We spent Thanksgiving, also Davida's birthday, in Osaka. Cool town. Kind of dingy, rather unrefined, we learned that we were staying in the day laborer/ghetto part of town- if there is such a thing as a ghetto in Japan. Our place was part hostel part frat house. It was filled with Swedes and other uptight European types, many of whom had been living in that spot for months or longer, studying Japanese or working in IT. Every white person in Japan seems to be an IT guy.
On the first night, Wednesday I think, we went out for a drink with Simon from Leeds, the superintendent of the property, Mike the Canadian and some cat from San Diego. After quite a tour of the touristy area full of electronic shops and shoe stores, we wound at The Hub, an English pub style joint which apparently had no beer... or it just wasn't on the happy hour list... or they didn't like us. Who can say? We split as soon as we sat down and kept walking. Still without a drink, mind you we'd been on and off trains all day from Takayama, I called an audible and directed us toward the nearest eating/drinking establishment. As it turns out, it was a yakatori-ya. We were seated in a small room with rice paper screen doors. Very Japanese, very cool. The main problem, however, was that though we had a server, we also had a big touch-screen iPad looking thing from which we were told to order. Of course, everything is in Japanese so none of us could make heads or tails of the menu and the waitress won't let us order directly from her.
Then things went a bit sideways. We got beers, sort of figured out our computer ordering machine, selected some food on a stick and waited... and waited... and waited. Totally being ignored by our girl, Mike the Canadian started looking through his Japanese phrase book and began to make a scene, shouting "sumimasen" whenever the server came anywhere near our table. When she did show up, he didn't know what to say next. San Diego went south with low blood sugar and started cursing and threatening. "This is bull$&!/!. Let's get the f@*{ outta here! I'm gonna walk out on this muth€?£&;%¥ check right now! Thinking our food was forgotten, we asked for the check. As soon as our girl dropped it, the food arrived. Coincidence? We thought not.
The food looked like it might have been tasty when it came off the grill. As it had been forgotten under a heat lamp, however, it was Alpo. We were bummed. We tried to explain to the girl that this was unacceptable, but all attempts to communicate our dismay were met with polite nodding and smiling. At the register, Mike the C tried one more time for a comp. The girl there gave us 20% off the exorbitant bill and we left considering that the one small victory in an otherwise unmitigated culinary defeat.
We split up and Davida and I found a small stand offering takoyaki manned by an old Osakan guy. This stuff is delicious. It's basically a fried ball of dough stuffed with a chunk of octopus. They jam ten of these golfball sized suckers into a small styrofoam takeout container, cover it with mayo, barbecue sauce and spices and hand it over. It cost ¥250; $3. Boom! Take that, overpriced yakitori bi!?€es..!!
-Ken
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