Tachinomiya - Japanese Standing Bar

The topic of today's post will seem very familiar to my friends in Spain and they're bound to ask "so what?" (¿Y que?) when they read it.

Typical Japanese restaurants and bars have tables and chairs (of course) but Tachinomiya are different. Meant as a place where a salary man can grab a quick after-work drink and snack (think tapas), they tend to be pretty simple. What makes them unique is that you stand up instead of sit. As I said, this is very familiar to my friends in Spain since there are tons of places like it but here it's kinda' different.

This is the view from the outside of one tachinomiya that's about three blocks away from where I'm living:

Here's the inside view:

I like that the customers are all middle-aged men (do I look that old???) and that they've used the beer crates and pieces of scrap lumber for tables. These guys were pretty cool and were attempting their best drunken English for me. Anyway, not very earth shattering but I'm sharing it as an example of my daily-Japanese-life experiences.