June 15th

Sorry this is late, I was up late Skyping with mom.

“Amerika” edition

Today, while taking my morning walk, I noticed a restaurant I had to go back to with my camera. It is called “King and Heavy American Power Food.” Based on the pictures it specializes in large pieces of meat with french fries on the side. On Friday night, while we were having dinner with people from Craig's work, one of the women told us she thought all Americans would party like Ke$ha. Not exactly the way I'd like to be thought of, king and heavy white rapper chick. Of course, Japanese people are supposed to be all about Hello Kitty and I haven't seen that here, yet.

I indulged in some “Amerika” food the other night and ordered the “hanbaagaa” plate. It was more like a piece of meat loaf. There were little hot dogs and french fries too.

Oh, and remember the dog bus I saw earlier. It is an elementary school bus. I saw a bunch of them early this morning picking up little kids. There were also ones covered in paintings of cartoon characters. They do like their cute stuff, even if I haven't seen Hello Kitty.

This is a dessert we bought at the grocery store. The Japanese don't seem big on chocolate but love azuki. Azuki are red beans that look a little like kidney beans but are soooooo much tastier. This is because they're served sweetened. Inside of the clear gelatinous stuff is azuki paste, basically sweetened refried red bean – it is so much better than it sounds. So, not only is the dessert the size of ping pongs but it features beans.

After work Craig decided he need some foreign food, as in non-Japanese food. During lunch that day he thought they were serving gnocchi in tomato sauce and was really excited. It turned out to be fried prawns in a Chinese spicy chili sauce. There is a pizza place three minutes from the rokko train station. It was called “Pizza House F,” we don't know if there is an A through E somewhere. The majority of the menu was written in katakana, the alphabet they use for loaner words, so if you could pronounce things with a Japanese accent then you could figure out what the menu said because it was all transliterated English. I manged to read the entire toppings section – sure it took 5 min but now I know you can put bananas, eggs, squid, and tuna on a Japanese pizza. We opted for the more traditional bacon, mushroom and garlic. It was really good. We also ordered “Itaria” salads. We figured they'd have curred meats but they actually had pieces of clams and squids. It was more expensive than a noodle bar but definitely took care of the foreign food craving.