neuuuughdles.

part of the motivation for writing this blog was to record my experiences of eating around the world. naturally enough, you'd think. but i've been putting the whole project off and off for so long that i've missed hundreds of amazing, odd, and disgusting meals. this is a shame, but i'm not one for regrets, and so... from here on i'm aiming to document the ones worth documenting.

in the meantime it'll be retrospectively half-arsed.

so, yes... here's a generic out-of-the-hotel-window shot of shibuya, tokyo.

obviously japan has some crazy food. "crazy" is putting it mildly. it's another world, etc etc. truly alien. a common platitude, but it's unavoidably true. everywhere you go you're confronted with weirdness, often on a fairly basic level: the plastic models of curries and soups sat outside every restaurant advertising the food within, for example--hilarious the first time, but somewhat off-putting every time after that; the bento boxes available here there and everywhere which consist of no single identifiable food stuff--holding a soggy grey cube between your fingers you wonder if it's animal, vegetable or mineral, or potentially none of the above; and the fact that even the western-style packaged sandwiches in convenience stores look like they've been cloned, delivered via caesarean, and then boil-washed.

here's some kind of gravy jelly, from 2008.

and here is a raw shellfish salad.


mmmmmm. notevenkidding.

for better or worse this world tends to incite anecdote-hunting. inspired by sake and a camp sort of macho bravado , i set about on our first tour attempting to one-up anyone who'd have me in the game of "eat the most disgusting that the kitchen can offload on us'" led by my famed (not really) dictum that i will "put anything in my mouth once", i ended up eating raw beef cartilage (which can only be likened to the imagined experience of eating a human ear), raw frozen horse meat (which tastes like... a horse lollipop), raw squid guts (which caused the midnight juggern tm to spontaneously vomit--i proudly held mine down), and a whole bunch of stuff that i've erased from my memory.

fortunately for me this kind of behaviour, as dubious as it is childish, quickly wore thin, and i haven't done it again. unfortunately for you i don't have any photos of any of this. i do, however, have a photo of some ramen noodle soup.

mmm. egg-in-soup. what's not to like? this is from a small cafe somewhere in shibuya which we've been taken to twice recently by our uncompromisingly charming japanese hosts the first time was on arrival into tokyo after a harrowing week-long australian tour of self-deprivation and general self-abuse. fried and frazzled, there was nothing that could have been more comforting than this steaming bowl of uncomplicated deliciousness. fatty strips of pork fall apart at the merest chop-poke of a chopstick, the egg oozes gunk from the get-go, and beneath it all lies a swamp of noodles so heavy and dense that a decent night's sleep is almost guaranteed.

i tried to jazz this photo up a bit because i look so haggard. apparently that's how i roll nowadays. and--look!--my ears are half as big as the rest of my head. but, delinquency and deformity aside, i'm delighted.

i'm reminded of a japanese film that i saw years ago on the secrets behind the stock that goes into these things. no, i don't remember anything else about--certainly not the title--but it did make clear the otherwise murky distinction between great noodle soups and shitty noodle soups: love, skill and witchcraft on the one hand, and an oxo cube on the other. you just can't do that shit at home.

here's walter struggling with a shitty noodle soup elsewhere in south-east asia (begins with sin and ends with pore).

neuuuughdles.