Japan Trip (Spring 2008) - Part 4

Are you ready for more? Here we go…. After visiting a sake brewery museum in the morning, we headed off to Awaji Island to enjoy a Japanese puppet play. We learned about how it takes three people to control one puppet (one for the head and arm, another for the other arm, and the last person for the legs). The play is in Japanese but if you read the summary before hand you can understand what’s going on. The gidayu narration and shamisen accompaniment to the puppet play also add a great element making the whole experience very enjoyable.

Next we moved on to the prefecture of Tokushima on Shikoku Island. Here we got to see the famous Awaodori Dancers perform. The women as well as men were all really great. It was kind of like the dancing at Hawaii bon dances but a little more enthusiastic. This and the puppet play were both very culturally interesting and entertaining. If you’re in the area, I’d definitely recommend it.

Food, yes - I know you are all waiting for the food pics. Here was our dinner at the hotel…sukiyaki.

At first when I heard it was a sukiyaki dinner, I thought…that’s good I guess. Simple and homey. But this was really so much more. For example, we started off with these little appetizers.

Then the waitress came and started cooking it at our table.

There were a lot of fresh ingredients and it was a big pot so we all ate a lot!

It also came with some tempura.

And fruit…

And some sweet potato ice cream. See the little pieces inside?

The next day we went to Ritsurin Park. A park or garden in Japan is very different from what you think of in Hawaii. Normally when I think of a park, it’s just grass and some trees. In Japan it is beautifully landscaped gardens with manicured trees, ponds, bridges…everything just very elegant.

Here are some koi fish which my other half despises. He grew up with a big koi pond in his backyard, which he was responsible for cleaning every other Saturday. I guess I’d get nasty flashbacks too if I had to do that. But I didn’t, so I enjoyed looking at these pretty fish.

Magnolia trees, so beautiful.

And finally, sakura.

Here was one of our many bus snacks, it’s called taruto. It is a sponge cake roll with azuki bean paste in the middle. It’s supposed to look like the hiragana character “no”.

Both of our guides were really good about buying snacks for us to try in each new region we went to. If an area was well known for a product or specific snack they would let us know and often give us some to try.

I have to show you this, there was this man selling towels with geisha designs on them. The thing is, when you heat up the towel - I guess in the shower or onsen - the clothes on the geisha disappear leaving, yup you guessed it! I have it on video, but since this isn’t a rated R blog I can’t show it here, sorry! He was showing us by heating it up with an iron. Normally I’m really much more of a feminist…but this was pretty funny.

The hotel this night was a traditional ryokan. It was a first for me to walk in to a hotel room and not have a bed. Normally our routine is walk in, drop our bags, and flop on the bed. But this wasn’t bad. We took a look around, had a seat and found some snacks and tea there for us.

View outside our window.

Snacks, yum.

For dinner we were having kaiseki again like at Mt. Fuji. This one had so much food though, I could barely finish.

If you look at the white and blue plate in the picture above - the one with the two pieces of fish, lemon slice, and green looking ball - that was fugu (pufferfish). That was pretty neat to try…a little scary at first though since as you probably know, if it isn’t prepared properly you can die from its poison.

The other exotic dish I had was jellyfish. You can see this in the picture below in the little green dish. Until someone told me what it was, I totally thought it was pickled daikon or some other crunchy vegetable. To me that’s what it tasted like.

I have to show you a picture of one other dish. I was eating this soup, tasted good…nothing out of the ordinary. Then all of a sudden I felt kind of a scratchy feeling on my tongue when eating one of the “noodles”. I looked down at my spoon and what do I see but eyes staring back up at me! Eeek! These little fish tasted fine, it was just really weird that I was munching away on them without a clue that they weren’t noodles…that’s the part that weirded me out.

Lesson: Always check if your noodles have eyes.

And finally, a simple and refreshing dessert plate.

Thanks for hanging with me, just one more post to go to finish up this Japan Trip series!