101 Challenges:

Challenge number – 66
 
We never knew that a place called Harajuku even existed and we definitely never knew what the hell Cosplay was - which isn't the greatest of starting grounds for a Challenge. After some thought (which hurt) we eventually realised that Gwen Steffani had some Harajukian lassies in one of her music videos "mmmmmmmm, Kinky" was our joint reactions.

A quick Wikipedia search told us that "Nov Takahashi, from a Japanese studio called Studio Hard, coined the term cosplay as a contraction of the English-language words costume play while attending the 1984 Los Angeles Science Fiction Worldcon". Apparently, the geek was so impressed with all the shenanigans going on around him that "he reported about it frequently in Japanese science fiction magazines" so that other geeks could see more of the outside world. "The word fits in with a common Japanese method of abbreviation: combining the first two moras of each word. Costume becomes contracted to kosu (コス) and play becomes pure (プレ)". You're welcome!

Subsequent webernet searches resulted in us becoming somewhat disapointed. It turns out that "Costume play" doesn't involve rubber masks, inflatable suits and handcuffs - instead it's more to do with weird, wild, wonderful and colourful Japanese cartoons, film character and video game icon thingies. Bugger. What a waste of luggage space it was to bring all our gimp gear with us all over Asia for 8 months. Custom checks will never be so much fun again!

The challenge in question involved us getting dressed up in a non-sadomasochist-style and hanging out with the local Cosplay kids in their favourite hang out spot in Tokyo. Simple enough? No, actually. As our luck would have it, the weekend we had dedicated to this Challenge was the only weekend in the 2008 Japan calander that any and every Cosplay kid would be out of Tokyo, in a place called Nagoya, hundreds of miles away, attending an international cosplay summit.

Bullet train it is then. At a cost of over a hundred quid each!

Firstly though, we had to buy our costumes. We visited loads of cosplay shops and were amazed by what was on offer - there were indeedy some gimp-like-sex-outfits. These made us smile but the happy lips were soon turned upside down when we realised that these outfits (which were out of this world) came with an equally out of this world price tag. Eventually, after two days of window shopping, we finally stumbled across a cheap place - in the Akihabara district.

Lee found his costume almost immediately - a green Power Ranger one, and at a very affordable £20. Lindsay, for some reason best only known and kept to himself, wanted an outfit with wings.

After trying on an angel (which just looked gay) and a fairy godmother outfit (which made him look like a twat) he finally spotted a gorgeous black lycra suit - with stunning pointy ears and marvellous red wings. He was a sort of Batman/Kualaman type character. He was so excited and ecstaticly happy with his purchase that he wore the outfit home from the shop. It's times like these when Lee really hopes that Mum tells him Lindsay's adopted and that no genes from his younger brother will form in Lee's perfectly stranded DNA. The costume was a little more expensive at £35 but that’s the going rate for wings and pointy ears apparently.

So, on the morning of the summit, we dressed in our lycra superhero gear and boarded the bullet train to Nagoya. We could have worn normal clothes - at no point does the Challenge state that we should make longer-than-necessary asses out of ourselves - but, there's something very sexually arousing about the rubbing of lycra against the body (especially if you're going Commando) The locals were giving us all sorts of funny looks - we thought it was because of our clobber, but maybe they couldn’t believe that we paid the astronomical ticket price for a train journey when Lindsay could have flown and Lee could have teleported.

After a very enjoyable Shinkansen choo-choo ride, we arrived in Nagoya and headed straight for the summit area. It truly was amazing - thousands of Cosplayers were there and the assortment of outfits on display was a colourful orgie.

Everyone was having friendly family fun - talking and giggling with everyone else, prancing about and doing little
gesticulations as if they really were the characters they were imitating - smiles were everywhere and get this... everybody loved our Batman and Power Ranger outfits!

Thankfully, nobody at the party had the same outfit as us on. God! that would have been sooooooooooo embarrassing.

After standing for pictures and doing what Cosplay kids do (we don't know either) for an hour or so, the parade finally swung in to action, with all the cosplayers marching through the streets which were lined with tens of thousands of spectators.

We, being in great disguises, managed to smuggle our way into the competition part of the parade and become part of it. There we met transformers, monsters, Ken from Street Fighter and so many more people from showbiz. We should have asked for their autographs - would have been worth a mint! Literally, a mint! Like a trebor or polo.

