Blash around the World

Okay, I apologize for not having posted on Monday as some of you wrote me early this week. (s’trop la carotte…). I have been busy with work (really busy this time) and could not get the moods to write something interesting. Now you get served, so far I did not write anything about food and it’s a shame because there is so many things to try and taste here. So many that I do not know what I will begin with… as Sebastien wrote on sushi, I will go on with it. Bon appétit !
One can think that sushi is quite expensive, at least in Europe, and it is even in Japan. BUT there is no comparison in taste. I would say that the sushi I am getting from the supermarket here are equivalent to the ones I had in some restaurants back in Switzerland and in the United States. Now you can get two different types of restaurant here; belt type were sushi are moving along a belt and you pick the one you like – pretty cheap like 100-200 yens the pair, or you get the counter type, slightly more expensive, where you order directly the cook in front of you and he will prepare them in a jiffy. おいしいね ! Right so delicious (even though I am not so sure of which one I tried…), taste is not the only particularity in Japan, you have to count on diversity and as gaijin, we tried everything, more or less. The fun part is to report what we ate to our Japanese colleagues, though we can remember some sushi English name, it has barely a meaning for them as they use Japanese names obviously. Still by describing some of the sushi they could tell us that we ate kazunoko, I am not able to transcribe the taste but the texture was interesting, it was a little hard like plastic but you can bite it easily. And of course we had twice of my favourite one, unagi. I am just totally mad of it, on a side note; we also had unadon this week for lunch. Oh and at the end, they servedus chawanmushi though we did not order it, but as curious as one can be, we taste it for you. Yummy !

You probably guys are getting hungry so we go on! Something funnier, everyday we have lunch at the NEC Kansai Lab cafeteria, which is serving good food. You choose between set A or B; both include miso soup, rice, some vegetables or side dish and the main dish. The latter one can go from tonkatsu to hamburger, salmon to tempura. Not to say that it is really cheap either 520 or 630 yens, but recently I have been eating curry rice and ramen or udon more than I can eat in a row. Those sets described earlier come in a limited number and I do not know whether my colleagues have so much work that they go to lunch late or if it did not ring their mind that they are going to eat curry rice for the third time in a row within one week… still I cannot stand this situation anymore. Hopefully, 2 of our colleagues (freshmen) probably felt the same and start the move to go to lunch a couple of minutes earlier, nicely done.

Oh yeah, by the way, Japanese eat very fast! Some of my earliest reader may remember an article entitled “Eat fast and get lost”, the same situation apply here and I would transcribed it as “ittadakimasu, ike, gochisosama deshita”. They literally eat the set in two bites within 10 to 15 minutes and then back to the workspace. It is not like we were in a hurry and anyway as they will be goofing around for 1 hour or so, waiting for coffee to be done (by one of the two people knowing how to handle the coffee machine) and then sit and talk about anything.

Still caring for some more food? Then let’s try takoyaki and okonomiyaki! The first one is a typical dish from Osaka, which consists of small balls of some kind of dough with octopus in it, usually served with mayonaise, very thinly sliced dried fish and a famous unknow sauce (that sauce goes with everything apparently as I can smell it everywhere). The other dish can be translated as Japanese pancake and depending where you eat it, filling is different. Osaka is know for its okonomiyaki with spaghetti but it also have cabbage, meat, shrimp, octopus, mayonaise, very thinly sliced dried fish and… the unknown sauce!

Though you can buy takoyaki and okonomiyaki almost everywhere on the streets (especially in Dotombori area), it is sometimes interesting to sit at a table and have cooks doing it just in front of you. At least you know what you eat or you try to guess which one is yours…

One more thing, sometimes you are lucky enough and get an English menu or the Japanese one has lots of pictures and you can just point at those to order. But sometimes you are damned hungry and get into some small lovely izakaya… there no English menu, even worse no one understand you (or put in the other way, we do not understand them…) . Well now I know that those izakaya are mainly here for drinking, preferably alcohol and the food they serve is only here to accompany the drinks. Itis pretty expensive and you do not get much to eat before you are drunk. The good thing with Japanese people being drunk, is that they socialize more easily and sometimes turn out to know a little of English to order their favorite dishes…

I hope you enjoyed the meal so just say “gochisosama deshita”