Japanese Cuisine - More Memories

Hello once again, people :) Today I'll once again be remembering good remembrances about my time galavanting in Japan. On this occasion, however, I'll be focusing on a much more specific subject, hinted at in my previous entry - food!
When I hear people saying that gaijin don't like a lot of Japanese food, I cannot for the life of me understand why. Maybe it's just because I'm a fat bastard, but I really love Japanese food, and if it weren't for the fact that I cycled everywhere every day in my year abroad, I'd be the size of a house by now ^^'
As well as being amazingly tasty, there is a lot of... unusual food in Japan, as I'm sure a lot of people are aware. I discovered this first hand a day or two after I arrived there, with this little beauty:

Behold - the pizza danish! (not the first time I'll be discussing pizza in this blog)
Found this little gem in a combini, definitely worth the 105 yen it cost me

Pizza danish is just one of the many delicious items I picked up in combini. As well as Japanese staples such as onigiri riceballs and cup ramen, I fondly remember melon-pan and yakisoba-pan ^^

In and around the Tsukuba campus there were a multitude of different restaurants that my friends and I would frequent. As there are a lot of them, I'll try to be brief lest this post end up as long as the last (sorry again ^^'):

• Big Boy - American-style restaurant, serving mainly burgery-style food although they did have an all-you-can-eat salad bar which I took advantage of a couple of times
• Kuraudo - Okonomiyaki ('Japanese pizza' - bad description) restaurant. Huge portion sizes, and so many different choices on the menu, although the gyoza one was a definite favourite, for reasons which shall become apparent
• Fuji-sen - A little Japanese restaurant just off of my first dorm. It had a nice, homely feeling about it, and they had a cute kitty that used to walk around under some of the tables :3 And of course, the food was amazing - my usual dish of choice was gyuniku piman (pork and green bell pepper). Also, this was one of the restaurants where we discovered ソース, a.k.a. awesome sauce, a.k.a. okonomi sauce, the most delicious condiment known to man
• The Chinese place on the other side of the dorm, whose name I still cannot remember ^^' Whenever a group of exchange students entered the place, the owners knew exactly what we were going to order - karaage fried chicken, which came with rice (refillable) and a side salad with another amazing condiment which we believe could have been sesame mayo, but were never 100% sure... Also of note, a dish I never tried consisted of broccoli, squid and... strawberry XD
  

A small dish of noodly things from a day I was hanging out there more for the company than for the food (accompanied by Makkurokurosuke)

• The Korean place, whose name I also cannot remember ^^' My dish of choice was the ishiyaki bibimbap, although there were about 3-4 dishes my friends and I rotated between. As well as yet another kick-ass condiment - 'Korean ketchup' - they had both refillable rice AND refillable side-dishes (different assorted vegetabley things, including kimchi, which were largely unidentified and entirey delicious)
• Hanazushi, the conveyor-belt sushi restaurant. Of course everyone knows Japan is famous for sushi, and of course, it's better in Japan. Rather expensive, naturally, but very good. Can't say I thought much of the sea urchin sushi, but I did get to try horse meat sashimi
  
• Shakey's Pizza - Perhaps my second favourite restaurant which we frequented in Tsukuba, for a very simple reason - ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT pizza. Of course, this isn't just any pizza, this is Japanese seemingly-random-toppings pizza

Case in point - Strawberry, Oreo and Marshmallow dessert pizza

• The restaurant which tops this list - White Gyoza. Part of a chain of Gyoza restaurants in Japan (including the epicly-named Fight Gyoza in Tokyo), it is common opinion that no Western gyoza/pot stickers could ever hope to compare to such heights of awesome
  

For those of you who are health-conscious, we worked out that gyoza contains all of the vital nutrients :D

Anyways, moving on from restaurants, I want to briefly talk about a couple of other Japanese tasties. First up is bento boxes, the famous packed lunches. As well as people making them theirselves, it's also possible to buy pre-made ones. Apparently each train station in Tokyo is famous for certain kinds of bento, although I didn't go and investigate that. On the way to Shimoda, however, I did pick up this 30-piece healthy bento box:

Healthy, colourful AND delicious (and the cheapest thing on their menu ^^')

Speaking of Shimoda, the food at the Marine Research Centre was also just as good, if not better. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were a delight

The one example I managed to photograph

During my New Year's trip to stay with my friends in Yokohama, I got to experience the Japanese New Year traditional foods - osechi-ryouri. My friends were surprised by the fact that I tried a little of everything, but as I said at the start of this post, I can't understand why - it's so damn good!

Case in point

One brief point I'd like to mention at this point is the ice cream from the Sakura Matsuri in Kawazu. We passed by an ice cream vendor just out of the station, and decided to try two of their interesting-looking flavours - sakura (which tasted mainly of cinnamon but was still great) and wasabi... that's right, wasabi. And honestly, it wasn't as bad as I would've imagined ^^'

Om-nom-nom!

The last piece of deliciousness I'll mention in this blog is something I mentioned in my previous post - nomihoudai, a.k.a. all-you-can-drink. Expensive, but worth it. In addition to the pretty sizeable drinks menu, food is served throughout the course of the three hour drinking session. What's more, it differed pretty much every time we went; while the staple of edamame was always there at the beginning (in much the same way as we in the West have peanuts), we got everything from fried chicken and vegetables to a hot pot!

You have to admit - for a pub, the food was pretty classy ですね。

And with that, I'll bring another long blog post to a close. All this talk of Japanese cuisine is making me hungry! XD

Kanpa~i!