Due notti e un giorno a Kyoto

Iwao Takizawa, whom we were to meet for dinner, had translated into Japanese 'Letters from Wolfie', a book by Matt's mom about a boy who volunteers his dog for service in the Vietnam War. Over the last several years, the two had conducted a lively correspondence, with subjects ranging from the Iraq war to Japan's buraku. Matt had contacted him before our trip and asked when we might meet. Afterward, we would get urgent-sounding emails from him asking, "When will you be in Kansai?" Well, it was hard to say, since we were playing this thing by ear. In Tottori we finally had our plans finalized, and told him when we'd be in Osaka and Kyoto. Great, Iwao wrote, meet me in Kyoto at 6 at the City Hall and I'll take you to my favorite restaurant. We had hoped to find lodging by then, but the ride had taken longer than expected. We barely had time to wash off a bit at a public restroom.

Iwao was waiting in the dark suit and glasses he said he'd be wearing. (He had just returned from Tokyo from the funeral of a famous professor at University of Tokyo.) After introductions, we started walking. Kyoto is famous for its haute kaiseki cuisine, with some restaurants so exclusive that only known customers are allowed entrance. Though we didn't know it, we were headed for one.

We were warmly greeted at Kyoshiki (meaning the four seasons of Kyoto) by women dressed in kimonos. They saw our bikes, and as if this happened all the time, insisted we should leave them in the garden just inside the outer door. We tried to refuse this offer, pointing out that our shabby bikes would be just fine out on the street. But they would have none of it, and Matt ever so carefully wedged the bikes between the even more carefully groomed plants.

We entered and were guided to a private tatami room. We left our shoes outside and entered. A glass door separated our room from an interior garden; the room itself was (need I say) tastefully decorated with paintings of nature. Matt thought he would show off the seiza sitting he had been practicing at home, but the okami could probably tell he wouldn't last 15 minutes, much less the entire meal. Saying "please, be comfortable," she persuaded him to sit cross-legged with his back against the floor-level chairs that are typically reserved for old folks with bad knees, and westerners. Here you can see Matt and Iwao just before the meal:

Iwao explained that we were to have several small courses, each in a different style. We had read about this type of meal in our guidebook, but didn't really expect to try it. As you will see, we weren't going to be disappointed.

We started with some cold appetizers:

It's hard to explain exactly what the little cubes were. They were all prepared with fish; the leftmost one contained fish eggs in a gelatin, and was particularly delicious.

The second course was sashimi:

The white fish in the center of the bowl was hamo (pike eel), which was in season and only eaten in Kansai. Hamo was going to recur throughout the meal. As we later learned, it is a difficult food to prepare---removing its many small bones takes time.

A clear soup followed:

Clear soups are considered to be works of art, where the ingredients are as carefully presented as a painting. Here konnyaku noodles float underneath hamo wrapped in yuba. (Konnyaku is a jelly made from the root of a plant, often known as devil's root tongue. An interesting post about this can be found here. Yuba, or tofu skin, is made by skimming the dried top layer from a vat of hot soy milk.) Oishi!

The next course was yakimono, or grilled food.
Here is anago served with okra and seaweed. Anago is a salt-water eel, less fatty than regular eel.

Then, a baked dish:
Iwao explained to us that the most elegant way to eat this fish was to take small pieces off it with the chopsticks (easier said than done), and dip them in the sauce we were given. I ate all the bones, too, and Iwao finished also the head!

A simmered dish followed:
Hamo simmered with eggs and shiso.

As a small break between this and the next important dish, we had a little sesame cake:


The next course was an elegant tempura of asparagus in hamo:
These pieces were to be dipped in a broth, where we had previously dissolved a small amount of grated daikon, supposed to help the digestion. My enthusiastic stirring of the daikon into the soup earned Iwao's remark "more delicately!" -- Every gesture must respect the meal!

A miso soup was served with the tempura:
This was a delicate dashi with miso, green onions and myoga, an aromatic flower bud, seen earlier on the baked fish.

The last savory dish was a trio of pickled vegetables:
In keeping with the overall restraint, these pickles were less strong than usual.

