Japanese Train Food

So far, everything I've eaten in Japan tastes like the best meal I've ever had. Luckily, our food on the train today was no exception.

Normally if I bought a meal from a cart I would expect, at most, a sandwich. But for lunch today I bought a coke in an aluminum bottle (genius!!! I like canned coke best because its colder, but I always wished I could seal it up and take it with me) and a boxed rice meal. This is how the meal looked in the box: two plastic dishes of rice and the standard chop sticks and moist cloth.



Mmmm...this is what it looked like when I opened it. Looking out the window of our train there was the mountains to one side and the ocean to the other, so it seemed appropriate that one bowl was food from the sea and the other was food from the mountains. I didn't even think I liked mushrooms...



This was my friend Satoko's meal. My first North American reaction to this was "Fish on a train! Gross!". But I tried a piece and it was really fresh and delicious. This is what the meal looked like in the package.



This dish was basically a sushi pizza with the salmon in thin layers on the top and rice on the bottom. This is what it looked like unwrapped.



For dessert, we had a treat that Satoko's father brought for us. It was sweet and gelatinous inside and had savoury soy bean powder outside. It came with syrup to pour over the top and a little wooden knife to eat it with.