Zushi Daytrip

This morning was pretty lazy. I got up, went to the hospital to round, ate breakfast and went back to bed.  Awesome!

This afternoon was more interesting.  SMS and I went to our Japanese lesson, which left me feeling slightly depressed and feeling pretty stoopid.  While the feeling is somewhat motivating to study more, I still felt kind of down.  But rather than go home and wallow in my ignorance, SMS and I decided to head out to Zushi since we were already in Oppama.

Zushi was awesome!  We walked to the seaside and along the beach while SMS recited haikus in Japanese to me.  Just kidding about the poetry, but it was a really nice walk.  We were both hungry since we had a light lunch.  We thought about Cantina for a few seconds but decided we weren't totally craving pizza.  I saw a Japanese restaurant ahead and we went to check it out. 

It was amazing!  We walked in and immediately took off our shoes and put them in a locker.  There were wooden tabs/pegs inside the lockers and when I took mine out, it actually latched the locker closed.  Sagoy!  We were escorted to a booth and we decided on the shabu shabu set.  It was 2,100 yen for all-you-can-eat for 60 minutes.  It wasn't even our intention to get all-you-can-eat.  The amount of food in the picture seemed more than reasonable for the price.  We had a bowl of vegetables (cabbage, sprouts, glass noodles, shumai (dumplings), mushrooms, kabocha squash and carrots), thinly sliced beef, thinly sliced pork, mini-sausages and chunks of chicken.  We ended up getting a second order of the beef and vegetables.  

We picked our broth and a portable burner was brought to the table and lit.  The broth quickly reached a boil and we started cooking.  Veggies first, then meat.  There were three different dipping sauces.  One was a sesame seed sauce and the other a ponzu soy sauce.  There was one other sauce with the slightest hint of karai, or hotness, but it was pretty similar to the ponzu.  We also ordered some soba, which was also included.  We could have gotten rice and/or udon too.  So!Much!Food!

It's a slightly strange experience coming from my Western cooking background since the meats and veggies mix pretty freely.   I definitely avoid that in my kitchen, but one, the meat is well-sourced here and two, everything was being boiled to kingdom-come.

We ate a lot but not too much, i.e. we still had room for a delicious small soft-serve ice cream.  It was Hokkaido milk flavor, slightly sweet and totally delicious.  We walked back to the train station and headed home.  Time to study more Japanese!