Meals with other "gaijin"

Here you see pictures from two different outings with some of our colleages. One is from when we walked down the street from the YMCA to eat lunch during the day we had to go to the kids course (the bottom picture and the small picture on the left second down from the top). Here we ate at a garlic restaurant, which is a popular type of restaurant in Japan. As you can guess, there is garlic in everything. It was good, I had some type of fried fish with a tangy, sweet garlic sauce which came with salad with a garlic dressing, and garlicy chicken broth soup, and tea. This was one of my few real meals here. It was my first. The menu was totally in Japanese and there wasn't any of that lovely plastic food, but all those people you see with me, most of them can read and speak some Japanese. One of our friends even ordered the fish without the mayo for me!

The other pictures are from a night out with a friend of ours eating Yakitori. It was the first time I'd ever had it, and it's really good. If you don't know how Japanese restaurants work,nicer ones anyway, first off that big plate of cabbage which is pictured and pickles, which aren't, ...that's from the table charge. When you walk in and sit down they bring that stuff even if you order it or not and you're charged for it. I still don't know what the charge was because I couldn't read the bill. Anyhow, it was good stuff, but you'd better eat it, cause you paid for it. Yakitori includes many different types of veggies and meat with sauce on them that are stuck on a skewer and grilled. It's very tasty and basically they have something for everyone. However, it's hard to get full without spending tons of money. Me, being the cheapy that I am, and loving my veggies, ordered mostly veggies, so most my sticks were only 100 yen a pop. I had tofu, chicken, peppers, eggplant, and leeks. The ones you see laying on the plate are two tofu and some kind of pepper. They were seriously yummy. We had a lot of fun, and it's definitely something I'd like to do again. Afterwords we were invited over to a friend's room to partake in some sake, and we stayed up late just talking about random stuff. It was so much fun, and it was the only night we've really just goofed off and had fun. I should mention, I hadn't had any sake yet when that picture of me was taken, I just don't do so well when someone takes my photo. I wasn't going to post it, but Mark looks nice in it and he's the one with the beer! haha

Oh and I should mention...here are some things that you can get Yakitori style that I wouldn't want to eat, but found rather interesting. If you click on the photo with the menu and make it bigger, you can see some of them .....Chicken's Peel (chicken's skin), Chicken Neck, Chicken sashimi (raw chicken), Chicken tail, fried cartilage (not sure from what animal), quail's egg rolled in chicken, duck's peel (I think they mean duck skin), tongue (not sure which animal), gizzard.