I have been in Japan since January and since I have been here I have had good experiences with food and food is always worth to write about in my opinion. I did not live in Osaka the entire time. I had one semester of University at Kansai Gaidai, and I lived on campus in Hirakata. Hirakata is a city that is in between Kyoto and Osaka. It has a good accessibility to other stations too.
In Hirakata I experienced the first time of trying Japanese food and tried a few restaurants with my friends. I probably do not remember the correct order of the first few foods that I ate but I hope I can bring up as many as I can remember. Since food is a very broad and interesting subject I’m dividing it by: Convenience food, food from the supermarket, food from restaurants and food from stands/at temple’s and/or festivals. So far I have lived in Hirakata, Miyakojima and Toyonaka.
In Hirakata I had a couple of different varieties of food and if I remember correctly, the first time I went out at a real restaurant was with a Japanese friend. We went to eat nabe in Hirakata station. I am not an expert when it comes to explaining Japanese food, but it is Japanese hot-pot and it was in this big pot where you could choose two kinds of broths. We chose a beef broth and one that was soy bean based. We had all kinds of meat and my favorite enoki mushrooms. It was an all you can eat restaurant, and it was not cheap, but for me, it was really worth the money.
The next thing that I went out to eat for was in a small shop but I feel really bad for forgetting the name of it but this is the picture that I made.
It had meat, noodles and an egg. It was really good and I recommend this to everyone because it was really simple but really delicious. The next thing that I ate was ramen in Kyoto and I have nothing bad to say over anything that I eat in Japan because all the food is so delicious!
I also had a rice bowl near my campus and it had shrimp in it and tasted really good!
I also ate some sukiyaki which was for me getting used to it, because you dip everything you eat into raw egg. I couldn’t get over the fact that it was a raw egg in the beginning, but it was good.
In Hirakata, I mostly to 7-eleven, Lawson and Welcia. Welcia is a drugstore, but there is a section where there is food too, so I used to come there a lot. I remember buying dango for the first time there and not liking it that much in the beginning. I gave it another try and now it is one of my favorite things to eat. For me what I usually bought in the morning, were the sandwiches from 7-eleven. I also bought an onigiri with it usually. After trying onigiri in Lawson, Welcia, Family mart and 7-eleven, I can say with confidence that the best onigiri is from 7-eleven. I always get mayo tuna or shrimp mayo. When I was in university I used to cook for myself in my dorm and the favorite thing I made is pasta carbonara and the ingredients in Japan gave such a different flavor to it. What I really loved from convenience stores were the corndogs you could get and they were not that expensive.
This sums up my time in Hirakata. After living in Hirakata-Shi for around six months,
I moved to Miyakojima. In Miyakojima my experience with food changed a little bit, because I went more often to a supermarket that was 10 minutes away. The already prepared food was really really good and I tried a lot of different new things. So mostly I spend my food adventures in the supermarket and went out for dinner with my friends in Osaka. I don’t really have pictures from the food I ate in Osaka with my friends, because I mostly recorded everything on my phone. Some interesting food choices were Korean BBQ, a very delicious okonomiyaki restaurant etc.
After for about a few weeks maybe one month, I had to move again. This time I had to move to Toyonaka, which is a little bit far and has more transfers than before. So in the beginning when I had to come to the office, I was confused a lot, but I found I good connection for me to travel to. First of all, My train has one line to directly Umeda. I really love Korean food, so I had Korean BBQ, and more Korean food in Umeda and I really loved it! After that, I had my first time eating yaki niku and it is a big recommendation. I really really love Japanese food, and I really love hot pot, in Umeda I went with a friend and ate plenty of dishes and they have a lot to choose from. Also what I really started to love when I came to Japan was Indian food. Near Toyonaka station there was an Indian place that was really good and you can have good food for a good price. There is not a typical place to get the best food, but the place ‘Dotonbori’ is a recommendation for all tourists, but be careful because it is always busy. Even though it is busy the best time to go is during the evening, because you can see the whole place lighting up with the beautiful lights.
