Tonight, we took a long, swift, and smooth shinkansen ride from Hiroshima back to Tokyo, where we will be spending our last two nights in Japan. It’s always such a bittersweet feeling when I know a trip is near its end; for most of the places we have visited, I’ve always felt like there was never enough time to see, do, and taste everything we wanted. But then, there are always those amazing things that happen you never expect that you will always be able to look back on and remember, and realize how much it has the ability to change the way you view life.

For our time in Tokyo, that event was the ability to have an extremely notable meal at Sushi Yuu, which was recommended to us by one of Chris’s colleagues who works in their company’s Tokyo office. He met us during our dinner at Sushi Yuu, where he used to work as a sushi chef and of course is still friends with the owner, Daisuke Shimazaki, who personally prepared each and every one of the pieces of fish we ate tonight. Sushi Yuu does not have a Michelin rating, nor is it on any major top sushi list of Japan I have found, but it is one of the most amazing dining experiences of my life, very likely made even more exciting since we got to sit right in front of Dai as he prepared our sushi and told us about each little dish’s preparation and how it should be eaten. We were treated as special guests, which truly was so special for us. It helped that he spoke pretty good English to describe all these little details to us.

Before coming to Japan, I never really thought much about things like salmon roe or fish eggs, nor did I ever genuinely enjoy uni (sea urchin). Salmon roe was one of those things that I just ate because it might be on the side of my sushi platter in New York; uni always tasted like the guts of the ocean, and not in a good way. I would take a quick sniff, place the uni into my mouth, and swallow. And that weird, gutty taste would linger in my mouth after that I’d need to wash away with sake or green tea. Well here, Dai has showed us what very good salmon roe can taste like and how big and juicy the little individual orange-colored eggs can be. And when the juices squirt out in our mouths as we bit into the little eggs, it actually tasted sweet, like juices from the ocean. He carefully prepared the most delicate pieces of uni, all picked himself at Tsukiji Fish Market where he buys pretty much all of his fish every morning. I watched him as he removed each piece from a wooden box lined in bamboo strips; he made the entire sushi preparing and sashimi cutting process look so easy. The pieces were smooth and silky, not oozing and intestine-like the way the pieces back in New York were. Watching him cut and prepare everything was like real live entertainment, but with a huge learning experience woven into it.

Dai introduced us to anago, the sea eel that is leaner than its cousin unagi, which most of us know and have at Japanese restaurants. Unagi is river eel and is known for its high fat content. He’s the reason we ate actual, real bonito sashimi, as I’d only ever had bonito in the flake form at Japanese restaurants. And he also explained to us the growing and harvesting process for wasabi root; it takes about two to four years to grow wasabi that is just a couple inches long, and because of this, a kilo of wasabi that, on a busy day, only lasts him a single day to feed his customers costs him about 15,000 yen, or about $125 USD. He’s clearly not skimping out on good ingredients for his business.

He ended the meal by serving us some of his mother’s homemade plum wine, which she’d been fermenting for the last eight years, and serving us each a single slice of honeydew, cut up into bite sized pieces. For the first time in my life, I actually witnessed my Chris eating an entire piece of melon voluntarily, and not only that, but enjoying it. I guess it was a life-changing experience for both of us. Who knew how complex the sashimi world really was?

I was first introduced to zaru soba noodles, or Japanese buckwheat noodles, when I was 12 by one of my best friends, who is half Japanese. We went to a traditional Japanese restaurant in San Francisco’s Japantown, which unfortunately today is defunct. Zaru soba is traditionally served cold in a little wooden box on a bamboo mat, with a thin, semi-sweet soy sauce that you mix wasabi and scallions into. You then dip the noodles into this sauce to eat. The reason it’s considered such a delicacy is that buckwheat, unlike regular wheat, is very hard to manipulate into pliable dough that is sturdy enough for noodles. It’s a subtle taste, not one for people who are used to very bold flavors. You really need to appreciate subtlety to enjoy zaru soba. I didn’t realize this at the time, nor did I realize that the overwhelming majority of soba noodles served and sold across the world had a higher ratio of regular wheat to buckwheat because of the difficulty in making them. However, today, we were lucky enough to try these delicate noodles made the very old-fashioned way in a gorgeous noodle house that has been operating in Kyoto for over 590-plus years. It really doesn’t get more authentic or traditional than that. I’ve never eaten at any restaurant that has been around that long, and I don’t know anyone else who has.

The biggest difference I found with these noodles was that not only were they lighter in color (the soba noodles back home were a deep grey color; these noodles were more like an off-white, pale grey), but the texture itself was very silky, emphasized even more in Chris’s hot soup version than in my cold dipping version. These noodles were so light to eat, far lighter than the buckwheat/wheat soba noodles back home in Japanese restaurants. We enjoyed our noodles with a few pieces of tempura, again very light with the thinnest fried batter, and some sake. On the table, they advised us to use the traditional Japanese green pepper and the ichimi (Japanese seven-spice mixture) as condiments. I’d had ichimi before and even have it in our kitchen at home, but had never had the Japanese green pepper before, which was peppery, hot at the finish, with a very strong lemony taste. This has been one of the most refreshing meals of our Japan trip so far.

One of the things that gets me really excited when we travel is seeing different markets. I always tell people about how fun these experiences are, but most people don’t seem to get as excited as I do because they’re not into sampling new or different foods as much. I wasn’t always as open to trying new foods, but as I’ve gone into and through my twenties, I want to try as many things as possible. It’s a fun way to explore other cultures and learn what they value and what’s important to them.

