Want be taken care of by a non-human nurse?

Dolls? No, i'm not a really big fan of Barbies, Bratz, Babyborn dolls, Chucky and other humanlooking dolls, since I was a little Jumi. Some dolls really look scary..looking at you with their meaningless eyes, created to pretend as if they're human. Well, the next scary thing is a robodoll. And I'm sure that it won't take long or we will see these robodolls, in our daily lives. (Now certain scenes of A.I. cross my mind)

Entertainmentcompany Kokoro came up with a new invention. Actroid F. This is a robotnurse who is going to help nurses in Japanese hospitals. At the moment she is still in a testingperiod. I've seen a lot of documentaries about robodolls, but this one...It looks so realistic that it's almost scary. She can move her eyelids, mouth, shake her head and even pretend to breath and she can even laugh! This invention is so good that they've put Actroid F. in the Guiness Books of Records, as the first Android ever. Check out the video about Actroid F. here at Jumi!

Coolest fittingroom 2010

So I was in this new shop in Amsterdam called Monki.
The design of the shop is with lots of mirrors, discoballs and flowing lines. Monki sells slightly different fashion than commercial. The discoballs and black/pink colours drew me inside of the shop.

And then... I entered Monki's fittingroom. OMG. This one is so cool, the whole room is with mirrorwalls. You could see yourself 1000 times. I must've spent at least a quarter in that room to play around! :D

Loved it!

If you are near a Monki shop you HAVE to check their fittingrooms :D

Monki

A crabby vendingmachine snack

While Dutch vendingmachines are mainly filled with unhealthy boring snacks, I was overwhelmed by the great variety of snacks in Japanese vendingmachines, they even have banana-vendingmachines. Yes, the bananas are still fresh and new and healthy ofcourse. Well, there is a new vendingmachinesnack. I don't think you can find a fresher snack than this one.. Yup, in China they came up with a real Crab vending machine! Put money into the machine and a packed LIVING hairy crab will come out. This Dazha crabs is a healthy delicacy in China, and it is supposed to be eaten alive. Check out the video of this vendingmachine, here at Jumi!

A living nightmare: the zombies! They're coming!

Trick or Treat! Yes, it's almost Halloween! On this day we (and small children) walk in the neighborhood from house to house, asking for treats (candy) while wearing scary costumes. In the past in some cultures believed that on this day, spirits/ghosts of dead people would rise to find a new body which they can possess...brrr scary, a nightmare..
Last Tuesday, it looked like this nightmare came alive. Zombies invaded several cities in the world such as Hong Kong and New York! Watch the footage here:



It's a promotional stunt for the tv series: Walking Dead. The story is based on the comic by Robert Kirkman. Walking Dead will be aired on sunday, this Halloween. Be prepared...

Jumi on tour: Camera Japan part 1: EATING

With the anime King of Thorn, we ended our trip to Camera Japan festival 2010. We really enjoyed some aspects of this festival, but we also had to bear disappointments. There were definitely a lot of things to see and to do and to eat.

EATING

Filmbrunch
It was impossible to watch all the films/documentaries at the festival, so we made a selection of 'mustsee'-films. A nice idea was that they organized special filmbrunches, where you can get sushi and other small snacks as a starter, before enjoying the main course: the film. We decided to go. The food in the picture of the brochure looked really jummy... but it wasn't, at all! They served dutchysushi on plastic plates, with a small cake and green beans with some sort of peanutdressing and Udonwater.

No special drinks (we had to pay extra for normal English tea). The sushi rice was, in my opinion, too hard and the things they put in it, hm. :/
The cake tasted like..uhm.. I wish it tasted like something, anything. What a disappointment!
We washed away 'the taste' of it, with chocolate- and carrotcake, which wasn't included or part of the whole filmbrunch. So the starter wasn't a success. And about the main course, the movie 'Pool', well you can read about it later on.

Macrobiotic food
During the festival, visitors could also taste macrobiotic food. Macrobiotic food is mainly vegetarian food that has been planted biologically without using chemicals. Lovely Kyoko-san showed and explained the different dishes to us.

We tried sushi, pumpkincake and small colored nutty snacks.
The nutty snacks tasted weird. It's covered with some sort of greentea-ish powder. The pumpkincake, jummy!! The sushi has been made with brown rice and it tasted good.
We really look forward to see Kyoko-san and try her macrobiotic food again next year!



Sake
Visitors could also try different kinds of sake of Yoigokochi Sake Importers. I regret the fact that I didn't buy a bottle of Ine Mankai...jummy..

Besides enjoying the culinary part of the festival, we also went to lectures at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Read more about it, at part 2 of Jumi on tour.

