I'm back from the deep country where my homefamily lives, also known as twenty minutes' train ride from Hiroshima and in a town bigger than Spokane. The family was an amazing experience - the daughter works as a secretary and is charming, the son is helpful and friendly, the mother is extremely generous and irrepressibly chatty, and the dad spends most of his time making wisecracks and starts getting drunk the very moment he returns home from work, which makes him even jollier. Despite the fact that the Japanese can't hold their liquor any better than a five-year-old girl with liver problems, men as they age start to drink it by the crateful.
Anyway, I sort of figured we'd just sit around being familial and all, but we ended up going to the neighboring prefecture, to the very tip of Honshu, and staying the night at an onsen. On the way back we did all sorts of exciting and wondrous things, which will be told in a magical and family-centered movie featuring the acting genius of Joe Don Baker, to be released this summer.
A couple of nights ago I think I ate the most objectively nasty food I've ever seen in person - it's kim chee, which means just pickled-ish Chinese cabbage with lots of spices and hot peppers, but instead of the cabbage base, you use whole cod stomachs. Now, this may seem odd at first, but I can see how one would make the leap from cabbage to fish stomachs - after all, they are both organic, originate on the planet Earth, grow in the ground and taste like cabbage. Or maybe one of them tastes like whole fish stomachs because that is, in fact, what it is. Regardless, though by all rights it should be the foulest-tasting food I've ever eaten, in reality it was not only palatable but quite delicious, and given the opportunity I would gladly down another hearty helping of fishy wobbly bits.
Tomorrow starts early, so today I cut things short. Will naturally right more about all this later, unless I am struck with force upon the skullcap with, say, a sock full of pennies, at which point I may forget that any of this had ever happened so that I may better focus on my new life, in which I will believe that I am a space chicken sent to save Earth from poor quality oak furniture.
- Gyaa! I'm give up
Naka-ku, Hiroshima
730-0803
JAPAN
