Top 10 food experiences

In no particular order...

Okonomiyaki

Okonomiyaki is a kind of savoury cabbage based pancake from the Osaka area. Some people call it a Japanese pizza, because you can top it with whatever takes your fancy, but the connection to pizza ends there.

At an okonomiyaki restaurant, you sit at a booth, and the table has a built in hotplate. At some restaurants, they will make the whole okonomiyaki for you right there at your table, at others, they will make it in the kitchen, and then bring it to your table and place it on your hotplate. From there, you take your spatula, cut off a piece, put it on your plate, and enjoy. It's communal eating at its best.


Shabu-shabu

Another fantastic communal eating experience is shabu--shabu. This time, instead of a hot-plate in the middle of your table, you have a large pot of simmering broth. Into this, you briefly place thinly sliced vegetables, meat and tofu. The small pieces of food are cooked in no time, and you can fish them out again with your chopsticks, and enjoy.

It tends to be on the expensive side, but with all-you-can eat, and is both healthy (as long as you remember to include vegetables), and very tasty.


Sashimi restaurant

If it comes out of the sea, then you can eat it at a traditional Japanese restaurant, and most likely, you can eat it raw. Not only that, but it will also be beautifully presented, like the raw fish platter to the right, where you can see slices or raw fish presented between the head and tail of the fish that you are eating.

Unless you're naturally adventurous, it's best to experience this sort of food with a local, one who genuinely enjoys eating this kind of food, as there's a good chance you won't enjoy all that much of it, and it's not cheap. Personally, I don't mind certain kinds of raw fish, although it doesn't excite me either, but raw squid is awful and I haven't been able to bring myself to try raw octopus, although half-cooked stuff was a struggle to get down. I've written more about one experience here.

Despite the somewhat negative sentiments of the above paragraph, this is something that you should try, it's a real Japanese experience, and I know Westerners who love it.


Sushi Train

If you're on a budget, a sushi train gives you an opportunity to taste lots of horrid stuff above cheaply. You can try most of the standard raw Japanese seafood at a reasonable price (our local one was 105 yen a plate). Once you're enjoyed the masochistic experience of trying all the stomach turning weird and wonderful options on the menu, there is also a decent selection of the kinds of food that would look appealing to the average Westerner.


Yakitori

Yakitori literally means cooked bird. Our favourite restaurant charged 280 yen a serve, whatever it was. 280 yen for a drink, 280 yen for a plate of two skewers, 280 yen for a bowl of salad, 280 yen for dessert. Among the chicken with plum sauce, chicken meatballs with cheese , and fried battered chicken were also chicken hearts (chewy, but edible) and bowls of deep fried cartilage (rather nasty). Nevertheless, there was plenty of delicious stuff on the menu, and we could eat our fill for between $10 and $15.

Ramen
Ramen is basically a fancy version of 2-minute noodles, usually served topped with spring onions and pork slices and/or half a boiled egg. It tastes great, and is fantastic in winter as it warms you right through. No it is not healthy, but then, most Japanese food isn't.



Gyudon

Gyudon, literally beef on a bowl (of rice), was our fast food.All it was was beef and onions stewed in a sweet-soy sauce, and served on top of rice, but when dinner costs only about $4, and is delivered to you in minutes, who can complain?


Yakiniku

Traditionally a Korean-style cuisine, yakiniku has become incredibly popular in Japan. Yakiniku (literally cooked meat) is another breed of cook-it-yourself Japanese dining. With Yakiniku, you order plates of raw materials (meat, including lots of offal on offer, and vegetables), and cook them on a grill in the centre of the table. You can then dip the meat in your choice of sauce, and enjoy it hot and tasty.


Soft-serve ice-cream
Go to any tourist trap, and you'll see plenty of ice-cream stalls, all selling soft-serve. As well as the standard vanilla, and not-uncommon chocolate and caramel, there are plenty of other flavours to be found. Green tea is incredibly popular, it's actually easier to find than chocolate. Other flavours include mango, blueberry, strawberry, grape (tastes like hubba bubba), rockmelon, orange, pineapple, pumpkin, sweet potato (not bad), dark sesame (surprisingly tasty), soybean (not soymilk), and cherry blossom (pretty awful). I have actually tasted all the above listed flavours, and I suspect a few others that I have forgotten about.

