He directed us instead to a rather interesting little warren of eating and drinking places a good couple of hundred metres away on the other side of the major intersection near the railway station where we'd boarded the bus. Now, you might take this next bit the wrong way, so it's important to emphasize that while I was keen to hit the yaki tori chicken with a couple of beers for the evening meal the key issues were avoiding a big meal, and, particularly, avoiding the rice, salad and miso soup that almost invariably accompanies a set meal in Japan. In short, I was looking for a little bit of something tasty, preferably something that didn't require chopsticks.
We arrived in a little maze that contained about fourteen assorted eateries, most of them of the sit at the counter and drink while you snack on the nibbles you can order off the blackboard menu. There weren't any spaces at the yaki tori place, but there were a number of alternatives. The problem was, initially, deciding which one, and then when we'd settled on one particular establishment, avoiding Madam's natural inclination to try as many as possible of the yummy alternatives.
Personally, I would have been happy to have had another couple of goes at the scallops we started with, simmered in a little stock on top of a small metho stove, with a particularly large shell as a cooking vessel. I wasn't keen on the sight of raw scallops, but once they'd simmered away atop the little cooker the result was quite superb. As stated, once they were gone I could easily have gone another, probably another and quite possibly a fourth serve, turning the pieces in the cooking broth and taking hearty swigs of beer in between turns.
Madam, on the other hand, couldn't help but order sashimi, which I'm sure I could have done had I been Japanese, and there was a dish of potatoes where you were supposed to hollow out a space on the middle and insert raw squid and a daub of butter. This, I gather, is a Hokkaido delicacy, and it wasn't bad, but, as the reader might guess, it involved chopsticks to do the hollowing out, something I was hoping to avoid.
I was also hoping to avoid the suggestions that I might like to try assorted bits and pieces off the platter of sashimi which followed said platter's arrival. Like I said earlier, I was after a small fed that didn't involve chopstick and definitely wanted to avoid concern about whether I was enjoying myself. Because, actually, I was. We're talking an eating and drinking environment you're not going to find in Australia, and if there weren't the old language issues I'd have been joining in the badinage.
We were in there following a chat with the proprietress, whose son acted as the barman while she did a bit in the room at the rear that served as the kitchen. When we arrived there was a married couple finishing up before heading elsewhere and a couple of girls apparently on a quiet night out. Conversation ebbed and flowed back and forth, aided, abetted and redirected by the bar man, who was a pretty classy operator. After the couple left, a rotund and rather jovial gentleman arrived, settled in to simmer scallops and engage in repartee, much of which seemed to concern the relative merits of Hokkaido and Tokyo, which was, as far as I could gather, where the two girls were from.
All in all a very enjoyable little session, except for the fact that the bloke over there was sitting down to what I'd have preferred to be eating rather than the other bits and pieces that seemed to be deemed necessary to broaden Hughesy's gustatory horizons. Those attempts we're definitely something I could have done without, as was the inevitable consequence of moving the venue from staggering distance of the hotel to a much more remote location.
We'd been snug enough in the little eatery, and when we hit the side street outside things weren't too bad, but as we stood at the intersection near the bus terminal waiting for the lights to change the wind factor kicked in big time. It's fair to say I've never been colder in my life. One minute I was fine, but as the body core temperature plunged, Madam looked in my direction, noted that I seemed to be having trouble and asked whether I was all right. An anguished No produced an offer of the scarf she'd been using to insulate her neck, which produced a minor thermal crisis on that front. Needless to say, once the lights decided to change, there was a frantic scramble across the intersection, along the main street to the side street that housed the hotel and though that cut out a large part of the wind chill it took a good five to ten minutes to restore the equanimity once we were safely inside.
A warm bath for Madam, a hearty slug of medicinal sake for Hughesy and by nine thirty both of us were snugly pushing up Zs, with the prospect of an early rise on the morrow, when temperatures were bound to be a major cause for concern.