29. Thank you! Domo Arigato Gozaimasu!
We want to thank so many people who were helpful or went out of their way for us on our journey.Before we left for Japan, we practiced and sharpened our Japanese language skills with the excellent podcasts from JapanesePod101.com. Those lessons are fantastic! We owe a special thank you to Peter Galante and his team!
Takeuchi-san and Shimizu-san were so kind to us in Sapporo, and great dinner companions as well! Thank you Shimizu-san for the Kyoto recommendations. Please thank your mother for us. You can see that we enjoyed several of the places she mentioned!
Vivek Bakshi led the charge and knew the way to the Taj Mahal Restaurant in Sapporo. What a great dinner conversation!
Thanks to the City of Sapporo for your hospitality, and for making the cultural enrichment classes available.
Thank you for bagels at CTS (how did you know what we were looking for?)
Thank you to the amazing concierge staff at the Hyatt Regency Kyoto. We've never seen better anywhere.
Thank you to our kind hosts at Kodaiji Ikkyu-an. We may have been your only diners that night and we had a tremendous meal.
Thanks to all the small stores selling filled mochi cookies and offering free samples. We have to admit that we did in fact know what they were when we asked kore wa nan desu ka? for the hundredth time that day.
Thanks to the Kitsune (Fox) Cookie Man, and his sweet mother near Fushimi-Inari Taisha, for the free fox-face cookie! You made our day.
Thank you to the cinnamon-tile-cookie makers. The ones lining the way to Kiyumizu-dera, and especially the couple with the small shop on the Philosopher's walk, not far from Ginkakuji. I hope and pray that there will be cinnamon tile cookies for people to discover and enjoy for many years to come.
Thanks to the Little Italian Restaurants on Sakaimachi-dori for being there, twice!
Thanks for Miko-an, our new favorite restaurant in Japan. I have no idea how you do it, turning out so many great dishes in that tiny kitchen. We'll be back.
Thanks to the friendly people at Café Angelina, for a great breakfast of eggs and jamtoast. The matcha cappuccino with soy milk was a real treat.
VegeTable, you appeared out of nowhere, on a night we found out that another place had closed. Thank you for a tasty meal.
Thank you Biotei, for three great lunches! Could you please open a branch in Berkeley?
Thank you to the sweet staff at Pontocho Uzuki. We really appreciated that you took the time to look up the English names of every single ingredient in all nine courses from the dog-eared Japanese-English dictionary behind the bar. And thanks for not laughing too hard when I picked up the little green twigs in my chopsticks and asked, "kore o tabemasu ka? daijobu desu ka?" (Is it okay for me to eat this?).
Thanks also to the waiter at Co*myon Korean restaurant. You may not have understood why we'd order a third pot of Dolsot Bibimbap, but it was good!
Tofu restaurants, we'll talk later.