Festival food

Takoyaki

Festival food is awesome. Yakisoba (fried noodles with cabbage and pork), okonimiyaki on a stick, chicken and leek skewers, fried battered chicken, beef skewers, jacket potatoes, toffee strawberries and much more. There was also the ever-present takoyaki - balls of okonomiyaki batter with bits of octopus inside. Takoyaki was a local rather foul local speciality, and rather unappetising, but after an initial taste, I only bought it to inflict on visitors.

Sakura

The day we left Japan, the first cherry blossoms in our area were just coming out. Somehow, I didn't ever post my sakura photos from last season, as I was still sharing Hunter's laptop at the time. This year's flowers should be approaching their full glory, but I don't get to see them. This resulting an incredible amount of moaning and complaining, however, the trees continued to do their own thing with no regard for my desires. To somewhat compensate for this, here are some of my best photos from last season.

While cycling

When cycling is the primary mode of transport, you see some interesting bike set-ups on the road. Below is a small selection of what I saw, unfortunately, usually by the time I had my camera out, the opportunity was lost.



Carrying large loads:

Off to work in the office:

Riding through a covered mall:

Riding with a parasol (or umbrella):

Carrying another bike in the front basket (this was a once-off, but I got a photo):

Taking the kids to school:

This one was just funny:

Also regularly observed but not photographed were:

• Talking on the phone while cycling
• Texting while cycling
• Carrying a seated girlfriend/family member on the rear luggage rack
• Cycling in a really short tight skirt

Andy claims she once saw a man in a suit, on the way to work, shaving with an electric shaver.

The rubbish cycle

The rubbish cycle in Japan is incredibly involved. Click the below image to enlarge and see the level of detail we had to work with.

Also, there's no such thing as a wheelie bin, or anything similar. You simply keep your rubbish inside until it is time to dispose of it, and then put it out in the street where it is picked up by hand and thrown into the back of the rubbish truck.

Home!

We're home again, except that it feels strange, not quite like home anymore. We flew in early yesterday morning, and were met at the airport by Dad, Val, Mum and Dave.

It feels really strange to be here. Everything is familiar, and yet not. I see a lone person and think "There's a Westerner!". Everything is so spacious to the point where I still feel uncomfortable at times, because there's just too much space. The people (on average) are huge, both tall and wide, and poorly dressed. I need to stifle the urge to speak Japanese to shop attendants, and not to say "sumimasen" as I squeeze past someone blocking my path. Australian accents sound so strong and coarse. I keep bowing. I have to stop myself from speaking slowly and gesturing. No doubt these effects will wear off soon enough, but it's unsettling how foreign (in many respects) home has become.



Note: I still have a few updates planned with things from last week that I didn't quite finish, so if you're interested, please check back.

About to go

We're all packed up and ready leave for the airport in about 2 hours. Japan has farewelled us with miserable weather and pouring rain, but tempered that with the first cherry blossoms of the season coming out today on our local cherry trees.

We'll fly out late tonight, and arrive at the Gold Coast early tomorrow morning. I hope to see many of you soon!

Quck status update

I still have some catch-up posts to do about the things we've been up to in the past two weeks, but I'll just fill you in with some up-to-date information.

Penny, the new AET who will be living our apartment arrived last night. The apartment is stripped of anything ours, and we are fully packed except the things that we are still using: clothing for tonight, tomorrow, and laptops.

For the past few days I have been alternating between running around over-managing all the preparations to leave and driving Hunty crazy, and getting all sad about leaving Japan, also driving Hunty crazy.

We had a dinner with one of my teachers last night, and lunch with Dave (our supervisor) and his wife Mariko today. Farewells are all done now, except to other AETs.

We just have a few minor tasks left, and we will be ready to leave tomorrow afternoon, although there's probably going to be a bit more of me driving Hunty crazy between now and then.

No more monkeys

On Tuesday, Hunty and I went to Arashiyama. I needed to say my farewells to the monkeys, and there were a few other things that we wanted to do there.

