From yaki tori to Crispy Nuts

Yesterday, we met up with a friend of a friend, who has been living in Japan and teaching English for the last 10 months. She has been here long enough to understand some parts of the culture that have been puzzling us, but not long enough to have fallen out of love with exploring and marveling. She took us to Nishi-Nippori, a part of Tokyo that reminded me of Ile-St.-Louis in Paris-- full of small shops with beautiful clothing and jewelry, as well as a million food vendors. We made the day into a culinary tour, since there was so much that we wanted to try. We started with yaki tori, a kind of Japanese shish kebab, and were also introduced to satsumaimo, a kind of sweet potato snack. We drank green tea samples, and accepted the Japanese cherries kindly pressed into our hands. Later, we stopped at an underground food kingdom, beneath the Shibuya station, and found a bakery selling bread with sweet beans (like kidney beans) baked in. Finally, we actually sat down at an izakaya in Sangenjaya, a kind of tapas place, and had a variety of foods from spring rolls to gobo, fried burdoch root, and each tried a grapefruit sour, made with the very light (don't worry, Ma) Japanese liquor called shochu.

From there, C and I hit a punk/hardcore show, one of her top priorities while here. It was at a place called Heaven's Door, and featured a band called Crispy Nuts. Though she is a major hardcore veteran, I'm definitely a newcomer to this scene, and loved every second. She was particularly intrigued by the number of women at the show-- considerably more than at American shows. As we have found everywhere, there was a lot of English, on signs, in lyrics and on t-shirts. My favorite example was Crispy Nuts' drummer's shirt, which read "Psycho food eaters". I thought it summed up our day incredibly well.