Where are we?: Conveyor belt sushi

Some of the most stressful times we endured in China and Japan were when trying to get food. As you may have noticed over the year, we tend to avoid the easy tourist spots in favour of local restaurants. Sure, we could have found a KFC or Pizza Hut in a lot of the places we went to, but what's the point? (OK, we did go to a Pizza Hut once in China when we had reached meltdown stage.)

What's the secret to eating out when you don't speak the language? Picture menus!

Or pointing to the plastic food in the window. But that's a bit awkward. Street vendor food is always pretty straightforward. The Takoyaki (octopus balls) were a big hit with Rich in Japan.

Set meals were always a nice break too. When someone just brings you a bunch of food, puts it in front of you, and leaves. This was a Buddhist guest house we stayed at in Koya-San. It is vegan Shojin temple food, like the restaurant "Medicine", in SF.

The tempura and the sesame tofu were particularly great.

Hands down though, my favorite dinner in Japan was at a conveyor belt sushi restaurant in Kyoto. So low stress. You just sit and watch the sushi go by and pick up the plates you want. You order beer from the roving waitstaff and they count up the number of plates you have in front of you and you take your ticket to the register to pay. When they bring you a beer they bring you a yellow plate to put on your stack to show you had a beer. Or in our case, a few beers.

There is soy sauce and big boxes of pickled ginger in front of you, and if you don't see what you want you can request it from one of the many sushi chefs. We went to the same place twice, that's how much fun it was.

The second time we went, Rich was having a silent eat-off with the two growing teenage boys to his left. They eyed his stack of plates when they sat down and then proceeded to eat so much sushi it was amazing. Even at only 137 Yen (about $1.25)per plate two teenaged boys can do some serious damage. The two of us ate about 22 plates of sushi, together. The boys must have done about 35 or 40 between the two of them.

When you travel you occasionally go to a place and wish you had a specific friend there. A friend who you know would just love whatever it is you're doing. At the sushi place, about twenty plates in, Rich already had eaten all kinds of things that we couldn't identify and had never tried before, he looked at me and said "Know who would love this?" "Leif" We both said in unison. Leif is a friend through my brother who once came through SF for work and we had a fun sushi fest with him at Godzilla Sushi. Leif is great because he'll try anything, and like Rich, can eat a lot. At conveyor belt sushi I stop eating a lot sooner then Rich and sit there picking at pickled ginger while he keeps saying - oh! That looks good! and plucking more plates from the conveyor belt.

And about the wasabi - anyone who's been to sushi with me knows what a pain I am - the wasabi has to be on the side because I don't like wasabi. I thought. Turns out I don't like the green horseradish passed off as wasabi in the US. In Japan the wasabi is real wasabi and tastes different. To test this new theory we went to a wasabi farm and even ate wasabi ice cream.