Breakfast, continued

Today, Monday, there was a young Japanese woman eating breakfast in the guesthouse dining hall when I got there. This was something of a relief, since I was no longer under the constant spotlight of the manager's attention during my meal. She divided her attention across the two of us.

She hovered over me while I demonstrated that I had finally mastered the art of eating my raw egg. (1) Self-serve rice from rice cooker into rice bowl. (2) Crack raw egg into egg bowl. (3) Beat egg and a little soy sauce with chopsticks. (4) Make a hole in the center of the rice. (5) Pour about half the beaten egg mixture into the hole. (6) Stir up rice and egg. (7) Eat, say "oishii desu" ("delicious").

My demonstration elicited a broad smile and a thumbs-up.

Each breakfast is a bit different. There is always a cabbage salad, always a package of nori, always a raw egg. But it's been a different kind of fish each time, a different kind of soup each time, and two or three different tiny side dishes. Today's meal:

The salmon was really good. In front is a spaghetti salad with little bits of hard-boiled egg, tiny strips of what was probably ham, and a mayonnaise dressing; deep-fried squid; and something I couldn't identify. I asked her what it was, and she said konnyaku. I was quite excited by this answer, since I'd just worked on the etymology of the English word konnyaku for the American Heritage Dictionary a few weeks ago, so I'd learned the word but didn't really know what it meant. It's a plant-derived edible jelly-like substance. Today's soup had big chunks of orange squash in it.

My Japanese is recovering to the point that I understood when the manager told the other guest proudly that the onions (tamanegi) topping the cabbage salad were fresh. I believed her, since I'd seen the big box of onions sitting outside the front door of the guesthouse, presumably freshly delivered from the countryside, the previous afternoon when I'd come home.

While we were eating the manager brought a little basket of sucking candies to each of us and asked us to take some. When I took only one, she motioned that I should take a giant handful instead. It reminded me of my grandmother offering candy when we would visit her house. "Fill your pockets, children!" she'd say, always encouraging us to take more.

[Add June 16, 2010:

A photo of the next day's breakfast:

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