Oishiibashi

The current hostel I am staying at, "J-Hoppers Kyoto," is located on an intersection called "Ooishibashi." This basically translates to something like "BIG ROCK BRIDGE" or something, but when reading the directions to the hostel written in English, they wrote out the name of the intersection in a very neutral way, "oishibashi," which has no indicator of whether the name is actually "ooishibashi," or whether is is "oishiibashi," which is what I initially thought! This has a completely different meaning, basically "YUMMY BRIDGE." Which I was looking forward to, staying in an area that is literally named YUMMY promises good food right?

Well, this is not actually Oishiibashi, but its been living up to that name anyway. Two amazing dinners in a row since I came here.

And tonight, I ate something so amazing I just have to write about it tonight.

Kushikatsu! Which basically means fried things on sticks. Katsu is a really popular food in Japan, and usually consists of breaded and fried chicken or pork, but kushikatsu is a special version usually only available in Oosaka (but for some reason I ended up eating it in Kyoto :P) where pretty much anything you can think of is put on a stick and then fried up. The shop we went to, SamaSama, had like 30 or 40 options! :D

I went with my wonderful friend Mizuho, who is actually one of the first Japanese friends I met way back at community college :D Its funny because we already travelled in Kyoto together once, and then here we are here again!

We ate a good array of different types of kushikatsu, everything from lotus root to apple :D My favorite was the simple onion, but everything was amazing, not only because it was fried and on a stick, but also because they cooked everything perfect and we were given a huge container of amazing katsu sauce :D :D :D mmmmmmm

And there is just something about the people working at the restaurants here, but they are so nice! These kind of restaurants have the cook right behind the counter, so you can talk to them easily, and I think we surprised the cook because I was speaking in Japanese the whole time, and we ended up talking to her a bit. And when we left, the cook chased after us with hot cans of coffee! :D So nice!!

I also met my wonderful nunim again today! Unfortunately we had a snafu where I read where to meet wrong, and the true difficulty of not having a cellphone arose. Luckily, with the help of a payphone everything worked out :D I need to get a cellphone soon!

Overall such a good day though :D Just hanging out with good friends like this is so much better than frequenting all the tourist places in Kyoto, although at some point I might as well take advantage of being here and see some of them that I haven't been to before! Hard to stomach being around all the tourists though :P Kyoto is so touristy, and no matter where you go you are guarenteed to see some (often very lost looking) foreign tourists wandering around.

I must admit I've spent my share of time being lost too though, but I'm really enjoying getting to know the cities of Japan. Last time I was here I just followed my friends around and didn't understand where I was going at all, but I'm steadily figuring out how things work here this time :D. And I feel like I got a fairly good understanding of how Oosaka works as well! Next up is Kobe :D

Motorcyclist+ pedestrian crossing? Bicyclists certainly make crossing scary at times, but this is just too much!

Also, I am watching the Lion King in Japanese right now, forgot how totally amazing that movie is! Watching movies dubbed into Japanese is all kinds of fun :D especially deciphering the translated lyrics of the songs, hahaha.

Anyway, time to get some sleep, watching Lion King was fun but watching it to the end was kind of a bad idea, now I'm up way too late!