rules for eating in Japan

Rule #1: Don't make any assumptions about snack foods.

Japanese snack foods are great! They're just as quirky as you expect them to be, only possibly along more axes than you'd considered. It's definitely worth adventuring around in the snacks aisle and seeing what you turn up. However, as with any chance you might take, the possibility of being pleasantly surprised is balanced by a risk of being unpleasantly surprised. If you expect to be surprised, then the whole experience is much more tolerable. "What? My candy bar is full of fish roe? Oh well! *toss* *yarf*"

This leads us to...

Rule #2: If you're feeling adventurous in a restaurant, expect to be surprised.

Let's say you duck into a Chinese restaurant because they had lovely platters of greens pictured out front. Only, you forgot the Kanji underneath the greens platters, and the menus inside only have a few photos! So, you look at the menu and find an item that costs the same amount and looks plausible ("da-i-e-to something something"). If you then decide to point to that item and say "kore ni shimasu!" to your waitress -- which is, now that you think about it, probably not even the right thing to say -- remember that there is a chance that you won't just get the wrong item and eat it anyway (like, oh, shrimp croquettes), but also that you will have been wrong in so many ways that what you receive won't even be in the right category of item (like, oh, say, ( a pot of tea )

.)

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( the view from our hotel window )

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Yesterday, we visited the small-but-charming Meguro Parasitological Museum -- a museum of human and animal parasites in Meguro-ku, a district of Tokyo, and not (as you might imagine) a museum devoted to parasites in tuna.

( this isn't *that* gross, but I could see people being squicked by human parasites. )