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After travelling for more than 24 hours, My friend Ioni and I were in Japan, where everyday western stuff seems weird, out of place. And Japanese daily things are a constant surprise. Take, for example, eating. Forget about dealing with chopsticks, that’s just the tip of the iceberg (though I’ll never be able to master the chopsticks as they do, using it for plain rice and grabbing mouthfuls while I seem to pick up only a few grains). In every meal there are steps and traditions to be followed and everything has its own place (the soy sauce, some dry seaweed or fish scales to add to your meal, the chopsticks… and there’s sometimes a hot towel that works as a kind of napkin, but not really). But first of all, how do you order? It’s not easy to find someone who speaks english at restaurants, so you’ll have to rely on images, pointing, and most of all: hope. Hope you’ll like what’ve you just pointed at. Some menus have pictures and the most unusual have some english words, but what I really loved were the Sampuru, real size plastic models of all the dishes of the restaurant displayed in the window. This waxy fake food was not only craftily done, but also made for a nice experience to go out with the waiter to the window in order to point. You’d be surprised with how much of the food in restaurants you have to cook yourself. It’s not unusual for tables to have some kind of device in order to grill or boil the food. In order to eat Okonomiyaki, a kind of really tasty omelette, you have to order a bowl of raw eggs with whatever meat or vegetables you’d like and it gets cooked at your table. Another very similar case is eating Shabu-shabu. We ate it one cold night in Hiroshima, and when we sat on the table we honestly thought we were ordering some kind of ham. But no, it was way better and more surprising than that. After our drinks, a small mobile cooktop was brought and lit. Then, a pan with water. By the time the water was boiling, the waiter was already bringing a plate of vegetables and signing us to throw them in the water. And then came the meat. Pork carpaccio cut really thin. We stare at the waiter waiting for instructions. I was so hungry I had no problem with eating it raw. But with a lot of effort he was able to say, while moving up and down some imaginary chopsticks in the air, “push, push, roll, eat”. We grasped the concept and proceed: Put the meat in the water, push it down twice, roll it along with some vegetable already floating on the water, and eat. It was delicious. Though rain is never an obstacle to move around Tokyo (they use some of the best umbrellas I’ve ever seen, and they even have special lockers and bags for them at shops and museums), a great activity when it rains is to go grocery shopping. Is kind of a piñata situation: you never know what you might get. Everything looks vibrant and colorful. The aisles sometimes have small screens with videos and music, adding to the confusion. You usually can’t make up if what you’re grabbing is sweet or salty, or both. There are drawings of different animals or people in even the most “serious” food, and one of their most beloved sweets is mochi, which if you search online is really hypnotic and interesting to watch how it is made, but as far as taste goes, is colored rubber. So, whether you like bean paste filling for your sweets or are not sure if you can handle wasabi snacks (tip: the trick is to have them with lots of beer by your side), one thing is for sure: If you go eating in Japan, you will be surprised.