A Taste of Japan

 Hi everyone. Happy Wednesday. It is time to think about food over at Kathy's blog and her  Food Wednesday link up.

Tomorrow/Thursday for Rain's art date (Fond Memories is the theme) I am sharing some Japan trip photos from back in 2018. While pulling photos together for that post, I found lots of food related ones, so this week I thought I would share some of those with you  for      .

It was 4 years ago that I traveled to Japan with my school as part of a Sister City exchange program. We visited 3 areas, the southern part of the main Islands that make up Japan in the city of Nichinan, then we flew to Kyoto, and finally we took the Bullet Train into Tokyo before we flew home.

Each area has their own food specialties, which I think is true for most of the world. I think it is fun to try different foods, and there was only 1 food in Japan that I had to think a little bit about. I'll show you that later in the post.

And if you don't read Japanese, luckily most restaurants have plastic models of their foods in their windows so you can look and pick out what looks good to you.

Except for the hotel breakfast that is.

I have a lot of photos of food today so you can breeze on through. I'll try to keep the writing to a minimum.

Sweet bean paste snacks with tea, although there's no tea in these photos. They are just beautiful works of art though.

Next we have Japanese "pizza" in Kyoto, and the tourist menu also. We were told to think of this as pizza, but it isn't really pizza. Maybe more like a filled crepe.

The one that looks like a cinnamon bun is not sweet. That is Japanese mayo drizzled over it.

And we had lunch at a ramen shop one day. You can't compare this to those little packages you buy (at least here in the US).

We also went to a very formal, traditional Japanese meal put on the the school we visited. Here's a few  photos of what I remember as being 10 courses.

This pretty wooden cover below is what was over that part of our meal in the above photo.

We also had some friend veggies/tempura.

The one food I had to think about eating was when we visited an eel restaurant. There wasn't a lot of choice on the menu except eel dishes. I ended up with a eels in a Korean style dish (bibimbap) but of course it was Japanese bibimbap.

OK the eels were just like fish. They should be as they are fish, right?

And I didn't take a photo when it had the egg on top and first arrived at the table. Here it is all mixed up as I eat. 

And below, some little eel vertebrae snacks before dinner with my beer.

And how about something sweet? We had ice cream a few times, which worked for me. 

the above photos was of matcha green tea ice cream.  I wasn't crazy about matcha tea, it tasted like drinking asparagus water, but the ice cream was good. I also had cherry blossom ice cream one day too, although that was more like cherry flavored ice cream. But also good.

Although I didn't try any these cute little panda cakes, they were big in  Tokyo. There were celebrating the birth of a panda in the zoo.

And the best dessert was something more universal that strictly found in Japan.

This strawberry ice cream sundae. Notice the lighter strawberries. They were fully ripen pink berries. That was something new to me.

That's just a taste of what we ate, which was a travel adventure in itself. I would love to go back again, but being retired it would have to be on my own. That would be true if I wasn't retired also, as the school district would only allow you to go once. It was such a great trip though.

Thanks for visiting my blog today. As you would say in Japanese for the phrase bon appetit, 

meshiagare. See you over at Kathy's blog for Food Wednesday.