Of Rice and Ramen

Can noodles be beautiful?

I don't think I'd care to live in a world where they couldn't. So while Zack's been busy with maps and "planning" things - whatever that means, I've been documenting something of much greater importance; our food.

Pictured above is what has become one of our most frequent meals. Unlike the boring spaghetti noodle, ramen noodles twist and turn haphazardly through a murky bowl of soup, the flavour of which is usually written in Kanji, the one Japanese script that we can't reliably read and so is usually a surprise.

Twisting around each other into a loosely knit rope of noodles they lie waiting to be dredged up from the bottom of the bowl with our steadily increasing chopstick skill, the temporary pockets formed in the noodle-rope hold just enough of the soup to make each bite full of flavour.

On top of the pile often lies a slab or two of meat, fish or a raw egg - again depending on which picture in the menu we gesture at, and again usually a surprise - so far never a disappointment.



The prices are about what you would see for a meal in Toronto, thought the portions are much larger. It's hard to tell the size from the pictures, but the bowls are massive. It's an ideal meal after a few hours of cycling and on the cold, rainy, foggy days the thought of a giant hot bowl of delicious calories is enough to keep you going. That and dry clothes - I don't know if we aren't operating the dryers properly or what, but every place we've stopped I swear the "dryers" are just spraying our clothes with hot water. Often after spending 400 yen on one load of clothes we just give up. They were inevitably going to get wet again anyways.



There's also plenty of sushi to be found and it's as good as you would expect. The wasabi particularly seems to be much better here, almost buttery.

However, this being a bike trip we are on a modest budget and since most places we ride through either don't have restaurants, or the ones they do have are open at odd hours it's not all delicious ramen and sushi. Especially breakfast which is usually these terrible oats we bought that I'm pretty sure were supposed to be for horses.

Enter Seicomart - the Japanese equivalent of 7/11 (although they have those too) - somewhere around 40% of our meals are made up of prepared foods you can get off the shelves that we warm up in the microwave, and usually eat sitting on the curb outside the store.

There are many different kinds, some better than others but they are all actually pretty good. Seicomart meals, with a sweet bean bun and a yogurt has been our staple food for through small towns where we can't find a real restaurant or don't have enough time to stop.



Then somewhere at the bottom of the line is the road stop food. Don't get me wrong, it's all very tasty, but it's so obviously unhealthy... it's basically battered, deep fried fat. Being able to eat stuff like this and not worry about it has been one of the best parts of bike touring.



Other than all the above we've had a few amazing meals at some of the hostels we've stayed at that we don't have pictures of - an indoor seafood barbecue, some raw horse meat, basically an entire deer at one point - everything has been fantastic even though we often don't even know what we're eating.



The final thing that has to be mentioned is the drinks. You practically cannot go more than 10km in any moderately populated area in Japan without running into something like this.



Just about anything you could ask for. Juice, water, coffee, tea - it's all there. We've probably spent $25 each so far just on vending machine drinks because it's so incredibly convenient. There's even sometimes a selection of hot drinks, for those cold mornings.



So, for those of you asking about the food, that's how it's been so far. We're pretty much over our fear of looking like tourists, especially since with Zack towering over everyone and having to crawl through every doorway it's pretty much impossible to blend in - so we'll be sure to keep taking pictures of anything interesting that we decide to eat. I'm sure there'll be plenty.

There's a lot more to talk about but I've been using the only computer in this place for far too long now. We're at this hostel for another two nights, so I'm sure boredom will kick in again and we'll write something else.

For now, here's a picture of a dog. His owner's were even kind enough to label him for your convenience. And no, we didn't eat the dog.