Eating Japanese - Friday

Well, the American breakfast reigned again in the morning. I should clarify that it's not really a breakfast you're actually likely to find in America: the sausage, toast eggs, and ham are standard enough, but they're complemented by potato salad and a greens salad with thousand island dressing.

Lunch was at a Korean barbecue restaurant. Korean barbecue is sort of like Mongolian barbecue, but you cook the meat yourself at a little grill at the table. The one I went to last time I was here was better, with a big buffet-style selection of meats and vegetables. This place was a little nicer, but we just ordered steak and there wasn't much of it.

Dinner was really good at a little hole-in-the-wall yakitori restaurant in Tokyo. Yakitori is just little grilled skewers of meat or vegetables. They brought out our chicken selection, which included regular chicken-breast meat, but also had skewers of skin and gristle. The gristle one was especially weird; it was basically just the little part at the end of the bone that no one ever eats. Well, my co-eaters weren't too excited about those skewers, so I ate them myself.

About halfway into the hour-and-a-half train ride back to the hotel, things started to go wrong down south, if you know what I mean. It was a loooong ride back, and an interesting lesson that, just because they serve it to you and you can actually eat it, doesn't mean you should.