We mingled, we chatted, we cried, we sung, we laughed. We had a brilliant day out! It's as if we were exactly where we should be in our lives... dressed up in tight and colourful lycra, jumping up and down and flapping our arms in full open view of the public - without being arrested.

Like 5 year olds exhausted after a day out at the fun fair, by the end of the day we were shattered. So, in order to get back to our beds quickly, we skipped the return train and instead flew and teleported back to Tokyo.

Challenge number – 33
 
When we first realised that the "Free Hugs" Challenge made it in to our 101 to-do-list, we instantly thought of the 60's - where free love was all the rage and people did anything and everything with and to one-another without consequence. We'll happily have some of that.
But as quick as only a few minutes after landing in the land of the rising sun we thought that such a simple challenge would fall flat on its arse. As we've mentioned before, the Japanese people are incredibly shy and maintain nothing but eye contact (with the ground) as soon as anything out of the norm occurs.

You see, in our opinion, the people of Japan (especially Tokyo) display painfully obvious afflictions of "rat-race" syndrom. The Japonians are very disciplined and very self-goal-orientated - work, work, work, work and then a little more work before they'll ever allow themselves to play.
 
All our initial observations　were in stark contrast to the outgoing and (let's be honest here) the bloody mental people we expected (sadly, these expactations are wholely based on us stereotyping the everyday Japanese man and woman on the tv game shows that you get on Bravo or some other cable channel). So, by the time this challenge was to be attempted, we weren't sure if we would achieve a single hug. We hate feeling unloved. The sadness of loneliness often　causes us to pee the bed at night time. Maslow's heirarchy of human needs puts love and belonging in the middle - he's stupid.

We feel it deserves nothing other　than the position of fundemental starting block. Bugger air and food and water - we want cuddles, spooning and pats on the head every now and then.
 
Faced with the horrid possibility of being rejected not once, but perhaps 20 or 200 times was a very daunting thing indeedy. This fear of rejection possiblycomes from our childhood days. Mum and Bob (our Step-Dad) used to go on loads of holidays abroad. We didn't. Instead, we were always treated to a fortnight of what Mum called "Zoo-land". Turns out that Zoo-land wasn`t really the hip and happening place Mum always told us it was - it was in fact... the local kennels. With our dogs.
Whilst she and Bob were away soaking up the sun and getting p*ssed, we'd be soaking up dog-poop and getting p*ssed on. It wasn’t all bad though. Lindsay can now communicate in barks - no word of a lie - he really can.
 
In preparation for this Challenge we had to create a sign so, we headed off to the shops with the A-Team's theme tune playing in our heads - occasionally we'd sing it out loud but mostly it was just in our heads. With this inspiring music roaring away, we purchased marker pens, sticky tape, and a butterfly net (this'll make sense when you look at the picture). There was a discarded cardboard box on the roadside on our way home, so we yonked that and we already had some A4 paper that we "acquired" earlier back at the hostel.
 
Armed with an arson that would put any Tracey Island wannabe maker to shame, we got to work. But, to our dissapointment, we quickly discovered that we weren't members of the A-Team and so, we didn`t have some hardcore machinery, some tools and a montage with funky music of us putting 23 random objects and 4 peices of fruit together to create a tank or a plane. None of us were Hannibal, Face, Murdoch or even Mr "I pity the fool" T. Instead, we came up with a rather plane and boring - but big and colourful - FREE HUGS sign. A tankplane would have been much cooler.
 
With our sign prepared and some hug-enducing aftershave applied it was now time to head to the Shibuyu crossing and try and get some luvin.
 
As there was only one sign, Lee went on the first hug shift. Shouting things like “free hugs" and "had a hard day at work mate? Need some loving?” the first minute produced only weird looks of awkwardness, embarrassment and pity. But then something happened. One Japanese guy wanted a hug, then another and another. Even some woman joined in - to Lee's disappointment - he was rather enjoying his manly hugs - they feel more secure and sincere from a man. This continued for a good half-hour until Lee was completely hugged out and passed the sign to Lindsay.
 
