Seika and her friend Moe took me out to a fancy soba dinner. The menu was only in Japanese, and I trusted their order. 

They ordered for the table and we had a variety of appetizers like chicken with wasabi, beef tendon, omelet, tempura, and sashimi, followed by soba.

I got the normal soba as it was my first time. My soba came on a woven plate with a cup of broth on the side containing green onion and ginger. I each bite of noodles into the broth one at a time. The noodles are buckwheat noodles and remind me a bit of the taste of the healthy wheat pasta noodles at home. I enjoyed my soba experience.

Moe knows English and we had so much fun conversation. It was a great girls night.

They treated me to dinner, and I was very thankful. ごちそうさま! (Gochisōsama, “thank you for the meal”)

After dinner we had tea, and the tea came at a very hot temperature

暑い (atsui, “hot)

お茶 (ocha, “tea”)

There’s a phrase in Japanese that if you you are sensitive to hot temperatures and have to wait for hot foods and drinks to cool down, you have a cat tongue (猫舌, nekojita). And if you can drink very hot tea right away, you have a dog tongue. Seika and I have cat tongues and Moe has a dog tongue.

The dinner and tea was in a new fancy 29 floor building that was just completed a few weeks ago. We ate on the top floor section and had amazing views. The whole building was trendy with an open air rooftop and lots of fancy trees and plants.

At the tea place, I offered to pay and I got to practice saying ここは私が (Koko wa watashi ga) which means “here is on me.” Success!

Over tea, I asked them to show me how they type in Japanese. The keyboard is so confusing to me that anytime I needed to have japanese characters, I would do speech to text or I would google it. Here’s how you actually use the keyboard. There’s a lot of swiping. If something starts with a beginning sound of one of the visible letters, it is hidden with that letter in the keyboard. They were telling me you just get used to it. It is like a dance. 

It took me about a minute to type this, and it would take them seconds.

今日は雨です (Kyō wa amedesu, “today is rainy”)

I then showed them the qwerty keyboard swipe to type functionality that some people use. They were equally as amazed with that method of typing.