Baud Attitude

In Narita Airport, on the way to the gates for flights to the US, there is a small sushi restaurant.  It has a sign which bills it as your “last chance to enjoy good sushi and sake before you leave!!”

This sign is a lie.  I fell for it on my last trip.  The sushi was of questionable quality, and the prices were exhorbitant - they would only have been slightly above average if they were the price for a pair of pieces of sushi, which is the way that sushi is normally priced, but they go the extra step in fleecing you - they’re priced by the single piece.

On the other hand, there’s also a McDonald’s restaurant in Narita airport, and they serve both sandwiches that I had mentioned to me the other day - the Teriyaki McBurger and the Ebi Filet-O.

How could I pass up this last chance to subject myself to potential intestinal discomfort?

Neither one is particularly complex in construction, so I’ll skip the bulleted list format for them.

The Teriyaki McBurger is made up of a bun, a hamburger patty, some lettuce and some teriyaki sauce.  I think there may also have been some sesame dressing in there.

It’s the work of a few bites to finish off, and reasonably tasty - not something I’d get hooked on, but inoffensive.

The Ebi Filet-O doesn’t mess with the bun + patty + lettuce + dressing formula, though the dressing is mayonnaise-based (I think, perhaps, Thousand Island dressing, a choice I have no complaints with) and the
patty is, well, it’s shrimp covered with breading and deep-fried.  Presumably, it’s lots of shrimp mushed together into each patty, unless there actually ARE shrimp that flatten out to be a circle roughly 3 inches in diameter.  I guess that’s not huge, and I don’t know much about shrimp.

It’s nice and crunchy and shrimpy; it wouldn’t be out of place on an American Skipper’s or Long John Silver’s menu really.  For McDonalds, though, I suspect it will remain a uniquely Japanese offering.

Actually, in America I’d expect cocktail sauce, which sounds quite good on this thing now that I think about it.

Overall verdict: If you like shrimp, you won’t be done wrong by the Ebi Filet-O.  If you like Teriyaki, there are worse choices than the Teriyaki McBurger.

I live my life by a set of simple rules.

Stuff like “by default, be nice to people” and “don’t spoil the end of movies for people who haven’t seen them” and “girls with glasses are automatically about twice as cute as girls without”

But those aren’t the rules that cover today’s situation. Today’s Rule To Live By is this:

“Curry loves me, and wants to be my friend. Curry would never hurt me.”

I say this because, after yesterday’s disaster with the McGutPunch (with egg), I was a bit gun-shy - but, while passing a Wendy’s here in Tokyo, I saw that they had a line of advertising banners up for their latest limited-time sandwich, the Double Cheese Curry Burger.

They also had a guy standing out front trying to get people to come inside to try it. I love that about Tokyo, the fast food joints will have someone standing on the sidewalk shouting the daily specials and exhorting the passers-by to come in and eat them.

However, despite his obvious energy and the innate seductive aura surrounding the Double Cheese Curry Burger… This was around 11 AM, and I was headed out to go traipsing through little obscure suburbs of Tokyo. It didn’t sound like a good idea to have one just then, but I kept it on my “to do” list for dinner.

Dinner time found me back at this very same Wendy’s, ordering a Double Cheese Curry Burger Set Meal with Diet Pepsi.

As presented on the tray, it looked like this:

Neat and tidy, right?

Open, it looked like this:

This was either going to be glorious, or the second worst idea I’d had all trip.

Let’s run down the contents:

• A bun. Nothing unusual there.
• Onion Rings. Not something I expected, but not unwelcome.
• Lettuce. Sure, something green is a good idea.
• Shredded cheese.
• Two hamburger patties.
• Mayonnaise, because the Japanese believe that mayo goes with EVERYTHING.
• And, of course, a healthy helping of curry sauce with onions and mushrooms in it.

It was… It was wonderful. Granted, messy as all get out - they were smart enough to toss a couple extra napkins on the tray - but a GOOD kind of messy, not the greasy Am-I-Done-Yet-Can-I-Go-Now? greasy monstrosity that was the McGutPunch (with egg).

It gets my highest recommendation, and I say that several hours later having suffered no ill effects.

Because, Curry Loves Me, And Wants To Be My Friend. Curry Would Never Hurt Me.