The first order of the day was to hike up the monkey mountain to see the monkeys. Every time we have gone to Arashiyama, that has been the first thing we have done, so we kept to our traditon.

Not a monkey, but he seemed to fit in among them

Lord of his domain

After feeding and photographing the monkeys, and promising them I would be back again someday for a repeat, we hired a row boat for an hour and paddled around on the river. To Hunter's great amusement, every time I picked up the oars, I started working them backwards, but eventually I figured it out, and we had a lovely time bobbing around in the sunshine, though we moved very slowly upriver, and only marginally faster back down.

After lunch, we caught the "Romantic Scenic Train" that wound it's way upriver from Arashiyama. I'm not sure about the "Romantic" part, it was crowded and there were heaps of kids around, but the train travelled along the river pretty much the whole way, except the frequent tunnels, and the views of the river were stunning.

A new friend from the train

Once we arrived at the train's destination, we needed to find a way back. We had a few options, and decided to take a boat down the river, which first meant getting a bus to the boarding location. It was expensive, $40 each, and I suspect we wouldn't have done if we'd known in advance, but buy then we'd been 10 minutes on a bus, and would have to retrace our steps back to the train station, and then find a way back, so we decided that we might as well pay up.

The cruise, or whatever you call it, was amazing. There were three men working the boat. One in the back with a rudder, and two in the front moving the boat. The one on the right used an oar/paddle, the one on the left poled along the bottom, and occasionally of rocks. I'm not quite sure how it all balanced out, but it seemed to work well.

Sometimes we just drifted down the river, enjoying the stunning scenery, the peace broken only by the creak of the oar. Other times, the water got rough and we raced between rocks and down small drops, often passing extremely close to the rocks either side of us. It got shrieks out of many of the passengers, and whoops of excitement of me, though the men manning the boat treated it all as routine, which I suppose it was. The boat was always well controlled.

Towards the end of the boat trip, once we'd reached the calm, broad expanse of the river near the town, a floating food vendor pulled up beside us for a few minutes hawking his wares. We passed on the squid, octopus, and everything else he was selling.

Soon after that, we arrived at our destination, and we wrapped up our last sight-seeing day trip for Japan.

Wonderful things about Japan - Episode 6 - Bicycle friendliness

Brisbane is supposedly a bicycle friendly city. They've put in a few bicycle lanes, which are mostly frequented mostly by lycra wearers? Japanese cities like Takatsuki are genuinely bicycle friendly. Firstly, nobody wears lycra. People wear whatever clothes they are planning on wearing at their destination. This makes cycling practical.

Then there is the infrastructure. There is dedicated bicycle parking near the station/shopping centres, free for the first 3 hours.

There is undercover parking dedicated to bicycles. I love parking my bike there. It is staffed exclusively by men almost at retirement age, and they are unfailingly friendly. A few of them know my bike, and frequently, at the end of a day, before I've handed over my ticket, one of them is already jogging off to fetch it. It costs $2 a day, and if you go outside of peak (park after 9:30, collect before 4:30), they give you a $1 refund. If I come by myself, they always ask where my husband is.

However, if you just need to duck into a shop, it's normal to park in front of the shop, ignoring any no bikes signs.

If you need to walk your bike up a steep slope, for example, out of the underground bike parking, or to pass over or under the railway line, there is a mini bike escalator, so you can put on your brakes, and just walk alongside the bike.

There are bikes everywhere. This means that motorists are on the lookout for bikes, and are used to sharing the road. Need I say more?

Wonderful things about Japan - Episode 5 - The Combini

Family Mart, Sankusu (Thanks), 7 Eleven, Lawson, and other chains besides. The combini or convenience store is truly convenient. They are much like the Australian petrol station shop, but without the petrol, and with much better food. They are also always open. Hence they are much more convenient.

A day spent sight-seeing always involves lunch. Bakery food is nice, when it can be had, but bakeries can be a bit hard to find. Restaurant food is tasty, but can get expensive. Then there's the combini. You never have far to walk before you stumble upon an combini, and for under $3, I could get myself a carton of chocolate milk, and a niku-man (steamed dumpling with meat inside).