Like a Hurricane

Apparently Wendy promised you weeks ago that I would write a blog detailing the dinner that I went to. Well here it is:

One of the other summer interns that I work with is from Japan and so her father invited me, and another summer intern, to have dinner with him and a few people he works with. This began by going to his office, taking a short tour, and then going to a resturant. We apparently rented a room in the resturant (pretty common in Japan) and then we started the dinner. Keep in mind that the entire time the interns father is attempting to embarrass her, but only speaks Japanese.

The first thing on the schedule was to order some wine. However, it would take a minute to chill the bottle (or something) so we, of course, had to order a beer to drink while we waited for the wine. Eventually the wine came and then the food started. There were probably seven different courses of food. All of them very small and most of them having something to do with a sea creature. About halfway through, the main dish came out - a complete fish.

This fish still had all the parts of a fish such as the eyes, the gills, the fins, the tail, the rib cage, the heart etc, but it was also cooked all the way through. Armed with only two chopsticks, I began by making an incenscion from the from behind the gills to the tail on the top of the fish. Then I opened it up and tried to excavate whatever meat could be found. The edible portions had to be sorted from the inedible portions (or at least those portions which I was foregoing e.g. The heart) before I could eat them. In the end, it worked out to about one bite of food for every 30 seconds. Delicious.

Unfortunately, we then ran out of wine, which meant we would have to move on to something else. Turns out something else was sake. Then out came a plate of breaded fried things. One of them was a sea urchin. Having never eaten a sea urchin before I couldn't decide if they would be classified as shell fish (they are it turns out), so I didn't eat it even though apparently its a delicacy. I tried to get someone to look up sea urchin for me on their phone but no one really wanted to.

Finally at about 10:30 they threw us out of the resturant because it was closing. This, however, is not the end of the story. In Japan, after a dinner such as the one I've just described there is the nijikai (which means the second party). So the night was only half over. We then had to go to a hotel bar close buy and continue socializing until 1:15. Then I had to go meet Wendy and Christian at a club close to our house.

Japanese clubs are an interesting thing. People don't actually dance together, they just sort of stand in lines and dance by themselves.