Motsuyaki in Kanda
Still catching up on lost sleep, last night Ali and I sluggishly strolled out of our building and around the traps of Kanda, in search of some place interesting to eat. Kanda has a ridiculously good selection of restaurants and takeaway places, mostly scattered around the JR station (like so many other Japanese towns) and stretching deep into the back streets. There must literally be hundreds of awesome places to eat with so much variety it’s quite overwhelming to mentally process it all and make a decision, so you just have to pick something.
We stumbled across this interesting looking motsuyaki place. Motsuyaki traditionally refers to a restaurant that specialises in grilled organ meat, but can have a whole wide variety of offerings including even pizza and pasta. An elderly gentlemen noticed we were still wearing our “Japan n00b OMG we can’t decide on a place” smiles and politely suggested that it was a great place to eat, so we took it as an excuse to make a decision and in we went.
We were tempted by a couple of large pints of draught beer, but then invested some time familiarising ourselves with the menu and reading what we could, and looking up what we could not. Pretty soon, we’d ordered some raw prawn sashimi, some chicken balls (like dim sims) and some squid that was served like an artwork with the main bottle section of the squid all precisely cut up into sections with a nice dipping sauce. Some maguro sashimi finished the appetizers off nicely. Then we thought for a change, let’s try the salami and tomato pizza. It was pretty awesome. Extremely thin and light, not some 1kg worth of bread like you get from dominos.
Pretty soon after, we got another beer and started talking to a couple of guys next to us who were really friendly and celebrating one of their engagements and the meeting of his fiance’s parents. Jun san and Sadahiro san have been best friends for the past 13 years since University days. Kanda is their favourite place to eat and they come often as they work nearby. They actually thought that Ali was a famous actress so it was pretty funny.
They explained that they want to practise some English as they never get the chance to speak to foreigners in English, which vice versa was pretty much the same for us. So off began the English/Japanese conversations in parallel and we exchanged tips and advice on our respective native languages for the next couple of hours. Their English was pretty awesome. Sadahiro san is studying English, but Jun san has never officially studied English, just travelled. Which further reinforces one of my beliefs that learning by practical experience is the best way – young children don’t need a degree to become fluent in their native language. We are hoping the same theory will pay off over time with our Japanese. Sadahiro san and Jun san taught us some great phrases that we will put to good use from now on. It was one of those moments when you just felt you had access to a world of local information and know-how to help us blend in faster and more effectively. Each time you learn some new key phrases or words, you look back the next day and think,
How could I possibly have survived without knowing that phrase before?
Then you realise, it’s just the beginning of the beginning. Experiences like this definitely help to fill the gaps in all the core essential Japanese that we’re starting to employ for daily survival and common tasks.
A “good time!” and we made some lovely friends. There is a plan in place to meet up again sometime over dinner and exchange more language tips and ideas over another round of sake.
The lady at the consulate had explained that we needed to wait another 10 minutes while the boss vetted our applications, as he’d been absent the entire week. But then, the senior security manager wearing a suit, came in to inform us that protesters had set in and we were therefore locked down and stuck in the embassy until the protests finished. It is embassy policy that while ever a “protest” is under way, they are not permitted to open the main front gates and let anyone enter or exit. So out came the massive chains and padlocks and they locked the gates down. I told the security guy “that’s ok, we’re late for work, but we’ll just enjoy the show.”