|
Today, we went and had lunch at an okonomiyaki restaurant.
Okonomiyaki is a type of Japanese pancake, and at this restaurant, you are
given all the ingredients for your okonomiyaki, and then cook it yourself
on the hotplate built into the table. I had tako (octopus),
which was delicious, and the whole thing was incredibly enjoyable, getting
to cook the food yourself (it’s very easy). Plus, the restaurant was a
very traditional-style joint, where you had to take your shoes off to
enter and, for small groups, you had the option of eating on the floor,
kneeling on tatami mats. In Britain, for this kind of “authentic Japanese
experience,” you could expect to pay from around £30.00. However, for us
the whole meal only cost around 600 yen - £3.00! I’m going to have to go
back to that place again, and take my family there when they come and
visit!
Saranne and Richard at the Okonomiyaki restaurant
Cooking okonomiyaki! Yummmm....
We also got to watch a fashion show put on by one of the wedding shops
(there’s loads of wedding shops in Shimotori and Kamitori), where they
exhibited all of their dresses. In my opinion, none of the dresses were
that nice, and some were plain hideous – think giant pink blancmanges
walking down the aisle! Still, it was really fun to watch.
Hideous wedding dresses being modelled in Shimotori
We ended the day by getting purikara photo-stickers done of us all in one of those
photo booths. Again, Japanese photo booths of this sort are nothing like
in Britain. In Britain, all you have is a tiny booth designed for one
person, and have a choice of perhaps four different novelty backgrounds
for your photo. Not in high-tech Japan – here, you get a huge booth that
can fit about 10 people easily, and then after the photo’s taken, you can
add lots of different decorations or scribble on it. Even when you’re
outside waiting for the photos to be processed, the machine has a little
game built into it to distract you! They really do think of everything in
Japan…
|
