Kaiseki cuisine

Today was another long travel day - a 10:03am shinkansen from Tokyo had us in Hiroshima at 2:35pm , where we transferred to a local train and arrived in Ono-ura at 3:29. Breakfast was a tuna mayo onigiri (too heavy on the mayo for me) and coffee. For lunch we had chicken katsu sandwiches and pineapple from 7/11 that we bought for the train journey. When we arrived at Ono-ura we were met by our ryokan (Japanese inn) host who drove us to the ryokan. There we had a nice long soak in our in-room onsen before having a kaiseki dinner in our yukatas. This is a traditional Japanese meal and we had about 8-9 small dishes including sashimi, slow cooked beef cheek, conger eel, crab and rice, and milt in white miso soup. The host carefully explained each dish in English for us and how they are best eaten. Even after spelling it, I wasn't sure what milt was - with my phone left in the room I wasn't able to google...it was a bit gloopy, a bit thick and was in a delicious soup. I wasn't liking the texture and B gulped it in one mouthful. Google now tells me it was fish sperm... Yup. Thoughts of the great horse eating adventure in France 2015 came flooding back. B would rather have horse again. Everything else was amazing and the quality was something else! Full (of sperm?) we headed back to the room for hopefully a very restful night on our futons. We are definitely in Japan.Leggi altro