Hokkaido - eat your heart out

Within one day mum and dad saw two sets of TV crew from two different countries filming food related programs in two different places 120km apart in Hokkaido. They saw a Japanese TV crew filming in Kushiro Washo Ichiba 釧路和商市場 in the morning and late afternoon they saw a Taiwanese crew filming 莎莎 probably for 食尚玩家 in Kita no Yatai 北の屋台 in Obihiro 帯広. 莎莎 was actually filming in Banchou Butadon in the afternoon according to the old lady at the shop. Auntie J was happy to meet a fellow country woman and took a picture with 莎莎.

Unfortunately, they still have no idea who the Japanese actress was.

Update
The Japanese actress was an AV star called Rio. She has her own blog here.

Kushiro Shitsugen National Park 釧路湿原

Photos taken there were quite pretty and it was comfortable hike around the trail. Worth visiting if you are around the area and have never been, but visiting once is probably enough.

Kushiro Washo Market 釧路和商市場

Kushiro fish market is one of the three biggest fish market in Hokkaido and the other two being Sapporo and Hakodate. One of the famous offerings is ”As you like it" bowl 勝手丼, where you buy a bowl of rice (a few sizes are available) and pick your favorite sashimi ingredients as you go around different stalls in the market. Only mum managed to pick up her appetite after the previous night robatayaki dinner and did one small bowl. There were a bewildering choices of toppings, but mum set her eyes on the tray of ぶどうえび, which literally means "grape" prawn perhaps on the back of its purple color. There seems to be no English name for this prawn other than the long Latin name. For some really wonderful close-ups of them, please check out this website http://www.siretoko.com/budo.htm. Mum picked two of them with the green-brown roes sticking to their underside. The flesh was firmer than the more common Botan prawns ボタンエビ and there was almost a sweetness in it. While they have eaten the same prawns in Tokyo Tsukiji market before, the ones in Kushiro were huge in comparison and they have never had the roes.

What You See is What You Get WYSWYG!! But then which ones to pick??

ぶどうえび "grape" prawn

”As you like it" bowl 勝手丼