Once in a while I like doing a long, loving post about something completely inconsequential. Today the sky was blue and the mountains were calling, and I went for walk in search of sustenance. Sort of hunter-gatherer thing, you understand.
On the other side of the mountain, life is simpler. This is really like country Japan. Hanging out the laundry, growing a little citrus…you’d never know how close to Tokyo we are.
I had to walk quite a bit, so you get to look at the pictures. While completely unexciting, this is also indicative of every major country road in Japan. It’s like America in the sense that the same chains and strip-mall like confusion appear everywhere. I like to say that the immediate environs of every station in Japan look the same, and you could say that about a lot of the roads too. Unremarkable.
Ichi for the Kichi has a bunch of parking, which I realized when I saw this – the two spaces nearest the sign in this parking lot are also for them. Must be getting close.
That she blows, humpin’ on a snowhill, a whale of a white sign. And also a picture of a bowl of ramen. All the extravagant signage here was making me think that it must be a pretty nice bowl. I’m such a sucker for advertising.
I was really sucked in by this red sign. It’s so glossy. And shiny. I couldn’t stop looking at it when I first saw it, but that’s because I was doing the washing at the coin laundry next door (really) and looking at this sign was just about as fascinating as watching the futon covers spin dry.
Jeez, why do I always get busted when I try to take a casual shot? To their credit, the master and his wife were unphased to see me come in. In fact, she came right over to help me with the ticket machine. This guy must have been a regular; they were having a deep conversation about some non-ramen type of food. You wouldn’t do that with a ramen guy unless you knew him, right?
Now I am knowing this bowl. It was unremarkable (which, to be fair, is exactly what the online sites would cause you to expect from this place). The pork was maybe the highlight. The egg looks prefectly cooked but was somehow uninspiring. The soup was decent too…eh, just meh all around. And the cabbage is there to make you feel better but just bugged me.
Why did I go here? There’s a place across the river that’s supposed to be better. And it looks good; I walked over after lunch and checked it out. But I was saving that to go with someone, who isn’t eating reliably these days and hasn’t wanted to go.
This being Japan, there is always a shrine around to make yourself feel better. You just wander into them. This one was called something to do with reading the moon (月讀神社, Tsukiyomi).
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