Food and Love

Kyoto, Japan

I love the food. Oddities: sliced bread that is the thickness of three slices of bread in Canada, liquid sugar in every cafe, and matcha (green tea) flavoured everything.

Whenever we decide to look for a place to eat I get excited. Our dinner adventure last night led us to some cool places in Kyoto. We found a small winding alley that had restaurants overlooking the river and spent some time looking at every display of plastic food we saw. The restaurants along that street were very expensive, about 30 - 40$, because they overlooked the river and the Gion district. All the buildings were low, made of wood and had an authentic Japanese style to it that the main shopping streets lacked.

Since the restaurants there were so expensive, we decided to keep walking. Along the main street we found a place that served pasta. But it was the strangest pasta I've ever had. We took our shoes off at the door and placed them into lockers, then sat at our table. The waitress gave us the Japanese menu and an edited English version of it. I randomly chose a cup of soup and a pasta dish. The soup turned out to be corn chowder. The pasta had in it garlic, small pieces of ham, little fish things with small black eyes and strongly flavoured shreds of what looked like lettuce (but didn't taste like lettuce). It was surprisingly tart.

Now, as I munch on some shrimp chips I bought from a local convenience store, I'm looking forward to some Japanese-style curry on rice tonight. Some other hostellers told us it's good. In plastic it looks disgusting. But I'll take their word for it.