Lindsay immediately set about the crowd - not in a fighting sort of "setting about", but in a fighting for some love "setting about". He waved the hugs sign frantically - like a non-rehabilitated-pervert-released-far-too-early-from-a-corrections-programme. With one arm stretched to the sky extending the sign as far as it could go, with his free arm opened so wide as if he was trying to hug the whole world and with a smile on his face that said without words "I want to hug you now and then take you to bed" the hugs started to roll in.
 
Again, and worryingly, it was mostly men that came forward and after a few minutes Lindsay knew what Lee meant about the secureness of a guys hug. He felt safe and as if he were to jump in the air, any of those guys would hold him there like that water scene with Baby in "Dirty Dancing". Lindsay was creating orgies of hugs with sometimes up to 6 or 7 huggers at once. It was a beautiful sight - Patrick would have been proud.
 
After becoming all-hugged-out, we dismantled the free hug sign as we could take no more. You know the feeling - where it starts to get a little painful. We were so full of love it - we were floating in the clouds.
 
NOTE TO SOCIAL WORKERS - Mum and Bob never put us in the kennels. Sometimes, we just talk crap to achieve a word count figure. But Zoo-land would be a good place to put all those little buggers who set wheely-bins on fire - you can use that idea for free.
 
One final thought. If the free hug sign can work in Japan what would a free sex sign do in the UK? We can hear the A-Team theme tune again.

Challenge number – 43

The Japanese Jive Challenge was always going to be a bit-of-bun (peice of cake for the stupid out there) All we had to do was turn up at the local arcades in the Akihabara game-land area of Tokyo and play some video games against the local youths. 

This was p*ss easy for the following reasons; 

1) We're what you would technically call "socially integrating inadequate nerds". We don't understand this either. At school we had loads of friends - Pacman, Mario, Luigi, Zelda (a foreign exchange student) and the little Mushroom headed guy (can't remember the freaks name - he was a quiet lad and only hung out with us for one summer before his parents moved him to a posh school) there were more but the good times ended when Pacmans Mum and Dad got divorced.

Ms Pacman (as she's now called) became a very bitter woman - she was truly heart broken and soul-destroyed. She turned a dark and horrible person and thought if she couldn't enjoy life then her son sure-as-hell wasn't going to either. So she locked him in her basement with some ghosts - we've never seen him since and the rest of the gang kind of lost their way - we say hi to each other if we ever pass on the street, but the magic has gone. Long gone. That Ms Pacman - she was a bitch quite frankly. 

Anyhoo, reason number 2) We're big and burly Scottish lads. If a 9 year old kid was to even think about trying to show us up, we'd just push them over or tell them Santa ain't real. That would do the trick.

And so, back to the Challenge. To be included in our war of pixel-terror was that dance mat game - the one which carries 48,291 epileptic warnings - a million flashing lights per second which create some sort of pattern on a screen in front of you that is humanly impossible to recreate with a mere 4 limbs. We initially thought that you hear music - and you dance. This ain't no kids game - it's a heart attack waiting to happen.

But, and not wanting to undermine the young folk of Tokyo here, we have been playing video games between us for about half a century now, granted when we first started it was two white lines with a white dot on the screen. You could select tennis, volleyball, soccer etc. It didn’t matter which you choose as every selection was the exact same as the previous or next option but at least you had a "select" button which added to the excitement.

From there we moved onto the Atari 1600 with its joystick －　another revolutionary device which in our opinion， is better than sliced bread and doesn’t get enough credit as what it should. Then we had a Spectrum 48k where you had to load the games in by a cassette tape and it made a weird noise like doooo dit, doooo dit dit, dooo dooooo dooo dit dit dooo dit dit dit dit.

We played so many games on this we learnt how to beat box the games into the machine using a microphone and doing away with the cassettes altogether. That’s how much computer games we have played.

Mum was good enough to keep us in with the “in crowd” and every xmas we got last year's amazing play-thing;

• The Commodor 64
• Sega Master System
• NES
• Megadrive
• SNES
• Gameboy
• Gamegear
• Playstation 1
• Xbox
• Playstation 2
• Xbox 360
• And the forever amazing WII
  

Yep we are still those ”socially integrating inadequate nerds” but now we’re old enough to buy adult magazines with nude pictures so it’s not as bad as it once was. Not bad at all.

My god how the games have changed over here. The Dance Revolution machine is hard enough but when compared to other machines in the arcades it’s like the cassette loading Spectrum of years ago. 