Well, I certainly had that opportunity yesterday afternoon when we arrived in Kyoto and visited the 400-plus-year-old Nishiki Market. I had read about the vast variety of tsukemono (Japanese pickled vegetables) before, but I had no idea exactly how many different varieties there actually were until we got here. Pickled vegetables are served with virtually every semi-formal meal in Japan. There were entire stores devoted to pickled vegetables. I tried things as new to me as pickled squash, pickled eggplant, and even pickled soy beans mashed into a clear jelly-like paste wrapped around another variety of beans pickled in a completely different mixture. And to make the experience even more Japanese, if you’d like to buy these pickled delicacies as gifts, you can have them beautifully packaged in origami paper wrapping to resemble artful envelopes. I can’t imagine ever being handed a thin envelope wrapped in colorful paper as a gift, to then take out the thinnest possible tray of six types of Japanese pickles. It’s so much intricacy, care, and beauty put into something (well, pickles) that doesn’t at first glance seem that delicate or “beautiful” at all.

On our first night in Tokyo, we were wandering around the Akihabara area, full of bright lights and thousand-dollar rice cookers, when we came across a sex shop. So of course, we decided to go in and check it out. We might as well go see Japanese sex toys while we are here.

I think my slight fascination with the idea of Japanese porn and sex toys came about when at my last job, one of my colleagues received a formal warning from HR because of some “suspicious activity” he was found to be doing on his work computer. Apparently, a colleague with whom I was friendly who worked in IT told me that the internet complaints regarding the terrible speed were due to this guy streaming anime porn during work hours. First, they tracked down the streaming to his computer, then identified what he was streaming and which site it was from. It was pretty hilarious to me when I found out because then, I had no idea anime porn even existed; I was completely ignorant to it. I thought about how sexually repressed Asia, and especially Japan, is, and it made sense why people would be drawn to anime porn; it’s not real people having sex, but just a bunch of cartoons with big eyes and big boobs. How illicit could that be?

This sex shop had multiple levels. The first one was for women, the second level was for both sexes, and the third was exclusively for men. There were signs all over the second level saying that women were not allowed; “FORBIDDEN!” with female symbols were all over the stair well to the third level. Chris chuckled and said that since I was forbidden, I’d have to wait for him on the second level while he went upstairs. So while I waited for him, I watched my very first segment of Japanese anime porn on their television screen. Boy, was that an eye opener.

Even if I didn’t see anything on the screen and just heard the sounds, I’d definitely know I was listening to people having pretty intense and rowdy sex. But as I looked at the screen, all the usual things you see in anime were there: cartoon women with massive, buggy clear eyes, thin build, big, ball-like breasts, and long, flowing hair. The man and the woman were on some swinging contraption, screaming and moaning loudly, likely yelling at each other to go faster, and swinging back and forth. The one thing I noticed about the action was that every time there was a zoom-in shot of the penetration, it was completely pixelated out. It’s already fake, so why the need to pixelate it at all? This culture is so repressed that they had to reduce sex down to a cartoon, and even in a cartoon, I can’t see what’s really happening to cause all that ecstasy? It completely boggled my mind in multiple ways.

I probably made the longest restaurant list I’ve ever made for this Japan trip, but sadly, we have gone to only one listed place in our 2.5 days here so far. I suppose it’s actually not that sad considering that every meal has been very enjoyable and has exceeded expectations not just for quality but also for price.

Three years ago when I was in Singapore, I met a friend’s friend who was American and working for Delta while living in Tokyo. We spent quite a bit of time together for the few days he was in Singapore, and he told me that while of course, Tokyo was not a cheap place, he said he felt that most people’s depiction of how expensive it is wasn’t very accurate. He said that he paid less for his shared apartment, where he had his own bedroom and bathroom, than most of the people he knew living in Manhattan, and if you wanted to eat Japanese food in Tokyo, it could be had for quite cheap and in most cases, less than eight to ten U.S. dollars. Sure, you could spend $500 for dinner if you wanted (and there are quite a number of restaurants to do that at given that Tokyo has a large number of Michelin star restaurants), but you could also spend less than $5 for dinner at hundreds of places. Hotels are expensive in Tokyo, but they’re in the same ballpark as hotels in New York City.

Everything he told me was right. On our first night, I had a delicious pork katsu curry over rice with miso soup for less than $7 USD, and today, we had ramen for lunch for about $6 USD each. As I slurped my delicious tonkotsu broth, I thought about how we’d normally pay $12-20 for good quality ramen in New York City and felt a bit sulky. Everywhere you go here, there are so many overwhelming options for food. It’s like being in New York, except everyone here is extremely polite and well mannered, and all the writing is in Japanese. And there’s probably no high fructose corn syrup in every product here.

One of the most enjoyable parts of traveling to another part of the world is observing everyday people in that society and how they lead their lives – and then thinking about how it compares with life back home.

One thing that is so conspicuous in Tokyo is how everyone seems to follow the rules. On the subway stairs, there’s a sign and written guides on the steps for walking up the stairs on the left, down the stairs on the right. Everyone follows this. Everyone. The most amusing part of watching this was when there were too many people going up the stairs that they started lining up in a double-file line, but not a single person was walking down the right side. I thought in my New Yorker head, why isn’t anyone just walking up the right side of the stairway? It’s wide open! Gradually but very hesitantly, a few people meekly walked up the right side, and Chris and I joined them. “I don’t follow rules, baby,” Chris said. Yes, he’s certainly not Japanese.