Finally, we were served the traditional green tea:
The okami prepared one bowl of tea in front of us, using a bamboo whisk to mix the matcha (green tea powder) and water until a layer of foam was formed. Then she came back with two more teas, served in cups of different color and slightly irregular shape. Matt commented that they were wabi-sabi. Almost, Iwao said: His was wabi, mine was sabi, and Matt's was too green and bright to be either. She also brought us some red bean sweets to finish the meal.

This meal was definitely one of the best of my life -- I rarely had some food prepared, presented and served with so much care.

The eventful evening wasn't finished yet, though. Because we arrived so late, we didn't have time to reserve a hotel. But Iwao had an idea: He was the caretaker of a house in Uji, 15 minutes by car from Kyoto. The house was formerly owned by Senroku Uehara, a historian and former president of Hitotsubashi University. When he died, his daughter lived in the house for a few more years. After her death, the new owners were about to demolish the house and replace it with something up to modern standards. However, Iwao said, the house still had electricity and warm water. Most importantly, it held the scholar's lifetime collection of books. Would we like to stay there? How could we refuse this offer?

The only problem at this point was what to do with the bikes, as we would need a car to go to Uji this late. Iwao had another idea, and said we could leave them at the Kyoto branch of the newspaper where he had worked for many years. He called a friend of his (who turned out to be also the real estate agent of the house in Uji), and this kind person came to pick us up with his car. Once at the newspaper building, Iwao managed to find somebody who opened the doors for us, and we left the bikes at their storage. We then left for Uji.

The house was very large, built in the 1970s, and had indeed a very peculiar feeling. In the entrance hall, the wallpaper was starting to detach from the walls from the humidity. The hallway was divided by shelves, used for storage. A loft was visible from the hallway, filled with shelves and shelves of books. The most incredible room was the largest one, where we ended up sleeping. One wall was blue, and had Chinese-style marionettes hung on it.

The other wall was completely covered by shelves of books. There was one more room completely filled with shelves of books, and two more rooms that probably were dining and living rooms, now used as storage.

Iwao showed us around, then found some blankets and a futon in one of the closets and gave them to us. He then left, saying he would be back the morning after with three students, coming to help him classify all the books that were going to be taken somewhere else before the house was torn down.

Once alone, we spent some time just wandering around the house. The books were a fascinating treasure. Most of them were in Japanese, but some of them were in German, French, and there were even some in Italian. They were all very old, mostly about history, but also religion, and literature. Some of them had clearly never been read, and their pages were still attached to one another, uncut. There were also some LPs, jazz and classical music. I imagined the scholar sitting on the floor at the small table in this room, surrounded by his books and listening to his favorite music. Would he have imagined what was going to happen to his realm? What would he have thought about us, young gaijin peeking through his books and possessions?

We couldn't resist snooping around more of the house. The kitchen was full of surprises. Inside the many cabinets, each shelf was filled with boxes, each containing a beautiful cup, bowl, serving dish, or similar. Most of them were probably gifts that had never been used. It was impossible to look at them all, and we had to stop after a while. In a dusty corner, Matt found a glass jar of what he thought were ancient pickles. (The next day, the real estate agent surprised us by confidently opening the jar and taking a deep whiff---the jar wasn't of pickles, but rather homemade plum wine.)

Iwao had told us that we could take anything we wanted -- but what could we have carried in the backpacks, our only luggage? So, sadly, we left to stay the kitchenware, the poster of Communist Cuba, the books, and the marionettes, which Iwao specifically offered to us. We just went to sleep on the futons on the floor, the windows open to let some fresh air in, surrounded by the strange atmosphere created by the dusy books and boxes, and spied on by the marionettes hung on the blue wall, waiting to see if we were going to take them with us instead of leaving them there, destined to who knows where after the house's demolition.

Iwao arrived the morning after, as expected, with the real estate agent and three young women -- the students who were going to help him catalog the books. He had brought us breakfast, two bento boxes containing a large variety of sushi, omelets, and even some small pieces of ham. Moreover, he gave us two more boxes for lunch. These contained a special type of sushi, each piece wrapped in an persimmon (kaki) leaf, prepared with a special technique that would have allowed the fish to last for a few hours without refrigeration. We thanked Iwao profusely -- his kindness was hard to believe. We left the house directed towards Kyoto, after making arrangements with him so that we could see each other once more in the evening for dinner.

