First, Thursday was a day off for me so I met a friend and went for lunch. He took me to a nice crab restaurant...omg it was amazing. The first things I noticed were the details. There were even crab-shaped ashtrays!
They started us out with some towels for our hands and green tea. Then we got those little boat dishes (see the first pic) filled with crabs, which we scraped out with the special curve-ended chopstick thing. The orange crab is a chopstick rest.
Next came the big bowl in the lower right of the picture. It was full of ice and had crab legs standing in it, and in the shell was the green stuff...the innards, if you will. Delicious. I didn't think I'd like it but I did. Yay! The legs had the meat pulled out already and were buried in the ice, meant to be dipped in one of the sauces they gave us.
Then came a little bowl of this heavenly savory custard stuff. It had crab (of course!), shiitake mushrooms and one or two beans in it. It was possibly my favorite thing. I loved it.
After that came a grill and some raw crab. Pretty self-explanatory. Delish.
After that came a crab ball dumpling thing...I have no idea what it was. I swear it had egg in it but they said it didn't. It was also very good. Then came the giant pot thing in the upper left hand corner of the pic. The top was filled with rice, a little seasoning, and you guessed it, crab. They gave us seaweed, sesame seeds, etc. to sprinkle on it ourselves. They brought us rice bowls so we didn't have to eat it out of the...vat/pot things. Yeah, that was the cooking device, I imagine. There was one for each of us. Since my friend invited me he kept prepping my stuff and serving it to me. Alongside the rice came crab miso soup and a salad of sorts (no crab, perhaps the only things besides the tea and dessert without), which had sliced fresh and pickled cucumbers and some weird gooey yams. *Then* came dessert, which he picked a vanilla ice cream drizzled with matcha, which is a green tea made from water whisked with powdered tea leaves. It was quite good. I was stuffed.
All of the crab was in the shell too, so we had to dig it out, including the miso soup crab leg. It took two hours to eat lunch. I was so happy. And for the caliber of meal, I should've been. It was quite a nice meal. We had to take our shoes off at the door and sat at one of those low tables where your feet are in a recess below the table. Yeah it was awesome.
After that we went to karaoke and then to a bar in a hotel. It was on the 25th floor of The Metropolitan Hotel in Ikebukuro. Here's the view from the women's bathroom...
Me! My friend's pic quality sucked. I also felt slightly underdressed...even though I wasn't. Oh well.
The view from the table. I especially liked the way this one turned out because the reflection of the bar in the sky. Such a cool place. ^_^
Then i met some friends in Ikebukuro and had a little extra fun until last train. Oh, did I mention my friend drives a Benz? And it's a western-style one, with the driver's side on the left. So weird for Japan. But he had an air freshener hiding in the stuff hanging from his mirror...dork.
Friday I had a near-mishap with the ATM while trying to pay my rent. I'm an idiot sometimes, and to prevent reliving it...again, I'll let you watch the video about it instead. I'll link all the videos at the bottom. After that I did a whole lot of nothing. I was hungry and decided...to go nowhere. It was a lazy day. On the way there I saw an all-black butterfly, which was the most beautiful butterfly I've ever seen. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a picture.
Today some funny stuff happened, but I talked about all of it in my last video. Oh, except for my dinner. I had tendon (said "ten dawn"), which is tempura stuff on rice. It was only 500 yen and made me happy happy and I'm still full. Woo! They served that with miso soup and cold oolong tea. Woo, delish.
And one of my roomies is moving out. She's out in a month.
That's about it. I hope everyone else had a great week! ^_^ Here's the videos for y'all.
Idiot American, right here!
Crabs. Oh yeah!
Cheers!
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