I wrote the below paragraph as part of a longer essay about my first trip to Japan. Which was an incredible trip, one that changed my life. Still think about it often.
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When we finish shopping at our final store, and because such shopping requires an inordinate amount of getting lost and doubling-back and finding wifi to navigate and bothering strangers for directions, we are famished and it is almost time for dinner. So we set in search of food and soon, for in Tokyo the food is everywhere, come upon a ramen shop that obviously, just so obviously even to a non-gourmand like me, looks like heaven in a ceramic bowl. Why, you ask? In some ways it is like seeing good art, or hearing good music, or enjoying a good novel: the five senses take in their snapshots and the intuition immediately gets to work. Your eyes see the locals bent over their steaming bowls as if on a mission, chewing and scooping with their eyes fluttering in tasty ecstasy just-so. Your eyes see the chefs with their indescribable air of learned confidence and personal satisfaction from a noodle well-made, a broth well-boiled. Your ears hear the slurping noises of lustful customers both deep and long, an inhalation hard to fake. They pick up the quiet chatter of the waiting guests who can think only about the upcoming meal, talk only about the menu. Your nose smells the salted broth with its thousand unknowable seasonings, the frying fat of the pork slices cut so thick they could be mistaken for albino chuck roast, the fragrant simmering essence of twelve humans sweating, drooling, sighing. I’d only had two dining experiences so transcendent they were instantly imprinted in my largely vacant memory like a newborn duck imprints on his mother. This made it number three. The final stroke of blissful dining state was when we soon sit down at the bar, next to this roly mountain of a working sarari man, his extra-large white dress shirt glued to his sticky white undershirt by helpless layers of sweat, his face, his shoulders, his chest, even his stomach seemingly hunched over a Giza pyramid of chewy noodles piled high and defying gravity, alongside not one but two plates of gleaming white pork steaks dripping with fat and oil, the chef handing him the food slowly, methodically, sympathetically, with the solemnity of a royal banquet and the familiarity of an old friend, this poly giant nodding with controlled diplomacy, his aura screaming silently in impatient ecstasy, and then watching him, from the corner of my eye and with measured glances, destroy his meal like a reincarnated, vengeful Ramses come to annihilate Cairo.