Food and drink

  Several dining experiences to share.  First, Friday we went to some little diner.  In the front was a vending machine, except instead of pictures of Pepsi cans, there were pictures of food (rice, noodles, chicken, etc).  You put some money in the machine, press the button of the food you want, and a little ticket gets printed out.  You sit down at the table, and in maybe 3 or 4 minutes, someone brings your food.  Amazingly efficient, very cheap, and you don't have to worry about not speaking Japanese... as long as you can figure out what the food is from the little 1.5" x 1.5" thumbnail pictures.

  With the exception of fast food joints like this, most Japanese restaurants that I have found are very small.  Some have only 4 or 5 tables.  If you try to go anywhere with a group of 10 or 12, forget it.  Perhaps somewhere they are hiding the huge BW-3 style restaurant with like fifty tables and a hundred TV screens showing World cup soccer, but if so I haven't found them yet.

  Bars are pretty small too.  Another thing: in my experience in the U.S., a bar is something that is on the first floor.  You walk in off the street, and there you are.  Maybe in some urban areas or in a large hotel there might be a bar on the 2nd floor or down in the basement.  In Kyoto it is not uncommon for there to be a bar on the 8th floor of a building.  You go up the elevator, and there's a small room in the back which is a bar.  There's a different bar on the 7th floor, and a different one in the 9th, and maybe even two or three others on the 8th floor as well.  Because of the huge number of small bars, some of them seem to be very specialized or highly themed.  

  The little 8th floor bar we were in on Friday night specialized in American beers.  Except that beer was $10, while scotch and bourbon were only $8.  I've never been in a place where whisky was cheaper than beer.  Coke, by the way, was $4.  

  Then Saturday night, we went to a sukiyaki place.  This is kinda like a fondue restraurant.There is a burner at your table, and they bring you the pot of uncooked beef or whatever, and you cook it at your table.  Our Japanese was not all that good... we understood that the lady was saying $15 each, which we initially thought was pretty good.  But the pot was really pretty small, and we were kind of disappointed in the quantity of food for the price.  When they brought the check we realized that it was $15 per pot, so it worked out to only $5 per person.