Dining Japanese Style

I actually have a coworker who is more finicky than me when it comes to food. He absolutely hates Chinese food...He will only eat Japanese and Korean... so today, we were off to Japanese again. The others convinced him to try someplace else, that they swore by. We pulled up into 5 Color City (the alleyway of bars and restaurants, and made our way to the restaurant. The one table downstairs is full, so they ushered us upstairs. Ahhh... looks like we will be dining japanese style today. The tables are low....with bench for the seats...but the bench is within the floor..almost like an attic effect..we take our shoes off, and i put on the sandals provided...evidently i was the only one to put them on.... we climbed on the bench/floor..then walked over to our place in the place, put your foot under the table and then sat down... Picture a coffin being lowered in the ground... the coffin is the table and the top level of the ground is where u sit.....
The waitress brings the menus....much to our surprise, there are no pictures, and the menu is in japanese... ummmmhhh...how the heck are we going to order?....So we hoisted ourselves from the table, and was off again, in search of another restaurant...This one has menus in English, but they are not open the owner says... Off we go again....round the corner...Oh, we have English menues....

We are led upstairs again, but to normal tables this time. The rooms with the lowered tables are visible, but i guess it's not open for dinning. We ordered guided by the pictures, and the few words some of my coworkers knew...

A group of 4 men wearing the same jacket comes and sits across from us.... and the smoking begins... i don't know they smoked that many cigarettes in about an hour....Etiquette is obviously not in chinese vocabulary... Don't talk about slurping as they invented the word.... i think people on the street could hear them slurping the piping hot soup.... when they eat with chopsticks, they bite everything...food hanging out mouth...and they just keep going like the food is running away... like my mom used to say 'like hog a nyam hot food'... just like the cafeteria at work.... no Chinese husband for me...lol

Then the food start coming... It's weird how they serve food here... the portion sizes are really small, but yet they bring it out for the whole table... No wonder they aren't fat... We had 2 fried rice, 2 (yes only 2) prawns on a stick, tempura shrimp and vegetables, beef with vegetables, fried chicken and potatoe/rice balls.. The rice balls were really great, i think even shrimp was in there. My one coworker is fuming, as he is still starving...lol...He vows never to come back....

The restaurant has no forks...and i can't use chopsticks.... so i am figuring out how to use the chopstick as a knife to cut the food, and then as a spear, to pick it up... the rice is a different story... Maybe i should practice on the packs of chopstick i bought for souvernirs....