The Food Interlude (somewhere between Days 4 and 5)

A quick note here about Japanese food. At this point we've been eating Japanese for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and I am thoroughly sick of it already. Some of you may remember that the first time I had a full Japanese meal was in Hong Kong last year, and it may not have been a direct consequence, but I threw up that meal along with everything else I tried to eat for the rest of that weekend. I hadn't had Japanese food after that until this year, when D started getting me used to it by taking me to J restaurants and feeding me bits here and there. So I thought I was ready to go on the trip, but it started out badly on the plane when I ordered the Japanese meal from Qantas (pork on rice) and about four hours later, for the first time in my life had to use the airplane sick bag. I recovered by the time we arrived, but here we are four days later and I believe Japanese for every meal is getting to me.

We've been having yakitori almost every day for lunch or dinner because we don't know what else to order--and that's just lumps of meat grilled on skewers, usually extremely fatty, or some fried chicken on rice, or fried pork with curry sauce. And since that first day, we haven't found a decent noodle shop, so for almost every lunch we slurp down a bowl of sub-par salty soup with a few tasteless noodles and a bit of pork floating in it. As for vegetables, I have never liked tempura anyway, which is one of the only ways you get vegetables here--battered and fried. They say it's a "light" oil but I am not sure what that means, it still feels greasy to me, and I make a lot of people stare by peeling the fried bits off the veg.

Now, I'm not saying that a lot of this isn't our fault--we don't know which local restaurants are good, and we can't read the menus a lot of the time so our selection is limited. Also, sushi is supposed to be pretty good for you--fresh vegetables and fish--but I don't eat it, which is my own problem, and is causing D great pain. But, my worst problem is with breakfast. I knew I was in for it on the first day when the hotel fed us fried chicken bits for breakfast, and the second day, when we didn't get out the door til after 10 and D suggested we go to a restaurant for a Japanese breakfast consisting of noodles and--you guessed it--fried chicken. At home, I eat muesli with fruit and yoghurt for breakfast every single day, with oatmeal some days to mix things up. And I have an apple a day around 10:30, which here, is Not An Option. A tray of cherries we bought--maybe half a pint--set us back twelve dollars US. An apple I paid three bucks for was obviously imported--most of their fruit is--and turned out acidic and mushy. So with fried chicken and noodles for lunch and fried pork for dinner every single day, my system was Not Happy.

Around Day 3 we got in the habit of going to a bakery every day. The bakery offered a bit of familiar food, usually something with fruit in it--strawberry jam in a roll, or an apple tart--different, and filling enough to keep me going through the next salty, greasy fried meal.

Also a note on the bakeries--bakeries seem to be to Japan what diners are to the US and cafes are to Australia. There are thousands. You can buy custard puffs at Beard Papa's (now officially my favorite bakery chain EVER), boxes and boxes of donuts at Krispy Kreme (there were lines out the doors of every KK store we saw--and young, fashionable women walking around swinging bags of them like Gucci purses), crepes filled with ice cream and fake cream from roadside stands in all the shopping districts--sometimes one per block, roadside stands specialising in freshly made Belgian waffles covered in chocolate sauce, and croissants, savory buns, sweet lemon tarts, and roll cakes just about everywhere. The traditional red bean paste dessert is still popular as well, but now it comes not only in mochi (pounded glutinous rice, NOT my favorite) but also between pancakes, in what are most likely increasing sizes, and frequently accompanied by green tea-flavoured "soft cream" (soft serve ice cream).

D is convinced, for some reason, that the food here is super healthy. But he also keeps commenting on how many more chubby Japanese there are now than there were when he used to live here. Not fat, but chubby in the way a naturally skinny person who eats poorly puts on weight in strange places. It's also obvious why. Pastries are all the rage in Japan. And then there are the dozens of hamburger chains. I would have thought hamburgers would be hard to find, or at least unpopular in Japan...wrong. Aside from the ubiquitous McDonald's, there were Lotteria burgers (including the infamous 7-patty burger!!!), Mos burger, something called Freshness Burger, and ads for Wagyu Beef burgers just about everywhere.



Anyway, the point is, you take some skinny people who just eat rice, meat, and veg, and introduce Krispy Kreme--no wonder they're getting taller, and wider as well. And no wonder my system is unhappy. By the end of the trip I would be ordering potato wedges and Western style salads whenever I could find them on the menu, just for some familiarity, and some greens. Luckily for Darryl, who has to share a bathroom with me, he lets me.