SOFTWARE, JAPAN, SELF-ACTUALIZATION AND

Ok, so yesterday evening I ate dinner with Sakuma san, one of Ayako’s senpais (like “mentor” in english) and a friend. We occasionally eat and drink together so that he can practice english, and I can practice nihongo - works out well, because we both have to reference the dictionary sometimes

Dinner last night was at a Yakitori (usually grilled chicken on a stick) place, not unusual here. However, I ate perhaps one thing I never thought I would eat… and I lived to tell about it.

It really got me thinking about strange food, and although there are a lot of firsts from living in Japan - I decided to narrow this down to just 3 things that shocked me as food I’ve eaten:

1) Snail steamed in its shell. There is something quite strange about pulling the snail out of the shell with your teeth and then gobbling him up… the taste was too bland to recall, I just remember closing my eyes and chomping.

2) Nama Tori == Raw Chicken. This was perhaps one of the first real scary meals for me. I actually blogged about it a while back. The chicken was served in very thin round slices, the very edge was steamed cooked slightly white, but the center was pink, cold, and definitely raw. Fearfully I ate, but my taste buds never complained, it was quite tasty.

3) And tonight… cow intestines + cow stomach! At the yakitori I ate small ringlets of cow intestine + a little cow stomach on the side. We grilled it over open flame at our table (cooking at one’s table is quite common in Japan), and then we ate. I was a bit reluctant, but showed no fear. Experience now tells me that cow intestine and stomach has no real taste, however, intestine is impossible to chew so you have to just swallow it like a piece of gum.

Since I couldn’t get my phone’s camera to work I can’t provide a photo of the intestines… let your imagination work. However, I will share what I had for lunch, Yakisoba.

Charles Abbott’s yakisoba lunch, step 1 pull out the dried veggies and sauce, pour in hot water and veggies.

Step 2, pour out hot water, remove cover, pour in sauce.

Step 3, put on mayonnaise… the favorite sauce of most Japanese dishes. Before Japan I did not like mayonnaise, but now I do

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 7:31 am and is filed under life in Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.