Sushi, Sahhimi and Karaoke

So what else has been happening, there are six of us here now including H our translator/interpreter, even had to hire another car, too many people to cram in the little Toyota Ractis, (on the right) which by the way is a pretty nice little car, built in sat nave the lot.
Actually thinking about cars there are lots of weird and wonderful little cars out here, would have though they would have gone down a storm over in Europe especially in big crowded and congested cities, great for nipping down the shops, parking and fuel economy.
A lot of these small cars have a yellow number plate which means they are below 660cc so great on fuel, all come with air con, some of them come with fully fitted sat nave elect windows, mirrors the works. Probably the crafty European car manufactures have had them banned or some how got high import duties or other regulations placed on them making them expensive and not viable for the Japanese to ship them to Europe. I think these car would sell like hot cakes and corner the market in small cars, there done my bit to promote Japanese small car sales in Europe.
Back to what’s been going on, the other night we all went out for Sushi and Karaoke with Arri san of 7/11 fame, first he took us to a Sushi and Sashimi restaurant, they are both raw fish but Sushi is with rice and Sashimi is just raw fish, gotta say it was some of the best I’ve had since being here.
We also had Shabu-Shabu at the same restaurant which is real thin slices of raw beef basically poached in a broth. They bring out a big pot of broth place it on a gas burner bring it to the boil, you chuck in mushrooms, radish and other vegetables which they bring this makes a sort of soup which you drink/eat later. The Shabu-Shabu is really the thin slices of beef which you poach in the broth then eat. Typically you’d pick up a slice of beef with you chopsticks or Hashi they are called over here, dip it in the boiling broth swish it back and forwards a couple of time till it sort of goes a pail brown then eat it, taking car not to scald yourself at the same time cos it just come out of boiling water but very nice it is too if you can avoid third degree burns.
After eating the food and paying the bill which was pretty steep around $500, guess you get what you pay for, it was good though then It was off for a bit of a sing song.
Arri san he took us to another one of his “snack” bars but this time in Utsunomiya, I was crap as usual at the singing but everyone else seemed OK. Arri surprised me and in true Japanese style was actually pretty good, even if we didn’t know what the hell he was singing, he could have been getting all the words wrong for all we knew but it sounded good and he got a good score, that's him on the right in full voice. All the Karaoke machines over here seem to give out a score, I’m usually in the 40% range seems to me everyone else is above 85% I really should have got the message by now, but no one else seems to care so why should I.
It seems the only snack bars Arri goes to or knows though are run by old women and this one was no exception either, don’t know how they keep going have been to this one twice with him and both times we have been the only people in the place that is unless they all run out when they see foreigners or “Guigin” heading their way.
The bar though was nice and plush inside, the owner or manger was real friendly as well guess she would be as we were the only customers and spent about $300 between us in an hour or so guess, you don’t need that many customers at those rates. All told the night came to about $800 between 5 off us, not too bad but not something you would want to do every day, think everyone had a great time tough.