Asia Trip Day 12: Day of Rest (12/30/17)

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Look at the massive forearms on this guy
Xuezhu and I were physically sore from the trip in Japan, primarily in the traps, shoulder, and back from walking around all day wearing our heavy backpacks. She took me to a massage parlor, which had several blind masseurs. The building was old and a little messy. They took us to the back through several doors into a private room. Xuezhu had a blind woman to massage her, but I got a normal guy. This was my first massage, and it was quite brutal. My masseur was super strong, as evidenced by his massive foremans. He really dug into my muscles, and it felt like he was trying to crush them. It was the most agonizing when he was working on my traps and calves. The whole body massage lasted about an hour, and after that I felt battered and bruised in a different way.


Mushroom! Mushroom!

After the massage, we met with her dad at a restaurant specializing in mushroom hot pot. Since I was still recovering, they wanted to take me somewhere that was light and nutritious. The mushroom based soup was very savory and earthy. There were many types of mushrooms inside the soup, and we ate it with silken chicken and fresh pea shoots.

I remember my Dad mentioning how he used to have sugar cane as
a kid. Bite off some fibers, drink the juice, and spit out the rest
It was a lot tougher than I imagined 


I ate a lot of the pea shoots because they were fresh and far cheaper in China than in the US. In Japan, we hardly ate any vegetables. The only couple I could think of were the tempura vegetables, salad in the kobe beef restaurant, pickled vegetables in the bento box, and then the sheets of seaweed in sushi and ramen. Most of the main foods were very fatty (tuna, ramen, beef) or fried (tempura, okonomiyaki, fried pork or chicken). I think this diet imbalance caused the indigestion problems I suffered. Japanese diets are usually considered very healthy, as evidenced by their highest life expectancy (many of the oldest people in the world were Japanese). However, since we picked all of the street foods and luxury foods, we were obviously selecting taste over nutrition.

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