Shabushabu

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Rena, one of the Japanese interport students, told us to try Shabushabu and that it was really good.  I didn’t know what it was.  You probably don’t either.  We didn’t really understand it until we got it.

 

So you go to a restaurant with shabushabu style and sit down at a table.  In the middle of the wooden table is a circular slab which you remove, and underneath is a pot split into two parts with a semi-sweet solution and a spicy solution.  You order plates of raw food (noodles, chicken, beef, vegetables, mushrooms, etc.) and, after the solutions have heated up to about boiling, you throw a bunch of your food into the stuff.  You can split it up however you want ‘cuz it’s at your table, so you decide how much is spicy and how much is regular.  They also give you some sort of peanut sauce and some raw egg to help with the crazy amounts of spiciness.

 

Anyway, yeah, you only have to wait like three minutes for the food to cook, too, and you can fish it out with your chopsticks if you’re good, especially if they float, or you can use a ladle with holes in it that they give you to drag some stuff out.  It’s actually REALLY tasty and it’s sorta sad that we don’t do it in America.

 

While we’re there, some other things that are sucky about America that Japan does better:

 

Existence of bullet trains

Really amazing public transit systems

Staircases have ramps in the middle

Vending machines everywhere

Sweet internet cafes

Mandatory foreign language classes

 

When the subway stops, they play a cute piano-ish jingle.

 

People rarely made eye contact on the streets.  It felt really different from pretty much everywhere else I’ve ever been.  I wondered why.  Maybe I look mean.  I think white people in their movies and cartoons are usually evil, and I’m pretty damn white.  Oh well.  I was not nearly as popular as I thought I would be.  Maybe I’ll have more luck in China.