Genocide and Learning

We all know how much I love to eat animals...but this time I think I have gone too far. I had this dish a while ago but failed to blog about it. In school, they served some fish called Shishamo. It's a traditional springtime dish in Japan. The idea is that you eat the whole fish and the eggs that are inside. 

Now I will eat just about anything that is deep fried, but this is almost too far. You can see in the picture below that there are fish eggs inside. It is the yellowy stuff on the end of the fork...not the white. You feel like you are Galactus, Devourer of Worlds. Seriously, in the two fish I ate, I must have eaten the unborn eggs of between 1-9 billion fish. 

Speaking of learning, there are somethings you learn, and some things you wish you hadn't learned. One thing  I learned after 10 months of being in Japan: I drive by a restaurant at least once a week with an advertisement I couldn't understand. In Japanese, the word is Ranchi. This is the type of word that you have to sound out and figure out what it is supposed to mean in English. For instance, hamburger is hanbaga in Japanese. With my practice in translating Japanese words, I figured that this word meant Ranch...like cow ranch or something. 10 months of trying to figure it out and I realized the word it was indicating...

Lunch. The word is Lunch. Ranchi...Lunch. This place makes little sense sometimes. 

Now for the things that I wish I had not learned: last week, a friend of mine gave me a potatochip-type snack that he had gotten from the 7-11. It wasn't technically a potato, it was more of a veggie chip that was lightly fried. It was really good. I couldn't figure out what flavor it really was though. The only word I could recognize was Mayo. Japan has a real obsession with mayonnaise, they put it in everything. It is really nastly. They put it on pizza. The other word on there was tarako. I didn't know what it was, but I really liked the chips. 

I decided to show someone else the chips and looked up what flavor tarako was. Turns out it is salted Alaskan Pollock roe. Here is a link. There I go annihilating unfertilized future fish again...