Things you can't do in Nashville

Tuesday, another day off, I got a great start to the day by skipping my Japanese class and sleeping in. About 1, I sauntered out of the house to meet my friend Ben for some galic ramen.

Now Ramen is quite the antithesis of the American dish you may know. The ramen you buy in the states is 1)cheap, 2)small, 3)not good or 4)filling in any way shape or form. Just some quick eduaction, for those who can't know this delight, Ramen is actually a Chinese dish. I believe it means Chinese noodles, or pulled noodles or something. These are also the places you may have heard about where you quantity of you slurps reflects on the quality of the dish. They start with these thick, long noodles that they've pulled by hand, and finish with this soup of noodles, vegetables, meat, egg (sometimes), spices, and all sorts of deliciousness. And it's so freaking hot. They bring the bowl out and it's just steamin away. We start digging in with chopsticks for the noodles/veggies/etc, and a big spoon for the broth; and halfway through, we're both sweating, faces red and noses running. It's fantastic. So a full bowl will last you all afternoon and sometimes late into the evening, and will run you about 700-1000 yen, less than 10 bucks. Not exactly cheap, but pretty good for what you're getting.

So when our bodies are wondering what to do with all this garlic and hot soup they've just been given, we head off to a temple to watch kids sumo. 4-6 year old boys sumo wrestling each other. It was probably the cutest thing I've ever seen, and definitley one of the most entertaining. I took over a hundred pictures of these little boys wrestling each other. So funny.

In the meantime, there's a fall festival going on to celebrate the beginning of autumn, so everyone's out in the streets with carnival style tents lining the road, and people are dressed up preparing for a parade with these huge wagon-shrines and small shrines that are carried by 10-15 kids. So while we're watching the kids wrestle each other, other people are bringing these shrines by the temple to get them blessed before carrying them into the street.

I apologize for the lack of pictures. I'm having trouble with blogger and/or my choices in web browsers. Apparently both Safari and Mozilla are inadequate to perform a simple task like loading pictures on the internet. Whatever. They'll get here soon.