Jumi on tour: Camera Japan part 2: LEARNING

Last Saturday we went to museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, because Camera Japan organized a special 'Japan' program: a guided tour and two lectures. Before we could join the program, we had to buy a special Camera Japan ticket at another place, Lantarenvenster (a cinema). So we went to the cinema (approx. 30 minutes by metro) to buy this ticket. With this ticket you can enter the museum for free AND watch a movie at the cinema before or after visiting the museum. We wanted to see a movie and we found out that this ticket is actually cheaper than buying a normal ticket at the museum. We planned ahead, and decided to go and watch the movie Solanin after our visit to the museum. We did have enough time to travel back to the cinema, after the lectures at the museum. We would be on time for Solanin, according to our schedule.

LEARNING

Museum Boijmans van Beuningen

Guided tour
OK, so we waited at the museum with some other people, for the special guided Camera Japan tour. A grumpy old (who thinks she's still 20) pms-lady was looking at us, full of arrogance..but wait,... so she's the one who will be the guide? Nooooo! Luckily we could choose between 2 guides. Ofcourse we joined the other group and not Ms Grumpy's. The guide brought us to paintings of Van Gogh, Monet and other painters. These paintings had some typical elements of Japanese or other Asian painting styles and techniques. We also saw collections of (Chinese) porcelain and vases. It was an interesting tour, thanks to our friendly guide Mr. Chan. Thanks!

Lecture 3D Tokyo Love Hotel

Loved this one. The photos of Canadian photographer Nathalie Daoust are telling so much without words. She went to Tokyo, to explore the love hotels and ended up at Alpha In, a SM love hotel. Nathalie had lots of interesting stories to tell about her adventures as a photographer. But sadly she couldn't tell everything because of limited time. Her goal in Tokyo was to photograph portraits of the mistresses of Alpha In to show their emotion and their femininity. The photos were absolutely not cliche or gory but very beautifully shot. While watching a photo you can almost feel the emotion by the colors and setting of the photos. An unique element of her photo reportage is that she also made pictures of rooms in 3D. So with 3D-glasses which we received before the lecture, it gives the pictures a nicer view, than seeing it just as a plain picture. During her presentation everybody was silent and paid attention in the room. Very nice, miss Daoust! She also had a giveaway for everybody, the actual questionnaire of Alpha In in English. Besides your name, the questionnaire had a list of very intimate and explicit questions.. which we won't share with you guys here. *teehee* Send us a message if you want to take a peek in the list.

Lecture J-Horror

One of Jumi's highlights was the lecture of J-Horror by Kishino Yuichi, a professor sounddesign at Tokyo University of the Arts. He brought an assistant to support his lecture. During the lecture, we went back in time through short scenes of Japanese horror movies from the sixties until now. Sometimes I really laughed out loud watching scenes of long ago. For example an horror of the seventies called Matango, starring mushroompeople and a man who had mushrooms sprout out of his face. Haha hilarious, it was like having a LSD-trip or something, watching this strange old horrorscene and lots of other scenes. But well, ofcourse time is changing, just like advanced technology and special effects in  movies. Nowadays, we're less afraid of watching horror with silly puppets (just like Chucky) or human mushrooms.

Unfortunately the lecture was planned for about one hour. Normally it takes three hours. So, in my opinion, it was as if the lecture was improvised, because of the lack of time. We didn't get a lot of general explanation about the development of J-Horror, only explanations about the scenes. Maybe it's because of the language barrier. It didn't seem like they could speak English very very well. The assistant just read everything from a piece of paper, instead of really presenting or lecturing it. Yet, it was really fun to see horrorscenes of 40 years ago 'till now. I really hope that I can attend the whole lecture of three hours of Kishino Yuichi someday..

The lecture ran out a bit late, so we had to hurry to be on time for Solanin, the movie which would be shown at the cinema, another location! Read part 3 of Jumi on tour and find out if we will be on time for the movie!

Jumi on tour: Camera Japan part 3: WATCHING

After visiting the museum we had to rush to the cinema to see the movie Solanin. When we arrived at the cinema, it was already too late. The movie started twenty minutes ago... Too bad that this festival had a tight schedule, as a result that some visitors have to miss other activities or movies. We missed the movie, even though we would make it on time according to our schedule. It might be an idea, to organize the program in that way, that there wouldn't be planned two or more activities/movies at the same time at the same city/place.

I really needed to see Solanin, and luckily i saw that one my favorite websites dramacrazy.net, uploaded this movie. So, I could see Solanin eventually.

WATCHING

Solanin
Solanin is a mangabased movie of Miki Takahiro. It's about a young couple who are living together and trying to find their way in this world. The boy is a musician and forms a band with two friends, while his girlfriend has a boring officejob. The band hasn't been really successful, until something happens. Could this mean that it will change the band? Some scenes were really recognizable, that's why I love this beautiful doramamovie.  Jumi's recommendation!