We danced, we drummed, and we guitared our way through the spectacular array of games that the youth of today splendour in, feeling older and further out of touch as we went along. We did hold our own though and commanded respect probably never seen by westerners in these parts before.

That respect came in the form of Lindsay ripping his shirt off to some air guitaring – yeah that showed them!

After a few near-death experiences (perhaps the Japanese should invent a defibulator simulator game) we then tried explaining the old Spectrum 48k (our one was the tiny thing with the rubber keys) to a few of the kids but they had no idea what a cassette tape was never mind a Spectrum.

Challenge number: 98

The "Shaken Not Stirred" Challenge was one we knew we'd enjoy. Namely because the location for this Challenge was a pub - that meant we got to indulge in some alchy-holic-drinks in the name of entertainment - it's always a great thing to be able to camouflage your alcoholic-dependencies in the name of art. A second reason we we're looking forward to this Challenge is because said pub was in fact the cool (ignore the pun) Tokyo Ice Bar.

As far as Challenges go, this one was probably the most simple on our 101-to-do list. All we had to do was turn up, change into one of our numerous costumes and have a drink and wee dance.

Our mate Fogo (John Fogarty) set us this challenge and so, it was never going to be quite as straight forward as we have made out thus far. You see, Fogo is a bit of a perv and we're positive that he fancies at least one of us. 

He wanted us to enjoy our wee-swallies whilst wearing Mankini’s. There's no other justification for this Challenge idea other than the obvious. JF clearly wants to see as much of our flesh as he can without breaking the friendship/relationship boundaries and creating an awkwardness between mates that could so easily be avoided - rather than asking us to strip for him which may or may not/never happen in our private lives) never say never... so there's still hope John) he decided to "camouflage" his addictiveness (unlike our alcoholic tendencies, his is the naked muse of two hairy assed Scotsmen) and so, always game for a laugh, off we went.

We were instructed to wear a customary robe due to health and safety reasons (and maybe to preserve the innocence and uncorrupted minds of any local customers) because everything in the bar is made out of ice, and therefore, there was every chance that we would stick to things. This didn’t stop us from flashing as much flesh as we could and what amazed us was the fact that we had the other punters in stitches with our clobber. Innocent minds? No way! The Japanese were grabbing and squeezing every dangly bit they could find (which, as the cold set in, became a much harder and precision-like task).

We stayed in there far longer than the challenge required us to. Simply, we loved the Mankini’s and it's so liberating to dance around in them, in public - if it wasn't for the fact that we began to choke on our own shrivelled up testicles, we'd have stayed in the bar all night. The temperature in there is a chilling -5. We were going to say that it didn’t feel very cold at all, but if we did, we couldn't justify the smallness of our truncheons.

Trust us, it was really, really, really, really cold.

A Challenge success and on top of that and much more importantly, some of the best holiday snaps of all time - if perhaps a little scary.

Challenge number ­ 21

Just your average day for us two. We headed to the fish market in
Tokyo at oh-my-god-why-do-people-need-fish-at-this-time o'clock where Lee had his heart on purchasing a nice and big and juicy, fresh fish for dinner.

Lindsay, who was waiting near by had other plans. In order to show his
appreciation of the dedication of all the Japanese fishermen he (as he thought was customary for this part of town) paid respects by dressing up in a giant shark costume.

Lee purchased a shiny and (at this point) smell free fish (as the
following events are explained the frozen fish began to thaw and let off a horrendously unstomachable stench) He was rather happy with his bargain-buy and held it up in the massively busy market to examine the delightfuly refreshing meal for later that night.

 

At this point you could almost hear the do doot, do doot, do doot, da
da daa, as the shark (the mentally deranged Lindsay) smelt his target and approached at lightning speed. Please note here that 'lightning speed' is not the speed of lightning but the fastest someone with so much bulk and their own gravity field can run and please note also that 'do doot, do doot...' was meant to be our typing impression of the 'Jaws' theme. You're welcome, don't mention it!

The fish was snatched (we love that word) from Lee's hands and the
shark ran (swam on his feet is what we were trying to convey) away through the completely bemused, shocked, flabergasted, scared, concerned and disconcerned fishmongers and customers in one of the largest public fish markets in the world.

