Mmm, delicious...

Something I hadn't even considered that might be an issue in Japan was the capacity to understand food. What I'm eating, what it says on the menu, etc. This became immediately clear when we got off the train in Kyoto on the first night and couldn't tell whether the store was selling sweets or bento boxes.

So, on day 1 in Kyoto when left to our own devices to find lunch, we were gloriously happy to see plastic food. Yep, plastic food. As it turns out, it's pretty common in Japan for the restaurants to have displays of plastic food outside of them to show what they offer. If they didn't have this, I don't know what we would do. So instead of ordering from the menu (in Japanese), our waitress led us back out front to this case to point at things and order. And lo and behold, I got udon. Huzzah.

I've been told there's a huge culture for collecting Japanese plastic food in New York City among art people. Next thing we know, this stuff's going to show up at MoMA.