Parade
Imagine living together in a house with three people. You get along with each roommate, but how much do you actually know about each other? Do you want to know, do you need to know everything about your roomie? This is the story of Parade (パレード) of Yukisada Isao. Four young people living in the same house, having the same routineday every day, until a new mysterious guy is moving in. The roomies are trying to find out who this mysterious guy is. It turns out that they all are kind of mysterious to each other..
This movie was awesome!! I really liked the way how the acting was done, so naturally and it flowed. A must watch!!





They call us aliens
In this documentary of Veit Helmer, different people are being portrayed. They all have one thing in common: they (temporary) live in Japan. Experiences and differences with their own culture are shown. There was a portrait of three girls from eastern Europe, who went to Tokyo to do some modellingwork. It was their first time ever, traveling outside their own country, on their own, so this trip experience was extra weird. Another portrait's about a man who has a Japanese girlfriend and they're about to get married. The whole arrangement is ofcourse totally different when you arrange a marriage in another country. This doc. reminded me a bit with Cityfolk, a doc. that portraits citizens with different lifestyles living in Europe. It's nice to see how these people manage to handle and live with these cultural differences.


Pool

Imagine a movie scene, just long enough to make you realize you have been watching a clothes line with no movement at all. You even have time to think it over and asking yourself if you are really watching a clothes line. This movie is about a difficult relationship between a mother and a daughter and their misunderstandings. The movie was really too long and became boring.







King of Thorn
This anime, nominated for the 2010 Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA),must be one of the highlights of Camera Japan. Katayama Kazuyoshi adapted the manga of Iwarahara's King of Thorn into this film. It's about a girl who got seperated from her twinsister because she was selected to be one of the 160 people to be placed in a special project of a chemical company, where the selected ones have to sleep in a seperate closed section, away from everything, everybody for years. Why? The world has been infected with a pandemic virus. So they have to sleep until there's a cure. After years, the selected ones wake up in the dark future. Earth became another world with monsters. The girl hasn't forgotten her twinsister and wants to find out what happened to her. This anime is definitely not suitable for children under 16, because the story might be too difficult to understand and probably a bit scary. So I also don't recommend you to watch this anime, when you're sleepy or tipsy or else it would be impossible for you to follow the storyline. Yet, it's beautifully made and I'm definitely going to watch King of Thorn again soon.

Gomma cookies!

On a rainy cold dark autumnday, like today, I just want to sit on the couch, watching Doramaseries, with a hot cocoa in my hands and continuously eating cookies, homemade cookies. Ofcourse I don't want to stand in the kitchen the whole day, baking cookies. Well, with this simple (surinamese) recipe I (and you) don't have to..

You only need the following ingredients:
- 225 gr. cornstarch
- 125 gr. sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 125 gr. butter
Decoration: almonds or coloured sprinkles. And you can also use a cookiecutter if you like.




Stir butter with sugar and vanilla extract well. Add one egg and stir again until it becomes a creamy dough. Now add the cornstarch.








Roll dough into small balls and flatten it. Now you can press a fork to create a pattern on the cookie. Ofcourse you can also use your own cookiecutter to create certain shapes.







Sprinkle or put decoration on it. Bake the cookies for 15-20 minutes in a oven of 180 degrees Celsius. In the meantime, download your favorite dorama.








Yes! The cookies are ready to be eaten. Make some hot cocoa or tea for yourself and enjoy your cookies while watching your favorite dorama!

Star Protector Dog

For those who really enjoyed reading the manga Hoshi Mamoru Inu (Star Protector Dog) of Takashi Murakami or people who love to see Tetsuji Tamayama on the big screen again, have to/need to see this film: Star Protector Dog (Hoshi Mamoru Inu). Yes, the manga has been adapted into a film. On august this year, they've started filming and the release date will be in 2011 (Japan).

The story
Star Protector Dog is about an unidentified man found dead in his car in a mountainarea. His loyal Akita dog is standing by his side, who also dies five/six months later. Now Kyousuke Okutsu (Tetsuji Tamayama) has to investigate the dead man and his loyal dog's past.

I haven't read the manga, but I think this also might be a 'cry-movie', just like Hachiko Monogatari, another movie starring a loyal Akita dog who waits for his boss till the end of time. Akita dogs in Japan are kind of special. 'Akita dogs are evidently highly respected for their loyalty in Japan. The famously loyal Akita dog Hachiko is permanently honored by a statue in Shibuya, Tokyo.'

CBS News made a short item about the Akita dog. Click here to watch the video!

Source: AnimeNation

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Yes! I love Tim Burton's creativity. I love vampires. I love weirdness. So the movie 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter' produced by Mr. Burton and directed by 'Night Watch' Timur Bekmambetov is a movie I am really anticipated about!

"My baby boy..." she whispers before dying.
Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother's fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire.
Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House.

Check out the cheesy lookin trailer of the book here:

I hope the movie will be much better ofcourse!! XD
The movie is in pre-production and release is set somewhere in 2011.