As Lindsay (still the shark) ran, Lee helped to stir the confusion by
shouting 'Oi that shark has got my dinner, somebody help me!' But nobody was brave enough to wrestle the shark ­ for one of two reasons probably;

1. The Japanese are very polite and a little shy, so they probably
refused to let themselves believe that a gigantic shark had just nicked someone's fish,­ better to just carry on as if nothing happened and,

2. The Japanese are very polite and a little shy, so they probably
refused tolet themselves believe that two twats were ripping the p*ss out of their world-famous fish market, ­ better to just carry on as if nothing happened and hope the two idiots leave.

It was only a few minutes before we were asked to leave, but when we
say asked, we actually mean told and any options we had were crushed as the three fish-security or police men escorted us out of the market.

 

The day was to continue in somewhat the same fashion with repeat
stunts on the subway lines and for good measures, in a Sushi Bar. As always, the telly folk have our Mum locked up in bondage chains and slap her hourly with old cabbages to prevent us spilling any more beans. We can't not spoil all the footage for you but let's just say the day proceeded to go on as it had started - with us being escorted or banned from every place we visited and one bloody smelly fish.

Mum, be strong.

Despite the extortionate cost of living and breathing in Taipei we did manage to eat out once or twice whilst visiting this glorious city. We wish we could say this was in a lovely and swanky restaurant but unfortunately it twasn't. We don't do lovely, nor do we do swanky. Both these words imply expensive.

We were challenged to visit a local night market - dubbed "Snake Alley" for our culinary delights. No prizes for guessing what it involved... (but just for the stupid readers out there, it involved snakes. You're welcome)

Night time it was when we sat down at our nice little table for two. The lovely waitress gal approached and with her, brought a couple of trays. On said trays were the following yummies; shots of Snake Blood and Snake Bile and Snake Venom and Snake Penis (which, thankfully yet bizarrely, was blended for us) and last but not least, a big bowl of scrumptious Snake Soup - which was basically just snake in a bowl of warm water. Mmmmmmmmmm.

To describe all the above (should you ever feel adventurous or stupid enough to try any of it for yourself) the blood tastes like... well, it must taste like blood really. We've both sucked on our fingers when we've cut them - tasting your own blood is ok - tasting someone or something elses - is rather wrong. It's gluey in substance and makes you sick at the mere thought of it sliding down your throat.

Bile is just wrong - how the hell did the Taiwanese come up with the idea that snake sick would be good for you? It's spicy, tangy, sour, spicy and sickly all in one and ain't nice.

Venom is worrying. Doesn't this stuff kill you? It's thick and milky and vomit inducing. Not good. Bad.

And then we have the Penis... where does a snake keep this? We thought the snake was a breed of one (trouser?) but when you drink the blended brown-coloured substance (poor snake) you can't help but feel a) Sick b) Mortified and c) As if you know you're now being condemned to hell.

Snake meat is just like chicken with the exception that chicken doesn't make you want to throw up all over your plate, table and dining partner. Chicken is also a cuter and more appetising alternative to a greasy, slimey and scary looking reptile.

If anything was going to fire our libido's into the next century and give us super-human strength, surely it was all the above or... maybe we should abandon tradition Chinese medicines and cure-foods and just start taking vitamin supplements? Anyhow, Viagra over here in Asia is cheaper than snake... we've heard!

Location: Taiwan

Details: Our brother Leyton gave us this challenge. It sounded like a pretty easy one: go to a restaurant, order some food and then eat it.

The restaurant was (and still probably is) called ‘Modern Toilet’. A strange name for an eating establishment we thought, before embarking on a near impossible mission of finding it.

2 hours of later, we finally found the place. Off we headed upstairs to be seated and that’s when we found out what makes this place unique.

Diners are made to sit on a toilet seat at a table based on a bath/sink and the food comes in small toilet bowls with a plastic turd. Believe it or not but this is actually a very popular place – which means one of two things… the Taiwanese need to be commended on their eccentricity and sense of adventure and humour or… they have too much money and are stupid with it.

If you order a drink, it’s delivered in a small urinal. This is the most psychologically disturbing thing.

