The are a lot of ramen shops here in Hokkaido.

I'm not talking about some store that sells cup-o-noodles by the bulk. I'm talking about full blown restaurants that feature ramen. I guess the closest thing I can compare them to is Katana-ya for all you El Cerrito/Richmond folks out there. Except that even there, ramen is one of many other kinds of "Japanese" food you can get. The extent of variety in the ramen shops here in Hokkaido includes ramen (what else?), sometimes potstickers, and sometimes fried rice (I'll get back to the fried rice in a second).

How is the ramen served? In a bowl... kinda like pho minus the nasty dirty chopsticks and the even nastier dirty soup spoon. Yo, if you need to wipe the eating utensils with a napkin before you use em, there's something wrong. Getting back to the ramen, I remember my senior year in Berkeley when my roommate and I went crazy over the Korean ramen noodles sold at Ranch 99. We seriously bought them in bulk. Then we'd put all this stuff inside to make it semi-nutricious. Eggs, bok choy, spinach, even mochi... I don't remember other stuff we put in there. Anyway, because of all the good stuff, we served it as a meal. Gourmet ramen I think was what we dubbed it. Hahaha. So anyway, I come here to Japan, and "gourmet ramen" is everywhere. It's like college batchelors took over Japan and opened up all these restaurants.

So about the fried rice. As my other roommate Jason said once, "You can't make fried rice from your rice." "Your rice" of course, is in reference to the sticky Japanese rice. Apparently, he tried to make fried rice for lunch one day using the Japanese rice, and it just didn't work because Japanese sticky rice stays... well, sticky. Regardless, Japanese people still make fried rice... or at least their version of it. A sticky version.

The best thing about Japanese rice though is that you can make rice balls (onigiri) out of them. Can I get an amen from some of the Japanese readers out there? Going on a picnic? Wanna eat rice? Have no worries. Just smush a gob of rice together into a rounded triangle and wrap it in dried seaweed for some wholesome goodness. Portable rice. Aww yeah.