I’m trying to update my blog more frequently, but I’m getting behind because I have a backlog of fairly long entries that I need to finish. In the meantime, here’s another short post. This one is about yakiniku! Yakiniku (焼肉) means “grilled meat” and usually means Korean-style BBQ. You know, the kind where you have a grill at your table and cook the meat yourself. If you want to eat yakiniku in Osaka, the BEST place to go is the Koreatown around Tsuruhashi Station. In the labyrinthine alleyways there are tons of stalls selling Korean goods and tubs of kimchi, along with stores with beautiful hanbok in the windows. But I only ever go for the yakiniku.

When the train doors open at Tsuruhashi, you will immediately know that you’re in the right place because it smells amazing.

If you exit out of the front of the station, it looks like the photo above. But if you exit out the back, you’ll be in grilled meat paradise…

You can tell because of all the meaty smoke wafting around.

Let’s remember that I am often mostly a vegetarian in Canada, but I’m also about living my fake Japanese life to the fullest.

Meat + fire + sauce = yes

A little cabbage kimchi is nice too.

The onion is actually my favourite. I know! You’re probably like “Oh, you never eat meat so it must be amazing to be eating some MEAT!” but no, I still prefer vegetables. You could probably grill almost anything on this fire and it would taste good, though.

Mike however, is still meat’s #1 fan.

So that’s my tiny entry on Tsuruhashi. I could get into the myriad issues with Korean people in Japan but that would not make this a short entry. It’s pretty complex. So I’ll just say this for now — if you’re ever in Osaka, visit Tsuruhashi and eat Korean food and be happy. The end.

It makes me feel better to know a tiny bit of a language before I visit a country. And it shows respect to learn a couple phrases before you go. It’s easy in France, even with my microscopic knowledge of French. Other Romance languages are often similar enough to French and Spanish, so you can usually at least decipher a menu to some degree. I’m grateful that so many languages use the Latin alphabet!

I’m not a person who finds languages easy — I wish! Because I know some French and some Japanese, they kind of roll around in my head together. When I try to think of a word, I reach into the “foreign language pool” in my head and fish around.

Since I have trips coming up to Japan, China, South Korea, and Hong Kong, I’m trying to learn a little of Korean and Mandarin. And as always, work on my Japanese. Korean seems easier than Mandarin, but written Mandarin is easier if you know some Japanese kanji. Both of them are still baffling to me. It also makes me appreciate the Japanese I know, because languages are HARD. (And of course, these are all some of the hardest languages for English speakers to learn IN THE WORLD. I should learn Swedish instead.)