Outcome: Although the kiwi juice we ordered tasted like it should, we just couldn’t get past the fact we were sucking through a straw, which is dipped in a urinal. The lumps of ice and the kiwi seeds do nothing but make you think of those massive stinky polo-mint things they have in the smelly pee-holes in bars and clubs and thus, the entire sensation induces nothing but the need to vomit.

The food looks like a steaming bowl of sh… shitaki stew and again, it’s hard to enjoy something that reminds you of being extremely ill or the dreaded 17 hangover toilet visits on a Sunday afternoon.

Dessert comes in the form of a poop shaped ice cream. It tasted exactly like it said on the tin, or carton, or box. But it did make us giggle like 5 year olds. We liked that.

With all the novelty and uniqueness aside, this is one place we wouldn’t recommend to anyone. The food was crap (not literally) and, to be honest, the challenge was a little too easy for our liking so, we had to (we wanted to) up the anti by pulling down our trousers and mocking a number 2. Much to the bemusement of the other diners.

Love ya!

Location: Taipei

Details: Taipei is home to the Worlds tallest building open to the public - the Taipei 101 skyscraper. This was to be the scene of our actual record breaking challenge. All we had to do was run up all 101 floors via the stairwell in less than an hour and we would be guaranteed a place in the Guinness Book of Records.

As Roy Castle put it “dedication’s all you need” and with us having that in bucket loads, we headed off for the highest building we could see. Being 101 Challenges, there was obviously a catch. We were to do the race up the thousands of stairs in a 3-legged style.

Outcome: Having done no research at all on this Challenge, we arrived at the building hoping to open the doors and start our ascent. Unfortunately there’s a massive shopping mall at the base of this fantastic piece of architecture and so, it took us absolutely ages to find the stairs. Worryingly, at this point, we were already knackered and, we hadn’t even climbed a flight!

We decided that the best course of action would be to use our inside leg(s) first then outside legs – simple really.

Ready, steady, go! We flew up the first few floors in amazing and beautiful fluency – faster than a speeding bullet, but not as fast as a lift.

Everything was going better than planned (if we ever bothered to make one) but for now, that’s it. The telly folk won’t let us tell you anymore as apparently it’d ruin the show.

Three days ago we finally pulled ourselves away from Manila and, after enduring yet another agonising two-and-a-half-hours of Lindsay’s in-flight squirming and screaming, Lee was happy to be back on land… but now in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. He wasn’t as happy as Lindsay though – Paul McKenna can you help him? Lee? Any airline passenger that may accidentally be placed next to the sweating and trembling oaf?

On first impressions, this is a very impressive little ole city. Very clean, very busy but very efficient – everything runs like clock work - and to best describe it, it’s probably a bit like a small Tokyo (although we can’t truly compare because we haven’t been to Japan yet) But, it does have huge bright signs (the electricity bill here must be massive!) adorning every doorway and stacked onwards and upwards on every building with squiggly writing (possibly Chinese) and we’ve seen things like that in Japan on the telly.

What surprised us is, despite most of the signs here being in hieroglyphics, is that it’s very easy to get around thanks to the underground. What initially looks like a game of “Snake” on drugs, turns out to be a rather fluent and easy guide/map of the miles-upon-miles of subways.

Despite the excitement of being in a new country, Lindsay’s been feeling a little home sick over the past few days (missing his teddy and easy fat girls probably) and was in desperate need of a good cuppa. So, we decided to bring the “All the Tea in China” Challenge forward to Taiwan.

We heard there was a tea plantation on the outskirts of the city so, we hopped on a train and hopped on a bus to go and visit it. We hoped to have a nice day out in the fields and hoped to educate ourselves and you too, on the processes of how tea bags are made. What better place to go? Well as it turned out, anywhere else on earth would be better.

We were to “see how the leaves are harvested and the final cuppa brewed” and then “shock the owners by tasting their most expensive tea by dunking digestive biscuits”. Aaah, the culture.

Well, we’re not allowed to give away all the details (the telly people would kick us in if we did) but what we can tell you is, everything we hoped for was dashed and everything we sooooooo wanted to do was dangled in front of us like a carrot before being snatched away – at the same time as being punched in the dogs-reproductive-glands.

We only got offered one brew, and that brew was bloody disgusting. The plantation/museum was as boring as it sounds and the guide who we had arranged to meet us obviously didn’t know who we weren’t and failed to show up.

