Good Eats in Kumamoto: Horse, Lotus Root, and More!

My trip to Kyushu this winter gave me the opportunity to sample some of the local delicacies—and wow, were they delicious! A couple of my favorite eating/drinking experiences were definitely in Kumamoto. Kumamoto is one’s of Kyushu’s major cities, best known for its famous castle but otherwise often dismissed as less than interesting. So imagine my surprise when the city gave me one of the trip’s best nights out!

After spending the day wandering around Kumamoto Castle (more on that coming later!), we decided to check out Yokobachi, a great little izakaya recommended by Lonely Planet. Yokobachi serves up some of Kumamoto’s famous specialties and other tasty dishes. The first thing we just *had* to try was basashi—raw horse sliced in thin sashimi form (pictured above). Being fond of horses, I was a little reluctant to try it, but “when in Rome,” and all that. And I have to say—it was *amazing*! So fresh and such a delicate flavor. I loved it!

Next up was karashi-renkon, fried lotus root with mustard. This was a really unique experience for me. I’ve had lotus root before, but not in this form, and certainly not filled with spicy mustard. One word of caution: the mustard is quite spicy, so you might not want to take huge bites!

We had a number of other dishes, but the other standout was definitely the nabe. Looking around the restaurant, we realized that every other table in the izakaya had ordered the nabe, which we took as a good sign. And wow! We were a little skeptical because one of the ingredients was pork intestines—but by the time the nabe had boiled down, the intestines practically melted in your mouth and just tasted like really yummy pork.

Another great find was Café Lafcadio, a great little café/wine bar right across the street that served up some tasty wine and beer at quite reasonable prices. The atmosphere was really charming too—quiet and casual, perfect for chatting and enjoying some nibbles. They had an adorable, huge armchair in the window, and the whole place seemed like such a great neighborhood hangout. One of the proprietors was a charming ex-JET named Dom who entertained us with fun conversation (pictured above). This place was just starting out and hadn’t really been fully opened for business yet, but I really hope it succeeds!

So, if you’re planning to pass through Kumamoto, stay a night! Enjoy yourself! Take a load off! The Kumamoto Dormy Inn is nice, affordable hotel and has great free in-house hot springs. And places like Yokobachi and Café Lafcadio mean that a good time can definitely be had.

More on Kumamoto and other Kyushu eats soon!

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• Fugu: The Fearsome Fish
• Wordless Wednesday #25: Hello from Kyushu!
• Shin Yokohama Ramen Museum
• Traditional Kaiseki Cuisines at a Japanese Ryokan

Wordless Wednesday #27: The Original Kirin, Nagasaki

I spotted this statue when I was at Glover Garden in Nagasaki. According to the brochure, it was the model for the picture of the Kirin used on the logo for Thomas Blake Glover’s fledgling Japan Brewery Company, which eventually became the Kirin Brewery Company.

What do you think? See the resemblance?

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• Wordless Wednesday #26: Heart Stone, Nagasaki
• Wordless Wednesday #25: Hello from Kyushu!

Owakudani: The Great Boiling Valley

Thanks to Bloggiesta, I’ve been motivated to finally finish writing up some of the travel posts that have been wasting away in my drafts folder. I thought I’d start with one of the highlights of my trip to the Hakone area last fall: the “great boiling valley” of Owakudani.

One of the best ways to see Hakone is to do the “round course,” circling the area with five different means of transport (train, cablecar, ropeway, boat and bus), using the Hakone Free Pass. The course starts and ends in Hakone-Yumoto and takes at least a few hours to complete—but if you want to actually enjoy any of the attractions, I’d recommend budgeting most of a day.

One of my favorite parts of the round course was the cable car from Sounzan to Togendai via Owakudani. From the descriptions in various guidebooks, I wasn’t really expecting much, but as soon as we began our descent across the valley, I found the scenery simply breathtaking. We could see the plumes wafting up from below and even the bright yellow marks of sulfur on the ground below, making the whole thing look very dramatic.

 

From the station, we followed a little walking trail past a souvenir shop and through some lovely paths surround by steam vents, bubbling pools, and babbling brooks (filled with slight opaque water). The smell of sulfur hung in the air, but it was a cool, crisp fall day, so I didn’t find the smell overwhelming or even unpleasant. (All the same, it might not be a good idea to linger for too too long, lest the fumes get to you.)

One of the main attractions of Owakudani is its “black eggs”, cooked in the naturally hot sulfuric water. The sulfur blackens the egg shells, and the eggs are said to prolong one’s life by seven years. You can buy a set of six for 500 yen.