In Kyoto we found our hotel as usual, by asking at the tourist office for a place at the highest price we were willing to pay. We were sent to a nice Japanese-style hotel run by an old couple. We got there at lunch time, so we gratefully ate Iwao's special sushi and finally left, looking forward to explore Kyoto at least for one afternoon.

The hotel was close to the train station, and we knew we had to do at least two stops during our walk before getting back there, where we were going to meet Iwao for dinner: we had to get our bikes, stored close to the City Hall, at the newspaper building, and we had to go back to Kyoshiki, the restaurant where we had dinner the night before, because I had left my watch there.

So we started walking towards downtown. On our way there we saw quite a few interesting things. The first was a Buddhist temple, in an area somewhat far from the main temple area of Kyoto.
We entered the gates and we found out we were allowed to enter, provided we took off our shoes. The inside was huge, covered with tatami mats smelling wonderfully of wood and hay.
Nobody was there, and we set there quietly, medidating for a while in front of the images of Buddha.

It was a powerful experience.

After the temple, we saw a small hamono, or cutlery, store. An old man was sharpening a knife on a water stone, and seeing our interest in the shop, he invited us in. We entered, and Matt, ignoring for the moment the knives on display, asked about the sharpening stones piled up along the wall. The communication was a little hard, but we managed to understand each other with gestures and an electronic Japanese-English dictionary that the man owned. He showed Matt some very fine artificial stones, but Matt insisted he wanted to see some natural ones. He showed them to us, even though he made it clear that they were too expensive. While we were talking, his wife arrived with coffee for us. The man showed Matt how to treat a water stone, how long to immerse it in water, and finally how to use it.

The man was very interested in us, and asked us where we came from. He took an atlas and asked us to point where exactly the places we named were. He then proudly showed us a postcard from the Pacific northwest of the US, sent to him by a friend of his. He also noticed we were carrying an umbrella, which was completely broken: we had just bought it a few hours ago at a 300 Yen store, because it was raining really hard -- however the umbrella broke almost immediately from the wind, and we were carrying the handle separately from the rest. The man pointed at the Chinese sticker and laughed at it. He then looked for a word on his electronic dictionary, and after some suspense he showed to us the translation of what he was thinking: "Junk"!

Matt ended up buying one of the artificial sharpening stones, and the man gave us a two gifts to go with it: a mostly worn down natural stone and a very tiny knife, which he sharpened for us!


Here he and his wife are posing for us:


We left with yet another cherished memory of Japanese hospitality, and walked on toward Nishiki market, in a more crowded part of Kyoto. The market proved to have a great variety of very good food. Here are different kinds of high-grade rice:
And here is an amazing array of pickles. Here we bought some pickled gobo (a root called 'burdock' in English) and ume, which we brought on the plane to the US.


After the market, we walked back to Kyoshiki. As soon as the okami saw us, she knew what we were looking for, and gave us a small package containing my forgotten watch and, unexpectedly, a coffee table book with pictures of Japanese antiques and art. It was a gift, she said, from the restaurant for us. We were truly impressed by such kindness, especially since the book was probably worth more than the watch. Here is the okami, saying goodbye for good, at the entrance of the restaurant:
And here are my watch and the book. The watch will never have a nicer package than this!


It was getting late, so we went to the location where we thought our bikes were. We walked for a while around there, but were unable to find them! So we ended up running to the subway, and using it to get back to the train station, just in time to meet Iwao for dinner.

He brought us at the top floor of the building built around Kyoto's central train station: it's new and beautiful, and the top has a gorgeous view over the station and Kyoto. We entered one of the restaurants upstairs, and Iwao ordered three complete dinners, insisting we tried three different ones.

