Tachikawa Food Festival and Hachioji Izakaya

Today Ben and I went to the Tachikawa food festival with our new friend Chihiro. It was really fun. We ate a lot of tasty food. The festival was called manpaku which is a combination of the term for full, and festival, so we translated it to 'fullstival'.

We had Kyushu style fried chicken, and soup dumplings. Ben had a massive Hokkaido style hamburger that looked delicious.

The soup dumplings were an IQ test in the form of food. If you were and idiot like Ben you bit into the dumplings and let the boiling hot contests burn the crap out of your mouth. If you were a massive idiot like me you did this 3 times in a row. They were delicious, but my tongue is mad at me.








Betsubara is the term for the second stomach you have reseved just for sweets, a dessert stomach. After delicious foods we had to fill our betsubara. We got shaved ice. I was pleasantly surprised. I don't like shaved ice in America, they taste like artificial flavoring poured over snow, but the shaved ice I had here was pear flavored, it had real chunks of pear, and real pear juice. It was the perfect treat on a hot day.






After our wonderful day at the festival we went into Hachioji to a really cool izakaya (Japanese pub). All the decorations on the wall were from the '50s. There were toys, posters, and even music from the '50s. It was really cool. We had a few drinks, and ate some tasty foods at the izakaya. I had a great drink with a whole frozen mandarine orange in it, it was fruity, and delicious.






To commemorate our day we did a Japanese photo booth. It was surprisingly fun. You choose what style photo booth you want depending on how you want it to photoshop you. Some of them make you whiter, some of them make you skinnier, all of them make your eyes bigger. They are all suppose to make you look prettier, which makes guys look hilarious. Ben has never looked so... ?