Jun 9, 2014

Day 10: Failed attempt at Japanese conversation

We discussed a fascinating book called Sanshiro by Natsume Soseki in class. It's a coming to age book about a boy called Sanshiro who moves from a village to Tokyo and undergoes transformation.

After class, I met a friend at Takodanababa. We went to Mr Donut. Everything on the menu was in Japanese so I tried asking the lady at the counter the name of the teas listed on the menu. There were 3 teas listed and she named two of them. So I tried asking her the name of the third tea by saying "san teas?" (san is the number three in Japanese and I was hoping to make effective use of my newly acquired japanese number skills). As soon as I said that, she smiled, nodded and said "san teas? hai!". It took me a few seconds to realize that she was going to order 3 teas for me. So I gave up and pointed to a picture on the menu, which turned out to be some sort of grape juice or soda.

My friend who has now been in Japan for 2 months shared some of his wisdom with me and told me about the concept of butler cafes, which are similar to maid cafes except that they're angled towards women. He also told me about the 'ramen burger' which is a burger with ramen noodles inside it. Fusion food at its best.

For dinner, Kaori-san cooked kimchi nabe with udon noodles. Nabe implies a hot pot dish in which you put a variety of meat and vegetables and eat them hot out of the pot. Kimchi nabe is a hot pot dish with the broth made of kimchi.  In the end, when we were done eating the meat and vegetables, we put udon noodles, a thick kind of noodle, in the hot pot and added egg to it. After it was cooked in the hot pot for a few minutes, it was a delicious blend of egg, the kimchi broth and udon. As I mentioned in my earlier post on sumo-wrestlers, this is a kind of dish regularly eaten by sumo wrestlers to bulk up.
Kimchi Nabe
Udon noodles with egg and leftover kimchi broth

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