Infiltration

We met our Japanese friends Atsuko and Nao, and their baby Ema, to go to a famous toy store in Aomori. Kiddy Land had five levels of Japanese materialist heaven, from humping dogs that you can slot into your USB ports to tiny plastic doll house food in all the world's major cuisines. Bek bought five boxes of them, and some other things, nothing for the babe, though. I got some sushi magnets.



Dinner was at a Korean barbecue restaurant. Bek ate cow stomach, we didn't tell her until she'd swallowed. She thought it was chicken. Don't worry it was the cow's second and third stomachs. None of that low grade first and fourth stomach. I tried the raw beef liver, in sesame oil. Didn't taste bad or good. In fact I think the texture has been completely erased from my memory, no......... wait, there it is.


Yuck.




Nao and Atsuko invited us to their house, something we heard was rare for Japanese people to do. We probably tricked them into it, as we'd already taken them to our house in Sydney, so they owed us. Big time.


The house looked very new and very modern. The bathroom sink sat on top of the toilet and the used water drained into the cistern. The tap turned on automatically but it ran for so long I didn't know if it was ever going to stop on its own. Their house had a small footprint but was four storeys tall. The staircase was a little precarious but other than that it was very cool.

We drank tea and ate ice cream and o-kashi, a type of formal sweet served to guests. These days they are often biscuits or chocolates, but you can also find the more traditionally shaped candy and small cakes in specialty stores. Ema and Alice played together while ignoring each other, as babies sometimes do.