Kurama's got nothing on this: sushi-themed post

Here is our lunch from today, delicious hot sandwiches! (hoto sando, as they are called in Japan :D). They had tomato, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, ham, mayonaise, and lettuce in them. I ate waaay too much but it was so good. I was surprised that we ate a hot food on such a hot day but they turned on the air conditioning for lunch.

Today's faux pas check: In order to buy the food for lunch, Namiko-san and I went to the grocery store right next to our apartment building. We couldn't find protein bars like I wanted or any Mexican food for the tacos I'm going to make for the family tomorrow. More on that shortly. :D But we were waiting in line and I saw a pretty box with a sparkly butterfly on it, and it said, "Glamorous Butterfly" with no other description. I said, "What is this?" and before Namiko could explain, I picked it up. She started laughing. I flipped the box over and saw a diagram of a condom and I was like ohhhhhh I see now. :D I tried to read some of the katakana but then I put it back down. :)

After lunch, we journeyed to an Aeon store in a huge mall to try to find some Mexican food, haha. None of the store employees in any of the stores knew what a tortilla was, even though it is a word in Japanese. :) And refried beans were NOWHERE, haha. Eventually we found a foreign goods store that had flour tortillas (not corn like I usually use) and black beans (not refried like I usually use). We also found El Paso salsa. :) I hope I can make these tacos taste good!!

We went to Kurazushi, the famous sushi restaurant that we saw on tv the other night! As you can maybe see from this picture, the wait for a table (without a reservation) is 135 minutes!!! I'm glad we had a reservation. It's not an unusually expensive store; every sushi plate is $1 only. But it's a very popular restaurant. We had to drive 20 minutes or so to get there. On the way there, we watched game shows in the car (there is a built-in tv right next to the driver's wheel!). The show was pretty funny because it was basically these comedians wandering through the wilderness of Japan  in order to hold scary wild animals, bugs, snakes, and lizards only to get bitten while the others laughed at them.

(Tangent, but speaking of animals: last night I saw a cute mouse in Shibuya and a bat in the iris garden eating mosquitoes. :D)

 Here's part of the waiting room. Ouch. 

 

Mmm, look at all of that sushi!

Next comes a sushi photo parade!! These pictures are actually a little hard for me to look at because I'm so, so, so full right now that I don't want to see any more food. :) I ate almost all of these, but sometimes I took pictures of the sushi my family was eating and of the sushi on the conveyor belt.

My favorite: salmon nigiri!

Shrimp with avocado, mayonaisse, and onions

Pineapple, yummmm

Raw eggs and raw fish. :)

Ikura (salmon eggs) and their mom

Marinated fishy steak, tuna salad and cucumbers

Can't remember the name but it was  great. :D And REALLY REALLY GOOD cooked salmon.

Sea urchins!

Real crab on the right and hard-boiled eggs on the left.

My dessert: mango sherbet, whipped cream, and some kind of gel that was really good.

One cool thing about this restaurant is that they play a lottery game for every few plates that you submit into their plate-return-drop thing. So we ate a TON of plates of sushi, I think 35 in total, and Takumi got to win some little prizes if the lottery game was won. I think Tomoaki-san might have eaten two extra plates of sushi just so Takumi could see if he would win again (and he did). :) The prizes were buttons.

There's Takumi's banana-chocolate pudding dessert. In the bottom left corner, you can see the cups for green tea. I have really wanted some of that green tea powder so I can make green tea whenever I want it in my apartment next year. All you need to do is mix it with water. Namiko surprised me by buying some for me while she was paying for the bill tonight!!! Green tea forever!!! :D :D

It rained a little today but it is still so hot. Time for another cold shower, a little more homework, and then sleeeeeep. I am going to Ueno tomorrow with Rika, a Japanese student who contacted me through the Kanda University Language Buddies system. :D I hope she's nice! (I'm sure she is.)