My dear readers:

I would like to say that I am writing this from the comfort of my Tokyo hotel room.

The sad truth is that there is no place on earth that could be comfortable right now.

I have, once again, in an effort to report on the topics people really want to know about, delved into the seedy underbelly of Japanese fast food.

But I delved too greedily, and too deep.

Tonight I tried the Mega Tamago.  In a land where food portions tend to the smallish, McDonalds has tried to go in exactly the opposite direction.  The Mega Tamago - or, as it will be called from now on, the McGutPunch (with egg) - consists of:

• A top, middle, and bottom bun.
• Three hamburger patties.
• A fried egg.
• Two strips of bacon.
• Cheese.
• And some pathetic scraps of lettuce, glued into the whole thing with sesame dressing.

It didn’t have any flavor of its own, except what the sesame dressing provided.  The rest of the contents could as well have been inert slabs of any vaguely textured material - their only purpose was to be greasy, and greasy they were.

I had been provided with a single napkin; it was rendered useless before I was half done with the monstrosity.  I found myself grateful for the packets of advertising tissues I’ve collected during my stay.

I ate it - it is more accurate to say that I forced it down. I ate the fries, thankful in so many ways that they were salty and crunchy. I drank my cola, and now… now I have regret.

Not plural, as in “I have regrets” - I have only one regret, and that is that I ever laid eyes upon the McGutPunch (with egg).

If I were, say, a youth of seventeen again, I could probably have eaten the thing, and possibly enjoyed it enough to order a second.  If I were a youth of seventeen again, and wound up NOT able to handle it, at least I could have blamed it on the foolishness of youth.

As a theoretically grown man, I have no such resilience, and no excuse.

Tomorrow, who knows?

I may rise from this a stronger man, ready once more to seek out the worst Japan has to offer.

I’ll let you know then.

Happy to report that I started the morning without a yelp of surprise. There’s something about the mattress in a capsule hotel that makes it quite impossible to think you’re waking up anywhere else. It seemed perfectly comfortable when I went to sleep, some gnomes must have come in during the night and taken all the padding out.

The plan for today was simple and straightforward; it was therefore doomed to abject failure.

I planned to hit a couple of tourist attractions in Osaka, head to Okayama, spend some time there, and then be in Kochi by dinner time, sampling regional delicacies along the way.

This might have worked if I hadn’t gotten on completely the wrong subway train at Namba station in Osaka. I thought that i was getting on the “JR Loop Line”, which lives up to its name in that it’s a circuit around Osaka. I was wrong. I actually wound up on a train to Nara, which is not a loop. I didn’t realize this until I started seeing stations that looked more and more “small town” and less urban - I hadn’t been paying attention to station names because, well, I figured that I was on a loop, I just needed to listen for Osaka-eki and I’d be fine.

Long story short - when I realized this, I dashed out the door of one train, directly across the platform into the doors of another train going BACK to Osaka, and lost about an hour in the process.

That minor setback aside, a few other things conspired to make me lose 10 minutes here and there… I had to scale back plans a little. Mostly I dropped my plan to visit Okayama castle, though I may hit it on the way back.

Umeda Sky Building, with its twin towers bridged at the top by an observator, is basically a “get high up and look around” sort of thing. It’s got some impressive views of Osaka and a couple of escalators that you shouldn’t ride if you have any fear of heights - they start at the 34th floor and go OUTSIDE up to the 39th floor, enclosed of course but still…

The observation deck of this tower is open to the elements, though it does have a sort of moat thing that looks like it would prevent anyone from jumping. I’m sure that, in Japan, suicide capital of the known world, that design is PURELY COINCIDENTAL.

There’s a nice little placard, which I failed to photograph, that basically said “don’t wear a hat up here if it’s windy” which I thought was Sound Advice.

Nice views of Osaka, especially of the bridges.

Not knowing Osaka at all kind of cut into the impact of the views - no “I can see my house from here!” factor, you see - but I got to enjoy watching natives point out stuff to each other and get quite animated arguing about what building was what.

