Kyoto and Nara
Days three and four and the first half of day five were spent in Kyoto and Nara (a smaller town 45 minutes away). Kyoto is unique because it was bombed the least out of all the major metropolitan areas during the war. As a result something like 20% of the world heritage listed sites in Japan are in Kyoto and Nara.
On the train from Matsumoto to Kyoto I met an Aussie named Steve. He ended up being my “mate to get pissed with” as he would put it. He was a pretty cool guy. We were staying at the same hostel so we checked in and then went out to explore. We went on a mission to find and eat as much exotic food as we could find.
There are a bunch of pictures of everything we ate, but I’m not going to be able to upload them for a while. I tweeted a picture of one of the oysters (here), the picture doesn’t really show scale well, but they were about the size of my hand. We also had monster pieces of shrimp. Both of these were in a tiny little restaurant in a back alley in Kyoto where they prepared all of the food right in front of us. We could see one person bringing the coolers full of oyster and shrimp out to start to prepare, and it was obvious that these had been in the ocean mere hours beforehand.
We wandered through the streets a little longer until we found what we thought would be an authentic Japanese restaurant with some more seafood. No one at this place spoke any English which made ordering very difficult. Eventually we got them to bring out a bunch of different plates of foods we hadn’t tried yet. Some of the best were the raw octopus and the cuttle fish (basically a tiny squid). The octopus was served with wasabi which made it very spicy, but not too spicy. It was really chewy and slimy textured, but actually tasted pretty good. The cuttle fish was sliced up already, but uncooked at first. They brought out a tiny little stove for us to cook it ourselves. It was really different because you could feel the suction cups on your tongue.
We also attempted to try some sake. I say attempted because we had trouble explaining what we wanted. You would think that the word sake would be something our waitress understood, but she thought we were just wanting something to drink in general. We did our best and just pointed to something on the drink menu we thought was a rice wine. She brought us two beers instead. On our second attempt we ended up with two glasses of sake. I’ve had it before in the U.S. and I can definitely see how some people would enjoy it, but it isn’t really for me. It tastes a little like vodka and they drink it straight or with a little ice to water it down.
I also took a day trip to Nara, but I’ll have to save that for another post. I’m on my way out the door to tour the Asahi beer brewery with Hamby.
