Back on the Shinkansen it was a further hour and three-quarters to Kagoshima, where the night's accommodation was a bit further from the station than I would have preferred if we were still lugging the Black Monster, but with the Little Red Travelling Bag in hand we found our way to the tram stop, alighting three stops later to head off into the eating and drinking quarter in search of the Sunn Days Inn, which lay right in the heart of the quarter, a prime destination for the hungry and thirsty salary man.
Having checked in we were out again in fairly short order looking for a particular venue that deals in one of Kagoshima's specialities, black pork. Previous stops, having been fairly close to the station concerned, had mostly been away from prime eating and drinking areas, and when we'd ventured into such territory we were headed for a place where Madam had, more or less, a fair idea of the place's location.
Here we found ourselves wandering along a backstreet, down another, onto one of the city's major thoroughfares, and back a block before we located the place she was looking for. Given the fact that this was, apparently, a highly rated purveyor of prime pork you'd expect it to have been a bit easier to find. Actually, tucked away at the back of a basement collection of eateries (two of them apparently French) on the edge of the Eating Quarter you'd have expected it to be doing things a little tough, but while we were there a steady stream of customers made their way through the door. Not bad, one would have thought, relatively early on a Wednesday night.
We ended up in a tatami mat cubicle, at the chef's suggestion, rather than seated at the bar, and I was glad we did, since we'd ordered the prime version of the pork, which was cut thicker and consequently took longer to cook.
I downed a substantial pitcher of beer while we were waiting, and I wanted to go another with the meal, a request that was overruled by the wait staff on the grounds that the meal was rather substantial and I wouldn't be able to manage both.
We'd learnt of Obama's re-election in the States on the last leg of the train trip, and I was in a mood to celebrate, so I was quite certain that I could, but Madam advised caution and the avoidance of scenes, so we had to do with the meal, which mightn't have been the largest I've ever tackled but was certainly in the running for the top five.A substantial piece of high quality pork had been crumbed and deep fried, then sliced into substantial chunks and came on a platter with a generous serve of sliced cabbage, a couple of slices of cucumber, a bowel of rice and the seemingly obligatory miso soup.
I'm not miso-friendly, so that was never going to enter calculations, but I made pretty fair work of the pork and my serve of rice. Around a third of the way through we were visited by the chef, who demonstrated the correct way of seasoning the pork.
He started with a healthy sprinkling of a sauce that wasn't too dissimilar to the one I'd disliked the night before and had been avoiding to date in the evening's proceedings, then added a fair dollop of hot English mustard, which I had been indulging in, not in the quantity seemingly required.
The combination worked rather well, and by the time my serve of pork and rice were gone there was only a skerrick of mustard left, which was a problem when Madam advised she'd been beaten by quantity.
There was about a third of her serve left, and a fair quantity of rice which the chef had described as a high quality product from Akita Prefecture in northern Honshu. Under those circumstances I felt obliged to finish both pork and rice, but there was no way I was going to manage the cabbage and still leave room for a celebratory ale or two.
Having completed the repast Madam wasn't inclined to hang around for pitchers of beer, and who could blame her, since she didn't have the capacity to join in the celebrations.
We wended our way back to the hotel, turned on the TV in search of updates on the Obama situation, found we were on the end of the relevant bulletin and settled back to watch a panel discussion about dieting as Hughesy downed a couple of Asahis to celebrate the Presidential result.
Predictably, by around nine-thirty the sawmill was in full production.