Of course I’d choose the last week day before Golden Week to order a bunch of stuff from Japan. I don’t really understand how everyone in a whole country as industrialized as Japan can take a week off but you’d think that mail order companies wouldn’t even want to. Well of course I forgot about Golden Week or I wouldn’t have ordered the goods directly from a japanese company. Anyway if memory serves it’s a week in which there are 4 japanese holidays one of (the first one?) which commemorates the previous emperor or something but because 4 is an unlucky number and any day that falls between two holidays is officially a holiday (in other words if monday and wednesday are a holiday then tuesday has to be one as well) the whole week is designated a holiday. Maybe. As a person who doesn’t even celebrate their own birthday (I do celebrate the national holiday as a matter of principal though) it’s absolutely a concept I can’t grasp. I guess people just look for any excuse to get out of work even if it means that they won’t get paid. And of those who don’t have to work, any excuse to party or just get intoxicated. I don’t think people need an excuse to drink though, they just prefer to have one so they don’t look as bad.
Speaking of drinking, somehow up to this point in my life I had never tried a Heineken beer. It’s true that I don’t like beer, at all, even though it’s the thing I drink the most among alcoholic beverages (following which would be wine, brandy, gin, rum, vodka, bourbon, whiskey), but it’s pretty prevalent so you’d think that I’d have had it incidentally at one point or another. As you might imagine it turns out that I wasn’t missing anything. I have known the odor of beer to be referred to as “skunky” before but never has it been so literal. After popping the cap the odor that assailed me was as sudden as a punch to the face. It tastes better than it smells but the bar isn’t set very high as far as that goes. I actually have to wonder if it isn’t perhaps something about the Dutch water which leads to the smell but I suppose the poor taste is a result of being rather plain and cheap beer. I’ve said it before but almost any other type of beverage can taste a lot better than beer for less money, notably soda I suppose. Probably the only redeeming quality of Heineken is the attractive design, the pretty green of the bottles, the distinctive red star which always reminds me of communist russia. To become the largest single line of beer based solely upon that is pretty ridiculous but after tasting it for myself that’s the only thing I can imagine to explain the popularity. I don’t personally have a favorite type of beer, I usually just drink whatever is available at the time or cheapest or both, which for some reason ends out being local “microbrews” more often than not. I swear to god that they produce alcohol in every last corner of the world and if you don’t care about pretense it’s one of the easiest things to get a hold of. I actually think that in some places it’s easier to find beer than safe water.
Well just to compare Heineken to another well known European beer, Stella Artois is better. I don’t think that it’s anything special either but it’s superior in just about every way (it might cost more, I don’t remember, and the design is poor which is about the least relevant thing ever) to Heineken. Notably with the absence of the horrible odor and the bitter lingering aftertaste Stella Artois is the clear winner. Just to mention it like all other things (notably motor vehicles) I boycott german alcohol as well. Supposedly Germany produces the best beer but I’m really not the one who can tell you. I can say that repute more often breeds acclaim than merit and this tends to blindingly true in so many facets of alcohol. Like really old wines and whiskeys, do you really want to drink something that’s sat around for 20-100 years in a musty cellar? I certainly don’t. If you want wine that tastes better then just mix some grape juice into it, if you drink whiskey on the rocks or in cola you can’t even make out the taste anyway. Just get over it and start living in this millennium. That’s what I’d like to say to the connaisseurs of the world. Don’t even get me started on composers!
Anyway the moral of today’s story is that the japanese have to take a week off every year so that they won’t kill themselves from work related stress and instead will kill their unemployed 20 something virgin children who refuse to leave the house. The message though is that Heineken really sucks, even for beer. Actually now that I think about it, heineken kind of smells like really bad weed. Maybe that’s not a coincidence…
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The Sky Before Dawn 