Japanese Food Mishaps!

This is my sweet little girl in her new Japanese dress, isn't she too cute?!

Anyways, so I'm pretty big on trying new things.  Sometimes whatever I pick randomly and eat is awesome, other times it is terrible, but that is part of the fun of being in a new place and trying new things.  We went to this town near where we are living called Kamakara.  I kept just randomly picking items I saw that were more roadside foods as I was walking buy shops and shopping.  Apparently this wasn't my day.

The first dish I tried I believe is called Nikuman.  It is a steamed bun with pork filling.  Granted Nikuman I believe has ground pork in it and the one I had wasn't ground pork but more of a pulled chunky style pork, but since I don't know an abundance of Japanese (yet) this is the best I can come up with for the dish I ate.  I didn't take a picture of the one I actually ate but got this picture along with a recipe from Japanese Cooking.

 Looks pretty tasty right?  Yeah, it was really good.  It was like onions and pork until I found a surprise in it.  I ate over half of it before I found what I am sure was some sort of organ, my only guess after we spent 10 minutes examining it was it must have been a pig testicle.  Let's just hope the other one was in someone else and I didn't eat it.  Though I won't lie, it was really good until I found that in it.  Of course, since there aren't any public trash cans anywhere I couldn't even throw it away I had to wrap it up and put it in my backpack until we got back to the hotel.  Apparently many years ago there was a terrorist issue with putting some sort of gas in public garbage cans so they were all removed so there are actually signs that say take your trash home.  Restaurants and stores have trash cans but there aren't any while you are just out walking really.

Next we find this donut place and I decide to pick a green donut, why not?!  I figure donuts are all sweet and though I don't know what this is, it has to be sweet and tasty, right?  Wrong.  This apparently is some sort of spinach donut and it was absolutely dreadful!    Not sure what the yellow part is, maybe it was ginger or something but I tossed the entire thing after one bite.



Need something to wash down that terrible spinach taste so hit up the vending machine.  It has an orange on it so probably orange juice or something, right?  Yeah, wrong again.  Not only is it not orange juice it is chunky.  It has a flat orange soda type taste with chunks of something in it.  This isn't the first drink we've bought that had something lurking in there, most of what we buy from the Japanese vending machines has bits of fruit or something floating around.  I'm just not into chunky stuff in my drink though, so another strike-out.

Ohhh yummy, look at these chocolaty looking things on a stick.  How can I go wrong here!  Ahh, yeah, apparently by not speaking Japanese or knowing anything about Japanese food I can definitely go wrong again.  This is totally not a sweet delicious chocolate type dessert treat on a stick!  Not even close!!  It is called a red bean dango.  Can you think of anything further from chocolate than a pureed red bean sauce?!  Yeah, took me totally by surprise.  Wasn't even a tiny bit good, I thought it was awful.  My 11 month old seemed to enjoy it though.  I got this photo from someone's flicker account (found here Flickr).  Though the other pictures is of me eating it, my husband wanted to capture the moment!  Ha!

Now this part is even more fun. Luckily I researched Japan before I ever came here so I wasn't taken my surprise.  We were told in a base orientation class that you "may" encounter a Japanese toilet at some point though it isn't likely.  Ha, boy was that a lie!  I think every single place we have gone so far has had Japanese toilets.  It is basically a porcelain hole in the floor you squat over.  My daughter was totally confused as to what it was and what she was suppose to do.  Of course, you just have to look for signs for handicap bathrooms and they have Western toilets like we know and are use to.  Most of the larger places like Aquariums and such have either both types of toilets or just Western but you will definitely encounter Japanese style toilets!

My next post will be highlighting the wonderful food we've found and tried and the things that we have really enjoyed.  This was just my surprise and shocking finds so far!