Over the past couple of days I have been given some strange things to eat. Marty and I stayed in a traditional ryokhan in Hakone for a couple of nights. As part of the package they provided us with Japanese food. For breakfast I was presented with rice, cold fish, miso soup, pickles, cold sausage, and scrambled eggs. Now scrambled eggs might sound like breakfast food but these eggs were cold, presented on a bed of lettuce and had been scrambled with baby eels that have little black eyes. There is no way I could eat food with eyes for breakfast.

As part of the dinner set, which was served in our room, we had stew that was cooked at the table. I didn’t really like the stew but it came in really useful as I was able to cook the sashimi in it. I know this was probably a terrible thing to do with the very expensive raw fish but I prefer my food to be cooked. Not all the fish was raw. We were given a deep fried catfish to eat. But it had eyes and fins and I just don’t like my food to look at me. Thankfully Marty likes loads of food and was able to eat lots of mine for me. We were also served lots of food that I didn’t recognise but sometimes it’s better not to know what you are eating.

Today Marty got hungry walking through the train station. He went to a small cake shop to buy a snack. They specialised in apple dishes and the air was filled with the wonderful scent of cooking apples. But Marty decided to buy candied sweet potato. And I was really surprised to discover that these actually tasted really good.