Matt's main dish was soba:

Mine was cold udon:
And Iwao's was sushi and tempura.
However, it quickly became clear that Iwao ordered his dinner for us. He kept insisting we take from his, because, he said, he could have that food any day. He also ordered some extra tempura and a beer. Japanese beer, Iwao said, was made good by the great abundance of good water. When the beer was polished off, he ordered sake, and when that too was gone, he asked Matt what was to be next. Matt suggested whisky, so Iwao ordered instead shochu, a distilled sake.

For mysterious reasons, the dinner became more informal than the one of the night before, and a different, more down-to-earth Iwao emerged. He talked about about life, love, society and philosophy. At the end, he refused again letting us pay for any of the dinner.

As Iwao took us by cab to our parked bikes, we were a little sad not knowing when we would see him again.

So, we are almost at the end of our story in Kyoto and in Japan. The next post will tell you about our last day and a half in Japan, and some more about Japanese home-made food and what we learned from the trip.

It took us a while to finalize this post, even though it was almost ready about a month ago, because in the meanwhile we packed all our stuff in Berkeley, took a road trip across the US, and moved to Canada. Anyway, we would like to dedicate this post to Iwao and thank him again for his hospitality in Kyoto and Uji. The house in Uji has since been demolished, and we were the last two who stayed there. Iwao recently wrote an article about our visit to Japan. Here it is:

Cicloturismo in Giappone III: da Osaka a Kyoto

We left Tottori for Osaka by train. This leg of our journey involved a difficult decision, because we were supposed to meet another family from Japan Cycling in Takashima, on the beautiful Lake Biwa north of Kyoto. The original plan was bike there from Kyoto, but we realized that we wouldn't have been able to do this and still have time to visit other cities we wanted to see.

(For American tourists there's a metric conversion pitfall one should be aware of: One converts the kilometers into miles, but then thinks to oneself that things are metric here, so the unit becomes kilometers again, e.g. 50km => 30 mi => 30 km--hence our surprise when Tetsuo told us that the ride from Kyoto would take the better part of a day!)

So in the end we declined Tetsuo's hospitality, hoping we hadn't been too rude, and sad because we knew how wonderful it would have been to spend another day with a Japanese family.

We knew from Tottori that the best way to get a cheap hotel in Japan was to find a tourist office and ask for a Japanese-style hotel, specifying precisely what you want to pay. (If you say, "We're looking for ¥10000 or less," you'll pay precisely ¥10000.) These offices are usually very close to train stations. The nice English-speaking officials at Osaka's told us to go south to an area with lots of cheap hotels. We biked south, and after crossing some huge intersections, we started really enjoying the city. Our ride was going to cross almost all the city, and we went through very different parts of it. Closer to the station there is the financial district, with elegant bridges, very tall buildings, and rose gardens along the river. Then we noticed some fancy districts, with expensive restaurants.

Here we stopped at an intersection to look at a map, and a young man stopped and asked us if we needed help. After he gave us directions (again, in English: it turned out that most Osakajin speak some English), we started chatting and asked him about his favorite local food. He asked if we had some time, and invited us inside of the restaurant he had come out of. He invited us to sit and gave us cold barley tea. While we drank and watched the sous-chefs work, he printed out maps for us, to show us where we could find Osaka's famous okonomiyaki and kushikatsu. Finally we asked him what his favorite restaurant in Osaka was. He answered, "Mine!" We hadn't realized he was the owner of the place we were in. He told us his restaurant made mostly beef dishes, of high quality. He warned us that it might be too expensive for us, most likely because he saw our dress and transportation, and he knew we were headed toward cheap hotels. Unfortunately, when we stopped by the restaurant later that night, we saw it was completely full, and thought our shorts and T-shirts weren't exactly appropriate for such a place. Nevertheless, we were impressed that he had been so helpful to people who weren't even potential customers.

We kept biking south, and crossed more and more very lively districts. Lots of people were walking and biking everywhere. The bikes especially seemed to follow no rules, going from sidewalk to road, with or against traffic: However, no car ever honked, and somehow we never saw an accident.

The cheap hotel area was, as expected, a poor one. An interesting detail: the first hotel we asked in told us that they allowed only Japanese people! Perhaps they were tired of westerners, not knowing which shoes to use to enter the different rooms, and leaving crumbs on tatami mats, etc. Anyway, we did find a cheap Japanese-style hotel to stay at (¥6000), where the friendly desk clerk quizzed me about Italian football.

