Japanese Food = Oishi!

Konbanwa! I am pretty sleepy but I've decided to update my blog before I go to bed. High five to myself because I studied Japanese for two hours straight without any breaks. So, on to my blog topic: food. These past four days, I've been eating amazing food. Even my host family has been preparing the most delicious food, and I have no complaints. Tonight, for example, we had shumai for dinner, along with some other side dishes, and I love shumai! This past weekend, I went to Nagoya to meet up with Alex. We ate at our favorite misokatsu restaurant in the Sakae area of Nagoya. This area is the prime shopping area in Nagoya. I got the restaurant's recommendation, which was hire, the more tender pork cut with zero fat. It was divine. I'm never getting anything else again! Afterwards, we indulged in some yummy ice cream from Tully's. We then proceeded to go on the huge ferris wheel. If you know me, I'm terrified of heights. It's not really so much the height part I am scared of--I think it's the possibility of falling that scares me. Anyway, yes, I am a chicken, but I did it. And I think I actually enjoyed the ferris wheel 75% of the time. It's worse going up than going down again...The view from the ferris wheel is spectacular. It's best when you go at night because you can see the entire city lit up.
Alex left for the airport the following morning, and then I met up with Shizuka, my friend from Nagano-ken. I was really excited to see her. We ate lunch at the same misokatsu place, but this time I ordered something slightly different. We ordered the same set that included the hire misokatsu, but I was really shocked because it only came with two pieces! Shinjirarenakatta! Oh well, it was still good but I was disappointed that they only gave us two pieces. Saturday was extremely hot and sticky so we opted to stay in cool areas, a.k.a. stores and restaurants, which were guaranteed to have air conditioning. We found a nice New York bagel place and I had a blueberry bagel with some blueberry cream cheese. It wasn't bad for a "New York" bagel attempt. After Shizuka left to go back to Matsumoto, I went home and slept for ten hours, naturally...

Today was Japanese cooking day! I enjoy cooking so I was looking forward to our cooking session as a class. We were split into two groups and I was put into a three-person group with my two friends: Alex and Morgan. Our cooking sensei (I don't know her name) went over food vocabulary before we started cooking. Then we started making the dessert that we would eat later which was fruits & coffee jelly. Now, I hate Japanese "jelly" in general, but the coffee jelly that we made was alright. After we finished making dessert, we moved on to making Kansai style sukiyaki. Our sensei taught us how to cut the vegetables and meat correctly so that it was pretty for presentation purposes. One of the biggest differences between Kansai and Kanto region sukiyaki is that Kansai sukiyaki doesn't use soup broth. Their sukiyaki is almost like a stir-fry, I guess. Our sukiyaki turned out delicious. It was so much fun preparing and making sukiyaki with my classmates, especially my group. As corny as it sounds, I felt like it was a bonding experience for us, especially since everyone in my group really loves food. Alright, off to bed now...There is a typhoon passing through Japan so school may be cancelled tomorrow so I need to get some rest since I need to wake up early to check in with Yamasa. Oyasumi!