 

While the outside was black, you’ll probably be relieved to hear that the egg inside tasted just like any other egg—no trace of the sulfur permeated the shell. So, in addition to being a fun gimmick, the eggs were also a tasty snack for us as we wound our way through the Hakone round course. It was also fun to watch them boiling batches of eggs in the sulfuric pools near the top of the main walking trail.

The suzuki grass was also particularly lovely—it really evoked that feeling of “autumn in Japan.”

In any case, I think that the guidebook descriptions don’t really do Owakudani justice—if you’re in Hakone, I would definitely recommend taking the time to do the round course and walk around Owakudani. Particularly if the weather is nice, it’s a great excursion. On a clear day, you can see Mount Fuji. And for the more outdoorsy among you, there are a number of hiking trails that you can take around the mountain. Who knew sulfur could be such fun?

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• Traditional Kaiseki Cuisine at a Japanese Ryokan
• An Afternoon at the Hakone Open-Air Museum
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Bloggiesta: Complete!

Well, it’s Sunday night here in Tokyo, and I’m happy to announced that I’ve crossed the Bloggiesta finish line! Over the past couple of days, I accomplished all of my stated goals and even a little extra. Specifically, I:

• Wrote five fun new posts, which will be unveiled here soon.
• Participated in eight mini-challenges.
• Learned how to use MisterLinky, which I will be incorporating in the future.
• Added menus/submenus to highlight themes such as travel, books, and food & drink.
• Commented on more than 20 blogs owned by Bloggiesta participants and others.
• Found some great new blogs to add to my RSS feed.
• Gained some new Twitter followers.
• Reviewed my sidebar, deleted some outdated items, added some exciting new items (like a Goodreads widget and a list of recent popular posts), and generally cleaned things up.
• Graded my blog and got some interesting ideas on areas for improvement.
• Added an updated copyright notice.
• Backed up my blog.
• Got some great new ideas for the future, like maybe having some giveaways, cleaning up my tags/categories, and exploring the idea of search engine optimization.
• Watched the 10th and 11th seasons of Frasier (which wasn’t on the list but made the whole thing much more pleasant!).

Apologies if any of you experienced problems while trying to view my blog over the past few days. And if any of you who follow me via RSS feed saw some strange and out-of-date posts, that was a result of me trying to clean up some of the tags on my older posts—sorry! If any of you know how to update WordPress tags/categories on old posts without having them resent to the RSS feed, please let me know!

Overall, participating in Bloggiesta was a really fun and energizing experience! It helped inspire me and renew my enthusiasm for blogging. I am definitely going to try and participate in the future—and you should, too!

There’s still lots of time left for bloggers participating elsewhere in the world, so stop by the Bloggiesta announcement post and do some blog hopping to cheer them on!

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It’s Bloggiesta Time!

I know I’ve been bad about blogging lately—real life is getting in the way, I’m afraid! (Clearly, I’ve fallen off the Post A Week 2012 bandwagon.) But in recognition of my poor behavior, I’ve decided to participate in Bloggiesta this weekend!

What is Bloggiesta, you ask? Well, to borrow the words of organizer Suey at It’s All About Books:

Do you have things you’d like to do on your blog that you haven’t managed to get to in forever? Do you want to do those things with lots of other bloggers from all over? Talk things over with them? Bounce ideas off them? Learn from them? Teach them too? If so, you will not want to miss the latest installment of Bloggiesta! A blogathon created nearly three years ago by Natasha of Maw Books so we could do those very things listed above!

This sounded like the perfect opportunity for me to give my blog a little TLC. The challenge starts today and ends Sunday night, and as part of the rules, I have to post about my goals before hand. After looking at my blog and reviewing the inspiring list of mini-challenges, here’s what I’ve come up with:

My Goals:

• Write 5 new blog posts of any size or shape.
• Learn how to use MisterLinky.
  • Mini-challenge hosted by Kelly from The Book Butcher (@TheBookButcher)
• Add theme pages to organize my posts about travel, reading, etc.
  • Mini-challenge hosted by Charlotte from Charotte’s Library (@charlotteslib)
• Comment on 20 blogs.
  • Mini-challenge hosted by Sheila’s from Book Journey (@bookjourney)
  • Mini-challenge hosted by There’s A Book
• Review/update my WordPress sidebar.
  • Mini-challenge hosted by Penelope at The Reading Fever (@ReadingFever)
• Grade my blog.
  • Mini-challenge hosted by Bookish Ruth
• Add a copyright notice.
  • Mini-challenge hosted by Bookalicious
• Back up my blog.
  • Mini-challenge hosted by Farm Lane Books

And off we go!

