Today’s kyushoku (school lunch): Squid soup, seaweed salad, and egg loaf.

Continuing with the theme of “sea creatures that we fry and eat whole,” yesterday we had fried shrimp for lunch—with eyes and legs and all.  But we also got a sweet potato crepe to go with it! (in the plastic package in the middle)

It’s been a good while since I posted a picture of my school lunch, so here’s what I had today: a typical Japanese salad, some bite-size fried fish (the entire body), a bizarre miso-ramen concoction with corn and quail eggs, and, of course, rice.

I’m about to go to town on this bag of kim chi flavored Cheetos.

spotted at the grocery store: Elixir the drink, promo for Final Fantasy XIII

These are some pictures I meant to upload a while back, but am just now getting to them.  This was a fantastic bento that I had at work a week or so ago.  One thing that I love about the culture here is that presentation is very important in Japan.  This is something that, if you came to Japan, you would probably discover within a few hours of being here.  At pretty much any place you go, from the most expensive stores around all the way down to the seven-elevens, they treat presentation of merchandise with great care.  It’s incredible.  And it’s probably one of the things I will miss most about Japan when I return to the US.  Because even a ten-dollar bento lunch, with the right presentation, can make you feel like you’re eating like a king.

Currently rocking out to Red Chili Chicken flavored Pringles

Japanese school lunch fun facts:

1. School lunches are the same for every school in the city, so every student (be they elementary, junior high, or high school) eats the same food no matter what school they’re at.
2. In fact, (most) schools don’t even have kitchens.  The school lunches are actually made daily at the school lunch center (no clue where it is) and then delivered to each school from there.  Unfortunately, they don’t have the nice Domino’s “Heat Wave” technology to keep the food warm in transit, so by the time you eat it, the school lunch is always anywhere between lukewarm and cold (soup and everything).
3. Most schools also don’t have lunch rooms, so the students eat at their desks in the classrooms.  And while I’m on that subject, I’ll mention that students stay at the same desk all day long.  In the US, students usually move from classroom to classroom and the teachers stay in the same room the whole day, but it’s just the opposite here.  Students stay in the same classroom all day and the teachers go from room to room.
4. After lunch every day is “cleaning period,” during which the students not only clean up their lunch stuff, but they clean the WHOLE school.  Schools in Japan don’t have janitors and so the students do all the cleaning.  Every day for about 20 minutes, the students work together to dust, sweep, and scrub the classrooms, hallways, bathrooms, etc, etc, etc.  It’s pretty impressive.  American students have it SO good.