One-offs, pt. 5

Live from Seattle, it's the last one of these!

I have a quick, loopy signature (just a C and and R), and folks in Japan loved it. Both the front desks at my last two hostels and at least one waiter giggled when they saw it.

Japanese grills cook things lower and slower than American grills. Takoyaki (octopus dumplings that are my favorite Japanese street food) take FOREVER to cook, and they're basically just little balls of pancake batter.

Teppanyaki in Japan is much less showy and more formal than in America, but is still very much a thing. I went to a Kobe beef restaurant my last night in Osaka, and that's how they cooked it. It was more like grilling than stir-frying: not a lot of fat, and things weren't chopped up until right before it was put on my plate. The fried rice was really simple, too: oil, garlic, salt, beef, and rice.

There's an urban clothing chain in Japan called "Womb." Sounds kinda metal to me, but it's more skinny jeans and slim-fit shirts.

I love how vertical Japan is. Everything is built on top of each other, and not necessarily in any particular order. In Osaka, I saw a restaurant, built above a night club, built on top of...a dentist?

It's really, really hard to eat crab legs out of the shell with chopsticks. Just sayin'.

Joys of visiting a country where folks don't speak your language: touts for restaurants and clubs leave you the hell alone.

Side note: if they DO try to get you into a place, it's generally a bad idea. Talked to several folks who have stories of getting stuck with three and four-figure bills after getting lured into a place by a woman in a short dress.

I was standing on a bridge over the river in Osaka when a tour boat went under it. The guide on the boat was waving to people as they passed, and kept yelling 'Konnichiwa! Konnichiwa!' to them. When they went under my bridge, she went 'Konnich-oh! Hello! Hi!' and a boatload of Japanese people (literally) followed suit. 'Twas fun ^__^

There' a big Starbucks in Dotonburi in Osaka that has a HUGE seating area upstairs that looks like a library.