Adventures in Japan

Anthropological study

We really didn't get up to much today. Just kinda hung out around Namba & Shinsaibashi, Eating, shopping, and people watching. Some items of note:

• A hot dog in a crêpe is not a good idea.


• Potatoes with a hard candy coating aren't enjoyable, even if they are from 551 Horai.


• There are a lot of women in this city with questionable taste in footwear.


• There are a lot of women in this city with questionable taste, period.


• People who hand out fliers on busy street corners meet with more rejection than I would have thought.


• People who recruit ladies of the evening on busy street corners aren't always rejected.

Plus we saw an old man wearing Playboy branded mukluks, and this random poster on the street:


Actually, we did get up to a bit of something once Tyler got off of work. We went out for shabu shabu, a communal cooking experience popular in winter (everything here has a season). We ordered three people's worth of shabu shabu fixins, but once they arrived at our table we weren't quite sure what to do with them. Eh, we muddled our way through. We started by dumping some vegetables into the pot of bubbling broth in the middle of the table. Then we cooked the thin slices of meat, one at a time, by picking them off the plate with our chopsticks, swishing them around in the broth, dipping them in mystery sauces, and eating them. Once the meat was gone, we started picking the vegetables out of the soup and eating those too. Once those were done, we tossed in some noodles, cooked 'em up, dished em out, and ate 'em. The whole experience was kinda fun, but the food itself was disappointingly bland. I wish I'd been more adventurous with the sauces.