Thanksgiving!

Well, it looks like Thanksgiving 2006 has come and gone, and for the second year in a row I have managed to avoid the eat-a-thon that usually occurs at this time every year. I'm not sure what it is about Thanksgiving, but it always seems to inspire some type of overindulgance regardless of my location on the map. Last year was a "wine-a-thon" and this year was "sushi-a-thon". In lieu of the traditional turkey and stuffing, this year I went for top of the line sushi at a little place here in Nonoichi. One of the teachers that I work with thought it would be fun to take me to an expensive sushi shop (as opposed to the ol' stand-by conveyor belt sushi, or kaiten sushi, favored among those of us with a less discerning palate for quality sushi...and also because it's cheap) so after work a few Japanese teachers and I met up at a unbelievably tiny little sushi shop. We all crammed ourselves into our seats at the counter, which is nice since you get to see the sushi chef in action and you can also see the wide array of strange fish behind the glass on the counter top (some of which was still moving, by the way) The owner/chef is a big soccer fan and likes to travel around the world to see soccer matches, so his english was perfect. He seemed to take great joy in pulling out all the most horrific looking sea creatures to explain what exactly I was about to eat....to be honest, on most occasions I think I would have enjoyed some of the food more had I not known what it looked like in its previous life...

As the sushi stared flowing, so too did the beer. It's always interesting to talk to the teachers outside of the school setting to get their real opinions about things. I got to hear all the juicy gossip about the other teachers and the principal, and during the course of the gossip session we got onto the topic of obscene words, which, in my opinion, are the most valuable words to know when learning a foreign language. By the end of the night, all the teachers and I were calling each other "assholes" and discussing the socio-linguistic differences between the phrases "take a dump" and "bowel movement". At one point, in the heat of discussion, I accidentally screamed out "unko" (the Japanese word for "shit") which gave all the other patrons in the restaurant quite a laugh. Now that's what I call internationalization....

Here are a few pics of the more interesting things on the menu:

sea cucumber (in its natual habitat)...very crunchy...

fermented squid intestines....salty

awabi (in english "abalone"...since I had no idea what this was in neither Japanese nor English, here's a definition: Any of various large edible marine gastropods of the genus Haliotis, having an ear-shaped shell with a row of holes along the outer edge. The colorful pearly interior of the shell is often used for making ornaments. Also called ear shell) I was told that this is one of the most expensive delicacies at high end sushi shops. Because I had never tried it before, the sushi chef gave us a free sample....I'll only say that it tasted about as good as it looks. I'll let you draw your own conclusions...

This is "anko", sweet bean paste found in many desserts here in Japan. We didn't eat this at the sushi restaurant, but if you'll notice the word anko is quite similar to the word unko (mentioned in the post above). It seems they share more than just a morphological similarity...