Guinea pig

Today was the first day of the new stations on the Hachinohe-Morioka line. To celebrate they were selling a special day pass for only 1000yen, so I took the train rather than drive. Was beginning to regret it when I saw how crowded the train was. Apparently the rest of Iwate had the same idea. It is good value considering someone coming from Hachinohe would usual have to pay 3000 just for a single.

Anyway, I met Mike at Morioka and we treated ourselves to a pound cake and cookie set in Aunt Stella`s then headed off to the university. We had agreed to take part in a research project about whether Westerners hear and interpret sounds differently to Asian people. We met the post-grad student and he look us to a little room where we sat at a table with a video camera trained on us and we had to listen to various nature sounds and write down a description of the landscape that the sound made us imagine. The first four sounds were Japanese insects, and the last four were thinks like blackbirds and frogs. It was interesting because the Japanese sounds gave me no real picture other than somewhere hot, but for the English sounds I could write loads, but Mike, who has lived in central London his whole life, couldn't identify any of them.

After we finished we walked into town - the long way thanks to my bad sense of direction - and had dinner at Watami, my favourite new restaurant. First we ordered the normal, Caesar salad, spring rolls, my favourite deep fried cheese...

and then Mike ordered this....

what was he thinking?? They are mini deep fried crabs which you just eat whole and they crunch!!! It is a torture method, not food!