Home made soba

I ran into a magician that I know and instead of talking about magic he spent the whole evening talking about soba noodles. He had spent the day making his own home made soba noodles and wanted everyone to try them. They were very good.

I also had to solve a puzzle where the two black things above are supposed to be arranged so that they make up a letter from the Latin alphabet.

Weird sandwiches in Japan

My local supermarket now sells sandwiches with yakisoba and mayonnaise (i.e. bread with fried noodles inside) and sandwiches with "minestrone soup" (presumably not in its liquid state).

Extreme servings of noodles

I passed by a very old soba noodle restaurant. They only serve yakisoba. You get plain noodles and have a selection of sauces at your table, I am told. They have many different sizes of yakisoba servings, though. The top shelf says "normal", the second says "large". Already at large, it is more than I would comfortably be able to eat... Then it goes on and on to even more ridiculous sizes...

The names are pretty interesting too: "normal", "large", "jumbo", "super jumbo", "miracle jumbo", "ultra jumbo", "try to eat even this much", "even if you die, we take no responsibility", and "unbelievable". Without the plastic models showing you what the different choices, I would not intuitively be able to guess if "miracle jumbo" is more or less food than "ultra jumbo", so this plastic model culture in Japan is quite useful.

Ramen from all over the world

My friend is using an ancient cell phone, so it requires a lot of concentration when taking photos.

In Japan, you have to give presents to everyone you know or work with after every trip you ever go on. Usually you give them small cakes. One of my Japanese friends hates sweets, so he has asked me to bring cup noodles from different countries instead. I have not had time to meet him much recently, but last week I had an evening with nothing planned, so I went to the bar where my friend works and gave him noodles from my trip to Oxford and from my trip to Sweden.

This thing that I was served was great. A cracker with something that tasted of crab.

He tried the "Kabuto" brand from Oxford first. Kabuto is a Japanese samurai helmet, but the noodles were "beef flavored pho", which implies Vietnamese noodles. Everyone that tried them agreed that the soup part was not bad, but the noodles were bad.

There was also curry noodles from Britain, and two types of soba noodles from Sweden. One was "classic yakisoba", and the other was chili flavored soba. My friend has not mentioned trying any of the others yet, but then again I have not had time to meet him so we have not talked.

Tiny and not tiny whiskey

I also mentioned that I had bought a bunch of tiny bottles of alcohol, and he said he wants to collect lots of those too to make a tiny bar for decoration.