Adventures in Japan

Beginning of the End

So today was Nate's last full day in Japan. Of course I had to work a full day. It sounds like I didn't miss much though. Mainly they did laundry.

But we were going to make up for the lack of daytime excitement with an evening of boozing and carousing. We started the evening off at a yakiniku joint. The same one we wrote about a while back. If y'all recall, yakiniku is like an indoor barbecue.


We ordered one of their meat combo plates and a bunch of drinks. Nate got himself a bottle of that there cheap Korean hooch I mentioned in this post. As is the Japanese custom, Carla kept topping up his drink without asking his permission. Needless to say, Nate became very happy in a very short amount of time.


As the en-happy-ing was happening, the meat tray was brought to our table. The meat tray contained many different kinds of meat. We think it was all from the same animal. We can't be sure. We aren't really up on our Japanese cuts of meat. Most of it was good, some of it was tripe and some of it was liver.

The beefy, meaty, steaky bits were just fantastic. I love stuff cooked over an open flame. We had to pace ourselves, to make the good meat last. You don't want to finish off an evening of delicious dining trying to choke down liver.


Trevor ate most of the liver. He's such a trooper. I tried one piece. I ate it all, but just barely. I know now that I will never, ever, in the span of my entire life, enjoy liver. I covered that miniscule cube of dark brown 'meat' in chili sauce and garlic and I grilled it FOREVER but it still tasted like something I don't like the taste of. But it's not just the taste of liver that I hate, I despise the texture of liver. If grilling and garlic can't improve the taste of something, then it doesn't need to be eaten, that's what I say.

Hell, I ate grilled tripe and liked it and I still can't stomach liver. That's a bold statement right there. Some might be shocked, but it's true. Grilled tripe is tasty. A bit chewy, I'll grant you that, but tasty. The gooey blobs of slimy white that shrunk when we cooked 'em were also more edible than liver. I just wish we knew what we were eating.

We were all a little tipsy and reeked of smoke when we stumbled out of the establishment. In fact Trev was so drunk that he left his wallet behind. We might not have noticed until much later if not for the fact that our waitress followed us for three city blocks and returned Trev's wallet. Japanese people rock.

A drunken plan of action was decided upon. We would catch a train to Shinsaibashi, where you can't walk two feet without finding a bar or nightclub, and stay there until the trains started running again in the morning. Cunningly, Carla suggested that we change into clothes that didn't have food and grease splattered all over them. Stupidly, we agreed. As soon as we got back to the Orange House, the sheer amount of cheap alcohol in Nate's stomach caught up with him. He fell asleep kneeling on his futon, hugging his giant Domo-kun. So our big night out was over before it ever really began. Well played Carla, well played.