Tegami o Kaite Kudasai

a little nugget of an evening to document before i forget... last night, in the lobby, on our already well rested laurels, not particularly hungry, but peckish enough to use it as an excuse to get the hell away from the campus for a while, a norwegian and a few americans hopped in rikako's car and headed off to find a little ramen shop that rikako had heard about on tv a few times. supposed to be one of the best in the area, i guess. so we wound around in the rain for a half hour or so through neighborhoods that looked unsettlingly suburban-american until most of the buildings dropped away and the only ones remaining were rusting into infinity, and rikako spotted the little ramen sign out of the corner of her eye. it's one of the apparently numerous noodle joints that have a little machine in the entrance where you pick what you want from a nearby menu, put your money in the machine, push the button for your selection, and out pops a ticket with your order written on it, which you give to a waiter, who passes it to a cook. so... we browsed for a while, and i picked a few things based solely on my inability to discern exactly what in the hell thet were. i ended up with a plate of plain noodles accompanied by a bowl of savory sauce with green onions, bamboo, and chunks of maybe pork or something floating in it, into which the plain noodles are supposed to be dipped. dangit. i dunno. maybe the best meal i've had since i've been here, plus the atmosphere of the dinky little shack in the middle of nowhere stroked a little section of my fantasy ideal of japan, so that probably had something to do with it, too. that's not all, though. the other thing i picked was like every japanese standard thrown into a bamboo steamer and slathered with mayonaise. there was a whole soft boiled egg in there, some fish, some kind of shredded meat, maybe some seaweedy stuff, a bunch of rice, another saucy sauce of some unknown derivation...god dammit. most of the gaijin weren't into it. honestly the combo was a little surprising at first, and i remember waking up at least once last night and berating myself for eating the stuff, but now i think i've got a little craving for it building up somewhere between the gut and the loins, this japanese version of that kfc everything bowl, whatever the hell that thing is called. after the ramen stop, we drove over to the mall for some reason or other and puttered around. i bought a cd by a japanese singer named shena ringo which is pretty bloody gaw damn awesome and completely unavailable in the u.s. it's a bunch of orchestrated torchy sounding stuff with weird electronics thrown in behind shena's raspy voice, and the lyrics are in english, french, and japanese. we also went down to the jusco market, bought some ice cream and looked at marinated animal parts in bags.