It's so funny to look at these pictures now, as opposed to when I took them a while back because when I took them, all of this food seemed so strange and somewhat scary to me. But now, after a few months of seeing it almost everyday, it strikes me at how living in a foreign country totally changes your perception on what's weird and what's normal. I never would have imagined myself looking at this food and thinking, "oh, yeah, that's dried fish flakes, let's get some."
Japanese food is just nothing what I expected. Honestly, I was expecting a few Moto's or Makato's places with loads of shrimp sauce! But, I have never once seen a Japanese stir fry place, nor have I even caught one glympse of anything that resembles shrimp sauce. I didn't expect octopus, raw quail eggs and fermented soybeans to be what's on the daily lunch or dinner menu. I didn't expect salad, miso soup (fish/tofu soup) and rice to be an extremely popular breakfast, and I certainly didn't expect at all that it was difficult to find a pizza without squid, corn or seaweed on it.
However, the most shocking part is, I'm gradually starting to go for this stuff. Japanese rice and miso soup is quite good for breakfast and green tea is gradually starting to not taste like the lawn. But, anytime I travel to a big city like Hiroshima, Osaka, Kyoto or Okayama, I'm already hunting for the Domino's, Wendy's, Pizza Hut's or "real" Mexican restaurants.
But, I have been forced to become a halfway decent cook now. I can make some mean chinese stir fry and thai green curry. I also became so despirate for nachos that I made nacho cheese sauce from scratch the other day and it was almost as good as Amigo's. Seriously.
Well, here are a few photos of typical Japanese cuisine!
