Owarimasu!*

Let it be known that on this day, the 27th of October, the year 2004, Phoenix did finish an entire Japanese lunch for the first time.

Here's a picture:



In case you don't recognize my hashi, you can still tell it was my lunch. Japanese lunches are served with a bowl of whatever is for lunch, and a separate bowl of rice. If you look closely at the two bowls, you should be able to see that they BOTH have a few grains of rice in them. This is because I dumped my rice bowl into my other bowl, something NO JAPANESE WOULD EVER DO. The Japanese don't mix their foods like us Westerners do.

Truthfully, though, I must point out that today's lunch did not have any seafood in it. I've come close to finishing a lunch before, but it had these little fish... It's hard to explain, just look at the picture:



That's a little snack pack of fish and almonds. Yum yum!

Anyway, today's lunch was rice, gyoza, bean sprouts, milk, tea, an orange, and whatever the main dish was (something with tofu chunks, I forget the name). It was NOT the best meal I've had in Japan, but it wasn't impossible to eat (there were moments, though, with the bean sprouts...).

It was also a lot of food. I'm stuffed. Unfortunately, I didn't skip breakfast like I usually do (and as it turns out, skipping breakfast wasn't the key to finishing a school lunch, so live and learn), so I'm a bit bloated right now. Honestly, it seems to me that the Japanese people eat much more food than us Westerners; I guess their metablisms must be naturally higher, since obesity isn't an epidemic here.

Anyway, I'm going to try not to move for a while, and just digest.

*'Owaru' means 'Finish'. When I first posted this in 2004, I could add that info as a title in the link. Now in 2008, I'm reposting with updated picture links, and those kinds of titles are disabled. Thanks for the update, Blogger! Perhaps you'd like to give me a papercut later and pour lemon juice on it.