I just got home from hanging out with my homestay family (who I lived with for my first two weeks here and try to hang out with every Monday). The stuff I did tonight is just so unique to being here that I have to talk about it.
Okay, first we went to eat at this famous sushi restaurant near my apartment called Sakai Sushi. It's really fancy shmancy, with a big zen garden in the back and aquariums with huge fish and squid in them ready for the catching. I let my homestay family order whatever and just went with it. So tonight, not only did I eat the typical normal sushi you would expect, like tuna, salmon, etc, but we had fresh squid sashimi. This thing came to the table on a bowl of shaved ice with flowers and a little plastic bonsai tree sticking out of it. They had caught the squid, cut off the sashimi from the "wings" of the squid, and then laid out the remaining LIVE (but dying...) squid under the sashimi. It was SO WEIRD. If you touched the squid it would wriggle and change colors. It freaked me out, but the sashimi was really good. When we were done with the sashimi they took the rest of the now dead squid back to the kitchen, fried it up and then served it to us again. CRAZY.
After dinner we went to visit grandma, who lives with my homestay family's aunt, uncle, and cousins. We just hung out and chatted (well they chatted and I interjected whenever I could say something) and watched a Japanese variety show that included a pretty young girl, a guy dressed in a pink rabbit suit, and three african guys dressed as firefighers. Didn't understand what was going on until they suddenly segued to a CHALLENGE! in which there was a huge pinball machine made out of wood using a bouncy ball as the pinball. The game was called Mix Juice, and how it worked was that they had 5 rounds, and there were holes in the pinball game in which the ball could drop. Each hole had a picture of a different fruit like strawberry or orange or whatever, but the gutter was goya, this bitter melon from Okinawa. For each of the 5 rounds, wherever the ball dropped, two pretty girls in some food service uniform would mix that ingredient into a blender to make a smoothie. One team ended up having a smoothie with 3 servings of goya and banana and orange, and the other had a decent normal smoothie with no goya. I didn't understand half of what was being said but it was still hilarious. The point of this is to highlight 1) how food and presentation centered Japanese culture seems to be, 2) how much Japanese people like anything that is labelled CHALLENGE!, and 3) how RANDOM tv shows here can be.
Here's some visual aids:
Naho (my homestay sister) and otou-san (dad) with their gigantic nama (live...like from the tap) beers. She asked me, "Is this American size?" and I told her, "actually, it's BIGGER than American size." It was a really big beer.
THE SQUID. So you can see the slices of white sashimi all neatly laid out, and beneath that is the live/in the process of dying squid. Pretty, but strange, and kind of scary.
The other food we had, the kind of stuff you usually think of when you think of sushi, though this stuff was high grade quality. MMM.
Me and okaa-san (mom) with the famous big Sakai Sushi tea cups. I don't know why this places like to have things extra large. Perhaps they're compensating for something, haha.
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