Lunch Set-o A

Omiya being rather small and out of the way, there’s not really much call for English menus and the like around town. Nor do people feel comfortable enough with their English to admit they speak any (although you can sometimes get them to admit they speak “sukoshi” English). So ordering meals in a restaurant is a little more complicated than you might otherwise think.

The larger places have plastic replicas of their food outside. No, I am not making this up. If they serve ramen with pork and corn and bamboo shoots, there is a plastic bowl full of “soup”, “noodles”, “pork slices”, “corn kernels”, and “bamboo shoots” in the display window (apparently there’s a factory that makes most of the plastic food and they give tours – I haven’t found it yet though).

The smaller places though ... if no one in the family owns a color printer so there are no pictures on the menu, you’re out of luck. But here’s a useful piece of information - almost every restaurant has lunch specials, variously called “Obento” and “lunch set-o”. The generally consist of a main dish, rice, soup, pickles, and sometimes a small piece of tofu (the Japanese seriously believe in *lots* of small dishes for each meal – they’re not courses per say since you eat them all together, just lots of items artistically placed on different plates and bowls in front of you).

Knowing these lunch specials exist means you can walk into a restaurant and order “lunch set-o A” and be reasonably confident that you’re going to get fed. Now, you have no idea WHAT you’re going to be fed, but sometimes that’s best anyway.

Oddly enough, this strategy got me gyoza (Japanese potstickers) three days in a row at three different restaurants. Today it was a Korean bbq bowl though.

And just when I think I’m getting the hang of things here, something happens to convince me I’m really a stranger in a strange land. I was coming back from a foray to the prefecture botanical gardens this morning and had to brake hard and swerve to avoid hitting a monkey. Yes, you read that correctly, a monkey taking himself for a walk across the freeway. No, I didn’t get a picture – I was too busy trying to remember which side of the road I was supposed to end up on (I was later told that he’s an escaped pet who hangs around town and while I can expect to see him occasionally, I shouldn’t feed him).