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.



The wasabi grows in gravel beds in cold running water under shade tarps.



The root is grated or ground up and the stems are made into pickles.



I'm now a big fan of wasabi. So is Rich.



Oh yeah, we're actually home in SF now. Looking for jobs and an apartment. There's no place like home.

This army runs on its stomach.

I must agree with Napolean, food is important. Since we arrived in Budapest four nights ago we've had Thai, Greek, Mexican, cooked pasta for ourselves, and went to a continential style resturant, the Soul Cafe, for yuppie type food. As much as we loved Croatia we were getting awfully tired of the food. That happened to us in Italy as well. As much as we both love Italian food, our fickle San Franciscan palettes are used to munching our way around the world in the course of a week. Thai, Ethiopian, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, brewpubs, veggie resturants, middle eastern....ok, now I'm making myself miss SF. One more word - burritos. Ummmm....burritos.

The hits so far while traveling:

France, lunch in Samoens with Hannah and Erik. Three of us had a yummy baked cheese dish with ham, pear and bread. Also the tartaflec that Hannah made. We easily could have eatten a dish twice a large, she wisely did not make the large size.

Geneva
Tomato fondue while sitting at a sidewalk table of a little resturant. It was not the right season or weather for fondue, but it was wonderful. The tomatoes turned the fondue a paler shade then tomato soup. There were few tomato chunks, just the taste of cheese and tomatos. While were eating a group of school children walked by with their teacher, their little eyes were table level and the chorus of "Oh, fondue!" rang out, along with many little voices piping up "Bon appetit!" Obviously a hit with the pre teen crowd. While the lunch was fantastic, the prices in Geneva are sky high. We had a starter of assorted chacueterie, the fondue, and a half liter of white wine for lunch for 80 dollars. Good thing we didn't want to do all of our traveling in europe, we would run out of money in a month or two.



Kotor, Montenegro
Grilled local fish at a resturant inside the old city walls. The waiter was one of the more outgoing we had encounted so far, he reeled off the names of hollywood stars when he found out we were from California. He kept pausing, as if expecting us to say, oh yes, we know them well. There is a salad in Croatia and Montenegro, and probaly Bosnia, that I love. It is called chopped salad, shopski, in phonetic Croatian, and it is cucumbers, tomatoes, onions or peppers and cheese all diced up into little cubes. The version in Sarajevo was good, but in Montenegro the local cheese was softer and less salty then the Sarajeven version. It made the salad so perfect. I miss that salad.