From there, I navigated my way back to the subway system - coming FROM Umeda Sky Building, I found the convenient underground tunnel that runs directly from Osaka station to the building, this makes the trip about 10 minutes on foot instead of the 20-30 minutes that it might take someone to get there if they decided to, I don’t know, take the first exit they came to in Osaka station, scan the skyline for their destination, and then try to figue out how to get there using sidewalks. You’d have to be a complete fool to go THAT route.

…

Anyway, subway system, four stops to Osaka Castle Park station. Osaka Castle Park station living up to its name, Osaka Castle is surrounded by a rather nice wooded park full of roaming cats. The feral cat population in Japan is one of the things I find most depressing about the country, but these cats didn’t look too badly off. Some of them were obviously on the prowl for small animals to eat, but there were an equal measure who’d found a spot of shade to lie down in and wait out the midday heat - and they were completely unafraid of people, the most reaction I got from any of them was a half opened eye to say “Yes, I know you’re there.”

Osaka Castle is DAMNED impressive from the outside.

Inside, well, it’s a museum with lots of informative displays about the guy responsible for building it. There’s nothing of the original castle left except for a few outbuildings, the keep itself is a modern reconstruction.

There are two floors of neat artifacts; these are also the floors where photography is prohibited. Did I mention that the museum sells nice photo books of all the artifacts? Do I have to mention this? OK, so the photography prohibition is really there to prevent the artifacts from being destroyed by slow exposure to flashes, but still…

Osaka castle didn’t really take that long to explore. Got a few photos that will hopefully be desktop-background-quality. I had some takoyaki at a small booth on the grounds of the castle - and I survived the experience, though I wouldn’t go out of my way to repeat it - and got back on the subway to Shin-Osaka station where I could catch a shinkansen to Okayama.

Okayama was where I started to feel well and truly off the map. This is unfair - the city is on a great many maps, even some that aren’t necessarily all that detailed - but it’s the first place I’ve been that speaking Japanese has seemed less like an affection and more like a survival skill. That is to say, this is the first city I’ve gotten to where the clerk at the JR counter has hit me with the “Oh my god I have to talk to a gaijin” face instead of the “Oh, time to bust out the English skills” face.

Nonetheless, she got me a ticket to Kochi and I had 45 minutes to kill.

Now, Okayama claims that it’s Momotaro’s hometown, and as such it has two regional specialties. The first is peaches, the second is a candy called kibi dango, which Momotaro is reputed to have fed to his animal friends before they went and whomped up on ogres.

I found peaches in the produce section of the station supermarket. I could have gotten a six pack of - admittedly gorgeous looking - peaches for right around $50.

That was a little rich for my blood. A small box of kibi dango set me back Y380 which was much more reasonable.

Eating a small box of kibi dango while on a 2.5 hour train ride is a good way to wind up with a horribly upset stomach, by the way. That somewhat negative aspect aside, it tastes an awful lot like botan rice candy and has the consistency of rather soft marshmallows. Not impressed, but you have to eat the regional specialty, right?

The train from Okayama to Kochi goes past some amazing scenery, both manmade and natural. The bridge between the two islands is six miles long, and it is quite startling to see massive container ships passing under the bridge and looking quite small. It’s hard to get a sense of the thing even when you’re on it; it’s one of those things that really makes you appreciate the kind of people who have the right sort of brains for mechanical engineering on a massive scale.

After you cross the bridge and wind up on Shikoku, you get to the natural scenery part of the ride; mile after mile of forested mountains punctuated by occasional bursts of civilization and cultivated fields. For a while, we were following a river - no idea on the name - that had absolutely stunning emerald water and tons of rapids, it was criminal how difficult it was to take any photographs from a moving train.

Got to Kochi around 8 PM, booked a room at the Comfort Hotel Kochi, changed, grabbed an area map and hit the streets. My goal was to get some photographs of Kochi castle at night, and I wasn’t about to be deterred by little things like not knowing where it was and never having been in Kochi before. It turned out to be about a half hour walk. Of course, the castle itself was long since closed up for the day, but nobody seemed to mind or actually notice me wandering the grounds and taking pictures. Hopefully some of them turn out all right.

Still nursing my upset stomach, I decided to hit a Lawson’s, get a katsu set microwaved by the helpful shop, and retreat back to my room instead of trying to sample Kochi’s regional delicacy, which is a sort of barely-cooked tuna dish. Maybe I’ll be up for it for lunch.