Saying "Sayonara"...

... is not easy, but doing it with food does help a little. We spent most of our weekends in the past month saying our goodbyes to our friends here in Tokyo, and what better way to do it than coming together for a final meal? We've said many goodbyes, and the following are some of the ones where there was food involved.

We had a pizza picnic at Kiba Park with my ex-student and her family as well as another family whom we met almost 3 years ago on our Hakone trip. It was at this picnic that I made the wonderful discovery that pizza restaurants also deliver to public parks. We ordered from Salvatore Cuomo, and the pizzas were delicious! They were a notch better than the standard pizza delivery places like Dominoes and Pizza Hut, but also a tad more pricey.

Another of my ex-student invited us to her lovely house for a home-prepared lunch, and this also gave us the opportunity to meet the new addition to her family! Our 22 month-old boy had fun with her girls, and we enjoyed a delicious spread of both western-style dishes (roast beef and salad) and Japanese food (temaki sushi - something we'd previously eaten at another Japanese family's home).

The set-up for DIY temaki (hand-rolled) sushi - sushi rice, nori and loads of fresh seafood:

Last weekend, we met up with Kim(chee), a friend from during our time as JET ALTs in the inaka (rural) Noto more than 4 years ago. We had a delicious sushi lunch at our favourite sushi joint, Sushi Zanmai in Tsukiji. Gonna miss living near the fish markets and having easy access to super-fresh sushi (though I won't miss dodging the crazy pedestrian and motor traffic on my bicycle in the morning around that area). The sushi that Sunday was superb, as always, even though we had to settle for a table rather than sitting at the preferred counter seats because we had Zak with us.

Some of our staple order: tamago (egg), Ikura (salmon roe), uni (sea urchin 'roe'), hotate (scallop), ika (squid) and ama-ebi ('sweet' prawns): 

Deliciously fatty abura-salmon (broiled salmon) and abura-toro (broiled tuna belly):

Our favourite sushi item at Zanmai - joh-anago (top-quality seawater eel):

I will really miss Japan - the beautiful people, their wonderful hospitality and kind generosity. In less than 3 days, we'll leave the land of the rising sun - the country we called home for the past 4 years. No doubt we'll be sad to leave Japan, but at the same time we're also looking forward to Hong Kong!