Zsup~!

Its been 25 in Japan already, not a very long time away considering that my last trip was about 3 weeks in Malaysia. The trepidation of this trip was immense knowing that it was going to be much longer than this. Several reasons were the cause of that trepidation, the weather, the culture, the people, the uncertainty that even research cannot dispel. However, much of that fear has been expelled from my mind after experiencing Japan for almost 4 weeks!

First off, the weather has been hell on me, but thats mainly because I cannot stand cold. It gets EXTREMELY cold when it rains, regardless of the severity of the rain, and it gets real hot when the sun beats down on you (I for one would prefer hot, hence I believe I probably am better off staying in the tropics). I have seen snow here, and ice forming and all the beautiful things associated with temperate countries, but I have also experienced 3 days of continuous rain and several days of zero degree temperatures. However, it has all been a refreshing and excellent experience.

The culture has astounded me. The politeness, the verying degrees of acceptance we see in the people' s eyes, the plethora of sub-cultures and dressing that can be seen on the streets that are NEVER frowned upon. Japan is really a buffet for the eyes, even without venturing far from the city.

The people are the main topic for this post though. Japan has been renowned for its manners, the people's helpfulness, and overall the kindness of the population is immense. From my trip so far, I have met quite a number whom have gone out of their way to help me. First up would be the nice restaurant owner from Choshi, even though she did not understand our half baked Japanese or English, she still helped us to find a hotel with available rooms! Then on the train to Nagoya, a nice uncle stepped up to ask if we needed help, something that surprised me totally. After that, while we were in Nagoya, another old man stopped to enquire about our well-being, whether we had eaten, whether we had a room. Our next encounter would be in Kyoto, where a customer in an internet cafe was requested to help explain to us the rules and packages offered by the cafe, and he did so with much patience. He even struck up a conversation with us after, talking about Singapore and all.

One encounter which I would like to mention would be in JR Kyoto Station, a restaurant named PASTAMORE. We headed in to have a meal shared between us, but when we found out that the restaurant had rules for ordering, i.e. each person had to order 1 each, we thought of leaving the place because we couldn't eat so much. This was the point that the nice waitress asked us to wait for a moment, and she went to check with the manager for permission for us to order 1 set to be shared. she returned moments later with a smile and told us we could, whereupon we ordered our share of food and guzzled it down. She never had to go out of her way to do this, and just let us leave, hence I feel very strongly for their service. If you even have to have a meal in Kyoto, try this place out, prices are decent even for 1 person, the food is excellent, and service is no doubt extremely good.

The last one on the list but definitely not the least, is a middle-aged man who sold Takoyaki from the back of a Van at JR Kyoto Station Hachijo Exit. His hospitality is boundless from the first time we bought a box of 6 Takoyaki from him, which was when he inquired where we were from, upon knowing that we were travelling from overseas, he immediately went 'Service Service!' and promptly changed the box to a larger box and gave up 10 balls instead! This happened the next 2 times as well, without fail and he never ever gave us the feeling that he wouldn't have done so for repeat customers. I definitely recommend anyone and everyone who visits Kyoto, Japan to have a go at the nice uncle who sells Takoyaki. You can find him at night parked outside JR Kyoto Hachijo Exit, with his Lantern hung to a white van, sitting in there cooking his Takoyaki!

I believe we will only meet more of these kinds of people as we move on in our journey through Japan, so I look forward to having these encounters of the nice kind. They keep my spirit up even in the cold.

Speaking of savoury, the stunning flavours of Matsusaka beef steak on a stick is still lingering on my mental tastebuds. When we glimpsed this street stall opposite a used clothing store, just down the road from Osu Kannon temple, little did ZsupCreator and I realise that we were going for a life-changing experience. I am NEVER going to eat a satay without dreaming of this, for the rest of my life. The beef simply oozed rich meaty zsup, and rather than being just oily, the fat-rich meat was an explosion of COW-ness that I have only previously tasted on shiny plates, in restaurants that have solid reputations. I have tasted good food from street stalls before, but never restaurant quality, dream making stuff.

The next day, we passed by again on the way to pick up stuff for a friend, and the stall was not there. We wish we were not on a budget and had gotten more, the day before.

Nonetheless, our gastronomic odyssey continued...

We have also eaten loads of noodles. Soba, udon, ramen, instant, in broth, in soup, with miso, soy and pork bone stock. The LOT. And I have to say, we have yet to encounter anything we dislike. From train station shops, both on the platform and in the station, to restaurants in shopping arcades... even a museum dedicated to Ramen (in Yokohama). It has all been fantastic for Asian tastebuds that were honed on the likes of Myojo, Ramen, and world-class wonton mee/hor fun/bak chor mee and etc.




The three pix above are just a random selection from the many many bowls of noodly type foods we have scoffed along the way. I love the way that the udon is always smooth, never overcooked. I favour the textures of the soba, firm and not at all mushy, regardless of the outlet I'm purchasing from. Much respect to all the noodle sellers in Japan!


Special mention #1: Ramen street in Nagoya! Despite my dislike for the city, I must say I very very much appreciate the existence of this place. Hidden in a backalley of the JR station itself, the bunch of shops gathered here represent the various flavours of ramen available throughout Japan. We is loves this!


Special mention #2: Perhaps Yokohama's only real place of interest to me. The Ramen Museum has a nice display detailing the history and makings of the yummy noodle, and traces its development in Japan. This is of course done in Japanese text, making for slow reading and even slower translation in my Chinese-stunted mind. I count myself lucky that I even know the alternate language that allows me to guess at what the Japanese text is really saying...