The area close by was a maze of small streets filled with places selling street food and (mostly) old men playing shogi. The most popular food sold there was kushikatsu, exactly what we had been told to try. We entered one of the stores, where a team of young cooks was inviting us in, whereupon we were simultaneously greeted by the entire team. It was very crowded, with people (mostly quite young too) seated all around the bar:
Kushikatsu are skewers with deep-fried battered food. Each skewer has one or two bites of a vegetable (lotus root, tomatoes, ginger, etc) or meat (fish or pork).
You eat them by dipping them in a sweet and sour sauce. The English menu emphasizes that sanitary practice dictates that if you want more sauce, you must scoop it with a cabbage leaf. You store the skewers in a wood cylinder; they are then counted for your bill. (The fancy items have longer skewers.) Most kushikatsu cost ¥100, and the fancy ones are ¥200. It's typical beer food, and in fact most places shut down around dinner time.

Osaka became more and more lively as the night went on. Large crowds were strolling along streets that became more and more bright, for all the lights.
Restaurants were everywhere, with eye-catching lights and signs:

And stands on the streets were selling every kind of food, from grilled or fried meat to this delicious red bean filled, fish shaped snack.

I have visited many big cities around the world, from Paris to London to New York, but I had never seen such a large area completely filled with people out and enjoying the night. It was exciting and dazing at the same time. Some areas were even more bright and confusing, inside long galleries with lines and lines of stores:
After a while, our senses were overstimulated, and we were completely unable to choose a restaurant from among the millions. So we left the most crowded area and wandered around somewhat darker streets, until we smelled something delicious, and finally the hunger won over indecision. We had found okonomiyaki.

Okonomiyaki is a savory pancake made with eggy batter and cabbage, topped with pork, and anything else you would want in it. It's served on a grill (sometimes they let you make it yourself at the table), and seasoned with mayonnaise, okonomi sauce (ingredients: tomato, apple, carrot, sugar vinegar, oyster flavor), and katsuobushi flakes to taste. Here is our okonomiyaki, topped with pork, pickled ume and shiso (a relative of basil, so common in Japan that there is now a shiso Pepsi). The katsuobushi flakes dance in the steam:

As you can guess, okonomyiaki is quite good and filling.

Back to the more lively area, we listened to some jazz:
These young players were dressed for and playing swing era jazz. They were really good, doing swing standards together with songs such as 'I Wanna be Like You', from the Jungle Book, with some choruses translated in Japanese. The experience was enhanced by the presence of an uninhibited (and possibly loopy) old man dancing at front. He's the blur in red. Occasionally someone young would join him, or just help him restore his basketball shorts to waist level, or higher. At one point, he was joined by another old man wearing the Mingun Bell of bell bottoms, who practiced a (quite good) kickboxing-inspired style of dancing. Our friend Keisuke tells us that this whole scene is typical of Osaka's relaxed atmosphere.

We completed our evening with a stroll along this peaceful canal.

Here we found a hole-in-the-wall place making crepes. While ordering, the chef asked me where I was from, and at my reply, said crepes came originally from Italy. I said, "Wasn't it France?" "No, no! That's what you might think," he said, "but in fact they were first made in Italy." Later on, I thought he may have been rightfully referring to crespelle, the lesser known, Italian crepes, which are usually savory and baked with a white sauce. His crepe turned out to be really good, as thin as the ones in Paris. Sugoi! To prepare to serve crepes from this hole in the wall, the chef/owner not only learned the right way to make them, but had also studied their history!

The day after we started our final bike ride towards Kyoto. Before leaving Osaka, we stopped by the castle, which was on our way. The castle is surrounded by two impressive sets of walls. This is the external one.

It's a very elegant building, constructed between 1583 and 1598.

We didn't go inside, because we were hoping to get to Kyoto in the early afternoon. We chose to bike along the Yodo river, which connects Osaka to Kyoto. We guessed that we would find a bike path, and in fact, after getting lost a few times and fighting though vendors setting up for a festival, we found a wide bike path that followed the river almost all the way.