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• A Modern Girl’s Year in Blogging: 2011 Edition
• Looking Back at Post A Week 2011

Reading Challenges!

   

Things have been busy lately, but I’m still trying to keep up with my pleasure reading. To help motivate me, I’ve decided to participate in a few “reading challenges”:

1. The Goodreads 2012 Reading Challenge: I made it through 50 books last year, and I’m hoping to do it again in 2012!

2. The 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die Challenge (hosted at Pub Writes): I’m shooting for the “Silver Medal” level (16-20 books from the list). This should work nicely with my participation in the monthly Goodreads book club. This month’s selection is Nicholas Nickleby, which I’m really enjoying!

3. The Stephen King Project: I’m planning to participate at the extremely modest “A King Novice” level, which means that I’m committing to reading one Stephen King book. I’ve never read any of his books, but I’ve finally been lured in by the amazing reviews of 11/22/63.

What fun!

I also downloaded a fun new 1001 Books app for the iPhone, which has a statistics function that really puts things in perspective:

Those figures were calculated under the assumption that I’d be reading two books per month, so I have a pretty daunting task ahead of me! (There’s also the matter of the list getting longer with each printing of the list—as you can see, I’m using the “All 3” book list, which brings my total books up to 1294 instead of the proclaimed 1001. So it’s a bit of a moving target.) Anyway, I’m not totally serious about pursuing this goal, but it’s a fun way to keep encouraging myself to read. I recommend it!

Happy reading!

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• My 2011 50 Book Challenge: The Results!

A Day at the Diet

Last week, my politics/economics class went on an outing to the National Diet Building, the home of the two houses of the Japanese legislature.  (We also went to the Imperial Palace, but that’s a story for another day.) As a building, it is fairly impressive. Completed in 1936, it is built almost entirely of Japanese materials, with the exception of the stained glass, door locks, and a pneumatic tube system (the last of which is prominently labeled as a product of the good ol’ USA). We were treated to a guided tour of the House of Councillors (often referred to as the “Upper House” in English). They don’t allow pictures inside most of the main rooms, for security reasons, but this is a scan of the main chamber from their official brochure (pardon the image quality):

As we learned in class, the the two halves of the Diet building (occupied by the House of Councillors and the House of Representatives respectively) are almost entirely identical, except for one thing—the House of Councillors has a special place reserved for the Emperor. You can see the Emperor’s chair in the scanned image above, in the center of the curtains. He rarely uses it, but it’s kept ready for him. The roof of the chamber features a gigantic stained glass window, which interestingly was not damaged at all in last year’s earthquake. The Diet was actually in session during the quake, as they repeatedly televised at the time—you can watch a video of the ministers’ reactions here (among other places). It seems that the building as a whole had very little damage, which I find pretty impressive.

Anyway, in addition to the “normal” tour, we were also allowed to see a few things off the beaten track. My favorite was probably the budget committee room, which you often see featured on the news. Here we are, cheekily sitting in the ministers’ seats:

Can’t you see us defending our budget decisions, just like the real folks?

Picture courtesy of the Kantei website

We also visited the Judge Impeachment Court, which (you guessed it!) impeaches judges. In many countries, the upper chamber conducts impeachment courts, but Japan decided to establish a special standing court consisting of 14 participants (7 representatives from the House of Councillors and seven from the House of Representatives). Since 1947, the Judge Impeachment Court has convened impeachment trials for a total of eight judges, of whom six were dismissed (and three of these six later had their qualifications reinstated through qualification restoration trials). Here we are again, pretending to be Diet members serving on the court (trying our teacher, funnily enough):

I have to say, those chairs were *really* comfortable. And so big! I think they were about 4.5 feet tall.

I also picked up the most awesome souvenirs ever, featuring various artists’ renditions of all of the Japanese Prime Ministers. *Amazing.* I picked up a couple of plastic folders and a mug. Aren’t they great?

 

I *love* this stuff.

It was a fun morning. Afterwards, we ate dinner in the Diet cafeteria—we didn’t see any politicians, but the food was pretty tasty. Anyway, this tour is probably not for the casual foreign tourist, but if you have an interest in politics, it’s fun to see where all of the action (or inaction) happens. My tour was arranged through my language school and was conducted entirely in Japanese, but a few cursory Internet searches seem to indicate that English tours can be arranged.

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• Election time!
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