Sushi!
Although most probably no one of you is going to believe me, yesterday I ate sushi for the first time in my whole life! I had a weird, innate aversion to anything which involved eating raw fish, which produced me horrible visions of gastroenteritis episodes and what not, and made me reject systematically even the mere suggestion of a visit to Japanese fast-food chains like Yo! Sushi. But I decided that it was stupid to act like that and that I needed to stop this non-sense about hypocondriacal hallucinations, so I kind of forced myself to try it out. And now I'm addicted to all things sushi.
We went to a little Japanese restaurant round the corner - we had spotted it last week but we decided to surround to a nachos feast instead (which left me thinking about nachos for the rest of the week, by the way). It was nice and cosy, with lots of small garnments and details here and there with Japanese characters, which are quite different compared to your nearest Chinese restaurant (namely a waterfall painting and a big fishtank). The Japanese ones remind me a lot to all the movies which from Studio Ghibli, for example the characters of Spirited Away (original title is "千と千尋の神隠し, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi"), or simply Dragon Ball, to use a more popular example - there was a picture of a dragon like that one there.
I have always been attracted by the Japanese culture, although not proactively enough, to describe it somehow. But since Shifter taught us how to create (korean) sushi rolls I became more curious about it all, and yesterday, after forcing myself to overcome my initial aversion to eat raw fish, I definitely decided that I have to learn more about sushi (that is, I want to cook sushi!).
Funnily enough, today a couple of office mates bought Japanese food for lunch (which made me hate my humble sandwich for a while). And I realised there are two more Japanese take-aways round my new office (apart from the one that I already spotted). Hmmm...
(Picture titled "too pretty to eat" by celiece, taken from sxc.hu)