8am overload

We're currently staying at this very deluxe resort inn in Kashikojima, Mie prefecture. Look at a map of Honshu, then find the part jutting out east that is south of Tokyo. Bingo.

Breakfast and dinner are included here, along with multiple baths everyday, from 5am to midnight. Bathing is a very serious pastime and I am delighted to spend an hour or more a day sitting in hot water, more on that later when we stay at an onsen on Hokkaido, but now back to breakfast.

For the last few years, working in advertising, I've had roughly the same breakfast 5 days a week. Clif bar, usually chocolate almond, eaten around 10am, and some kind of fruit, a banana or maybe an applesauce cup, around 11. So no great variety for me, and not too early either.

Knowing my usual breakfast comes out of a foil wrapper and takes all of a minute to prepare and eat, look at the photo below for my 8am meal. Since I've shaken off the jet lag, 8am is now early to me, also, I'm not really hungry when I get up. But I get served this, which, if you look closely, includes a personal mini-hibachi (in the upper left) that is actually grilling some fish. There are 3 types of seaweed, 2 types of tofu, soybean paste, myriad pickled vegetables, rice and this is only the beginning. There are two servers in kimonos who continue to bring out the courses as I try to make sense of why I want to try and eat all of this. Try I do, since I've vowed to try everything they put in front of me, including the tail end of some type of snail thing that looks scary and black. It's awful. Then I'm informed that I should only eat the top part, the bottom is the supersized equivalent of eating that vein in the back of the prawn - full of crap. MMmmmmmm.