sushi and whiskey
the lads went to miyajima in the afternoon today, while i stayed home and got caught up on the website. i spent 24 hours on miyajima last year, so this seemed like the ideal time to catch back up on the blog. so i spent most of the day at home. after they got back from their island adventure, i demanded they eat actually good sushi before they leave japan. it feels like it would be a sin to fly across the world to japan and have the only sushi you eat be conveyor belt stuff.
we also went to another snack bar in a more popular area, and had a blast.
the city i am writing these next couple blog posts from has absolutely horrendous internet. so thats the reason for the delay. i can’t post any photos on the site because the internet very nearly does not work at all.
the hunt for sushi
it took a surprising amount of effort to find a good sushi place for dinner. there are a ton of sushi restaurants in hiroshima, but most of them are like 5-8 seats. so a group of 4 wanting to come in is kind of a big ask. we tried a bunch of places. some were closed, some were impossible to find, and some were too full to allow it. but the walk through “downtown” hiroshima was nice. i love the vibe of the nightlife areas in japan’s tier 2 and tier 3 cities. i love it in the tier 1 cities like tokyo and osaka as well, but the vibe is a lot more interesting when it isn’t a mega city.
it’s like they simultaneously have much more space to work with (the roads are not 6 inches wide), but also try to cram things in there anyways (there are tons of restaurants with 8 or less seats). it feels like there are more people who are just out and about, enjoying wandering around and seeing where the night takes them. the bigger cities often feel like an enormous, barely navigable sea of people. people don’t loiter in tokyo. people absolutely loiter here. it’s nice.
we also saw this sign, one of the craziest things i’ve ever seen in japan.
yeah maybe its like massages for your hands. totally for sure yeah thats what that means. yeah.
after trying 5 different sushi places and experiencing a few different variations of “nope”, we finally found a sushi restaurant that seemed high quality and had room for 4 people.
i couldn’t decide which way i liked this photo, so i just made 2 versions of it.
the place had seating for maybe 12-14 people tops, and there were only 4 people other than us in here when we walked in. the sushi chef looked awesome, and i got a couple candid shots of him while we were just sitting down.
it felt like a very strange mixture of “high class” and “regular restaurant”. i say that because the atmosphere was not like the “dimly lit piano jazz” type thing you would probably expect from a super high class restaurant, but you could definitely tell it was one. while you technically could order specific items (and there was a glass display containing the day’s fish to pick and choose from), it seemed like the main way to order here was to just let the sushi chef decide for you. he did ask us to tell him any specific fish we didn’t like. and i saw they had oyster sushi, so i just went ahead and put that on the nope list. i wish i liked oysters, because hiroshima is famous for them.
the food here was incredible. might be the best sushi i’ve ever had. that bottom right one in the first photo, next to the shrimp, is simmered conger eel, a salt water eel, called anago. its very very different from unagi (the other 2 photos), which is grilled freshwater eel. this was very lightly cooked. i have since learned via google that conger eel blood is incredibly poisonous, but the poison is heat-labile, meaning it is no longer poisonous once cooked. so i guess don’t order this if you aren’t at a nice place that knows what they are doing.
the eel was definitely the best thing we had. we actually tried to order more of it, but they were sold out. they did have unagi sushi though, as seen above. the tuna (dark red one in first photo) was also 10/10.
i am very glad the gang got to eat super high quality sushi before leaving japan. it would have felt wrong for their only experience here to be conveyor belt style.
another snack bar
looking for a snack bar turned out to be very similar to the quest for sushi, as they are kind of tucked away. some of them also were just not open. but we eventually found one (that would allow 3 dumb americans with a friend who could translate in). it was called valente.
we hung out here drinking and talking with the two… bartenders? hosts? ladies? (who were not the “mama”) from 9:30 until 2:00 in the morning. one of them was without any doubt the most beautiful woman i have ever seen. never have i wished more strongly to be fluent in japanese.
eventually, around 1:00 in the morning, a bunch of regulars around our age came in and were immediately kinda dumbfounded that there were americans in here. the place got so full that they seated the regulars behind the bar (across from us). we chatted with them for a while, and i added one of them on line. i made a japanese friend!
at the beginning of this trip i said one of my side quests was to get a japanese person to bum me a cigarette. we tried to ask one of them for this, but he definitely misunderstood, because he got out of his chair and bolted out the door. he came back like 4 minutes later and handed us a pack of american spirits. he went and bought us cigarettes. this has to be one of the funniest interactions ive ever had. the quest was to bum a japanese cigarette, and we failed so spectacularly that they just bought us american cigarettes. double failure state. f minus.
smoking is bad dont do it tho.
eventually the regulars talked us into doing some karaoke. it was difficult to find songs on the karaoke machine that we all knew. for whatever reason, one of the ladies in the group like really, really, really, really wanted to sing “all i want for christmas” by mariah carey.
over the course of four and a half hours, the four of us killed an entire bottle of japanese whiskey. i also drank a beer and a strong zero, which is like a 9% alcohol cocktail in a can. my heart goes out to the brave soldiers who have to travel 4 hours by train and then get on a plane back to america tomorrow with a heroic hangover and ~4 hours of sleep.
this was a great and one of a kind experience. snack bars are rad. highly recommend going to one if you are ever in japan. my friends are encouraging me to go to more over the next two weeks while i am traveling. i don’t think i have the charisma to do that without a translator friend or a group of friends to go with. it does sound fun to try to go to more, but i just don’t think i am capable of doing so.
i only have 2 photos from this place, because i didn’t want to be rude. there would have been only one, but eventually they asked us to take a photo with them. shout out to tsukasa for taking the photo.
