Tuesday 2 September 2008

Azabu Juban Shopping Street Festival

The Azabu Juban Shopping Street Festival is just an excuse to eat and drink a lot, it doesn't even try to pretend that the festival is attached to some temple or religious holiday.



お好み焼(き)
おこのみやき
Japanese savoury pancake



こおり
Ice


やきそば
やきそば
Japanese fried noodles


ラーメン
ラーメン
Chinese noodles in soup


特製
とくせい
Specially made


いかやき
いかやき
Squid balls

The last one is a dish I hadn't seen before, I suppose it's like たこ焼き、(たこやき)、 octopus balls. They are a deep fried batter and octopus mixture. Kind of a Japanese comfort food, but it's not really very appetising, in my opinion.

All of these dishes are usually to be found at festivals. The ice is actually shaved ice with flavoured syrup, great in Summer. The signs were not very kanjified, I tried to pick the most kanjified examples but it wasn't easy. I forced myself to trudge around drinking beer and eating greasy food until I found some good ones.

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Did you get a look at the squid? Was it actually squid balls? I've never seen those before either.

What I've seen for squid at festivals, is that they just toss a squid on the grill and grill it. But I think it was called やきいか so maybe いかやき is different

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Street_Food_-_Ikayaki_(%E3%81%84%E3%81%8B%E7%84%BC%E3%81%8D).jpg

phauna said...

There was definitely batter involved. I just think they were going for something a little different.

sansIcarus said...

Yeah, it must have been such a stretch to have to keep drinking beer. :-)

phauna said...

I did it for you guys.

sansIcarus said...

Took one for the team, huh?

Unknown said...

howdy, I've been playing around with Picassa 3 today...I made a web gallery of Japanese signs that you are free to use.

I'll try to keep my eyes peeled for good signs and post some more pics in the future.

http://picasaweb.google.com/johnzep/JapaneseSigns#

phauna said...

That's great Johnzep, but I think you've done all the work already. You could make your own blog and upload them, me and Albion can link you up. Or just put them on that album on Picasa, it works just as well.

I mean, I'm doing this because I'm collecting signs anyway for my own use. So it's only a tiny bit more effort to put them up for everyone's use. Hopefully if everyone added something, a little at a time, then we'd have a lot of content pretty much free of effort.

I'll link to the Picasa page for now, if you want to make a blog, I encourage you to do so, I'm not looking to corner the market for Japanese signs or anything. Anything you find interesting, others will also find interesting.

Unknown said...

ya, I'll just keep uploading them, don't wanna be bothered with a blog. Thanks for the link.

I thought I'd offer them to you since I'm definitely not going to make the effort to import them into an Anki deck (^_^;)

phauna said...

Ah, well if you want me to post them, I will. I suppose having things in one place is somewhat useful.