Saturday, November 26, 2005

Mostly dead. Entirely Delicious.

I would like to say that I am not a squeamish man in terms of what I eat. I figure that since my ancestors bitch slapped their way to the top of the food chain, the least that I can do to show them that I appreciate all the hard work. In my opinion, the best way to show this appreciation is to not shy away from eating things that said ancestors bitch slapped on their way to the eventual signing of the Kyoto Accord, formation of the WWF, etc. In short, I try to stick anything put in front of me into my maw.

With that disclaimer for the following tale out of the way, I can safely say that I love sushi very much. VERY much. And not just those sissy rolls that involve things like “cooking” in the preparation process. Thus, you can imagine that I live in Japan with quite a lot of excitement about the entire eating party. Occasionally, I even get some strange surprises. Like finding a place that offers uber fresh sushi near my apartment as the team was on the way home from Yomuriland-mae.

This sushi restaurant also had an amazing extra little thing on the menu that made the sushi even better…. a little special called “All you can drink for two hours” for UNDER ONE THOUSAND YEN. That’s 980 Yen… or about $9.80CDN at the current exchange rate. Draft or bottles, hard liquor, wine, you name it. Two hours to guzzle as much as you can. OK, raise your hands if you think that this would be the best thing ever…

Yeah. Me too.

To top it all off, they happened to serve a few things that would make a certain ex girlfriend of mine want to call the wraith of the heavens down on my head (…cough….uh…er…again…).

That’s right! This joyful place served both RAW WHALE and RAW HORSE!

The whale is held in my eager chopsticks, and the horse in Nick’s. Yep, they happen to taste pretty awesome, actually. Well, whales wouldn’t be so freaking endangered if they didn’t taste so good. Sheesh. And as for Mr. Ed, well, I now know that you can not only ride him to lunch, but eat him for it too! No cooking required. It was tasty-good!

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Shocked? Offended? Hungry? Hopefully all three, because I hate to say it, but the real shocker actually came in the NEXT course.

Fish that was so fresh it was only barely dead. I mean BARELY DEAD. They pull it from a tank, slice off the sides, skewer it and serve it. Probably in not much more time than it took you to read this paragraph. This means that your fish is rather fresh.

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So fresh, in fact, that it is still twitching on the table for the duration of your entire meal. A good twenty minutes of occasional jitters and fish flips. Seriously. The mouth opens and the fins jitter, the gills flip every few minutes….. all while you much away.

I wanted to show this poor fish just how much I appreciated his good work on the table, so I made a point of holding bits of said dinner up in front of said fish’s eyes before I ate, which understandably guarantees me the same fate if/when I am abducted by little green men with a taste for Burentomeat. But seriously, it was good, and I wanted the fish to know. It was So. Freaking. Good. Perhaps the best sushi I’ve ever had, and we snagged this little offense to western sensibilities for about 500 yen. I also snagged a few videos, so if you are interested, email me and you can watch us guzzle fish meat in fuzzy camera-phone-vision and drunk-stereo sound.

After we were suitably shitfaced and full of fish for under twenty bucks, we hit up the local karaoke bar, belted out our lungs and made it home incident free!

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To prove how sober and incident free the night was, here is a picture of me being felated by Santa Claus.

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Thank you and good night.

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