Again, we misunderstood the distance on the map, and when we saw this nice sight on the east side of the river we thought that the skyscrapers were the sign of the beginning of Kyoto suburbs:
However, somebody explained to us that the panoramic wheel in the distance was that of Hirakata, pretty much half way between Osaka and Kyoto. We also learned about the importance of the elongated 'o'. We asked where Kyoto was, and the guy was completely confused. Then, after a while, he said "Ahh! Kyōto!" and then gave us a complex set of directions, which to our later chagrin we wished we had understood.

We kept pleasantly biking along the river. Towards the end, unfortunately, we lost the path and had to bike along 171, possibly the worst road for biking in the whole trip. Looking at google maps, it seems like we may have had to cross the river to avoid this part. We found the path again closer to Kyoto, and we arrived in the city around 4:30. We had a meeting for dinner at six, so we started looking for a hotel. However, crossing the city took us much longer than we thought, and we had just enough time to stop by a public restroom and wash off the dirt and bike grease before meeting our friend.

[To be continued!]

Cicloturismo in Giappone II: da Sakaiminato a Tottori

We left Sakaiminato with a medium-heavy rain, which stayed with us for about one hour in the morning. It wasn't cold, so it wasn't too bad---it just made us wet and somewhat dirty. We stopped for breakfast at a fast food place recommended to us by Keisuke. The chain, called Mos Burger, makes Japanese variations of burgers. We tried one made with a bun of rice, teriyaki beef or veggies, and nori:
Quite good!
We kept biking for a while along highway 9. This wasn't as pretty as 431, but it was very well structured for biking, with large shoulders or ridable sidewalks:
At some point, however, we didn't realize that highway 9 had branched (just before a largish climb) onto a divided highway where bikes weren't allowed. A car pulled over, and the driver was very worried we were on such a dangerous road (70 km/h speed limit). With gestures he got us to understand that we had to go back. We didn't want to backtrack, and it seemed from the map that there might be direct path back to highway 9. Indeed, Matt found a small road that brought us through verdant hills, with orchards.
This road in the hills turned out to be the best part of the trip that day. It brought us down to this beach:
And on the side of the road, we saw one of the many small cemeteries that we met a bit everywhere during the trip:
Every small group of houses in the countryside had one of these graveyards nearby. This is quite different from both Europe and US, where there are larger, centralized cemeteries. I liked this idea of looking at life and death as two inseparable aspects, instead of segregating the dead, almost as if we were scared by them.

From there we kept going east, passing some rural villages like this:
In the evening, we arrived at Tottori. The timing would have been good, had we known where we were going to sleep. It took us a while to realize that Tottori sand dunes wasn't as commercialized as my guide book said, and there were no hotels there. In the end, however, some very nice people reserved a hotel for us, after some struggles solved by an electronic dictionary. So around 8 pm we headed to downtown Tottori, looking forward to a long shower.

Tottori surprised us with its lively nightlife. Many young people were out, and there were lots of places to eat. We really liked it.

Here and there, we saw an Italian restaurant. Matt thought we should try one.
I resisted: Why go to an Italian restaurant in Japan, where the food would probably be bad? The point, Matt said, was to see what would happen if an actual Italian showed up in an Italian restaurant in a city where we had not seen any westerners. It did seem like an interesting idea.

So we randomly chose "Il piatto doro" (yes, unfortunately misspelled; it should have been "d'oro"). The restaurant was on the second story of a building and there was no plastic pasta outside, so we really had no idea about how it would be inside. When we arrived, we saw a small room, with seating only at a long, wide wooden bar, behind which there was a blackboard with the daily menu and shelves and shelves of wine bottles. It was run that night by just two people, the chef and a host. Just the right atmosphere for a small enoteca-like restaurant. The kitchen was at the end of the bar, separated from the dining area by a glass window.

When we sat down, I said, "Watashi wa Nihongo ga sukoshi wakarimasu. Demo, watashi wa Itariajin desu". This generated lots of surprised 'ooooohh', which are so typical of the Japanese expressive way of speaking. A habitue of the restaurant immediately ordered a bottle of wine and offered us two nice glasses of a really good barbera (a red wine from Piemonte!). Then, we had some grissini (breadsticks), and when I mentioned that they were made in my hometown we were given a lot of them as a gift for the trip.

