Faux pas - Shitsugen

Another day, another faux pas, maybe, I should have called this blog, Shitsugen in Yokohama - according to Google Translate shitsugen means faux pas. 

Just down the road from me is a Japanese Restaurant, it looks quite posh from the outside but once you got inside it kind of has the appearance of a Wimpy bar from 1987 – a Japanese Wimpy bar mind you. Anyway, as it was raining like it can only rain in Cardiff – that’s how polite the Japanese are, making me feel like I am at home by turning on the rain –  I thought I wouldn’t go far for my dinner, so I popped into the Japanese Wimpy. My first job was to work out just how the hell the umbrella stand might work. Now you might think that you can’t f*** up when using an umbrella stand, in which case you’ve never used a Japanese one. Think supermarket trolley crossed with bike rack and then apply that to the humble umbrella and you have the kind of thing I was faced with. My first effort at locking up my brolly failed and I spent a good twenty five minutes trying to retrieve the umbrella from the bottom of the rack. Let’s say, just to save me from further embarrassment that the second of my attempts was a success, my brolly was finally secure. (By the way, there are three bikes outside my apartment unlocked overnight, so why this restaurant felt it needed such brolly security is beyond me, although I did have peace of mind whilst eating that my umbrella was safe.) Anyway,  back to the faux pas in hand, with my brolly safe I could now enter the restaurant. I did so, bowing slightly and asking very apologetically for an English menu, they had one. I then took a seat, in a kind of well and this is where my problems started. Another waitress came over. She was trying to smile, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. No, her eyes were looking at me like I had just bitten the head off a live goldfish, not any old goldfish but her pet goldfish. She pointed at me, and at my feet. She said something in a language I didn’t recognise, at a guess Japanese, and then pointed at my feet again. It dawned on me slowly that I had not taken my shoes off and my dirty, rain sodden trainers were now touching the tatami mats beneath my feet. I was in trouble, big time. 

Actually, I wasn’t, I smiled and apologised and removed my shoes and locked them away in a little locker with a wooden key. From the look on the lady’s face, I was forgiven and she no longer saw me as the goldfish slayer. 

I know you want to know what I had to eat. I ordered the autumn special – udon noodles in a hotpot. It looked amazing, this pot full of goodies on a gas stove, but I had no idea how to eat it. Did I eat it straight from pot or try to chopstick the contents into the little bowl. No one around me was eating the same thing so there were no clues. but as the bubbles rolled in the pot, I realised eating straight from the pot was likely to cause third degree burns. I clumsily and messily used the spoon and chopsticks to get it into the bowl as best I could. 

So on my little excursion tonight I learnt two things, 1, make sure your socks don’t have holes in and 2 don’t wear clean on clothes when eating hotpot, oh and warn the couple on the table to your side that you might splash, (they didn’t look best pleased as it began raining inside as well as out.)

Finally, talking of splashing,  a word on toilets, maybe this blog should be called ‘On the Loo in Yokohama’. After my meal, I had to visit the little boys’ room and was not looking forward to doing this in my socks. But luckily(?) there were communal sandals there to save our feet from walking in whatever lurks on a bathroom tiled floor. Now, I don’t know about you, but I am no fan of putting on someone else’s shoes, especially when you consider just how many men have used those sandals while urine splashes back from the urinal.