There was a big snow storm today, and in light of the bad weather, Maeni-San offered to drive us the 2 minutes from the office to our house. Her english is not strong and when we got in the car she struck up a conversation in Japanese, to which I responded with many smiles and nods. We got to the driveway of the house and oddly enough the car wasn't stopping, was there something I missed? Where were we going? Should I trust this Japanese lady who feeds me cookies and candies everyday? Was she fattening me up for a reason?
I chose to trust her in the end, even after we left Otofuke, and then Obihiro, and our trip home had now turned into a 40 minute trek to nowhere. At last we arrived at our destination, which was to my relief, a restaurant. All the tables were placed around a large conveyer belt in the middle of the restaurant. The conveyer belt which probably measured around 50 m in total was carrying all sorts of sample sized sushi, sea weed salads, fruit, jellies, rice ball things, spring rolls, and faux American food. In the center of the oval shaped conveyer belt were 4 chefs who's job it was to stock the conveyer belt. We sat down at our table, as I watched the food move along past my shoulder. Maeni-San, like everyone here seems keen to make me try different Japanese foods, so on this occasion I sampled octopus and scallop sashimi and a few variations of sea weed salad. As the little plates of strange food piled up on the table, I was comforted by the biyabon (traditional japanese stringed instrument) covers of familiar Michael Jackson songs. To pay for our meal, the server simply came over and scanned over our plates with a zapper machine to decode the prices embedded in microchips in the plates.
Wow! I would have loved to see those conveyer belt tables!
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