After a small consultation, we decided we would have a pizza margherita. The chef asked if we wanted it Neapolitan or Roman style. This was already quite surprising: he evidently knew the difference in crust thickness and softness of the two styles! To make sure we understood each other, he showed me an Italian cookbook in Japanese with pictures of what each style should look like. We opted for Neapolitan, my favorite. We were told there would be some waiting, because the oven had been off. We enjoyed our wine and breadsticks, and the suspense.

Finally the pizza came. (I'm very sad I didn't bring my camera so I don't have pictures). The crust was perfect: puffy and soft at the borders, and very thin inside. The sauce was a bit lacking in salt, and there was too little cheese, even though it was good. However, overall the result was quite good, and I complimented the chef in all honesty.

We started chatting about Italian food, and he asked me my favorite dish. I thought and then replied 'gnocchi alla bava' (a type of gnocchi with really good cheese), and I started describing how hard I thought gnocchi were to prepare. The chef then disappeared, and we kept drinking more and more of the house wine and the barbera that the habitue kept offering us. Shortly later, the chef had prepared some gnocchi for us, even though they weren't on the evening's menu. They were amazingly good! They tasted like potatoes and were very soft. My respect for Japanese interpretation of Italian cuisine became very high after that. We left really happy, and quite drunk.

The morning after we were still tired from the long ride of the day before, so we decided to just bike and walk around Tottori. We changed hotel, opting for a very inexpensive Japanese style hotel. This was our bedroom:
As you can see, it was a tatami room, and we had Japanese futons as beds. They are quite comfortable, especially if set on the tatami. The place was clearly a little cheap (the walls were made in a strange foamy material), however we were offered some red bean mochi and green tea:

This experience was very meaningful for us, because we were partially inspired to go to Japan by an article we read in Bicycling magazine. The American author had biked throughout Japan, and reported about the read bean sweets and green tea offered at a hotel as an example of strange Japanese food. He said he was able to 'gobble them down' only because he was so hungry from riding. Ah, these open-minded American tourists . . .

We spent the morning walking around Tottori's downtown, and asked for a recommendation for lunch at a coffee bean store we had visited. The suggested restaurant served us the best ramen we had during the whole trip:
Even the cabbage was really good in that soup.

In the afternoon, we went to the Tottori sand dunes. We made our way there on a bike path along a river:
And we arrived a few km from the dunes, on a beach, so we walked to the dunes. The dunes are quite large, with sand compact and dark brown. The little arrow in the picture here points to a man, if you can see him. He was playing golf.
Back in Tottori, we wanted to try Udon Taira, which had been recommended to us by the chef and habitue at the Italian restaurant. As part of the recommendation, we had learned how to order two bowls of tempura udon. Unfortunately, Udon Taira was closed that day. We were really sad, but what could we do? We asked our landlady for another suggestion. She suggested an 'oishi' (delicious) restaurant just down the road, which we went to. We didn't consider that she most likely wasn't exactly the best person to ask for restaurant suggestions to, considering that she probably rarely went out to eat. In fact, the place turned out to be a chain restaurant, where the food looked quite good:
But instead, the food was the worst of our entire trip. Just to give you an example, the brown bowl contains tofu with Hershey syrup.
To redeem the food, we went for Matt's favorite dessert, which he just discovered in Tottori the night before: Japanese green tea donuts, prepared at 'Mister Donut'. The sign of the store said 'from SF Chinatown', and as we learned, this chain indeed started in the US (more on the East coast, actually). However, there aren't many Mister Donuts left in the US, and of course they never served green tea donuts. The Japanese 'Mister Donut' donuts we tried were actually very good, said by someone who usually dislikes donuts.
We are quite sure now that Japanese can make pretty much any food from any cuisine in the world, reinterpret it and improve it. We felt the same with bread: there are so many types of breads, even though they are not typical of Japanese culture, and they are almost all really good.

To conclude this post, here is the route of our second day of bike touring. It was about 110 km, including ups and downs to find the hotel.