The Gourmet Museum

At home my routine is oatmeal for breakfast and half a turkey sandwich for lunch. Now there are so many choices you'd never think of having the same thing twice. Since many eating places don't have menus in English, we've ordered several times by going back outside of the restaurant and pointing at our choices (complete meals are depicted in realistic plastic models) to the waitress.

After the early morning (5 AM!) at the fish market in Tokyo (an adult trek, the kids were in homestays), watching the tuna auction, we couldn't resist eating at one of the sashimi counters. We asked the girl taking orders about one of the items in the picture. She went off to make a phone call and came back holding up the cell phone with one word on the screen: scallops. The food counters at the the Gourmet Museum (really a floor filled with restaurants, Japanese, of course, and surprisingly many European foods, like pasta and lots of pastries and desserts) near our hotel in Osaka have Japanese food so beautifully displayed I thought it was soap!

- Ruth