Spam and other "different things"

I was excited to go since I have good memories of going there as a kid. I think I won a goldfish at the Festival, many many years ago.

The taiko drummers started up soon after we got there. It was quite a show. Lucas was really into it, just sitting there watching the drummers, he barely moved. I thought he would watch the drummers forever, until quite suddenly he got up and said, "I'm hungry, time to eat sushi."So we headed off to this sub-par sushi place where we overpaid for some rather anemic pieces of fish. Yuck. I was sure that we would find something inside the Japanese mall to get rid of the bad sushi taste in my mouth.

But what did I find? SPAM, all over the place! Spam Musubi to be exact. I didn't buy any, but from what I could gather, it seems like the $1 store version of sushi: a bed of rice, with a piece of fried Spam on top, wrapped neatly in a strip of seaweed. Not that I'm a stranger to Spam. I remember eating it when I was little. I also remember traveling to Japan as a kid and ordering it because it was something I recognized on the menus.

Unlike my parents, I decided NOT to introduce Lucas to the wonderful world of Spam. Instead, I found these little things that I used to like and that my mom still loves. I don't know the Japanese name, but they're essentially pancake-like things, in the shape of fish, with various fillings in the middle. Lucas opted for chocolate, my mom likes the red bean paste in the middle.


We learned that there was a schedule mishap and the much-anticipated martial arts demonstrations had been moved to the following morning. To get in some more authentic Japanese entertainment, we stopped off at a little store called, aptly named, Different Things. It was basically a store filled with cheap things from Japan. More on that later.