There’s an old saying in Scotland. It goes a little something like this… “Yi kin only p*ss wee the c*ck yav got” which means (in English) “One can only do, with the tools one has, only what said tools can allow one to do” So, Lindsay decided to run havoc around the joint and amuse himself in (what he claims) the name of “entertainment” Lee never moved from the stage of bored-stupid;

We saw your ad in the Tokyo Notice Board. We are currently filming a UK TV Series called 101 Challenges – to be screened on Channel 4 (UK) in November and December.

The show follows us, 2 brothers from Scotland, as we travel all over Asia completing 101 challenges given to us by the public. One of those challenges is to get on a Japanese game show.

We will do anything – for free – and give you publicity on our site, the e4.com site and the television show itself if you can get us onto a show this week.

Please email us asap if you can help. We are currently in Shanjuku.

Yours Sincerely

Lindsay and Lee Vine (the brothers)

Today we headed into one of the many markets in Manila - in search of a local dish. This was part of the ongoing Dodgy Delicacy challenge and, this one certainly lived up to the title.  The particular dish we were looking for is called Balute. It looks like a normal chicken egg, except inside there’s a partially developed foetus. Yum yum. Everyone likes chicken.

We found a little stall selling the Balute in no time at all and loads of people were coming to purchase the protein filled dish. Apparently you should have no more than 10 per week or you’ll die. We don’t know what of or if it’s true but that’s what we were told and we’ll believe anything – the moon is made of cheese!

Lindsay ate chicken feet in Vietnam so it was only right that Lee eat chicken feet-uss (see what we did there!) in the Philippines.

Lee approached the stall owner and made sure what he was about to buy was in fact Balute. He was very articulate and pointed to the pile of eggs and said chicken? The stall holder nodded and said chicken in which point Lee nodded back and said chicken one more time just to be sure there was no misunderstanding. Thrice confirmed – it was indeed chicken.

Not knowing what to expect, Lee proceeded to crack the egg and peel off the top of the shell. What was revealed looked like something from the movie “Alien” than a chicken or a normal yolk. There was loads of liquid in the egg (the “soup” apparently) and Lee was encouraged to down it by the now growing crowd - who were enjoying watching the little Westerner tucking in to one of their favourite snacks.

The liquid was downed, and despite a burp or two and stomach convulsions it surprised Lee to find that it didn’t taste too bad. Not good, just not too bad. The rest of the shell was then removed and the contents were unfolded. There was a hard stone like thing which you don’t or cannot eat, then a little bit of what look liked normal egg yolk and then the alien.

The alien part was gooey, slimy, ugly, and down right scary looking. This was certainly something that you did not want to hold, never mind put in your mouth. Nevertheless, with some members of the crowd instructing that it tastes better with salt, Lee sprinkled away and then shoved the gooey and slimey salty gunk in to his gaping mouth to a chanting crowd countdown of 3-2-1.

As it was chewed the vomit-inducing-stomach-spasms returned. Throughout the period of chewing and swallowing, a little dance was performed. This was just an involuntary reaction by the body and we don’t know if it was a “Lee” thing or whether Balute causes everybody to dance.

The crowd were pleased with the Westerner’s performance and happy that he had tried one of their delicacies and managed to keep the contents down. With the deed done we left the market with talk of future dodgy delicacies to come… things such as live prawns in Japan. Perhaps, in comparison, dead and uncooked baby chicken isn’t that bad after all

The last few weeks have been mental in so many ways.

Firstly we have been trying to set up our challenges that are planned for Taiwan and Japan before we enter the countries. This has provied rather difficult due to language barriers.

Lindsay has had a bit more success than Lee due to the fact that he speaks the Queen's English and well Lee speaks more like Rab C Nesbit. When Lee has called certain organisations he has asked to speak to an English speaker. This request on most occasions was not understood and on the few occasions it was they didn’t think Lee was speaking English. Lee is now practicing his “How now brown cow” sentence although it sounds like “who new brun coo”.

On average we have spent about 5 hours a day at the pc and on the phone trying to get the get people to help us and set up locations and other logistical nightmares.

We have now been told that the Philippines sell the Asian delicacy of duck embryos. These are almost hatched ducklings that are shelled and eaten with their cute little beaks and little feathery bodies included.

We have been challenged to eat one, so watch this space...