old New York street fair with gyros, funnel bread, kabobs, expensive lemonade, cheap irregular clothes, gimmicky informercial type items, and socks. There were a few more “real” restaurants that set up stands than the usual street fair, but not really enough for it to be worth trudging down all 20 blocks.

Second: GODZILLA! The original from 1954! Never before seen in the US! Remastered and retranslated! A pretty serious and dark movie, not like some of the later silly Godzilla movies. And seeing the first one is a perfect preparation for GODZILLA: FINAL WARS, the last Godzilla movie, which will come out at the end of this year.

Third: Sobaya! I got the “Zaru Soba”, just like in Japan. Plenty of Irasshaimases and Arigato gozaimashitas there, which along with the food brought back nice memories of our trip.

AND THEN, 驚喜 BONUS ITEM: At Kim’s Video, while Walde and Joe were looking through the obscure Japanese movies, I had a sudden thought: “This, of all places, seems to be where I’d have the highest chance of finding a subtitled version of Legend of the Sacred Stone“. Immediately Joe said “You mean this?” and pulled it right off the shelf. Subtitled! With the original Taiwanese language track! AMAZING! I’ve been searching the Internet for a subtitled version of this for the past 3 years, and could never find one. Now I’ll finally know what those puppets are fighting over.