Horse, it's what's for dinner

Yeah, you read that right. It's amazing what you can get away with when PETA isn't breathing down your neck. This post will partially be dedicated to the weird food I've eaten, and was inspired by the fact that I ate HORSE last night. On top of that, it was raw. Yup, horse sashimi. And I'm sure there are some making a weird face, or in stunned disbelief (I'm looking at you, Tamara), but hey, don't knock it 'till you try it. To be fair, eating horse is rare in Japan, it's not as if you can find it in every grocery store or on the menu at the local restaurant. My host dad, as per usual, has the connections, and while he was in Kagoshima(which is apparently semi-famous for the stuff) on business, he had some sent back to the house. It's just like pigs, cows, etc. where they raise the horses specifically for the purpose of being eaten, so it's not as if I'm gnawing on the tough muscle of some Triple Crown thoroughbred. Besides the chunks of raw horse meat, there were also chunks of fat, which after dipping in a little soy sauce, are eaten straight up. I could only handle one of those after I felt my arteries hardening from eating pure fat. That's a curious thing about Japanese people, their motto is the more fat, the better. ...It's amazing how they manage to stay so thin. In America, you hear a decent bit amount lean meat and whatnot, but that is considered less preferrable here. Beyond the horse meat, which was pretty tasty with a little soy sauce, I've had more beef in the past 3 weeks that I've probably consumed my entire life. And to a certain extent, I'm developing a taste for it. Case in point, I went to a yakiniku (grilled meat) restaurant with my host family about 10 days ago. The idea of these places is that the server brings you a plate o' raw meat, and you cook it yourself on little grill embedded in the table. It just so happens that my host dad is friends with the owner (again, his connections are insane) so we got what he called (saabisu) aka 'service' or 'the special treatment.' For appetizers we had beef sashimi. Yup, raw chunks o' beef. This was followed by raw cow liver, yet another thing I never thought I'd be eating. Now I'm not going to come back to America and start downing raw beef. A) Japan is draconian about preventing mad cow disease. B) The owner was giving us all the choice parts of the cow. After that, plate after plate of meat was brought in, along with rice, soup, veggies...the table was completely crammed with dishes. Quite the satisfying meal. I may or may not have already mentioned that awhile ago I had eel innards, etc. Anyway, enough about crazy food.
I saw Kabuki about two weeks ago, which was a great experience. Since the performance was going to be some 5 hours long, with the longest break being 30 min, a bunch of us exchange students decided to grab something to eat (and drink, of course) beforehand. So after eating some maguro donburi (tuna and rice, basically) and downing my fair share of sake, I headed to the theatre with the gang. The kabuki was loooong. Certainly interesting and I'm quite glad I went and had the cultural experience and all that, but I was definitely nodding off during the final play, which was 2hrs. 15min. long. We were up in the nosebleed section, but so were a couple of old guys who probably about the only two in the theatre to shout the actors' house names at climatic points in the play (or really whenever it seemed.) This is an established practice, so they weren't being rude, rather they were adding to the Kabuki atmosphere. Those two guys just sounded cool, and made it more interesting, so they get a big thumbs up. After the play, all the exchange students were taken on a tour below the stage, which normally isn't done (ahh, the perks of being a foreigner), and that was really cool. The guy explained some of the special names given to stage parts. The platform that lifts the actors to stage level from underneath is called a 'snapping turtle' because when it stops the actors' heads bob up and down a bit, apparently like a snapping turlte. Another one of the areas was nicknamed 'hell' etc. I have some pictures of that, but I forgot my USB cable, and these computers don't have SD card slots, so it'll have to wait.
Happy Halloween!