Green tea

Breakfast today included an avocado half, with the pit filled with soy sauce. You mix wasabe into the center and eat it with a spoon. yum. Also more fish and some white miso, apparently a kyoto specialty.

Additionally, i tried to order green tea. Apparently one does not order green tea. you just say "tea" (or ocha) and you get green tea. i got tea that was... green.

my green tea. it is super green, like wheatgrass juice or something.

sort of like tea but a bit sweeter, and quite odd. only 400 yen for a cup of green oddness. Thats like $5, but sort of what almost all hot drinks (coffee, tea) cost here. Except from the vending machine, where its like 100 yen for coffee.

JAPAN!

JAPAN! woot. so we finally got here. We are staying in Kyoto, next door to the imperial palace and the Imadegawa campus of Doshisha University. Our confrence is on the Muromachi campus, just down the road. We have a room in the Nashinoki inn, a little bed and breakfast run by a super old lady who speaks just a little english and her son (?) who speaks a lot more.

Nashiniki Inn!

The front door. You take your shoes off at the door, and swap them for slippers. Then you take your slippers off at your  room. you also get a special pair of bathroom slippers.

Our room has a sweet low table, some futons and a place to hang some clothes. Thats about it. The floors are  Tatami mat's, so no shoes allowed.

futon beds, with buckwheat husk pillows, which turn out to be really comfortable.

the outside of our room. lots of books i cant read on the shelf there.
as soon as we got here, we were taken upstairs and the old lady that
runs the place served us tea and rice cakes while explaining
the rules.

theres a 4-foot tall or so door onto a little
balcony outside our room. It looks over a
small garden, and at some other peoples
homes. the garden has a japanese maple in
it! which is sweet because we are in japan.

we had a traditional japanese breakfast...

everything was really nicely laid out, and all the hot dishes had neat little lids that fit perfectly and turned into sauce dishes when you took them off. the middle tray has miso soup, rice, dried seaweed, and tea on it.

the top two bowls have assorted cooked and or pickled veggies in them. most of it i have no idea what it was. the orange stuff in the upper left is probably the chewiest and crunchiest thing i've eaten, which is odd as it obviously started its life as a vegetable. the fried fish in the middle was remarkably good and not a bit fishy. lower right is a tomato filled with egg and peppers. i tried it but its a bit too much runny egg for me.

nom nom nom. Also we met an australian who lives here. This friday we should be drinking with him, which should be interesting. Lots of other cool stuff but im tired so ill post tomorrow.