Note to people who might venture here for the historically accurate and very excellent ramen concoctions at this place: It is popular with tour groups and queues for the little shops in there can run up to 1hr or more! Getting your hand stamped and returning in the evening at about 8ish will be good if you want to avoid queues, but this would mean less chance of sampling all the goodies at the various shops, since multiple queueing sessions before they close at 9 will be nearly impossible.



In Hikone, we caught sight of these biscuits in a convenience store. They were horribly overpriced, of course, but that's what you get for having Hiko-nyan gracing the surface of your food right? We chose not to eat it, but I felt like I would have liked to try it, just to bite off his head for fun!


Despite our tight budget for this trip, deprivation has not always been our lot. The plate of sweet goodies above is from Sweets Paradise in Nagoya, where we dug into several servings of cakes over the course of 80 minutes. The buffet is timed so as to facilitate the movement of the queue, which was really long. We would have liked to stay longer though, all the cakes looked amazing!

Food has also sometimes been a source of amusement for us, especially when we see tantalising shopsigns like the one above. While the pictures look really yummy, I doubt I would buy the stuff from reading the text...

This next picture holds the memory of a night in Nagano, being chucked out of a purportedly 24 hour Macdonald's that was really only a 22 hour Macs (they close from 3am-5am for cleaning) so that we ended up going next door to have a beef bowl to justify our taking up a new sleeping spot at 3am in the morning. With our brains scrambled from shattered sleep, we were faced suddenly with a bowl of stewed beef rice (familiar and tasty), and a chilled raw egg (????????) which we were told to simply stir into the meal. Chilled, so that it wouldn't cook even when mixed with the piping hot rice. With the risk of salmonella firmly stuffed into our one-week-old-socks, we tucked into this with positive comments of "MMM mmm MMMMMM". Kudos to ZsupCreator for scoffing the lot in his determination not to waste food in our impoverished travel conditions.


Better food memories exist in Yokohama, where we had our first Real Burger. McPork does not count - it is practically a sandwich. Everyone who goes to Yokohama should check out the lovely babes at Kua'Aina and have one of their luxurious cheese burgers. This is King of CheeseBurgerdom. Rivalling the portions of Carls Jr, and definitely floating around Uberburger and other gourmet burger stores' quality.


It was also in Yokohama that we had the chance to see a ninja chef literally whipping up a storm as he made the omelette in omu-rice a visual display of his skills. The above picture barely captures his mad skillz in creating an omelette of even texture on the pan, and does not at all show the very cool and accurate flips he makes every single time he creates a dish of omu-rice. We watched him do this nearly 5 times in an attempt to pick up some tips and maybe try this at home!

So now we're in Kyoto, and lodged in (yet another) internet cafe... I hadn't blogged about the previous one and planned to, so here's the presentation of both together...

I knew we weren't always going to be able to get as sweet a place as we did in Nagoya, or lovely as the Sendai peeps. But it seems things are swinging to new lows in Kyoto, where I have barely got more ability to access the internet than when I'm wifi-ing on my iPhone.

Grouse 1: So the first computer I had was so lagged out, I ended up changing to another computer. Sadly, the second computer has thus far failed to impress with its especially irritating keyboard (currently being mangled by my very persistent typing), backdated programs (archaic IE, no Firefox, Java mangle that *I* had to update for them) and refusal to upload my photos to Facebook after having stated that it was successful twice.

I recognise, incidentally, that the last could be Facebook's fault. But my travel companion is not facing the same nonsense, so I choose to blame the computer instead.

Grouse 2: Most expensive so far, and all I got was a "free" bath and a really old recliner. This is sad, because I know, Kyoto has a long, traditional history and a very popular tourist area. Still, they could do more about their obvious complacence in at least providing reasonable service for their freaking inflated prices. C'mon. It can't be that tough to give a good chair when charging nearly half extra all the previous places that DID give very excellent sleeping arrangements. *mumbles*

Incidentally, for Kyoto, we are putting up, ONE NIGHT ONLY, in Media Cafe Popeye, located along Kawaramachi Road. Never again. I'd rather go back to sleeping on the cold stone tiles of Forum Ippukudo. At least that didn't dig out my pocket to frustrate me.

And now, to recover my soul, I will point out that the space we had in Yokohama was actually not a bad one, all things considered. We stayed at a DICE outlet, near Shin-Yokohama station. It's not the nearest, but the nearest place charged a bomb for its location. A short walk of 200m provided us with an automatic "discount" of nearly 1k yen on the overnight package price. They charged the cheapest so far, but they had no shower facilities. Then again, it's not like we couldn't get access to that elsewhere (Thank you again, Milton!). However, the computers were reasonably swift, even if we had dodgy USB ports that shook in the casing. And we did manage to sleep quite well in the temperatures set indoors.

What impressed this traveller most, however, was their thoughtfulness in providing sanitary pads in the ladies' toilet. It's quite a nice thing to do, you never know when someone might have forgotten or run out, and it's not always easy to acquire it in the middle of the night, either - particularly in the middle of paid-internet-time. I also very much liked their non-contact pad disposer. You wave a hand over the sensor and the lid lifts, so that you can dump the stuff without actually touching the bin. Even better, the bin has a built in sanitiser and deodorant so that subsequent occupants of the toilet won't have to deal with the unsavory scent of used pads - something which is not at all rare in Singapore.

And yes, rarity as it may be, no photos for this entry because THE COMPUTER AT MEDIA CAFE POPEYE IS BEING AN ACCURSED BRAT.