Fishing for noodles

It’s been another long weekend in Japan and the summer is still going strong. Hence, we decided to attend a popular summertime event called Nagashi Somen or flowing noodles – a very instagram-able past time involving a cold-water bamboo slide, spaghetti-like noodles and you and your friends trying to get hold of them using chopsticks.

This particular event was organized by a friend at a small little farm within a residential area of Tokyo. The owners let us harvest some fresh vegetables and fruits to take home and also prepared a bunch of tempura from their home-grown produce, which was probably the best part. Somehow they even managed to make bitter gourd taste acceptable – a strange subtropical fruit that I will usually avoid under any circumstances.

Afterwards everyone lined up next to the bamboo pole, taking turns in snatching a few noodles here and there. There’s not much to it, but it was fun meeting some new people from around Tokyo that enjoy gathering at social events like these. Pretty sure I’ll bump into some of them again at a future Nomikai, but that’s for another blog post.

By the way, here is another way to tell just how “rule-abiding” Japanese people tend to be. When I told my Japanese language teacher in the evening about our Nagashi Somen adventure she stared at me in disbelieve and constituted: “But this is done only in the summer, from July to August”.