Japan Trip - Dec 22 "Nagoya Unagi, Kobe Viking"

Today was a whirlwind tour of Kansai. In the morning, we had a quick breakfast at home. Mariko's mom always prepares some food for us before she leaves for work, and today we had tamago-yaki (scrambled egg), sausage, gohan (white rice), and coffee/juice. Our only appointment for the day was meeting our good friend Kayo's parents in Kobe for dinner that evening, so our day was open.

We decided to take advantage of our JR rail passes and hop on the Shinkansen for Nagoya to eat at an unagi (eel) restaurant that our friends had recommended. I thought it was so cool that we could travel so quickly to another city just for lunch. Plus, riding the shinkansen is pretty cool, no matter how many times I have done it. So, we took the train from our station to Shin-Osaka, which is where the shinkansen stop in Osaka. We found seats in the non-reserved car and the train quickly sped up to Kyoto and beyond. I think it took a little over an hour to reach Nagoya. We switched to a local train, then found the restaurant, Unagi Horaiken, which was up on one of the top floors of a building.

The line for the restaurant was huge! There must have been about thirty people ahead of us, and the restaurant had chairs lined up outside in the hallway. I had forgotten this fun aspect of Japan. It's basically a line, but just sitting, and every minute or so, you have to get up and move over to the next chair as people are called to their tables. While the unagi restaurant had a huge line, the other restaurants up on that floor didn't have many customers at all, even though it was about 12:30pm.

We actually didn't really have to wait long at all, and were seated at our table, where Mariko and I ordered the popular unagi set. We also got some karaage (fried chicken) for the kids. The unagi set was pretty huge, and looked delicious. There is a certain way to eat it, which is to take a big flat spoon and divide up the food into quarters, then put the first quarter into your bowl and eat it as-is. The unagi tasted so good!!! When finished with that part, you scoop the second quarter in the bowl, then add nori (seaweed), wasabi, and green onion on top, and eat that bowlful of food. This was even better than the first! For the third quarter, it's the same as the second, but then you also add some soup broth to the unagi and rice. And the fourth quarter is any way you like it. I just added the nori, wasabi, and green onion, which was my favorite way. I hadn't had wasabi with unagi before, but it was really good. By this time I finished, I was pretty full. The amount of unagi and rice was incredible.

With the unagi lunch finished, we headed back to the shinkansen, and headed back to Shin-Osaka. Then we caught another train for Kobe, we we did a little shopping at the 100-yen store before meeting Mariko's mom and Kayo's parents for dinner. Kayo's dad took us to an all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant called Fisherman's Wharf (I think). We waited in line for a couple minutes, then were seated near the window, where we had a nice view of the harbor. The...