Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Japanese Food

I know now that for the most part I do not like Japanese food. I'll eat the rice and chicken and beef, but they are often few and/or far between. Just the other day I went with a group of the exchange students out for lunch... they ended up deciding on a sushi bar--the last place in the world I wanted to be. Looking at the menu made my stomache turn horribly. I had to walk back to the school and eat curry rice at the cafeteria. By-the-way, I've never had curry rice before and I ended up throwing half of it away... too spicy. In this city pretty much the only food afordable on a daily basis and in decent amounts disgusts me... but let me be more specific... Fish, guts, sushi, pork, indian food, and other nasty things are cheapest. Cheese, sweet things, chicken, fried rice, and beef are either really expesive or hard to find. My first couple of days I lived off of packaged pastries. I soon found spaghetti, but had to buy a pot, collinder, finger ladle, and utensils in order to make it. The tomato sauce wasn't sweet enough, in a large enough glass container, or at a reasonable price. Just the other day, I found some frozen fried rice at a good price, but man does it taste weird. I was going to buy stuff to make pizza, but then I realized that the cheese is basically three times the price in america for half the amount.

That's another thing. At resturants or whenever you eat somewhere other than in your room, with your meal comes a tiny little bitty cup. Appearently the Japanese don't drink fluids very much... maybe it's because they have soup with everything. I don't like miso soup either, it's swimming with seaweed and it tastes a little fishy. One day I lived off of these weird noodles that were a little sweet, but made my stomache turn and burn a little.

For the most part, I am at least beginning to find some cheaper things to feast on and eventually I hope to adjust enough to branch out to other tpes of food, but for now its strictly survival until I can get a comfortable base variety to lean on. I will experiment, but only when my stomache has the luxury of wasting food. I learned that the hard way. I went to the Fall Equinoxical Festival and it was amazing, but I bought this wierd potatoe and rice pancake wich sandwiched Japanese vegatbles with lots of sauce and mayo on top... It looked really delicious, but once I tried it it made my stomache turn for no good reason. I had to give it to someone else to finish.

Any-who... Japanese food sucks, but Tokyo is more than just food and I love this place! There are so many things to do and so many nice people. I'm sure I'll figure everything out... I also think I should probably write all of this down in some coherent fashion and put it here later on. Bt until then.... jya... matta!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I so miss Japanese food. It took a little getting used to, but then I totally fell in love with it. I've had every kind of sushi and sashimi and lots of other stuff. We do have a Japanese restaurant in town (Racine, WI) so I do get some now and then, but never enough.

The biggest challenge to try for me was "natto". Have you had that pleasure yet? My students always laughed when I mentioned natto - they think only true Japanese can eat it. But I could stomach it when served as "natto-maki". The seaweed and rice helped me to stomach it.

And then there was "habu-zake", which was sake that had a poisonous habu snake preserved in the bottle and the bottle buried for some period of time then served as a special sake. I tried it, but I remember throwing up the next day just thinking about it.

Ah, the memeories of a year of Japanese eating. You should have many memories still ahead.