Tsukemen and McDonalds

What is tsukemen you ask? It's like ramen in the sense that it's noodles and a broth, but instead of being served in the same bowl like soup, they're served in separate bowls. And the noodles are cold. I've heard it explained as summer's answer to ramen since only the broth is hot. You're supposed to dip your cold noodles into the hot, strongly flavored broth, then eat! Super duper delicious.  E tried the "regular" tsukemen, noodles served with a pork based broth with baby bamboo shoots and slices of pork. I tried the spicy version of that and added a soft boiled egg. Both were yummy, but I definitely liked my spicy soup better. Best part of dinner was when our broth got chilled from dipping the cold noodles into it, our waiter brought out hot stones to add to the broth. Very yummy, but I need to learn how to eat ramen without slurping the broth all over the front of my shirt! Bib please!

After dinner we had a little fun in the Pokemon Center.

Moomin Bubble Tea! Idk what Moomin are, but they're cute!

Curvy escalator delivering me to Pikachu!

 Penny press. But they don't have pennies here. So you put your yen in and they use a blank copper round to press your "penny."

What Pokemon is this? I can't handle all the fluffy cute!

Fast forward to Thursday night, and I got hangry. That's hungry-angry for those not in the know. I walked about 12,000 steps, or 5 miles before lunch time. And I got dehydrated. And I got a little sunburned. And there may or may not have been an earthquake cuz I got really dizzy then crashed for about an hour (probably not a real earthquake, probably just overheated dehydration). I woke up to Ethan coming back to the hotel from work and I had no dinner plan. And I was hangry. I really wasn't feeling walking around for a half hour scouting out food, so we had McDonald's for dinner. However, the only thing familiar about dinner were the french fries. We ordered the 4 sandwiches that aren't offered in the US. We ate a tonkatsu burger (fried pork cutlet, topped with a sweet thick soy sauce, and shredded cabbage), teriyaki burger (pork patty with a teriyaki and lemon-mayo sauce), filet-o-ebi (fried shrimp patty), and the veggie chicken burger (ground chicken with corn, carrots, and soy beans with a French dressing-like sauce). Sorry McDonald's Japan, none of these things were very good. I did like the veggie chicken burger, but the sauce was just waaaayyy too sweet for my tastes. For the record, McDonald's fries are the same in Japan as they are in the US. We chose the weird drink option too. Qoo it was called. I thought it tasted like someone put apple juice in lemonade, but according to the McD's website it's actually a white grape juice?

Anywho, snacks were also weird today. We sampled some kit-kats. The only flavor I know we had was a matcha covered red bean paste kit-kat ball. Don't judge. Our soda was oddly flat. It was carbonated, but like Pepsi that has been sitting in the fridge for a couple days. It tasted like coconut sprite? Who knows what the other kit-kat flavor was. We literally have no clue.