Japan #2

Ok, so seems like I have a lot of updating to do and not a ton of time to do it, so I'll really stick to the general picture and highlights of food travels in Japan.

Point #1: Food in Japan is kinda sorta really expensive.  More expensive than San Francisco expensive.  And especially coming from Taiwan where we usually spend around $3 per meal, my travel mates and I were conflicted as to how to navigate the situation.  This made for a lower volume of noteworthy meals, though this is not to say there were too few.

Point #2:  I've had lots of good Japanese food in the USA.

Point #3: Food in Japan has a much wider variety than I had ever thought to experience in the USA.

Point #4:  Food in Japan is kinda sorta really expensive.

With that said, there were still some awesome highlights.

* In Osaka, after befriending a few Australians from our hostel, we went into a place where everyone gets their own fire (grill) and you can order all the raw meat you want (of which there was huge variety, including "salted pig's penis" which we did not try) and then cook it as rare or well done as you pleased.
* I ate delicious ramen at a stand in Osaka and at the Ramen Museum in Yokahama.
* There was this cool style of restaurant called izakaya where every table had a button that you could press when you wanted your server to come over and then you would order small plates and drinks and then whenever you wanted to order more you could just press it again and they'd come over and bla bla bla and your bill only closed out when you said you wanted it to.  As a server, I would be thrilled to work someplace with that kind of system!
* In Kyoto, we ate at an izakaya restaurant where I got "tea rice with raw octopus"- you get a bowl with rice and raw octopus and a cup of hot tea and you put the hot tea into the rice so the octopus can cook- it was AMAZING.  And then I got chicken-plum-cheese tempura, and that was really good too.  This restaurant seemed to serve more "modern" Japanese food and it was delicious.  Christine got sweet potato fries with honey butter and that was also a huge hit.
* On the train on my way to Tokyo I thought I was getting a package of normal salmon sushi, but then when I opened the box each sushi piece was wrapped in a leaf!  And all the writing on the box was in Japanese so I had no idea how I was supposed to eat it, if I was supposed to unwrap it and eat it or not!  I unwrapped the first one which was impossible to do using only chopsticks, which I took as a sign that I, in fact, was supposed to eat the leaf.  It tasted super good, as if it was meant to be eaten that way, so I ate the rest of the sushi this way.  I showed it to Kirtana and a friend of her's and they had never seen anything like it before.  They read the package and it turned out that this leaf was a persimmon leaf!  Which only strengthens my theory that persimmons = the perfect fruit.
* At Starbucks I had a macha tea latte.  It was green and pretty and yummy and filled with antioxidants which made me think I was being healthy.
* In Yokahama I also tried Korean food at a Korean/Vietnamese/Indian restaurant, and in Tokyo I went to a ridiculously expensive but very cute and good smelling French bakery.
* The only other noteworthy food Christine and I tried was horse sashimi.  For some reason it reminded me of fruit juice, but Christine described it as a mix of raw tuna and steak.

Anyway, aside from the food Japan was a very interesting experience.  I've never felt so much explicit pressure to follow such specific conduct, which I had a hard time dealing with.  However, the country was beautiful, and we met a ton of extremely warm, kind people at each step of the journey.  I'm not sure if I would rush back for any other reason other than to visit Kirtana, but I am very glad that I went and got to see this country I've heard so much about my whole life.